The Samaritan's Secret

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Khamis Zeydan slapped his hand on the turquoise hood of the police jeep. “Later today I’ll see if I can trade this in for a nice comfortable Audi sedan at the police depot— something with only one previous lady owner, if that suits you. In the meantime this will have to do,” he said. “And I’m sorry it doesn’t have a cup holder and a CD player and airconditioning. I’m also sorry that the ashtray is full. But most of all I’m sorry that I have to stand here listening to you complain. Just drive.”

  Omar Yussef lifted himself toward the driver’s seat with a grunt. His shoulders felt weak and he dropped his trailing foot back to the pavement. “Why do they make these vehicles so far off the ground?”

  “So pedestrians will be able to duck underneath the chassis when you run them down.” Khamis Zeydan leaned over from the passenger seat, grabbed Omar Yussef’s shoulder, and hauled him inside.

  The jeep hopped along the road. Omar Yussef clenched his teeth, trying to avoid the pedestrians wandering out of the casbah. A taxi came up behind him and sounded its horn impatiently. “Shut up, you son of a whore,” Omar Yussef muttered.

  Khamis Zeydan laughed quietly and lit a cigarette. “Mind the tomato cart,” he murmured, with the Rothmans between his lips.

  A drop of perspiration stung the corner of Omar Yussef’s eye. “Mind the what?” he said, blinking to clear the sweat. He heard a sound like the sudden crushing of a cardboard box and then a shout.

  He rolled the jeep to a halt. At the passenger side window, a bony man with a keffiyeh wrapped like a turban around his head yelled that they had overturned his cart. Khamis Zeydan took a brief look at the tomatoes spread like poppies across the dirt at the roadside and grinned at the vendor. “Show me your market license,” he said, “or get out of my sight.”

  The man pulled off his keffiyeh and flung it toward his tomatoes with a curse.

  “We should help him pick them up,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Let’s go. And no more stops for vegetables,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  “A tomato is a fruit.” Omar Yussef stabbed at the gearshift.

  “What?”

  “It’s not a vegetable. It’s the fruit of the tomato plant.”

  Khamis Zeydan stared. “Just leave the grocery shopping to your wife, schoolteacher.”

  “I’m looking forward to the empty road above the town.” Omar Yussef sighed. “I can’t keep track of all these things coming at me in so many directions.”

  The engine roared as they climbed the hill. Khamis Zeydan advised Omar Yussef to keep the jeep in second gear. When the apartment buildings at the edge of Nablus thinned out, they turned onto the twisting, narrow road to the peak of Mount Jerizim.

  Khamis Zeydan threw a cigarette out of the window. He dropped his eyes to Omar Yussef’s right foot. “We’ll never get there at this rate. You can give it more gas, you know. The engine’s noisy, but it isn’t going to blow up.”

  At the entrance to the Kanaan mansion, Omar Yussef tried to pull over, but the engine stalled and he let the jeep come to a halt in the middle of the road. He pushed open his door and dropped to the ground.

  Khamis Zeydan leaned over and yanked the hand brake with his good hand, just as the jeep started to roll backward. “Were you planning on walking down to the town, after you wrecked my jeep?”

  Omar Yussef tossed the keys into his friend’s lap and pushed his door shut.

  The servant at the mansion’s main entrance greeted Omar Yussef with a twitch of his mustache. “Sorry. Still no airconditioning in the garden, ustaz,” he said.

  “We’re here to see His Honor Kanaan.”

  “The boss isn’t here, but you can see Madame.”

  Omar Yussef felt a pulse of frustration. He wanted to confront Kanaan about the man he had sent to kill him and the war he had started in the casbah. He didn’t need anything from Liana, but it would be impolite to leave now and Khamis Zeydan would want to see her again, anyway.

  The servant led them across the polished hallway, held open the door to the salon, and glanced at Khamis Zeydan’s limp. The policeman noticed and elbowed him in the ribs as he passed. The servant snatched Khamis Zeydan’s arm and shoved him into the room. “Mind your step,” he said. “Don’t fall on the rugs. You’ll make them dirty, and they’re very expensive.”

  “But you’re cheap,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  The servant smiled, straightened the gold brocaded hem of his blue tunic and closed the door behind him, leaving them alone.

