The Samaritan's secret

carved in stately thuluth calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the text and picked out the Touqan name engraved on the limestone. It’s the tomb of a wealthy man who once inhabited the palace where Awwadi lives, he thought.

Omar Yussef stared at the stone until the face of the corpse within seemed to glow through it. Please be quiet, he told the corpse. I’ll forgive you any sins you committed centuries ago, so long as you don’t give me away now.

He heard someone running through the souk. With a limp. Probably from falling over the box of trash, he thought. He tried to emulate the dead beneath the gravestones, who obliged him with their silence.

The footsteps halted outside the iron fence. Omar Yussef heard a man breathing hard. He thought he smelled the scent of cardamom and recalled once more that same spice on the breath of the man who had slapped him. The metal fence squeaked. He’s coming inside, he thought. But then he heard the feet move along the souk.

A door swung open, slamming against a wall some distance away, and cheerful voices rushed into the street. Omar Yussef heard his stalker curse in a low voice and turn back toward the casbah.

Omar Yussef dropped to the ground, his back against the Touqan tomb, and breathed desperately, like a swimmer surfacing from a long dive. He closed his eyes and shivered. Whoever that was, he probably saw me with Nouri Awwadi. Whatever I know about the dirt files or Ishaq’s murder, that man must suspect I know even more. He’ll try to kill me again.

A strong wind swept through the casbah and the evening sun dropped behind Jerizim. A deep chill emanated from the old tombs. It was too late to return to the Touqan Palace to hunt for the files. Omar Yussef climbed over the rubble, lowered himself onto the worn flagstones of the souk and rushed away.

Chapter 15

Omar Yussef disliked restaurant food. He suspected professional chefs of cheating, adding extra fat or too much salt, rather than taking the time to follow traditional recipes. Anticipating such second-rate fare at the hotel restaurant, he waited sullenly by the window of his hotel room, tapping his finger on a book he had been trying to read, while Maryam dressed for dinner.

Isolated blue lights were scattered across the hillside below. The people of Nablus had eaten early and gone to bed, leaving the streets to the gunmen and the Israeli patrols. And to the man who tried to kill me.

The stillness outside his hotel window seemed illusory to Omar Yussef, like the quiet of a corpse. A dead body appears motionless, he thought, but the serenity of death is only a mask for the assiduous decaying of flesh. I would have said Ishaq’s cadaver was lifeless when I inspected it on the mountaintop. In reality, it was being eaten away by countless awful microscopic organisms. This peaceful cityscape, too, is no less riddled with destructive undercurrents than a putrefying carcass. He clasped his hands anxiously. Perhaps if I just talked to the American woman again, I could get a better idea of why Ishaq died. I might be able to guide her toward the money, without really being involved.

Without taking any more risks.

“I hope the hotel doesn’t overcook the shish tawouk.” Maryam stepped out of the bathroom, slipping a small gold earring into her earlobe. “These restaurants always ruin chicken, so that you have to drown the food in lemon juice to give it any life.”

Omar Yussef laughed. “Next time we travel, I’ll rent a hotel room with a kitchen for you,” he said. “That way we’ll be able to avoid restaurants entirely.”

Maryam pulled on a black woolen jacket. “Omar, these restaurant people do all kinds of terrible things with food. They don’t love the food or the people who eat it.”

Omar Yussef noticed Maryam had left his short-sleeved shirt hanging from the shower rail in the bathroom, damp across the chest where she had scrubbed away the hummus stain. The food at Abu Alam’s snack bar had been good, even if it had offended Maryam that he ate there. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to condemn restaurant meals. “My darling, tonight’s dishes may not be so bad.”

His wife raised a scolding finger. “Yes, maybe the meal will be as good as the hummus in the casbah.”

Omar Yussef’s mouth dried up, like the overdone chicken on which he imagined he’d soon be choking. Can she read my thoughts, he wondered, or just my guilty conscience?

“I’m going to taste the salads,” Maryam said, “and if I don’t think they’ve made them correctly, I won’t even touch the main course.”

She frowned, lifted his hand, and inspected a greenish bruise on his wrist. “Did that happen when you stumbled after that scum slapped you?”

Omar Yussef hoped there was a limit to his wife’s ability to see through him. “That must be when it happened,” he said. He pulled back his hand. He ached all over from his tumble down the steps, but he didn’t want to alarm Maryam.

“I still don’t understand why they would hurt Sami.”

“He’s a policeman. They’re criminals.”

“I’m proud that you tried to stop them.”

Omar Yussef set his book on the dresser. He had tried to reread some poems by a famous Nablus writer, but the book had frustrated him. The poet struck a heroic tone that seemed to Omar Yussef as false as the melodrama of a news-caster. The poems praised people who, instead, ought to have been shaken to their senses before they made useless sacrifices of themselves. Even our artists can’t tell us the truth, he thought. It’s no wonder our politicians find it so easy to lie. “I’m going down for a quick coffee while you finish getting ready, Maryam,” he said. “It’ll relax me.”

“Of course, my darling.” She blinked hard. “I just have to tidy my hair and then I’ll join you.”

Omar Yussef smiled at his wife. Beside her black clothes, her skin appeared gray, though it was really a yellowed brown like the flesh inside an eggplant. She blinked frequently when spoken to, an idiosyncrasy she had devel-oped during the years of the intifada. Omar Yussef worried that it was the result of excessive tension, of repressed concern for her family amid the violence of Bethlehem. Perhaps she’s just surprised that she’s still alive, after what our town’s been through, he thought.

Maryam went back into the small bathroom. “I worry about Zuheir,” she said quietly, as Omar Yussef turned the door handle to leave the room.

He took his hand away from the knob. “Because he’s become religious?”

Maryam snapped her face toward her husband. “Because he’s all skin and bones. He isn’t eating well.”

“It’s just the stupid loose clothes he wears, like some Saudi herdsman,” Omar Yussef said. “Or maybe it’s because he’s fasting twice a week like a good Muslim.”

“Omar, don’t criticize the boy. He’s stubborn, just like you. If you tell him he’s taking the wrong path, it’ll only make him more determined.”

She leaned close to the bathroom mirror and, with a finger and thumb, toyed with the sagging skin at the corners of her mouth.

“Maryam, turn away from that mirror,” Omar Yussef said. “When you look at yourself like that, it reminds me how much worse my own reflection appears. Do you want to be cruel to your poor husband?”

Maryam twiddled the brass buttons on Omar Yussef’s blazer and brushed the lapels. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You look smart, as always.”

It wasn’t true that, confronted with a mirror, Omar Yussef examined himself critically. He saw more than a trace of the handsome young man he had been. He even imagined that he might be less bald than in fact he was and that his gray mustache gave him a manly gravity. But he was unsure of himself tonight. The mirror might catch him with haggard, drawn eyelids and new lines scored beside his mouth like scars.

He kissed his wife’s forehead and opened the door. She reached for her hairbrush, as he went out.

In the elevator, the mirror challenged him. He glimpsed a sallow face, streaked with deep gray shadows. He