Abu Jamal looked at Salah, then back to Omar Yussef. “If he doesn’t know, then how will we find it?”
“You never will.”
“Wrong answer.”
“It wasn’t an answer, it was a wish.” Omar Yussef pushed his chin toward Abu Jamal. He clenched his bloody hands and felt them shaking.
“If this old man doesn’t know where to find the missile-” Abu Jamal kept his eyes on Omar Yussef, as he lifted his gun to Salah’s head “-I don’t need him alive.” He pulled the trigger and Zaki Salah tumbled backwards over the corpse of Attiah Odwan.
Omar Yussef gasped. The old man’s legs twisted unnaturally at the knees. The wound on his forehead was a small black hole, but the blood poured from the back of his skull onto the sand. Omar Yussef reached out and grabbed Abu Jamal’s deformed hand. The smooth skin was cold in his palm. He pointed at Attiah Odwan’s body underneath the dead old man. “At least Attiah died bravely,” he said. “You will never have that honor.”
Abu Jamal narrowed his eyes and looked over Omar Yussef’s shoulder at Magnus Wallender. Omar Yussef wondered if the gunman was considering a new kidnapping, which might allow him to screw some kind of reward out of the government as recompense for the night’s fruitless operation. But killing Zaki Salah appeared to have calmed him. He spoke quietly. “Like Attiah, I’m ready to be martyred,” he said.
Omar Yussef smelled the menthol throat lozenges on Abu Jamal’s breath. “If Allah wills it.”
Abu Jamal put away his gun. His bloodshot eyes were distant. “Is that also a wish?”
“Get down,” one of the gunmen yelled from inside the ruins of the garage. Abu Jamal and Omar Yussef dropped to the sand. They heard a hollow ringing as something bounced toward them. A rock, a foot in diameter, came to rest against an olive tree a yard away from them. It didn’t sound like a rock and it bounced much too lightly. Omar Yussef tensed his whole body and waited.
One of the gunmen ambled across the sand from the garage. “Sorry, chief. I was tossing the rubble out of the garage and I threw that stone without realizing what it was. I think it’s a disguised fiberglass cover for a roadside bomb. As I threw it, I realized it was too light to be a rock and I thought perhaps there was already a bomb rigged up inside it. That’s why I shouted.” He knelt close by the rock. “It doesn’t seem to be armed.”
“What else is in there?” Abu Jamal gestured toward the rubble.
“A few dozen Kalashikovs and a lot of grenades under the wreckage. Salah’s weapons store. Quite a haul.”
“Bring the jeeps around and load it up,” Abu Jamal said.
“Now you’re happy?” Omar Yussef rose to his knees.
“Now I can continue our resistance. Until my martyrdom.” Abu Jamal kicked the fiberglass rock. Omar Yussef dropped to the ground again. The rock rolled away from them. Abu Jamal laughed, soft and jeering.
Sami sheared a slice of material from his T-shirt and bound his shoulder, where Yasser Salah’s bullet had winged him. He knelt by Omar Yussef with a pan of water and cleaned the dirt from his lacerated hands. “You were nearly buried alive back there, Abu Ramiz,” he said.
“Yes, I thought it might become my eternal tomb.” Omar Yussef remembered the way the images of the skeleton in the pathologist’s surgery and of the British War Cemetery had come to him in the tunnel. It was as though it had all been down there in the same hole in the ground with him and Yasser Salah. He rubbed his forehead.
“I wouldn’t have left you down there. I’d have dug you up and shipped your body back to Bethlehem. Gaza’s a terrible place to stay, even if it’s only your bones.” Sami ripped another piece from his T-shirt and tied it around Omar Yussef’s palm.
Even if it’s only your bones. Omar Yussef thought of Yasser Salah, crushed in the collapsed tunnel. Though Salah was gone, others would die when his stash of weapons was aimed at them. Beyond the grave, the men of Gaza could still wield death. He thought of the skeleton on the pathologist’s dissecting table. Who did you rise from the dead to kill?
Chapter 29
Dawn lent a roseate highlight to the dust cloud, as Sami accelerated out of Rafah, north on the Saladin Road toward Gaza City. Wallender had washed the abraded skin around his mouth under a faucet, but his face remained grimy and bloodied. The pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of the Jeep Cherokee battled with the scent of sweat and soil from the car’s passengers. Omar Yussef wondered if his body would ever be cleansed of the dirt constricting his breath and clogging his throat.
In the back of the car, Wallender had been gabbing with the excitement of new freedom ever since they’d left the Saladin Brigades men at the stationery store, their jeeps laden with Yasser Salah’s weapons and the dead bodies of four of their comrades. I’ll let him wash and rest before I tell him about James, Omar Yussef thought. Or about Eyad Masharawi. Perhaps I won’t tell him the rest, ever. Maybe that way I’ll be able to forget it, too.
He gazed across the cabbage fields. The wind had picked up and bent the isolated stands of sycamore. The dust storm was building for its final squall. Perhaps it would at last blow itself out and he would see the sunshine again before he left Gaza, after all.
As they passed Deir al-Balah, the tall palms bowed under the wind. The cabbage fields fluttered like the emerald surface of the sea, stretching to the neat green hedge around the British War Cemetery. The gusts came from the east with the dawn, as though the growing light were blowing into Gaza.
Omar Yussef stared at the hedge as they approached the cemetery. In the tunnel, it was as though this place of tombs was down there with me and Yasser Salah. The old skeleton was there, too. He frowned. “Sami, pull over at the junction,” he said, pointing toward the caretaker’s little farmhouse.
The mysterious skeleton in the morgue was discovered in the corner of a field near here, he thought. He recalled the desecrated graves he’d seen when he visited the cemetery with Cree. The words Khamis Zeydan had spoken to him when he first arrived in Gaza sounded in his head: There is no single, isolated crime in Gaza. Each one is linked to many others.
Omar Yussef stepped out of the car and trotted to the gate of the caretaker’s yard, his head bowed against the wind. The caretaker stared in fright when he saw Omar Yussef, his clothes filthy and bloody and his head covered in dust.
“You remember me, Suleiman? I was here with Mister James Cree from the United Nations.”
Suleiman Jouda nodded, but his expression remained one of shock.
Omar Yussef coughed. “This is Mister Cree’s friend, Mister Wallender. Also from the United Nations.”
Jouda gaped at Wallender’s gory face and his filthy clothes.
Omar Yussef edged past the caretaker. “He’s from Sweden,” he said, with a wink, as though that explained their strange appearance on Jouda’s doorstep at daybreak. Jouda nodded, hesitantly. “We need to inspect the graveyard on a very important issue of United Nations security business, Suleiman.”
Omar Yussef crossed the dirt yard, passing a wheelbarrow and some trenching tools that stood against the wall. Jouda opened the gate to the graveyard and entered. Omar Yussef picked up a long-handled spade and gave it to Sami. He ignored Sami’s quizzical expression and followed Jouda onto the lush lawn of the cemetery.
Wallender stared at the neatness of the graveyard. “This really doesn’t look like Gaza. What’re we doing here, Abu Ramiz?”
“We’re paying our respects,” Omar Yussef said. He turned to Jouda. “Suleiman, show us the graves that were recently desecrated. Was it these, near the end of the path?”
Jouda led them to the corner of the first block of gravestones facing the lawn’s central obelisk monument. “It was these few here, ustaz,” he said. “But can you tell me, please, what’s the matter? I’m sorry to ask, uncle, but the British consulate is sending someone today to inspect the repairs I’ve made to the damaged gravestones. Is your visit connected to that?”