The Collaborator of Bethlehem

“Why didn’t you believe me when I said that Hussein Tamari was the one who led the Israelis to the house in Irtas? The collaborator who helped them kill Louai Abdel Rahman? That he was the one who killed Dima Abdel Rahman to cover his tracks?” Omar Yussef said.

“Don’t start on that again.”

“Listen, it makes no difference now. The Israeli helicopter killed Hussein, so the murderer is dead. George Saba is dead, so there’s no innocent man awaiting execution anymore. The story is over. My so-called investigation is finished. There’s just you and me. Why didn’t you believe me? I showed you the MAG cartridge from Hussein’s machine gun. I showed you the evidence.”

“The bullets that killed Louai came from an Israeli sniper rifle. But you found a MAG cartridge. That’s not evidence against Hussein, because Louai wasn’t killed with a MAG. Dima was killed by having her throat slit, also not by a MAG. Your theory is good, but not necessarily correct.”

“So maybe Hussein didn’t shoot Louai, but he guided the Israelis to their target and he left a clue when he accidentally dropped the cartridge casing from his own gun. He must have been the one who identified Louai to the Israeli snipers with the laser sight, the red dot Dima said she saw flicking across his body right before the shots that killed him.”

Khamis Zeydan pulled the jeep over at the side of the road by Omar Yussef’s house. “All right, if it makes you happy, then I’ll say that I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. But you ought to know that there isn’t anything I could have done. You don’t have real evidence and, in any case, proof isn’t what decides criminal cases here anymore. Belief, influence, and evil—that’s what you need on your side.”

Omar Yussef wondered if he should tell Khamis Zeydan just how much more he suspected him than he’d already let on. He felt very weary. He decided to allow the policeman to go. He nodded and, silently, got out of the jeep. He waved goodbye with George’s black Bible and watched Khamis Zey-dan turn around, slowly jolting over the median strip into the other lane. He felt the rain coming down inside the back of his collar. He put the Bible inside his jacket.

The ditch the Israelis had dug across the street two days before blocked the sidewalk. Omar Yussef climbed over the low wall in front of his house and hurried inside.

Chapter 26

When Omar Yussef came through his front door, Maryam was waiting in the salon, wrapped in a blanket. He went toward her. Nadia was asleep against her grandmother’s chest. The posture gave Omar Yussef an immediate shudder: it reminded him of the position in which George Saba’s wife had died, with her two children huddled against her beneath her arms. The sleepiness of Maryam’s face seemed almost as static as death, and he felt an irrational relief when she looked up and spoke.

“I was telling Nadia a story,” she whispered. “She didn’t want to go to bed until you came home.”

Omar Yussef put George’s Bible on the coffee table. He lifted Nadia’s shoulders, while Maryam took the girl’s legs. He moved gingerly, careful not to wake her and not to strain his back, which throbbed again as the rain worked its chill into his bones and his muscles rebelled against the frantic heaving of the stones that had crushed the Saba family. Omar and Maryam took the girl to their bedroom and laid her in their bed.

“You had a call from the UN office in Jerusalem,” Maryam said. “I wrote down the number for you. It was very late for them to call.”

Omar Yussef nodded. He thought of poor Steadman. The UN people handling that crisis would be working late.

“I’ll sleep in the salon, once I’ve changed out of these wet clothes,” he said.

“I’ll make you some tea to warm you up. Do you want soup?”

“No, thanks. Tea, please.”

After she brought the tea, Omar Yussef sat in his silk pajamas and a woolen dressing gown and put his hand out to hold Maryam’s fingers.

“What happened, Omar?”

“George is dead.”

Omar Yussef realized that he hadn’t said those words before. They seemed so loaded with the grave it felt as though his mouth were full of the dust to which George Saba would now return. It choked him, and he gasped and sobbed.

Maryam reached around his shoulders, stroked his neck, and put her chin against his forehead.

Omar Yussef told her what he had seen, and she cried with him, quietly, deeply. She knows me, he thought. I’ve hidden things from her over the years and I believed we had grown apart, but she has been with me so long that she simply feels what I feel. Our senses are bonded together, even if we might disagree over politics or things that happen in the town. She didn’t want me to investigate George’s case, to risk myself to save him, but she knew all along what he meant to me.

It was a long time before Omar Yussef felt like breaking the tender grip in which Maryam held him. He sat up and looked at the clock on the sideboard. It was 2:30 A.M.

“Why don’t you go to bed now, Maryam?”

“I’ll bring some blankets for you.”

“I don’t think I’ll sleep. I’ll read a little.”

“Let me sit with you a while. I’ll make some more tea.”

Maryam was in the kitchen when Omar heard it. The thudding of the helicopter came through the night and held in place above him. Its rhythm disguised the roaring engines of the tanks and jeeps that came down from the hill above Dehaisha. Omar Yussef went to the window. He wondered if they were coming back to widen the trench in the road, but when they arrived there were no bulldozers. He looked across the street. Two tanks and two APCs took up positions right outside his house. He rushed to turn out the light. The soldiers piled out of the APCs and filed quickly, bent and jogging, up the stairs of the apartment building opposite. Maryam came through the door. In the