The Samaritan's secret

“I gathered that from what the Hamas boys said.”

“I think he might have stored the dirt files here. On the other side of this wall.” Omar Yussef ran his hand over the damp stone.

Khamis Zeydan stroked his mustache. He kept his eyes on the doorway. They twitched slightly with each gunshot in the courtyard.

“If you hang around, you might be able to find your file,” Omar Yussef said. “And dispose of it.”

His friend gave a low whistle and sat in the darkest corner of the storeroom. “I’ll wait,” Khamis Zeydan said.

A chorus of ululating women wailed in the courtyard as the family learned of Nouri’s death.

Omar Yussef lowered himself with a snort of pain and sat against the wall. He shivered on the cold floor and hugged himself. He would hide underground until Awwadi’s funeral, when the dead man would take his place under the earth. He remembered an eleventh-century Syrian poet had written that the surface of the earth was nothing but the bodies of long-dead men. Lighten your tread, the poet wrote, reminding the living that their corpses, too, would become the dirt on their grandchildren’s sandals.

Khamis Zeydan closed his eyes. Omar Yussef watched him. He wouldn’t have stayed with me, if I hadn’t told him that the file of dirt on him might be in the next room, he thought. I should ask the people here if they saw anybody emerge from this passage, but they’ll be in no mood to talk now. And anyway I don’t want word getting around that I’m tracking Awwadi’s killer.

“I’m grateful to you for coming with me through the tunnel,” he whispered. “You didn’t have to.”

Khamis Zeydan shrugged and swallowed hard.

He’s nervous about finding his file, Omar Yussef thought. What will he do if it’s not in the room next door?

The gunfire stopped. The wailing women moved up to the terrace and went inside. Omar Yussef lifted his head. “The men have gone to the funeral,” he said.

Khamis Zeydan crept up the steps and looked out. He beckoned Omar Yussef to follow him with a wave of his hand. The courtyard was empty. The goats gazed at Omar Yussef dumbly. He put his hand behind the ears of a dark brown kid and rubbed its bony head.

“Where’re the files?” Khamis Zeydan asked.

Omar Yussef moved along the wall. He shoved the gate of the horse’s stable. Its bottom edge squeaked across the stone floor. He froze, fearful that he had been heard, but the women went on screeching upstairs.

The stallion was white and ghostly at the rear of the stable. He stamped and shied as the gate opened. Sharik, Omar Yussef thought. Partner. A good name for a horse, until its partner is murdered. Omar Yussef felt unaccountably guilty, as though he ought to console the horse for the loss of its master. They slipped past him and down the steps at the back.

They entered another dark, damp storeroom. Omar Yussef cast the flashlight around. The room was empty. Khamis Zeydan dug his heel into the dirt floor and looked nauseous.

Omar Yussef came up the steps and stroked the dry hair of the horse’s mane. He peered into the sunny courtyard. Perhaps the files had never been in the Touqan Palace after all. Awwadi may have hidden them elsewhere. But if he had kept them here, someone else had them now. Either way, Omar Yussef sensed that Awwadi wouldn’t be the last person who would die for these files. No man was safe, so long as he walked above the dead bodies that were the surface of the earth. Not in the casbah.

Chapter 19

The men at the head of the funeral procession surrounded Sheikh Bader, thrusting their M-16s above their heads and chanting to Allah. Despite the perspiration and frenzy around him, the old man held his head still, glowering as though he were leading the mourners into hell to stare down Satan himself. When they left the vaulted souk, they fired their rifles into the air to honor the martyr Nouri Awwadi.

Omar Yussef clapped his hands over his ears and kept them there as the van that he had heard broadcasting Islamic songs at Awwadi’s wedding jarred the street with a heavy drum beat. Another troop of gunmen followed the Volkswagen, jogging in black combat fatigues, their faces obscured by stocking caps, the green sash of Hamas around their heads. They marched in military order, lifting their knees high, clutching machine guns across their chests. A few small boys skipped along beside them.

The last of the mourners sweated past, bellowing their desire to sacrifice their souls and blood for Awwadi.

Omar Yussef intended to talk to Nouri Awwadi’s father about the way his son had died. He was sure Awwadi had been on the trail of the secret bank accounts. Omar Yussef thought he might be able to use the fact that he had been with Awwadi just before he died to win the father’s trust and obtain information that would be useful to Jamie King. He would have to wait until the burial was over, so he paced warily about the casbah, keeping close to the busiest streets where he thought he’d be safe from the man who had tried to kill him.

He passed the most famous qanafi bakery. The soporific sugariness of the dessert lingered in his nostrils as he walked on. He drank a cup of bitter coffee, and he loitered by a man selling chickens from dirty metal crates. Neither aroma conquered the cloying scent of the qanafi, as though he were condemned to inhale the cheese and the syrup until the funeral ended. He decided that only when he caught the smell of sweat on a worker’s shirt or cigarette smoke drifting from the mouth of a passing man would he know Awwadi was under the ground.

Omar Yussef circled the cheap clothing stores in the souk and went through the lower casbah. He felt as though he were exploring the old town for the first time. When Awwadi had shown him around, he had thought that the place belonged to his guide and to the others who lived there. Now he saw that the casbah owned its inhabitants. Nouri Awwadi was muscular and powerful, but the casbah had taken him. The Touqan Palace, atrophied and decrepit, would still stand when everyone who remembered Awwadi had joined him beneath the earth.

Omar Yussef detected the bitter scent of urine in a dark corner. The sweet smell had finally left him. The funeral must be over, he thought, sniffing the cologne on the back of his hand.

At the Touqan Palace, he weaved through a crowd of older men who had returned to the house of mourning after the funeral, while the youngsters went to throw stones at the Israeli checkpoint. He climbed the steps to the terrace fronting the Awwadi family apartment, overlooking the uneven roofs of the casbah. A row of potted kumquat bushes quivered in the hot breeze. Omar Yussef plucked an orange fruit, inhaled its fragrance and savored the texture of its rind as he rolled it between his fingers.

A black tarpaulin shaded the mourners. A boy offered Omar Yussef a finger of thin, unsweetened coffee in a tiny blue plastic cup. He drank and wiggled the cup from side to side to signify that he didn’t want a refill. He saw Nouri’s father under the awning, made his way through the plastic chairs where the mourners sat, and shook the man’s hand.

“May Allah have mercy upon him, the departed one,” he said.

“May you live a long life,” the man mumbled, letting go of Omar Yussef’s hand quickly. He fiddled with a string of green worry beads like the one his son had used. Omar Yussef wondered if they had been recovered from Nouri’s clothes at the baths. The man’s stumpy fingers fretted the beads in his wrinkled brown hand, like an elephant’s massive feet kicking a row of watermelons.

Omar Yussef lowered himself into the seat beside the bereaved man. “I’m Omar Yussef Sirhan, from Bethlehem,” he said. “I was in the baths when Nouri was killed.”

“Welcome.”

Omar Yussef put his palm over his heart and bowed slightly. “Who would have killed your son, Abu Nouri?”

“I know exactly who is to blame.” The man lifted a thick finger. Omar Yussef remembered the shaven, scented corpse in the baths. The father’s gray chest-hair curled over the top of a soiled white T-shirt and he smelled of grease and sweat. His bottom lip hung heavily and his dead brown eyes reminded Omar Yussef of the dumb goats in the courtyard.