Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

“Only yesterday, I heard him tell Jibril the priest that he had an appointment here with an American financial expert from the World Bank. It was something to do with his old job. They were arguing, so Ishaq sent me upstairs where I couldn’t overhear them. Even so, as I brought them coffee, I heard Ishaq refer to ‘her,’ which means the American is a woman. But I don’t know her name.”

“When she arrives, would you ask her to contact my colleague Sami? She may be able to help us piece things together.”

Roween nodded.

Omar Yussef put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m sure Sami will find those respon-sible for your husband’s death, my daughter,” he said. “But now perhaps we should leave you to care for your family.”

Roween flushed. “We have no children, ustaz. Ishaq was so often away-” She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

Omar Yussef and Sami drove out of the village in silence and took the winding descent back to Nablus, spread care-lessly across the valley below.

“Don’t drop me at the hotel yet. I’ll come with you to the casbah,” Omar Yussef said. “It’ll help me clear my mind. I can’t eat qanafi with Nadia while the image of that poor man’s dead body is still before my eyes.”

As they rounded a sharp curve, a white Chevrolet Suburban roared past them. The driver was a local, mustachioed and wearing wraparound sunglasses. In the passenger seat, a foreign woman with reddish hair tied in a ponytail was talking on a cell phone.

“What do those license plates mean?” Sami asked, as the noise of the four-wheel drive receded up the mountain.

“I didn’t see them.”

“They said I-B-R-D and then there was a number.”

“The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” Omar Yussef said.

“What’s that?”

“The World Bank. That must have been the woman our friend Ishaq expected to meet this morning.”

“It’s a wasted trip for her all the way up here now,” Sami said.

That depends what she’s looking for, Omar Yussef thought.

They left the patrol car above the casbah and Omar Yussef descended with Sami into the darkness of the old quarter. In the alleys, vaulted ceilings trapped the moldy scent of murky corners, the drifting clouds of spices from the big grinders in the shops, the gamy sharpness of donkey droppings. He wheezed on the thick air.

When they came into the souk, a shopkeeper, loitering with a cigarette at the entrance of his tiny store, watched Omar Yussef with insolent, blank eyes. The stare made Omar Yussef duck his head guiltily, as though he had fled from some misdeed through the grimy Turkish passageways. Can he smell the Samaritan’s blood on me? he wondered. Glancing down at the spangly slippers and imitation Tommy Hilfiger sweat shirts laid out on low trestles outside the store, he hurried away.

At the end of the souk, the street opened to the sky. The high, late-morning sun dazzled off the smooth limestone. Omar Yussef caught the heavy scent of hot goat cheese from a sides treet and noticed the sign outside one of the town’s best-known qanafi vendors. His throat tightened with remorse. Sami dodged through the crowd, eager to reach the mosque as soon as midday prayers finished. Omar Yussef whispered an apology to Nadia for delaying her culinary expedition and followed.

The Nasser Mosque stood at the corner of a modest, rectangular plaza presently filled with junky German cars and trucks parked in ranks. Omar Yussef estimated the two-story mosque was a century old. Exhaust fumes had mottled its stone arches at ground level, and the winter’s rain had streaked the upper floor black with thick mold. The dome of the mosque was a bright green and its surface was as uneven and pitted as a lime.

Taped to the metal shutter at the mosque’s entrance, a colorful poster depicted famous faces from the Hamas leadership. The current chiefs smiled broadly and waved. The dead ones, all killed by Israeli helicopter missiles, were washed in sepia tones and looked a little wistful. Like the Christian saints on the walls of the churches in Bethlehem, Omar Yussef thought.

He tapped his knuckles against the poster. “This is your sheikh’s mosque, Sami? Are you having some kind of a fundamentalist wedding?” he asked.

“By Allah, if I wasn’t a fundamentalist, I wouldn’t be getting married at all, Abu Ramiz.” Sami winked.

The last midday worshippers filtered out of the mosque, slipping their shoes on at the door. Omar Yussef removed his mauve loafers, gave them a careful brushing with a tissue from his pocket, and placed them judiciously to the side of the worn sandals and scuffed moccasins at the entrance. Sami led him across a cheap green carpet, woven by machine and detailed with a symmetrical design of ornate gold and blue chevrons. The vinegary smell of foot sweat rose from the carpet. Omar Yussef sniffed the back of his hand, where he dashed cologne every morning to counter just such unpleasant odors.

Beside a mint green pillar in the corner of the mosque, a broad, bearded man with a casual toughness kissed Sami three times. Omar Yussef noted that a dozen bullets had pitted the pillar, gouging through the paint and thin plaster into the poured concrete beneath. An M-16 was propped against it.

“Abu Ramiz, this is Nouri Awwadi,” Sami said. “Abu Ramiz is visiting from Bethlehem for my wedding.”

Awwadi took Omar Yussef’s hand between both of his, a motion which forced the muscles in his shoulders to rise massively. His bottom lip drooped out of the middle of his black beard, a luscious scarlet, and his skin glowed as though it had been oiled. Omar Yussef noted approvingly that Awwadi smelled of sandalwood.

“Welcome, Abu Ramiz,” the young man said. He kept Omar Yussef’s hand in one of his and, with the other, wagged a finger at Sami. “Why didn’t you come to prayers, my brother?”

“I have no time to pray. The criminals of Nablus keep me too busy.”

Awwadi laughed loudly and slapped a handshake into Sami’s palm in celebration of the joke.

“Nouri is Hamas, but he’s a good guy, even so,” Sami said to Omar Yussef. He turned to Awwadi. “I have to see Sheikh Bader. I want to make sure everything’s all set for my wedding, now that the most important guests have managed to get through the Israeli checkpoints.”

“The sheikh is very busy with arrangements for the joint wedding tomorrow, but I’m sure he can spare you some time.”

“Joint wedding?” Omar Yussef touched his fingers to his mustache, enjoying the scent of Awwadi’s sandalwood oil on his hand.

“Hamas is paying for fifteen couples to marry tomorrow,” Awwadi said. “It shows we’re the only party that cares for ordinary people.”

“What does marriage have to do with caring for people?” Omar Yussef laughed. “You should try funding some divorces, if you really want to help society.”

“It’s expensive to get married. A dowry is at least fifteen hundred Jordanian dinars. Since the intifada, hardly anyone in the casbah has work. Young men would have to save for years to be able to afford marriage.”

“Hamas will pay the dowry,” Sami said, “because other-wise the young men would be tempted into immorality.”

Awwadi laughed and slapped Sami’s hand again.

“Maybe they’d get wise and they wouldn’t marry at all,” Omar Yussef said. He rasped out a scratchy laugh and received a big hand slap, too.

Awwadi pointed Sami toward the rear of the mosque. “I’ll keep your friend company while you bother our sheikh,” he said.

“Abu Ramiz is an expert on our history,” Sami said. “Show him around the casbah, Nouri, and I expect he’ll be able to tell you things about your home that even you didn’t know.”