Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

To save his friend embarrassment, Omar Yussef turned to the door, his eyes tracing its arabesque relief. The little servant in the blue tunic opened the door and stood aside to allow a short woman in a pink suit to enter.

Liana reached out to stroke the polished surface of an art nouveau table as she came toward her guests. That gesture is like a gambler’s tell. She’s as nervous as my friend Abu Adel, Omar Yussef thought. She held Khamis Zeydan by the upper arms and brought him down for three kisses on the cheek, advanced a step toward Omar Yussef and offered him her hand.

Her eyes were deep, black and cool, like the eyes in an ancient Pharaoh’s portrait, and they were painted with the dramatic shades of green and blue the Egyptians used for the hieroglyphs of their tombs. That great beauty Cleopatra might have looked like Liana, Omar Yussef thought, had she lived longer, but no more wisely. Her hair was dyed black and rolled back in high lacquered waves, so that it resembled the shell of a snail. She kept her chin high. Omar Yussef wondered if that was out of a sense of superiority or to give the parallel wrinkles across her neck room to breathe.

Liana invited them to the ornate Syrian sofas before the picture window. Khamis Zeydan seemed so loath to sit that Omar Yussef pushed his jumpy friend gently into a chair. Another servant in an identical blue tunic brought coffee on a silver tray. He held out his hand and, with an encouraging smile, caught an inch of ash from Khamis Zeydan’s cigarette. He lifted a gold ashtray from one of the Armenian tables and set it next to the policeman’s coffee cup.

“I’m happy that you brought your friend to see my home, Abu Adel,” Liana said.

Khamis Zeydan grunted.

“You’re most welcome here, ustaz, ” she said to Omar Yussef. “Consider it as your home and as if you were among your family.”

Omar Yussef was about to give the formal reply, when Khamis Zeydan spoke, louder than was necessary, as though he had to force the words out. “Are you glad I brought myself?”

“Abu Adel, I always want to see you. I wish you’d come often.”

“Really?” Khamis Zeydan sounded bitter.

Liana sucked in her cheeks, patiently. “Agreeable company is always a pleasure on this lonely hilltop.”

Khamis Zeydan stubbed out his cigarette and looked up at her. His blue eyes were sad and lost.

“My life here is like a dream,” Liana said. She fixed her eyes on Khamis Zeydan. “People always describe a pleasant experience as being like a dream. But how many of your good dreams do you remember? I seem to recall my night-mares much more clearly.”

Liana and the policeman stared at each other in silence.

Omar Yussef cleared his throat. “Perhaps people mean only that it’s a feeling they know is destined to pass quickly,” he said. “Like our memories of dreams, which are so vivid while we sleep, only to seem vague once we awake.”

“Are you a friend of Abu Adel’s from here in Nablus, ustaz? ” Liana asked.

“From Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef said. “I’ve known Abu Adel since we were students together in Damascus. We renewed our friendship when he returned to Palestine to become police chief in Bethlehem after the peace agreement with Israel. We had lost touch during his period in Beirut.”

Khamis Zeydan and Liana locked eyes once more at the mention of the Lebanese capital. Omar Yussef bit the end of his tongue at his indelicacy.

“Abu Adel and I are in Nablus for the wedding of our young friend Sami Jaffari. He’s a policeman, but he’s also involved with the Fatah Party, so you may have heard of him.”

“I also will be attending that wedding,” Liana said. “I attend all the Fatah functions.”

“Your husband is an important figure in Fatah,” Khamis Zeydan said.

The woman looked at him with pity. “Have I become such a minor character that I wouldn’t receive any invitations if it weren’t for my husband?” She waited, but Khamis Zeydan kept his eyes on his ashtray. Liana turned to Omar Yussef. “We used to live closer to the town, but we built this house ten years ago. The views are wonderful, although it’s a little isolated. Few people come up here to the peak of Mount Jerizim.”

“I was up here only this morning,” Omar Yussef said.

Liana inclined her head to the side. One of her large silver earrings rattled into her leathery neck and she stroked the lapis scarab embedded in it with her index finger.

“I was with a Samaritan priest when he heard there had been a murder in his community,” Omar Yussef said. “We found the body of a dead Samaritan man at the site of their ancient temple just along the ridge from here.”

“Allah will be merciful upon the deceased one,” Liana murmured.

“May Allah preserve you,” Omar Yussef said.

Ishaq had worked for Liana’s husband. Omar Yussef wondered if Liana would betray anything that might be useful to Sami’s investigation. “The dead man was an associate of your husband, I believe.”

Liana sat up and flattened her pink skirt against her thighs. A trace of fear crept across her eyes. She blinked, and the eyes came back as dead and dull as the surface of the water in a neglected well. “Who?” Her voice was cautious and throaty, as though she feared Omar Yussef might reach out to catch the word and slap her face with it.

“Ishaq, the son of Jibril the priest.”

Liana turned her face away from Omar Yussef and examined the diamond rings on her hands.

“Did you know him?” Omar Yussef said.

“Ishaq?” She spat the word down toward her rings and her jaw shivered. “I was acquainted with him.”

“Your husband’s acquaintance with Ishaq was quite a close one, I believe.”

“My husband makes friends easily. Most multimillionaires do.” Liana threw back her head and her face contorted as though she wanted to prevent a tear from escaping her eye. She sighed and thrust an arm out straight to Khamis Zeydan. “Give me a cigarette, Abu Adel.”

Khamis Zeydan pulled a cigarette from his pack. She took it and leaned forward for him to light it. Her hand shook and the cigarette missed the flame. Khamis Zeydan gently steadied her wrist with his prosthesis, while he lit the tip.

Liana sucked on the Rothmans and blew out a stream of gray smoke. Khamis Zeydan glanced with confusion at the leather glove covering his prosthetic hand.

Omar Yussef watched Liana take another long drag and shiver as she exhaled. Is it merely the mention of her husband and his money that made her suddenly so edgy? he thought. “Your husband attracts friends only because he’s rich?” he said.

She swallowed hard and looked at Omar Yussef. “My husband is charming and charismatic. But there’s no way to make hundreds of millions of dollars and remain a nice guy, ustaz. The more money a man makes, the greater his egomania and childish brutality, and the more so-called friends he requires to allow him to indulge such traits.”

“Doesn’t that depend on whether the money is made legally, or through crime?”

“I was a student radical in the late 1960s and a campaigning journalist in the 1970s, ustaz. I believed then that for one man even to possess a million dollars would be a crime. No matter how much the Prophet Muhammad is said to have praised the life of the merchant, I always believed there would have to have been some sort of crime involved in the acquisition of such a sum. That opinion hasn’t changed.” She looked at Khamis Zeydan. “Being with my husband hasn’t changed many of my opinions since those days.”

Ishaq’s name seems to make her furious and nervy, Omar Yussef thought. He wondered if Amin Kanaan and Ishaq, the homosexual, had shared more than just a business partnership. “Was your husband especially close to Ishaq?”