  “What’s eating you?” Omar Yussef said.

  “Did you see the way that bastard looked at my foot?”

  He’s about to see the woman he loved when he was young and vigorous, and he’s going to be limping on a diabetic foot, Omar Yussef thought. He ought to be happy I’m around to make him look virile by comparison.

  “I can’t stand the disrespect,” Khamis Zeydan said. “It’s bad enough that I have to put up with insubordinate young policemen in my division. They saw a little action as gunmen during the intifada, so now they all think they’re heroes and they won’t take orders from me.”

  “It’s the same problem with all our young people,” Omar Yussef said. “The older generation failed to liberate Palestine, so in their eyes we deserve no respect. You should hear how the girls speak to my staff at the school.”

  “They should be thrashed.”

  “Is that what you do with your policemen?”

  “It’s what I’d like to do to that servant, the arrogant bastard. I’ll hang him up by his girly little pencil mustache.”

  The servant opened the door and leaned back against its raised giltwork, looking down his nose at Khamis Zeydan.

  Liana moved quickly into the room and greeted them. She wore a sleeveless red silk dress that pouched a little over the slackness in her gut. Her eyes were painted more heavily than they had been when Omar Yussef had seen her before, and her face was stiff and joyless.

  A second servant carried a tray of coffee to a low table.

  Liana invited her guests to sit. “I’m afraid you’ve just missed my husband. He’s already gone down to Nablus this morning on business,” she said.

  “A deadly kind of business,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  Liana looked closely at him. “Dear Abu Adel, don’t misunderstand what I said about my husband when last we met. He may not be pure, but whatever he does, it’s never against the interests of the Palestinian people.”

  Khamis Zeydan drank his coffee with a noisy slurp, a surreptitious raspberry blown at Liana’s husband.

  Omar Yussef sat on the edge of his armchair. “Dear lady, your husband has embarked upon some kind of small war with Hamas in the town.”

  “As I said, he never acts against the interests of the Palestinian people.” She lifted her chin.

  She looks strong and defiant, when she holds herself that way, Omar Yussef thought. I have to admit it’s attractive. “This fighting can’t possibly benefit the people.”

  “He’s fighting for a good reason, not for the fun of it.” Liana continued her scrutiny of Khamis Zeydan. “He’s not that kind of man.”

  Khamis Zeydan growled once more and set his cup on the table, rattling it in the saucer.

  “What’s his reason, then, for taking on Hamas?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “He had to get something back from them, something important,” she said, “and now Hamas is fighting back.”

  Suddenly Liana’s more interesting than I expected, Omar Yussef thought. “Something important? What exactly?”

  Liana ran her tongue across her painted lips. “Documents that were stolen from him.”

  The dirt files. “Did Suleiman al-Teef steal them?”

  “Who?”

  “What did these documents contain?”

  “Information on top Fatah men,” Liana said. “He had to get them back. If they remained in the hands of Hamas, they’d use them to cause a real civil war. You heard how they slandered the Old Man.”

  “How did Hamas get th
e documents?”

  “They were stolen from my husband.”

  “By whom?”

  Liana shrugged.

  “How did your husband come to possess these documents?” Omar Yussef said. “They originally belonged to the Old Man. Who gave them to Amin?”

  Liana looked hard at Omar Yussef. “I didn’t say that they had belonged to the president. What makes you think that?”

  Khamis Zeydan rolled his upper lip like a camel protesting the whip.

  I messed this up, Omar Yussef thought. “I must have confused these papers with something else. Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve come across two dead bodies in four days. It’s very disorienting for an old schoolmaster.”

  Liana raised one of her painted eyebrows. “The documents were gathered by my husband, not by the Old Man. They contain dirt on top party people. They were meant as an insurance policy, in case Amin were ever threatened.”

  “Or blackmailed?”

  Liana’s eyes were half closed, but alert. “Blackmailed about what?”

  Khamis Zeydan sucked in his breath. “My friend Abu Ramiz has heard some unsavory rumors about your husband’s sexual appetite, Liana,” he said.

