“Then who’s in that grave?”
“Not who, but what.”
“I don’t get it, Abu Ramiz?”
“We just buried something that people have been prepared to kill for. Buried it where it will lie for a century, or perhaps forever. At least long enough to make it obsolete.”
Wallender stared at the grave, until it came to him. “The new missile?”
Omar Yussef nodded. “I switched it for an old Qassam missile, which Maki then tried to sell to the colonel.”
“Where did you get the old one, so that you could make the switch?” Wallender asked.
Omar Yussef tapped the side of his nose and thought of the two Saladin Brigades men from Gaza City, Walid and Khaled, who had surrendered a single missile from their stockpile and now counted themselves in the clear with the United Nations for their attack on Cree. The Saladin I had never left the graveyard. “Let’s go and lay this poor soldier to rest,” he said.
Suleiman Jouda packed the small mound of earth over the new grave with the back of his shovel and pushed in a temporary cross marked with the name of James Cree.
A tall, chubby, florid man in a khaki summer suit entered the cemetery. He waved cheerily and made for the grave of Private Eynon Price. It was the man from the British consulate in Jerusalem. He wiped the sweat from his neck and face with a handkerchief. “Bloody hot down here today,” he said. “Still, I gather I just missed the dust storm. Thank Christ for small mercies, eh?” He pulled some printed sheets from his jacket pocket and read the burial service, as the others gathered around the grave with their heads bowed.
The sky was deep blue. Omar Yussef recalled Nadia’s tale of Atum’s tears. If the ancient Egyptian deity had wept and his teardrops had become human beings, he was not, after all, a god in which Omar Yussef could believe. His god had cried dust, a tempest of dust that had denied him his sight and choked him until he was forced to end the weeping himself. As the caretaker shoveled earth into the soldier’s grave, Omar Yussef looked at the blue sky and smiled. The god’s eyes were finally dry from too much crying.
