“When will that be, Omar?”
“I don’t know.” He cleared his throat and tried to sound nonchalant. “You saw the news?”
“No, I told you, Dahoud saw it. But I can’t get any sense out of him. Why? What happened?” Maryam’s voice was edgy and loud, as though she had dived suddenly into the phone.
Omar Yussef hesitated. “Well, Magnus was kidnapped by the Saladin Brigades and another UN fellow who was working with me was blown up in his car-”
Maryam gave a high-pitched gasp. “By Allah, Omar, you have to get out of there.”
“I have to see to Magnus’s release, Maryam. The UN won’t send anyone else. They’re scared to have a foreigner here.”
“Don’t they have local Gazan staff?”
“I assume they’re keeping their heads down.”
“So should you. Are you to be sacrificed?”
“Maryam, I can handle this.” He could imagine her shaking her head at the other end of the line.
“You’re not so tough, Omar. Just because you stood up to the gangs in Bethlehem last year, doesn’t mean you can do the same thing in a strange town. Gaza is a terrible place.”
“I can take care of myself. And Abu Adel is here too. He won’t let me do anything risky.”
“Abu Adel may be police chief in Bethlehem, but in Gaza he’s nothing. They’ll kill him as though they were squashing an insect. And he can be just as rash as you, Omar.”
“Who are they, Maryam?”
“Whoever it was who kidnapped Magnus and blew up this other man.”
“It might not be the same group.”
“That only doubles the threat.”
Omar Yussef never liked to argue with Maryam. Usually, her perspective was more simplistic than his, and he would grow angry when she failed to understand the subtleties that were evident to him. This time, he knew she was right, and just as surely he knew he had no choice but to defy her logic. “Maryam, I need you to be calm. I don’t want you to upset Dahoud any more than he already is, or Nadia and the other children. Now, go to Dahoud and tell him not to worry. And Maryam-”
“What?”
“If you don’t put on a convincing show, Nadia will see through you. So you’d better really persuade yourself that your poor husband will be all right.”
“I can handle Nadia.”
“She’s a lot more difficult to bamboozle than the gunmen of Gaza, my darling. So don’t take it lightly.”
There was a knock at the door. “Maryam, room service is here with my dinner. You see, you were so flustered that you didn’t check if I was eating properly.”
“I’m derelict in my duty as a wife,” Maryam said. “Come home where you’ll be safe-from dangerous men and bad hotel cooks.”
Omar Yussef hung up with a few endearments.
He picked at his grilled chicken and dabbed some flat bread into the plate of hummus. He wondered what Magnus was eating, in whichever filthy little room the Saladin Brigades had hidden him. His mind gravitated to the corpses in the morgue at Shifa Hospital, no matter how he tried to focus on his food. His stomach ached for nourishment, but it turned at the thought of the dead men laid out on the dissecting tables. His head was heavy; the bruise on his temple had come back to life and was pulsing and jabbing at his brain. He opened the minibar. There was a large bottle of mineral water, some rosewater colas and canned fruit juices. He smiled bleakly at the empty racks in the small refrigerator, designed for miniature whiskies and vodkas. Allah be thanked that the Islamists of Gaza put so little temptation in my way, he thought.
He sat at the foot of his bed until the chicken was cold, slowly working through the plastic bottle of water. It halted the nausea and soothed the pumping sensation in his temple. He considered sleeping, but he couldn’t slow his thoughts. Instead, he listened to the wind, loud against the picture windows, and the pattering of the dust it blew against the panes.
It was almost midnight when there was a knock at the door. Omar Yussef froze. A pause, then a second knock.
“Abu Ramiz?”
It was Sami’s voice. Omar Yussef opened the door. The young man stood confidently in the corridor, smoking. His black T-shirt was tight across his muscular torso and he had a thumb tucked casually into the belt of his jeans. He looked Omar Yussef up and down, evidently finding his raggedness amusing, and smiled. He put his hand on Omar Yussef’s arm. “How’re you feeling, Abu Ramiz?”
“Rough, Sami. Where’s Abu Adel?”
“He’s down the corridor gossiping with some of the other Revolutionary Council members in his room.”
“The meeting is over?”
“The Council? Yes, for now. Those bastards never really finish talking, though.”
“Come in.”
Sami sat at the desk and glanced at the chicken.
“Be my guest,” Omar Yussef said.
Sami picked up the chicken pieces in his fingers and ate them languidly. “Thank you, Abu Ramiz. It’s the best shish tawouk I’ve had in an age. I haven’t eaten very well since I was deported from Bethlehem.”
“You miss your mother’s cooking?”
“It’s the best.”
“I know, I’ve tasted it.”
“Of course you have. My father speaks highly of you, and naturally I know your reputation around town as a man of integrity.”
“When will the Israelis let you come home, Sami?”
The young man turned a cube of chicken in his fingers, regarding it meditatively, like a connoisseur with an expensive cigar. “When my home is burned to the ground and demolished by my neighbors.” He chewed the chicken and looked at Omar Yussef. “Not before then.”
“Do you have any news of Magnus?”
Sami shook his head. “I’m trying to find out who killed James. I believe that will lead us to Magnus.”
“Remember you told me about the Husseini Manicure? That’s what had happened to Odwan before he died. I thought of telling you about it, when you were driving us back from the morgue, but I just couldn’t stand to speak of it.”
Sami ate another piece of chicken. He licked his fingers and nodded with understanding at Omar Yussef.
“The Saladin Brigades might murder Magnus in revenge for Odwan’s death,” Omar Yussef said. “Can we find him before they discover that their comrade has been killed?”
Sami shook his head. “No chance. If they don’t already know Odwan’s dead, they’ll have found out before dawn. They have men inside the jail with hidden cellphones. They know everything that goes on in the Saraya and all the other prisons and military bases. But I don’t think they’ll kill Magnus.”
“They have to show a response, to avenge Odwan.”
“I don’t get the sense that they’re ready to escalate things as far as killing more foreigners. They’ll choose something else. Something domestic that will send a message to the top people in Gaza, but that won’t bring the entire outside world down on them.” Sami held the plate of hummus in his palm and ran his bread around the edge of the chickpea paste, brooding.
“How did the Revolutionary Council meeting go?”
“Abu Adel says it was tumultuous. And dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Omar Yussef remembered what Khamis Zeydan had said about the growing confrontation between the security chiefs.
“General Husseini accused Colonel al-Fara of corruption. He called for an official investigation of al-Fara.”
“But General Husseini is corrupt, too, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but these Councils are strange. If someone accuses you of something, you can’t just turn around and say, ‘By Allah, you’re as corrupt as me.’ It makes you look like a stupid kid whose only defense is to turn the charge back on the accuser and, more importantly, you’re admitting the truth of the accusation.”
“So what did Colonel al-Fara do?”
“Abu Adel says al-Fara was silent. But everyone else was in uproar.”
If al-Fara was silent, Omar Yussef calculated it was a perilous sign. In that silence, the Colonel would have been plotting his revenge.
Omar Yussef remembered the comical exuberance, the heavy paunch and the wet, pebble-gray eyes of General Husseini, the man who probably had asphyxiated Bassam Odwan. Across the table at the Council, he imagined the lank, black hair and mustache of Colonel al-Fara, the bony hand collecting sputum in a tissue and the cigarette smoke flaring from his nostrils. Al-Fara, the torturer of Eyad Masharawi. The meeting of the Council had set the two men up for a final confrontation. With what new evil would they move to their endgames?