  The woman’s eyes widened and she raised her voice for the first time. Omar Yussef detected a vicious edge that was at odds with the silk and gilt all around her. “You have quite the wrong idea about my husband,” she said. The skin on her throat shook and she turned to Khamis Zeydan. “Whatever grudge you may bear against Amin from the old days in Beirut, Abu Adel, I expect you to stand up for the reputation of a man who has struggled and sacrificed for his people.”

  The police chief glanced at a porcelain statue of a leaping nymph on the side table by his armchair. He pushed a button by the nymph’s foot and a lamp set in her outstretched hand lit up. “Yes, he’s a great struggler for our people.”

  Liana’s face grew stiff. She leaned over and clicked the button to shut off the light in the nymph’s grasp. Her hand lay on the table by the lamp. Against her fingers, tanned and freckled, the gold in her wedding ring seemed unnaturally bright. Khamis Zeydan gripped the arm of his chair, until his knuckles were white. Omar Yussef sensed the tension and knew that the former lovers would have touched, had he not been present.

  “Perhaps you could tell me about Amin’s relationship with Ishaq?” he said. “So I don’t have to listen to what others might say about it.”

  Liana drew a long breath and stared at her hand on the table. She lifted it and touched her forehead. “Amin had a big argument with Ishaq before his death.”

  “He died four days ago. When did they argue?”

  “A few weeks back.”

  “Did it have something to do with these files about the Fatah leaders?”

  Liana shook her head.

  “Did Amin speak to you about it?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “He didn’t have to. I was there.”

  Omar Yussef wet his lips. “What happened?”

  “Ishaq burst in here, very angry.” Liana covered her eyes. “He made accusations, against both me and Amin. They weren’t true. I told him so, but he refused to believe me. He ran out of here and I never saw him again.”

  “Was it the last Amin saw of him?”

  “Amin talked to him afterward by phone. I don’t know what they said. I couldn’t stand to think of the boy’s rage. He was so close to us.”

  “What was the accusation?”

  Liana shook her head, her hand over her face.

  Khamis Zeydan reached for her arm and stroked it. His blue eyes were glassy. “That’s enough now, Abu Ramiz.” He stood and touched Liana’s head, his fingers reaching into the blowdried hair, pressing lightly on its lacquered bulk. When he took away his hand, her hair rose slowly to its original height.

  Omar Yussef followed Khamis Zeydan out. The servant crossed the hall, his face blank and insolent, to open the front door. As he stepped into the sunshine, Omar Yussef heard a sound like the baying of a jackal. It came from the room where they had left Liana.

  Chapter 26

  Omar Yussef turned the key in the ignition, revved hard and gripped the wheel as the jeep bounced and stalled. Khamis Zeydan knocked the lever out of gear with his prosthetic left hand. “You’ve uncovered a few dead bodies this week,” he said. “Are you trying to make a corpse out of my jeep, too?”

  “I told you I’m a bad driver.” Omar Yussef turned the starter and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine bellowed like a taboun oven when its flames catch a new log.

  “You have to put it in gear, my brother.”

  The guards at Kanaan’s gate coughed on the thick exhaust fumes. Omar Yussef blushed and fumbled with the gearshift, until the vehicle shook into motion. Once he had rattled into second gear, he stopped holding his breath.

  “I can’t concentrate on driving. I keep thinking about what Liana just told us,” he said. “Kanaan and Ishaq had an argument.”

  “I heard.”

  “Don’t you see what that could mean?”

  “Could?” Khamis Zeydan snorted.

  Omar Yussef turned the jeep across the road and backed into a threepoint turn.

  Khamis Zeydan looked doubtfully over his shoulder at the steep drop down to Nablus. “A hill start? This isn’t a driving test.”

  Omar Yussef ran the engine noisily and lowered the hand brake, so that the jeep roared up the hill. One of the guards at Kanaan’s gate put his fingers in his ears.

  “I’m turning around because we’re not going back to Nablus yet,” Omar Yussef said.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We’re going to the Samaritan village. I want to see the priest.”

  “What for? You want to check whether his Messiah came, after all?”

  “Amin Kanaan had the dirt files, according to Liana. Then Hamas had them, because Ishaq handed them over. Liana said they were stolen from her husband. Did Ishaq steal them from Amin?”

