Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

“Peace be upon you, Lieutenant.” The tall man’s voice was mocking. Omar Yussef heard someone expectorate and saw Sami flinch when the spittle hit him.

The men went back around the corner. Omar Yussef listened to their footsteps recede. Maryam handed him his glasses and stroked his stinging cheek.

Sami was hunched over his knees on the flagstones of the alley. Meisoun hugged his shaking body.

Omar Yussef kneeled beside him. He gave his handker-chief to Meisoun, who wiped the gob of sputum from Sami’s cheek. The young policeman’s face was pale and sweating. He cradled his right arm with his left.

“They’ve broken my arm,” he gasped.

This time Omar Yussef didn’t ask who they were.

The sun slipped behind the mansions on Mount Jerizim, as though their prodigiously wealthy residents had bought it and stashed it in their gardens. Why not? Omar Yussef thought. Everything’s for sale in Palestine, if you bribe the right people. He gathered his breath for the steps outside his hotel, coughing on the exhaust fumes as his taxi pulled away, and followed Maryam toward the entrance.

Few of the rooms in the Grand Hotel were lit. In the dark, its seventies facade of rippled concrete looked like the exhausted face of a man moments from death. Meisoun, playing the ironic tour guide, had said the violence of Nablus discouraged tourists, and her wedding guests accounted for almost every illuminated window in the hotel. Omar Yussef hoped not to have to be the one to tell them that the groom was in the sick bay at police head-quarters with his broken forearm in a sling.

As Omar Yussef tracked Maryam across the empty lobby, the hotel manager wrenched a jammed sheet of paper from the fax machine on the reception desk. “Peace be upon you, ustaz, ” he said, a little breathlessly.

“And upon you, peace.”

“This might be a reservation.” The manager beamed desperately at Omar Yussef. He had eyes the pale brown tone of cigarette filters and gray skin, so that his face looked like a heavily used ashtray with two new butts stubbed into it. He wore an expression of hopeless fragility that made him look as though he would, indeed, blow away about as easily as a pile of cinders. With the shredded fax close to his face, he struggled to read the text. His mouth tightened and he crushed the sheet into a ball, tossing it hard into a wastepaper basket.

Maryam caressed Omar Yussef’s face as they waited for the elevator. While they had watched the doctor set Sami’s arm, Omar Yussef had felt the sting in his cheek and wished the masked man in the alley had punched him instead. The slap had been contemptuous, as though he were a woman or an infant. He couldn’t help but resent Maryam’s sympathy.

“Darling, I’ll wait down here while you change for dinner,” he said.

He kissed her and entered the lounge. Lit a ghostly blue by glimmering fluorescent tubes, the room was noisy with the sententious voice of a presenter on the Abu Dhabi cable news channel resonating from a big-screen television on the far wall. At a breakfast bar of the same pale pine as the reception desk, a waiter in a white shirt and flashy striped vest leaned over a newspaper. As Omar Yussef approached, he shoved himself off his elbows and straightened the bottom of his vest over his paunch.

“Evening of joy,” Omar Yussef said.

“Evening of light, ustaz, ” the waiter mumbled. He looked nervous and defeated, as though he already knew he wouldn’t be able to fulfill any order to Omar Yussef’s satisfaction.

“A coffee, please. Prepare it sa’ada. ” Omar Yussef always took his coffee without sugar.

The waiter ducked below the counter.

“Please turn the volume down on the television, too,” Omar Yussef said. “The news is always bad enough without it having to be loud, as well.”

The waiter remained on his haunches, reaching up to a shelf behind him for the remote control.

The room had been recently whitewashed, but its furniture was a decade old. The couches were low squares of foam covered in nylon and corduroy with no armrests or support. Omar Yussef winced, wondering how he’d ever be able to get up, once he had sunk into one of them.

With the hotel almost empty, there was only one group in the lounge. In the far corner, Nadia balanced on the edge of a couch of spongy cushions upholstered with a russet fabric in an angular pattern. She was in conversation with her uncle Zuheir and a red-haired foreigner in her late thirties. Omar Yussef would have preferred to sit alone, letting the adrenaline that still thundered through him after the attack by the masked men dissipate. But if he didn’t join them, Nadia would want to know why and he preferred not to talk to her about Sami’s beating.

By the way Zuheir’s lips puckered and his thick beard twitched, Omar Yussef sensed that he was suppressing a powerful anger. The schoolteacher’s second son was twenty-eight years old. He wore a white dress shirt buttoned to the neck, its tails falling outside white cotton pants. It was the clothing of a religious zealot and Omar Yussef searched beneath it for the excitable, curly-haired boy he had secretly favored over his other sons, when they were children. Zuheir’s dark eyes flitted between the foreigner and Nadia. If his niece weren’t here, Omar Yussef thought, I suspect he’d give that red-haired woman a mouthful. He smiled. He was suspicious of Zuheir’s newly devout demeanor, but he was happy that the boy’s habitual trucu-lence hadn’t deserted him.

Nadia noticed Omar Yussef picking his way between the empty couches and waved. His favorite grandchild was skinny and tall and so pale that her grandmother’s main mission in life was to force food upon her in the hope of adding color and size. Her mischievious intelligence impressed Omar Yussef more every month. As he came close, she suppressed a smile. I know that look, he thought. She has a surprise for me. He bent to kiss her smooth fore-head. Her hair had a clean bubble-gum scent and Omar Yussef felt embarrassed by the sweat on his shirt and socks from the scuffle in the casbah.

“Grandpa, this is Miss Jamie King,” Nadia said, in English. She gestured to the foreigner with the spine of a paperback, keeping her place in the book with her forefinger. “Miss King, this is Omar Yussef Sirhan from Bethlehem. He’s a schoolteacher- with a secret life.” She opened her black eyes wide.

The red-haired woman stood and shook Omar Yussef’s hand with a strong yank that started at her hips. She wore a blue chalk-striped suit and a thin gold chain over the freckled, sunburned skin at her collar bone. “What secret life is that?” she asked.

“He’s a detective,” Nadia said.

“In my granddaughter’s imagination.” Omar Yussef raised his eyebrows and lifted a finger to caution Nadia. “I work for the United Nations, as a school principal.”

“That’s an excellent cover for a detective.” The American moved closer to Omar Yussef. “Actually I’ve come across your name before, ustaz. I’m based in Jerusalem and I’m a good friend of your boss, Magnus Wallender. He told me how helpful you’ve been to him in his job running the UN Relief and Works Agency schools.”

Omar Yussef smiled. “Magnus is a good man.”

“Miss King is from Los Angeles,” Nadia said. “We’re planning a crime together.”

Zuheir grunted testily and tugged on his beard. Nadia grinned at him and he averted his eyes.

Omar Yussef lowered himself onto a short sofa. The foam was even softer than he expected and he felt himself falling backward. He needed both arms to right himself, and the muscles in his back and abdomen twinged. “My granddaughter is corrupting you, Miss King,” he said, breathing heavily.