The Collaborator of Bethlehem

appear to be? Third, Jihad isn’t going to help you. He helps himself. He blew you off, that’s all, Abu Ramiz, stalling until he gets a chance to finish you off quietly.”

Omar Yussef struggled to think of a way to persuade the police chief. He could grab Khamis Zeydan’s gun from where it lay on the table. With the gun held on him, Khamis Zeydan would lead him to the cells and release George. But Omar Yussef knew it would be an empty gesture. He had heard of something called a safety catch and he wouldn’t know how to disengage it. Even if he did, he could never use the gun on his friend. Khamis Zeydan would simply take it out of his hand and he would let him do so.

The police chief glanced toward the window. He stood and slid the glass open. Omar Yussef suddenly heard what his friend’s keener ear had detected. The gunfire was growing nearer.

“Is the funeral coming here?” Omar Yussef asked.

“The burial was in Teqoa. This noise must be something else.”

The firing grew more intense. It approached up the hill behind the Church of the Nativity. Omar Yussef leaned out of the window. A row of jeeps pulled around the corner and stopped in front of the police station. There must have been more of them out of sight, by the entrance, because even as the armed men piled out below, he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs behind him. Khamis Zeydan turned.

“They’re coming up here,” Omar Yussef said.

“No. They’re going down. To the jail.”

Khamis Zeydan picked up his gun from the desk and holstered it. “Stay here, Abu Ramiz.” He went to the door.

“Why are they going to the jail?” Even as he spoke, Omar Yussef knew the answer. George. “I’m coming with you.”

Khamis Zeydan was already on the stairs. Omar Yussef could see how shaky the police chief’s legs were from the drink. Both men descended the steps slowly, despite their despairing efforts to move quicker. Omar Yussef cursed his aging body and Khamis Zeydan muttered about the whisky in his bloodstream. At the entrance, the guard stood against a wall with his hands in the air. Two Martyrs Brigades men held their Kalashnikovs on him. There were at least a dozen of them in the small hallway, and more outside.

From below came the sound of an explosion. Falling metal rang through a corridor. They must have blown the door off George’s cell.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Khamis Zeydan walked straight to the gunmen holding his nervous guard against the wall. He pushed their rifles aside. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Get out of here now, or you’ll pay a terrible price.”

Khamis Zeydan’s determined arrival seemed to puncture the resolve of the gunmen in the lobby. But they were revived by the sight of their leader a moment later. Jihad Awdeh came up the stairs with a raised Kalashnikov in one hand and George Saba’s hair grasped in the other.

George’s eyes were closed by fresh bruises and his nose wept blood. As Jihad Awdeh hauled him up the steps by his scalp, blood rolled across George’s forehead and he bawled in pain.

Omar Yussef made the last few steps, clinging to the banister. In his panic, he wasn’t sure if he would be able to stand without support. He called out to George Saba, but the gunmen chanted that they would revenge the martyr Hussein Tamari, and George didn’t hear his old schoolteacher.

Jihad Awdeh let go of George’s hair long enough to lift his rifle butt and club Khamis Zeydan in the face. The police chief crumpled. The policeman who had been guarding the door bent to catch his commander. Khamis Zeydan appeared to be out cold. Jihad Awdeh called above the laughter and cheers: “This way the godless bastard achieves oblivion without having to waste all his whisky.”

Omar Yussef jostled with the gunmen as they pushed toward the small doorway. He caught sight of George wearing his small herringbone coat. Its shoulders were drenched with blood. The gunmen took swings at the prisoner whenever they were close enough.

Omar Yussef was almost the last through the door. Outside on the sidewalk, he saw Muhammad Abdel Rahman. The gunmen must have brought the old man to see them exact their justice on the Christian who had led the Israelis to kill his son. Muhammad’s face was blank, deathly. Omar Yussef wondered what it was that he knew about the way Louai died, about Abu Walid, about the killing of Dima, his daughter-in-law. Then he thought that the knowledge of having lost two sons in a few days, one to an assassination and another who took his own life in the act of destroying ordinary people with a bomb strapped to his midriff, would be enough to make a man seem almost dead himself. Muhammad noticed Omar Yussef stumbling out of the police station at the back of the crowd. He turned away and wrapped his face in the end of his keffiyeh.

The mob of gunmen moved to the edge of the square. From the center of the crowd, someone tossed a rope over the arm of one of the fake gaslamps. Oh, God, it’s happening, Omar Yussef thought. He rushed toward the group, barely able to breathe. How could he stop them? He would get to the center of the crowd and throw himself over George. He reached the back of the melee. He shoved between two of the gunmen, screaming to them to make way.

There came a cheer and Omar Yussef saw George hauled halfway up the lamppost by his ankles. The tails of the herringbone coat fell over his face, so that at first Omar Yussef believed he was dead already. Then his arms moved, flailing desperately toward the crowd below as though he might catch hold of it and anchor himself to the earth. The gunmen yanked him higher until he was almost at the top of the post. Then there was a single shot, and it unleashed a full volley from the crowd of men. George Saba’s body jerked with each fatal impact.

Until it stopped. The deafening noise of the guns ended, and it seemed to Omar Yussef that there was perfect silence everywhere. No one seemed to move, even though the crowd of gunmen was joined by others coming from the funeral. They chanted the glory of God for the death of the traitor and their joyful, jostling number grew every moment. But Omar Yussef was alone on the square, staring above him at the swinging corpse of George Saba. He shoved into the center of the crowd, but they were not men surrounding him; they were empty of humanity and he was solitary among them with all he had lost. Below George Saba there was a slick of blood on the new cobbles. Omar Yussef felt the blood in the air, as though it were a light drizzle that would begore the surface of everything. Then he realized that it was rain.

The crowd moved away. Someone called out that they were going to the traitor’s house to destroy it, as the Israelis would obliterate Hussein Tamari’s house and the home of Yunis Abdel Rahman, the suicide bomber.

In only a few moments, Omar Yussef was almost truly alone beneath the corpse of George Saba. He reached up, but the body was strung too high for him to touch. The rain came more heavily. It was the downpour that had