  “Awwadi stole the ancient Samaritan scroll and gave it to Ishaq in return for the files. And Ishaq gave the scroll to the priest.” Khamis Zeydan stared through the dusty windshield of the jeep.

  “I don’t see why Kanaan would agree to that. They were important files and he got nothing out of the deal. Unless he wanted the Samaritans to get the scroll back.”

  “It seems like that’d only be important to the six hundred Samaritans, not to Kanaan.”

  Omar Yussef scratched his chin.

  The Samaritan village showed white beyond the windbreak of pines on the ridge.

  “Ishaq wanted the scroll back, for the Samaritans. It’s their holiest relic,” Omar Yussef said. “Maybe he was supposed to give something to Kanaan in return for the dirt files.”

  Khamis Zeydan leered. “A little fireside companionship on lonely nights?”

  Omar Yussef gave a slow, hesitant shake of his head. “It must have something to do with the secret account details.”

  The police chief’s leer became a scowl. “Three hundred million dollars.”

  “Does that sum of money make your diabetes feel more or less troublesome?” Omar Yussef laughed.

  “It makes me want to throw up. That was our money.” Khamis Zeydan pointed toward the houses of Nablus in the valley. “Their money.”

  “What would you do for it?”

  Khamis Zeydan grimaced. “You want to know if I’d kill for it, schoolteacher? Killing’s not always so difficult, when the cause is just.”

  “Are there things more shameful than killing?” Omar Yussef asked. What did his friend’s file contain that would still shame this acknowledged killer? Something worse than murder, he thought.

  Khamis Zeydan watched the Samaritan village grow closer. “Are you intending to drive all the way in second gear?” he said, turning a hostile frown on Omar Yussef. “Or are you just trying to annoy me?”

  Omar Yussef shifted awkwardly into third gear and the jeep picked up pace. He tensed his shoulders, struggling to hold the next curve, then he braked
and let the jeep creep slowly along the ridge.

  “The account numbers and passwords—that’s what Kanaan must have received from Ishaq,” Omar Yussef said. “Hamas got the dirt files. Ishaq got the scroll. Kanaan got the money, or at least the details of how to lay his hands on it.”

  “Very neat. Everybody’s happy.”

  “So why is Ishaq dead?” Omar Yussef thumped his fist against the steering wheel. “Kanaan was supposed to get the money. But he didn’t. The woman from the World Bank said she hadn’t traced any transactions indicating that such a sum of money had been moved. Ishaq must have held out on him, so Kanaan killed Ishaq.”

  “He murdered his boyfriend?” Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “I’m prepared to believe almost anything about that bastard, but would he kill a kid he loved?”

  “For three hundred million dollars? That’s real money, even to one of the richest men in Palestine.”

  Khamis Zeydan raised his eyebrows.

  “Ishaq said something to his wife about burying the financial details behind the temple, and he told the American from the World Bank that he had put the documents where anyone could find them,” Omar Yussef said. “Maybe they’re hidden on Mount Jerizim. Up there. Where Ishaq’s body was discovered.” He pointed toward the gray, square stones of the Byzantine fortress overlooking the Eternal Hill, the rock at the center of the ancient Samaritan temple.

  As the jeep entered the village, a teenager scratched his misshapen ears and stared at Omar Yussef, his mouth wide and dumb, a basketball jammed between his elbow and his ribs.

  “We’ve got one day to figure this out,” Omar Yussef said. “Or the World Bank is going to make this mess a problem for every Palestinian.”

  They came to the small park beside Roween’s house. Charcoal blackened the rows of concrete flame pits, still smoking from the Passover feast, and the dry grass had been shredded by the feet of celebrating Samaritans.

  Omar Yussef let the engine stall and stepped onto the curb in the silent village. When he swallowed, the movement of his Adam’s apple seemed loud in his throat.

  A resonant thump cut the quiet. The boy with the strange ears shambled down the road. Every few paces he bounced his basketball, clutched it with both hands, and pulled it to the side of his head. Omar Yussef listened: the ball made a shadowy metallic chime after the deeper impact. The boy bellowed, frustrated that he couldn’t grab the ball quickly enough to hear that high note close to his ear. He senses that it would be beautiful, Omar Yussef thought.