Cree blew air through his pursed lips and clicked his tongue. Omar Yussef gripped the arms of his chair. Wallender cleared his throat.
“You understand, Professor Maki, that we must pursue this case, because Masharawi is also an employee of the UN,” Wallender said. “He’s our responsibility.”
“Surely it’s an internal Palestinian matter. You needn’t concern yourselves.”
“The international community will view this very seriously.” Wallender’s voice betrayed some impatience. “For a university administrator to request police intervention in a matter of academic freedom is a shocking development.”
“Academic freedom? It was a slander.”
“You believe the allegations were a slander aimed at you personally?” Wallender said.
“Me and the university. It’s the same thing.” Maki made himself smaller, calmer. He put a hand to his forehead and lowered his voice. “It’s upsetting for me, too, gentlemen. As a gesture of my good faith, let me suggest that I make contact with the people conducting the investigation and report to you tomorrow. Perhaps if the brother Abu Ramiz would consent to come to my house tomorrow night for dinner, I will give him good news about this case. At least, I will be able to impart details of which you are currently ignorant, about the depths of Masharawi’s crimes.”
Omar Yussef knew why Maki wanted to split him away from the foreigners. There would be appeals to him in the name of the Palestinian struggle. There might even be a payoff to persuade him to throw the UN men off the scent. Still, Omar Yussef considered that, just as Maki thought he could better persuade his fellow Palestinian alone, he also might be able to manipulate the university president through the subtleties of their native language. “I would be very happy to come, Abu Nabil.”
“Welcome, welcome,” Maki said, turning up his volume again.
Chapter 5
The cold air sounded a single, long, deathly exhalation. Omar Yussef lay awake, freezing in his hotel bed because he couldn’t fathom how to turn off the air-conditioning. He wished its drone were the low, rattling snore of his wife. Whenever he dropped off to sleep, a key would turn loudly in a lock down the corridor or a voice would call goodnight to a friend. The noises seemed so close that at one point he thought someone had entered his room, and he sat up half-awake with a racing heart and sweaty pajamas, despite the chill. He went to the bathroom for a glass of water just before dawn, wrapped himself in the thin towels for warmth, and drank the water at the window. Peering past the edge of the curtain, he watched the detachment of soldiers outside the home of the head of Military Intelligence across the street. Through the dimness of the dust storm that had whipped up in the night, he counted the tips of their cigarettes, glowing orange each time they inhaled, until he felt sleepy.
When Omar Yussef came downstairs in the morning, Magnus Wallender was at the reception desk, laughing with the pretty young clerk.
“Abu Ramiz, morning of joy,” he said.
“Morning of light, Magnus.”
“Meisoun here tells me they don’t have the English-language newspapers in Gaza, as they do in Jerusalem.”
“Do you want me to translate the headlines for you from the Arabic newspapers? I’ll tell you if there’s an article about our friend Masharawi or if Sweden has invaded Norway. Any other news, believe me, you can live a few days without knowing it.”
Wallender laughed. “You’re right. Hungry?”
Omar Yussef took one of the Arabic newspapers from the reception counter. The main story was about the Military Intelligence officer’s funeral. He noticed a small item at the bottom of the page. He tapped it with his forefinger and waved the newspaper at Wallender. “Gaza is full of the most cheerful news, Magnus. Look: Body exhumed from grave, dumped near Deir el-Balah,” he read. “That’s the headline. Here’s the story: A farmer discovered the remains of a man near the town of Deir el-Balah yesterday. The farmer reported to police that he discovered the bones in a corner of his cabbage field near the Saladin Road.”
“Where’s Deir el-Balah?”
“South of Gaza City, halfway to the Egyptian border.” Omar Yussef read on: “ At first the farmer thought he had found animal bones, but then he discovered the skull, which was clearly human. Police transported the remains to Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, where doctors were puzzled by the age of the bones. Doctor Maher Najjar, Shifa’s pathologist, said it was hard to identify the precise age of the remains, but added that it could be as much as a century since the body was buried. There have been no reports of a grave being disturbed, but police are investigating in the hope that the bones can be returned to their original resting place. Do you have an appetite for breakfast now?” Omar Yussef chuckled and folded the newspaper.
They entered the breakfast room, sat by the window overlooking the sea and ordered toast and a basket of croissants.
Wallender peered out of the window into the impenetrable dust storm. “Hell.”
“We call it a khamsin, which means fifty,” Omar Yussef said. “That’s supposed to be the number of days each year in which clouds of dust like this descend upon us from the desert. But who’s counting?”
“How long will this one go on?”
“A few days, a week. Until it rains a little or until the wind dies down. Did you sleep well?”
“I kept waking. It felt as though someone was smothering me.”
“That’s the air pressure from the dust storm. It gives me a headache right here.” Omar Yussef drew a line from his right eyebrow to his ear.
“I have a bottle of aspirin. Do you want some?”
“No, I’ll simply add this one to my collection of headaches here, here, and here.” Omar Yussef tapped his head all around and smiled.
James Cree arrived at the same time as their breakfast. “What’ve you got for me, son?” he called to the waiter.
“Coffee, sir?”
“That’s right,” Cree said, lifting a croissant from the basket on the table. “Coffee it is, laddie.”
“American coffee or Arabic coffee, sir?”
Cree grinned aggressively at Omar Yussef. “What a polarized world we live in, eh, Mister Yussef? American or Arabic, that’s all the choice there is. East or West. Capitalism or fundamentalism.” He leaned toward the waiter. “I’ll have a European coffee, son. Make of that what you will. Run along.”
The waiter smiled and turned toward the kitchen.
Cree stuffed the croissant into his mouth. “Makes me bloody starving, this weather.”
“Here, have mine, too,” Omar Yussef said.
“You sure? All right.” Cree took the second pastry and bit, before he had swallowed the first. He wiped a buttery flake from his mustache and lowered his voice. “I’m thinking the Masharawi arrest could be a real problem for the UN.”
“It’s a bigger problem for Masharawi, though,” Omar Yussef said.
The waiter returned with a cup of drip coffee. “European coffee, sir.”
Cree sniffed. “Is that what I think it is, son?”
“Your double health, sir.” The waiter smiled and walked to his station by the swing doors.
Cree stared at the back of the waiter’s white shirt. He sipped the coffee. “Bloody hell, there is a drop of the hard stuff in here.”
Wallender leaned over the cup and inhaled. “Not European coffee. I’d call it Scottish coffee.”
Cree clapped his hands and gave a thumbs-up to the waiter. “I can see I’m going to become a caffeine addict,” he said. He drank, with a sigh.
Omar Yussef smelled the alcohol across the table. The raw scent of something he had forbidden himself made him resentful of Cree. “We have to see Masharawi as soon as possible. The longer he’s kept in jail, the harder it will be for us to persuade the security people that this is all just a misunderstanding,” he said.
