good hand. The policeman pulled tight on the black leather glove he wore to disguise the false hand. “Have you ever seen a body look this way?” Omar Yussef asked, gesturing toward Cree’s table.
“I’m sorry to say that I have,” Khamis Zeydan said. “It’s my misfortune that, if you lifted the sheets on the other two tables, I’d probably have seen dead men who looked just like those, as well.”
Omar Yussef wondered what horrors his friend had experienced in his decades roaming the Middle East and Europe for the PLO. He imagined the rough field-surgery where Khamis Zeydan had been treated for the loss of his hand to a grenade in Lebanon.
The nurse brought two plastic cups of tea. Omar Yussef breathed the heat from the steaming water. The temperature gauge on the Japanese fridge read three degrees Celsius. That must be the temperature at which they store the bodies, he thought, with a sudden urge to feel as warm as he could be. He sipped at his tea and felt it scald his throat.
As he leaned against the empty dissecting table, he imagined it might soon bear his dead weight. He wondered if Najjar would describe his death as routine, or if his would be a complicated case that required a lot of thought on the part of the pathologist.
Najjar entered with a clipboard. He asked for Cree’s details, so far as Omar Yussef knew them, and gave the board to him for his signature. “Will you ask the United Nations office to contact my nurse? She will get the full details and next of kin from them,” the doctor said.
Omar Yussef nodded. “Did he suffer?”
“Abu Ramiz, the compassionate response to that question is always ‘no,’ but in this case I can honestly say that it’s the correct answer. He died instantly. The shock waves from the explosion killed him, rather than the flames.”
Omar Yussef felt his anger straining through his chest. He wasn’t angry at the doctor, but someone had to get it. “How about this one?” Omar Yussef said, pointing at the next corpse. “Or this last one over here? Did they suffer?” He let his cup tilt and the tea burned his finger.
“I said that my response was always ‘no.’ But that’s just a matter of sensitivity toward the relative or friend who identifies the body,” Najjar said, calmly, watching Omar Yussef and measuring the schoolteacher’s emotion. “I’m free to answer you truthfully in the case of those other two. This one in the middle, well, I can’t tell for sure, but I suspect he died a long and lingering death from infection. The third one I can assess with absolute certainty: he suffered terribly.”
Omar Yussef looked at the two bodies. He remembered the black binders on the pathologist’s shelf. So many ways to die. So much suffering, so much to be feared. So many people ready to take another’s life.
“I’m sorry for speaking angrily, doctor,” he said. “It’s only that I came to Gaza three days ago, and since then one of my colleagues has been kidnapped, another is in jail under torture, and now this one has been killed. It’s too much for an old history teacher.”
Najjar reached for the clipboard and, as he briefly checked the details, took the opportunity to turn the talk away from Cree’s body. “A kidnapping? Of whom?”
“A Swede named Wallender. He was kidnapped by the Saladin Brigades last night. They’re demanding the release of one of their men from jail in return for his freedom.”
“These things happen frequently in Gaza, Abu Ramiz. The government always gives in. Don’t worry. They’ll free this Saladin Brigades man and your friend will be released.” The doctor countersigned the form on the clipboard. “It won’t be a pleasant process for you or for him, but you can be calm about the outcome.”
“I’m not so sure. The Saladin Brigades man killed a Military Intelligence officer. General Husseini seems determined to give him the death penalty.”
Doctor Najjar froze.
“Doctor?” Omar Yussef frowned.
“He killed a Military Intelligence officer?”
“Yes, the one who was buried two days ago. Lieutenant Fathi Salah.”
Najjar glanced at the dissecting tables before him. His eyes leaped back and forth between Cree’s corpse and the body on the furthest table. “Bassam Odwan,” he said.
Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan suddenly straightened.
The doctor went to the door and shut it. “Do you know what Bassam Odwan looks like?”
“I saw him in jail this morning,” Omar Yussef said.
“Is this him?” Najjar pulled the sheet partially back from the last table.
Bassam Odwan’s wide shoulders were naked. His face was pale and his thick lips protruded purple from his black beard. His hair was shaved above the ears and the skin there was yellow and blue and singed.
Omar Yussef turned to Khamis Zeydan. “It’s Odwan.”
Najjar covered Odwan’s face, but Omar Yussef pulled the sheet away, revealing the man’s entire body. He recoiled, with the sheet still in his hand.
Odwan’s heavy, muscular torso was so bruised he seemed to be wearing a camouflage T-shirt. His genitals were partially shaved and cut. His fingertips had been sliced off and there were bloody scabs where his nails should have been. The Husseini Manicure. A stink of burned flesh and feces emanated from the body.
Khamis Zeydan took the sheet from Omar Yussef’s hand and covered the corpse. He glanced at Omar Yussef and his expression was desolate and angry. “I assume there’ll be no paperwork in this case, doctor,” he said.
Najjar nodded. “There won’t even be an official autopsy,” he said. “The prison guards brought him here not long before your friend from the United Nations arrived. The prison doctor said he died of a sudden heart attack. I wasn’t even sure it was Odwan, because they’ve brought bodies here under false names before, when there’s been a death in the prison.”
“Do they bring many people dead from the jail?” Omar Yussef said.
“There seem to be a lot of heart attacks in the jail,” the doctor said, with a quiet, conspiratorial edge.
Omar Yussef felt a jolt of tension pulsing through his own heart. With Odwan dead, the Saladin Brigades will kill Magnus in revenge, he thought. Now I have even less time than I expected. “What has been done to this man, doctor?”
Najjar looked hard at Omar Yussef, before he spoke. “He has been given electric shocks on his temples and genitals. He has been beaten. You can see what has happened to his hands, of course. I can’t tell you if these things killed him, but I doubt it. I would have to examine his brain, for example, to see if it hemorrhaged when he was beaten. The inside of his mouth and his upper esophagus is badly cut, which is something I can’t quite figure out. It’s as though he swallowed razor blades.”
Najjar lifted the lids of Odwan’s eyes. Omar Yussef let out a little gasp as the dark, blank eyeball gazed at him. “You see just here, there’re burst blood vessels, tiny ones in this membrane where the eyelid is joined to the eyeball,” the doctor said. “That’s a sign of asphyxia.”
“He choked to death?” Khamis Zeydan asked.
Omar Yussef recalled Odwan’s shudder of fear as he had confessed that he gave himself up to Husseini’s men for fear of suffocating in the tunnel under the Egyptian border.
“Not on a piece of kebab. Remember the lacerations in his mouth,” the doctor said. “I’d have to do an autopsy to be certain. Until I’ve seen if there’s an obstruction further down in the trachea, it’s really hard to say for sure that someone died of choking.”
“When will you have the results of your autopsy?” Omar Yussef asked.
“I remind you that I have been ordered not to perform an autopsy. The verdict of the prison doctor is sufficient for the authorities.”
“A heart attack?”
“It’s something to tell the man’s relatives. The body should be buried today, of course, but I’ve been ordered to keep it here until the authorities decide to tell the family that he has died. Of a heart attack.”
“No one will believe it,” Omar Yussef said.
“No one is asked to believe. They’re asked only to be quiet. As quiet as Odwan’s body, here.”
“Quiet?” Omar Yussef said. “When I look at his body, I feel as though I can hear him screaming.”
“The poor one, may Allah be merciful upon him,” Khamis Zeydan said.
Omar Yussef tapped the end of the second dissecting table and turned to Khamis Zeydan. “Everyone I meet in Gaza is tortured or killed. If I didn’t see you standing before me, I’d assume you were lying under the sheet on this table,” he said.
