The Samaritan's secret

had found Ishaq’s body snoozed with his cap over his eyes. His dirty white undershirt had slipped up over his belly and the sweat shone on his hairy stomach.

Khamis Zeydan flicked his cigarette. The butt landed on the undershirt and smoldered. The caretaker came upright with a gasp, swatting the cigarette away. When he saw the policeman’s uniform, he gripped the arms of his chair and dropped his jaw.

“Evening of joy,” Omar Yussef said.

“Evening of light, ustaz,” the man mumbled.

“I brought a senior colleague with me.” He gestured to Khamis Zeydan. “He’s a brigadier.”

The caretaker swallowed hard and bowed to the policeman. “Welcome, pasha,” he said. Khamis Zeydan stared at him without expression.

Omar Yussef stepped forward quickly and looked down at the caretaker. The man’s eyes opened wide with surprise. “You lock that place every night?” He lifted a finger toward the summit of Mount Jerizim, visible over the tin roof of the shed.

“That’s right,” the caretaker said.

“You lock the gate by the parking lot?”

“That’s the only entrance, ustaz.”

“Who has the key?”

“Only me.”

“Ishaq’s body wasn’t there when you locked up in the evening, but you found it in the morning.”

The caretaker nodded dumbly. Khamis Zeydan took a small step toward him and the fat man pressed himself deep into the cracked leather of his armchair.

“So how did the body get there?”

“I don’t know, ustaz.”

“Whoever took the body to the mountain must have had the key.”

“No, that’s not possible.”

“Unless they had your help.”

The caretaker removed his baseball cap and wiped his bald head with his forearm. He looked at the front of the cap. Sweat soaked the band. He ran a hairy finger across the logo of the cheap Israeli cigarettes. “There’s a path in the pines beyond the village. It goes through a hole in the fence behind the fortress.”

“What’s the point of locking the gates, if there’s a hole in the fence?”

“No one knows about the hole in the fence, except us. Anyway there’s nothing up there to steal.”

“Who’s us?”

The caretaker bit his bottom lip. “The people from the village.”

“The Samaritans?”

The caretaker kept his eyes on Khamis Zeydan. The police chief shuffled closer and stroked the leather glove on his prosthetic hand.

Omar Yussef moved closer, too. “Ishaq was taken up to the peak of the mountain after he died, or he was killed there. But he certainly didn’t go through the gate, because it was locked. He must have entered through the hole in the fence-a hole known only to the Samaritans.”

“So the body must have been taken there by a Samaritan.” Khamis Zeydan smiled. “That narrows things down.”

“A Samaritan would never defile our holy place that way.”

Omar Yussef thought for a moment. “Unless he was doing it for the good of the Samaritan people,” he said.

“How could a murder be good for us?” The caretaker raised his arms. The dark hair in the pits glistened with sweat.

Omar Yussef watched the man closely. “Who’s up there now?”

“No one.” The caretaker opened his palms. “I have to take a break sometime, don’t I?”

“We may be back to talk to you again.”

The fat man bobbed his head. “Welcome, ustaz. Welcome, pasha.” They left him examining the cigarette burn on his undershirt.

When they reached the street, the police chief’s upper lip curled. He lifted a thumb and gestured back down the alley. “My dear father used to say, ‘When the wolf comes, the guard dog disappears for a shit.’” He turned to Omar Yussef. “Convenient that he wasn’t around when the murder occurred, eh?”

Omar Yussef scratched his cheek thoughtfully. He led Khamis Zeydan toward the jeep. “Ishaq told his wife he wanted to bury the dangerous thing he was dealing with behind the temple. That must have been the account details. I think he meant that he hid them up there on Mount Jerizim.”

“Behind the temple? What does that mean?”

“The temple of the Samaritans once stood at the summit of this mountain. We have to look there.”

“You wanted to climb up high enough that falling would be fatal. Maybe you found the right spot. The only place higher than that temple is heaven.”

The distant sound of rifle fire disturbed the silence of the village. “The entertainment started early today,” Khamis Zeydan said.

Omar Yussef blinked into the vivid blue sky. The gunfire was ugly and incongruous on the quiet mountaintop.

A deeper sound punctuated the cracking of the rifles. Omar Yussef brought his eyes down to the street. The boy with the misshapen ears caught his basketball as it rebounded from the side wall of Roween’s house. He stopped and watched Omar Yussef, then threw once more at the wall. He grabbed the ball and made his way through the flame pits, halting to stare at Omar Yussef before moving on again.

Omar Yussef looked at Khamis Zeydan, lifted his chin toward the boy, and headed after him. The police chief sighed and followed.

Thin smoke rose from the coals at the bottom of the pits where the Samaritans had made their sacrifice. The air was thick with the aroma of lamb fat. Fed by the grease, it might take days for the fires to burn themselves out.

The boy led them to a stand of trees at the edge of the park. The smell of the sacrifice mingled with the sauna scent of pines in the sun. Their footsteps crunched the carpet of fallen needles.

A figure in a blue gown watched them from a small glade. In the clearing, Roween caressed the boy’s cheek and tidied his hair. Sweat glowed along the fringe of darker brown skin edging her lips and in the fine auburn hairs that spread onto her cheeks. She pulled back into a shadowed corner and sat on a rock.

“He’s my brother,” she said to Omar Yussef, with her hand on the boy’s arm. “Ishaq was very close to him.” She whispered in the kid’s ear and he loped through the trees toward the village.

Omar Yussef watched him go and wondered at the bond between the homosexual, his retarded brother-in- law, and his stumpy, ill-favored wife. The misfits had shared some sort of tenderness in a community bound by rough convention.

Khamis Zeydan positioned himself on a rock with his back to the clearing, guarding the approach.

Roween turned a faint smile of conspiracy to Omar Yussef. This woman has her secrets, he thought. Ishaq may not have been the husband she bargained for, but they were joined in some kind of love and they shared things no one else knew.

“Is this the way to the gap in the fence? To get onto the mountaintop when the gate is locked?” he asked.

“The path starts here. But you can take the road to the very upper edge of the village and join it there, to shorten your walk.” Roween looked quickly back toward the Samaritan houses and rubbed the sweat from her lip. “You were at the home of Jibril the priest.”

Omar Yussef remembered the movement of her curtain as he had entered the priest’s house. “We talked about Ishaq,” he said, “and the return of the Abisha Scroll.”

“What did you learn?” Roween rolled her tongue in her cheek.

“I discovered that Samaritan priests are no more likely than Muslim sheikhs to confront the hardest truths. Am I about to discover that Samaritan women will only hold back their full knowledge for so long, once they see that they’re talking to a genuine friend?”