Damascus, either, when we were students and you were a political hack at the university. You were into all kinds of shady things back then, don’t deny it. And what about that son of yours in New York? The Israelis had him in jail a couple of years ago. What has he been up to?”
“Ala was never charged.”
“You sound like his lawyer, not his father,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Go into anyone’s past and you’ll find that we’re all dirty liars who manipulate the truth.”
“Lies are one thing. Running all over Europe and the Middle East committing murder is quite different.”
Khamis Zeydan sneered, as though Omar Yussef had thought to knock him down with no more than a slap from a wet towel. “It’s no secret that I did those things, which means it’s no scandal. But for all I know, you could be a murderer.”
“How dare you,” Omar Yussef said. He thought of the time he had spent in jail in Bethlehem before he went to university, on a false murder charge. “And if you heard that I was a murderer, you’d believe it?”
“I never believe anything I hear,” Khamis Zeydan said. “But you seem content to assume the worst about me.”
They poured hot water on their shoulders, but the relax-ation was gone.
“We all try to keep our past quiet,” Khamis Zeydan said. “All silence is guilty. I’ve done so much dirty stuff that I ought to be put away forever. But instead I’m a law enforce-ment officer. Welcome to Palestine.”
Omar Yussef put his hand on Khamis Zeydan’s pale, bony knee. “We can try to get your file from Awwadi.”
“Those files aren’t for his personal use, by Allah. Even if Awwadi and I have bonded in our towels, Sheikh Bader hasn’t hung out naked with me. I don’t imagine Awwadi has the sheikh’s dispensation to give up that file, even if he were prepared to do so. The sheikh will use it against me, if I ever try to arrest someone from Hamas. In Palestine, you can never allow another man to have power over you.”
“‘Call a man your master, and he’ll sell you in the slave market,’” Omar Yussef said.
Khamis Zeydan snapped his fingers. “This is where the sheikh got the idea that the Old Man died of that disease, isn’t it? From the files.”
“Could be.”
“But how? They were the Old Man’s files. He wouldn’t have the details of his own death in there.”
Omar Yussef took a breath. He was about to tell Khamis Zeydan how Ishaq had been with the president at the end and had also given the files to Hamas, but there was a cry from further back in the bathhouse.
Khamis Zeydan’s towel spattered water behind him on the tiles as he disappeared into the shower room. The cry could have come from someone suffering as his knotted muscles were massaged too strongly, but Khamis Zeydan must have recognized something harsher in the voice.
Another voice howled from the same direction. This time it was no cry of pain. It was a shriek of horror.
Omar Yussef slopped across the wet floor. His heel slipped in a pool of water, and he grabbed a shower curtain to break his fall. The plastic rings along the shower rail popped one by one and dropped him awkwardly to the cold, damp tiles. He cursed and rubbed his tailbone where it had hit the floor. His slip had quickened his pulse even more than the scream.
He found Khamis Zeydan kneeling before a massage bench. The baths’ manager leaned against the wall with the expression of a man who had just been punched hard. On the bench, someone lay on his belly, his feet hanging off the end.
Omar Yussef carefully crossed the puddled floor. The massage chamber seemed cold, after the steam bath and the hot water.
The bench was made of thick, clumsy chunks of olive wood, blackened with the sweat of many men despite the gray, smeared towel wrapped across it. As Omar Yussef approached, he saw that the body on the bench was muscular and hairless. When he smelled sandalwood, he gasped. He knelt by Khamis Zeydan, as his friend lifted Nouri Awwadi’s hand from where it dangled to the floor and laid it beside his heavy torso.
“His neck is broken,” the police chief said.
Awwadi’s head lay at a sharp angle to his bulky shoulders. The young man gazed blankly. Omar Yussef remembered the startling recognition he’d felt before Ishaq’s dead, blue eyes. Faced with Awwadi’s stare, he thought that it seemed no more to have been alive than the black, shiny eyeball of a fish staring back from a plate.
Omar Yussef lifted his hand to touch the dead man, but withdrew it. He was certain that Awwadi, who had either possessed the secret bank details or been confident of obtaining them soon, had been murdered because of them.
The body was perfectly muscled and oiled, but now it would commence upon the process of decay that Omar Yussef had considered while he waited for dinner the previous night. He wondered how many more bodies he would have to gaze upon, if he continued his search for Ishaq’s killer and the account details. He looked at Abdel Rahim. “May Allah have mercy upon him.”
“May you yourself live long,” the bathhouse manager muttered. “I was getting ready to do his massage when I heard the cry. I ran back here, but I found only Nouri’s body.”
“You were in the entrance hall?” Omar Yussef rose, stiff and groaning.
“No, I was mopping out the steam room after you used it. I went back to the changing room and from there I came this way.”
“Was it you I heard shriek in terror?”
Abdel Rahim sucked his bottom lip under his teeth and closed his eyes.
“Could anyone have sneaked past you, after they killed Nouri?”
The masseur shook his head. He grimaced at Nouri Awwadi’s back and turned away.
“Is there another way out of here?” Omar Yussef said.
The manager stared at the water dripping from the shower in the nearest stall.
Omar Yussef moved closer to him. “Abdel Rahim?”
“The Israelis were here last night to find our tunnels,” Abdel Rahim said. “That’s why they came.”
Omar Yussef cocked his head. “Tunnels?”
“There’re tunnels all over the casbah. Tunnels and passages between houses. No one knows them except those who live here.”
Abdel Rahim led them to the back of the massage room and opened a door onto absolute darkness. “Down these steps, we have our heating room, the generator, the steam mechanism. There’s also an entrance to a long passage. Eventually it leads to the back of a halva factory. The killer could have gone out that way.”
“Did the Israelis find it?”
“I don’t think so. I checked this morning and the entrance hadn’t been disturbed.”
Omar Yussef flipped a light switch and looked down at a spiral staircase, its worn stone steps shining in the yellow light. He put his foot on the first step to descend, but the cold draught reminded him that he was wet and wearing only a towel.
“Abu Adel,” he said. “Get dressed. We must follow this passage. You’ll have to do without your massage.”
Khamis Zeydan looked down at Nouri Awwadi’s corpse and rolled his head on his shoulders. “I prefer a stiff neck to a broken one,” he said.
Chapter 18
Omar Yussef followed Abdel Rahim past three rever-berating water heaters. The dense oil vapor in the basement flooded his sinuses. His head swam. He steadied himself against a grubby plastic drum of shampoo.
