The Samaritan's secret

me as entirely selfish, then look at it this way: if I could help cleanse Palestine of corruption and build good infrastructure, international investors would put money into the economy and my holdings here would appreciate in value.”

Omar Yussef dropped his gaze to his knuckles. Have I been blinded to this man’s better intentions by the animosity Khamis Zeydan feels for him? Perhaps he’s telling me the truth now.

“If I tried to put you out of the way, it was because I didn’t know your objectives,” Kanaan said. “You can’t blame me for assuming that if you’d found the money you would have kept it for yourself, or for some faction allied to your friend Abu Adel. I already paid off everyone else who might have considered going after the money, because I wanted to make sure that I’d be the one to trace it. Then I planned to deposit it in the Palestinian treasury.”

“If someone refused to be paid off, then you employed Mareh and his own special methods?”

“I used extreme measures, because the fate of our nation rests on the recovery of this money.”

“How about Suleiman al-Teef? Did you buy him?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“If this is true, why didn’t you coordinate your search with Jamie King. The World Bank could’ve helped you.”

“Foreigners like her just get in the way.”

Omar Yussef flexed his fingers. “Ishaq took the dirt files. Then he failed to hand over the account documents?”

“Correct.”

“So you killed him?”

Kanaan’s eyelid fluttered and something beneath his suave calm quivered. “I could never have done such a thing. I loved him.”

“You can’t kill someone you love? Love’s usually the most popular reason for murder.”

Kanaan glanced out of the window toward the gazebo where Khamis Zeydan sat, hunched and sullen. “Don’t you think that if I was that kind of man I’d have killed other people who were close to me? Ishaq wasn’t the first person I loved who betrayed me.”

His wife, with the dashing young field officer who’s now sulking in his garden, Omar Yussef thought. “Liana?”

“In Beirut, I had an understanding with her. We were promised to each other, though not formally engaged. Then I discovered that she had loved another man, too.”

Kanaan took Liana as his wife even after that betrayal, Omar Yussef thought. His attraction to her wasn’t only a matter of sex. He loves her as if she were his own flesh. Omar Yussef raised his head. His own flesh. “Ishaq was your son.”

Kanaan’s chin dipped like a man on the verge of sleep. “He was my son,” he said. He pyramided his fingertips at the end of his clumsy, wide nose and closed his eyes. “Liana and I had relations before our marriage. You should have seen her, ustaz. She was brave and intelligent, the most beautiful woman in Beirut. Were you ever there?”

“Not since I was a student.”

Kanaan smiled dreamily. “The spirit of Beirut back then swept me and Liana into each other’s hearts. She rejected the conservative morality of our culture and even convinced me that I could join this rejection. She had spent time in Europe and seen how young couples lived there.”

“You don’t look like a hippie to me.”

“We were radicals, not hippies. In those days, revolution was something creative and idealistic. Artists and theater people used to visit our headquarters. I met the great English actress Vanessa Redgrave more than once.”

Omar Yussef rolled his eyes, but Kanaan appeared not to notice.

“No one knew who would be alive the next day. You could be killed by the Syrians, the Israelis, the Christian militias, the Shiite gangs, by one of the other Palestinian factions, or even by the Old Man himself.” Kanaan gazed into the sun, glinting off the tall windows of his salon. “If you found someone who would love you, you loved her back with all the life you had, all the life that might be snuffed out the next day, the next hour.”

Omar Yussef sneered. “Liana became pregnant.”

“Shortly after we became engaged, I sent her to Nablus to have our baby,” Kanaan said. “I had to get her out of Beirut, where all the other PLO people were, to avoid a scandal. She couldn’t go to her family in Ramallah, because everyone knew her there. Nablus is my home. When she gave birth here, I paid the Samaritan priest to adopt the boy. I chose to hide my son with people so much on the fringe of the town that no one who knew me would ever discover the truth, but he would still be close enough that we could watch him grow up.”

“Why didn’t you go to live in Europe with him?”

“That’s what Liana wanted. But I realized that it was only she who could live outside our people’s morality and traditions. Only she could leave Palestinian society. I was too weak.” The sickly yellow around Kanaan’s irises glowed with desolation in the fading light. “After our marriage, it was too late to get the boy back without admitting what had happened. It would have been a dreadful slur on my wife’s reputation, to have acknowledged that we had physical relations before our wedding.”

Omar Yussef understood the dilemma. Many women had been killed for staining the honor of their families with even the suspicion of sex outside marriage, let alone an illegitimate birth. Liana’s family might have been a little more modern about it than that, but they could easily have disowned her, he thought. Certainly Kanaan’s business career would have been destroyed by the scandal.

“But I funded Ishaq’s schooling and I promoted him in the party,” Kanaan said. “How else do you think an obscure Samaritan kid became the financial adviser to our president? I propelled Ishaq as I would have my legitimate son.”

Kanaan stared at the shining marble floor. For a moment, Omar Yussef wondered if he was still breathing, then the man covered his face with both hands and groaned. Omar Yussef knew that now, when Kanaan was weak, he had to push him. “Ishaq died as his biblical namesake Isaac was intended to die,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Isaac was bound, ready for sacrifice, on the peak of the mountain where the temple would later be built. His father, the Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, as the Jews call him, was to carry out the killing.”

“You think I’m Ibrahim? Ibrahim didn’t kill Isaac in the end, and anyway that’s just an old story.” A wave of Kanaan’s cologne floated across the coffee table to Omar Yussef. “Ishaq threatened to blackmail me if I made a fuss about him failing to give me the account documents.”

“He put the bite on you?”

“What’re you talking about?”

Omar Yussef thought of Nadia and her American detective story and he hid his smile behind his hand. “He threatened to reveal who his real parents were?”

Kanaan ran his fingers through his hair. “It would have destroyed my wife.”

“And you?”

“By now I’ve made too much money for any dirt to stick. Too many bastards need me on their side. They stifle their moral outrage easily enough. But my wife is more vulnerable than I am. She couldn’t have taken the scandal.”

“How did you respond to Ishaq’s blackmail?”

“I gave in. I agreed that he could keep the secret bank documents. I told him it would be dangerous for him to hold on to that information, that deadly people would discover the truth and force him to hand over the account details. I had paid people to leave the secret funds to me, but if I didn’t get hold of the accounts quickly enough, those same people would consider the field open once more.” Kanaan spread his hands wide and let them slap down onto his tastefully cut linen pants. “And of course they-whoever they are-found him and killed him.”

“Who has the secret account details now?”

“I don’t know. Whoever killed Ishaq, I suppose.”

“And the files of dirt on the Fatah people?”

Kanaan smiled bitterly. “I reclaimed them.”

“You saw no reason to be bound by your agreement with Ishaq once he was dead.”