“He’s grieving for his father, Umm Rateb. He’s not a waiter. Leave him be.”
“I’ll make you coffee, ustaz. Sit down with Salwa.” Umm Rateb went to the kitchen.
Omar Yussef lowered himself onto the sofa. His thighs ached and he groaned as he came to rest. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to attend the funeral this morning,” he said. “I found my kidnapped Swedish friend and was able to free him. We brought him back from Rafah just now.”
“May Allah be thanked.”
“I want to tell you that, with all my heart, I worked to prevent what happened to your husband.”
“I know, Abu Ramiz.” Salwa dabbed at a tear beneath her eye with the handkerchief. “In Gaza, a man like Eyad can speak his mind and pay a terrible price, or he can ignore the wrongs in the world and his life feels no better than death. Eyad chose his way. That’s why I loved him.”
“You’re right, my daughter.” Omar Yussef lifted the briefcase and laid it on Salwa’s lap. She glanced at him and he nodded for her to open the case.
Salwa unclipped the clasps and gasped. “Abu Ramiz, what have you done?”
“I hope this will help you in difficult times.”
“Where is this money from?”
“This is the nearest thing to a life insurance payment the university is likely to make. Of course, our Swedish friend will be in contact with you about a United Nations pension.”
Salwa caught another tear at the corner of her eye. She opened her mouth to ask another question, but Omar Yussef clicked his tongue. She returned her gaze to the photograph of her husband. “Thank you, Abu Ramiz.” She closed the briefcase and slipped it behind the sofa. Umm Rateb brought in a small cup of coffee.
“Allah bless your hands,” Omar Yussef said.
“Blessings,” Umm Rateb said.
Omar Yussef caught the rosewater scent of the woman’s soap and felt the guilt of his attraction to her once more. And in a house of mourning, too, he thought, shaking his head. But he forgave himself right away. He had no reason to doubt that he was a good man, whatever his less commendable urges.
Umm Rateb lowered herself onto the armchair opposite him, blowing out her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “Abu Ramiz, I hope it isn’t too late, but you remember the leaflet you left in Professor Maki’s office?”
“I know what happened to that.”
“You do? I found it on the floor behind his desk. There was a dirty shoeprint on it. Perhaps he stepped on it without seeing it.”
“He certainly found it, Umm Rateb.”
“I’m sorry. I tried to reach you at your hotel to tell you I had it, but you were out.” Umm Rateb’s look of concern lifted and she smiled knowingly. “The lady who answered the phone at the reception desk laughed and said you were ‘out on a case’.”
Meisoun. Agent O. Omar Yussef felt his neck grow hot and cleared his throat. “I wonder what she meant.” His coffee cup rattled in its saucer.
He said goodbye to the women and went out into the humid shade of the awning. He sat on the plastic chair next to Eyad Masharawi’s lonely, awkward son.
The boy barely looked up. He reached out for one of Omar Yussef’s bandaged hands and laid his skinny fingers across it. Naji’s shoulders shook. The sobs came with the same rhythm as the call of the doves in their cage upstairs. He rested his forehead on Omar Yussef’s chest. The schoolteacher stroked the boy’s dark hair with the fingertips of his other hand. He sat still and firm for an hour, until the boy’s weeping was done.
Chapter 32
Sami stopped the Jeep outside the Sands Hotel to pick up Magnus Wallender and Khamis Zeydan. The Swede was quiet and grave-Omar Yussef had asked Khamis Zeydan to tell him the details of Cree’s death, while he visited Salwa Masharawi. The Bethlehem police chief, however, was positively frothing with excitement, as he handed a clean shirt to Omar Yussef.
“Professor Adnan Maki’s dead,” he said.
Omar Yussef twisted in his seat and dropped his jaw.
Khamis Zeydan slapped his good hand into his gloved prosthesis. “There’s a special meeting of the Revolutionary Council this evening to discuss the situation. After all, this is the second Council member assassinated in two days.”
“How did it happen?” Omar Yussef slipped awkwardly out of his bloody shirt and put on the fresh one.
“The official explanation won’t be available until after the Revolutionary Council meets, of course.”
“Of course.” Omar Yussef lifted his chin in a quick gesture of cynicism.
“Maki told Colonel al-Fara he could arrange for him to buy the new prototype missile, the one they’re calling the Saladin I. Al-Fara handed over the cash to Maki, who brought him the missile. But it wasn’t a new missile. It was one of the old Qassam missiles. There’re hundreds of them in Gaza and al-Fara recognized it immediately as an old one. He already has a stockpile of his own.”
“Couldn’t Maki talk his way out of that?”
“Maybe he could have, but al-Fara had received a call from Abu Jamal down in Rafah. He told the colonel about Yasser Salah and the theft of the new missile.” Khamis Zeydan slapped his thigh with excitement. “Abu Jamal accused the colonel of stealing the missile, because Yasser Salah was his officer, after all. It seems Abu Jamal blamed Yasser Salah-and, therefore, al-Fara-for the deaths of several of his men in the gunfight where you rescued Magnus.”
When he had left Wallender at the hotel with Khamis Zeydan, Omar Yussef had recounted the night’s events to his friend only as far as the Swede’s rescue. He had told Wallender to keep quiet about their discovery in the graveyard, and the sale of the missile to Maki was between him and Sami only. “So it was either to be all-out war between Abu Jamal and al-Fara,” Omar Yussef said, “or blame someone else.”
“That’s right. The colonel remembered that Salah was recently promoted after obtaining his law degree. He’d known all along about Maki’s sales of academic degrees- apparently he’d even bought his own law degree. The sales enabled him to connect Salah and Maki. He knew he’d been double-crossed, and he also had his scapegoat.”
“He killed Maki?” Omar Yussef said.
Khamis Zeydan nodded. “Maki was found less than half an hour ago in his garden, lying in the fountain. He was shot Mozambique-style.”
“What does that mean?”
“A bullet in each breast and another in the forehead. It’s a highly professional assassination technique. The CIA trainers taught it to al-Fara’s agents. No one else does it that way in Gaza. It’ll be clear to Abu Jamal that al-Fara ordered the hit to make amends for the theft of the missile.”
“Is that what the Revolutionary Council will decide?”
“Look, al-Fara killed Maki. Maybe he also had something to do with the death of General Husseini. If you were on the Revolutionary Council, would you finger him?” Khamis Zeydan snorted. “We’ll blame it on one of the Islamist groups, and we’ll all be very, very polite to Colonel al-Fara.”
They drove south on the Saladin Road toward Deir al-Balah. Sami pulled up in the shade of the tall date palm outside the caretaker’s house at the British War Cemetery. An ambulance was parked by the hedge and Doctor Najjar was standing at the gate to the caretaker’s yard, shouting instructions to the medics. The pathologist greeted Omar Yussef with five kisses and led him into the cemetery.
Omar Yussef looked up at the sky. The dust storm had abated fully as the morning went on. The sun seemed to bore right through the few strands of hair across his scalp and into his brain. It was noon, high noon, like the mysterious price Bassam Odwan had puzzled over in jail.
The grave of Private Eynon Price was dug in a neat rectangle, ready for the soldier’s remains to be interred once more. In front of the furthest cluster of graves, Suleiman Jouda threw his spade onto the grass as he climbed out of a second hole. Sweating from the work, he approached Omar Yussef. “When I took this job, the graveyard was eighty years old. I didn’t expect to be digging any more graves,” he said, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt.