“You’ve had many hardships, my son, I know.”
“If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that killing is easy and dying is easier. Suffering is hard.” Sami looked at Omar Yussef and, for a moment, his face rearranged itself into that of a much older man, deeply lined and sagging with the weight of troubling experience. Omar Yussef wondered if Sami would live to be that old.
As they rounded the traffic circle on the beach road, the dust storm was thicker than ever. The sea was barely visible beyond the Salaam Fish Restaurant. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but Sami had the headlights on. He turned onto the beach road and rolled past the Deira Hotel toward the Sands. Omar Yussef stared into the gloom.
A jeep’s red brake lights punctuated the dust cloud ahead. The back door flew open. A man dropped out of the jeep, stumbled and fell. Omar Yussef strained forward. The jeep was at the entrance to the driveway of the Sands Hotel.
“Sami?”
“I see it.”
Sami accelerated.
The man struggled to his feet, lifting himself without the use of his arms, which seemed to be cuffed or tied behind him. He took a few quick steps toward the perimeter wall of the Sands Hotel, halted and looked in both directions. Confused, he moved to his left, then to his right, and turned to face the jeep. He crouched, poised to run, but a short, hollow bellow of gunfire dropped him against the wall.
The jeep sped into the dust, its back door flying open. A man leaned out to pull it shut. He wore a stocking cap.
Omar Yussef’s mouth was dry when Sami skidded the car to the side of the road. He lifted himself stiffly from the Cherokee.
The whitewashed perimeter wall of the Sands Hotel was smeared red where the man had been flung against it. Three narrow trails of blood daubed the stucco, where he had slipped to the floor. He sat with his legs out in front of him and his shoulders leaning to the right. Blood seeped into the sand around his thighs.
Omar Yussef came to the body. He wasn’t sure. He lifted the man’s head. The ear was splayed out at a right angle, just as the son’s was. He felt the neck for a pulse, but Eyad Masharawi was dead.
Masharawi’s head fell to the right, as though he were still shielding the strangely formed ear from sight the way he had disguised it in the photograph at his house. He had a few days’ growth of beard, gray and black. His feet were bare and his blue shirt was stained with sweat and dirt and soaked with blood. All the buttons were missing, and his torso, punctured with three bullet wounds, was bruised and slack. Omar Yussef closed Masharawi’s eyes with the edge of his palm.
“Get in the car, Abu Ramiz,” Sami said.
Omar Yussef felt Sami pulling him to his feet. “What’re you talking about? We have to report what we’ve seen.”
“To whom? The people who killed this man? Or the people who’re about to kill you?”
Omar Yussef heard voices approaching on the driveway of the hotel. Khamis Zeydan came to the end of the drive. He held a pistol and there was fear in his face, which dissolved into a hard relief when he saw Omar Yussef. He turned back to the drive and shouted: “Stay where you are, everyone. I’ll handle this.” He came toward Omar Yussef. Dust was thick on his face and shirt; clearly he had been loitering outside the hotel, behind the wall, waiting for Omar Yussef to come back. “You have to get out of here.”
“It’s Eyad Masharawi,” Omar Yussef said.
Khamis Zeydan looked at the dead man, briefly, blinking away the dust. “I’ll see to it that his wife is informed.”
“It was a jeep. They pushed him out and-”
“Sami, get him out of here, in the name of Allah.”
“Why? Why do I have to go?”
“How many dead bodies do you have to see before you develop a better sense of self-preservation? I think Doctor Najjar liked you, but not so much that he wants to see you naked on the dissecting table in his pathology lab.” Khamis Zeydan drew close. “My brother, go now.”
Omar Yussef climbed back into the jeep. As Sami started the car, Khamis Zeydan tucked his pistol into the holster in the back of his waistband and watched his old friend. When they reached the junction at the end of the Beach Road, Khamis Zeydan was a vague spot in the cloud of dust and the body of Eyad Masharawi had disappeared from view.
Sami turned south onto the Saladin Road toward Rafah. Omar Yussef imagined Salwa Masharawi watching the dust swirl through the olive grove in front of her house and listening to her children playing in the other rooms. He wondered if she had sensed her husband’s death and what he would tell her about the way Eyad died.
He thought guiltily of the Saladin Brigades leaflet he had left in Professor Adnan Maki’s office. If Maki had read the notes on the back, he might have connected it to Omar Yussef’s interest in Masharawi and the selling of university degrees. He might have passed that along to Masharawi’s captors. Omar Yussef slapped a fist into his palm. His own clumsy attempt to investigate may have killed Masharawi. But he couldn’t believe the security agents would murder a man over something as minor as accusations of corruption at the university.
Sami’s cellphone rang. He listened, spoke quietly, and hung up. “That was Khaled. Abu Jamal will see us in Rafah in the next few hours.”
The wind was hard against the car’s windows. Omar Yussef hadn’t had the chance to pick up a sweater at the hotel, after all. He shivered.
Chapter 26
Bent under backpacks twice the size of their torsos, streams of schoolchildren slouched home to the ragged tin farmhouses along the seashore near Rafah. In the dunes, shredded plastic sheeting flapped against the metal frames of greenhouses left behind by the Israelis when they evacuated their settlements. Sami shook his head. “It should be lovely down here. If only things were different.”
“I prefer the hills around Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef said. “The rocks and the sharp slopes and the sunrise over the mountains beyond the Dead Sea.”
“The sun rises here, too, Abu Ramiz.”
Omar Yussef gestured at the pale darkness of the dust storm. “If Allah wills it.”
The road veered inland away from the palm groves near the Egyptian border and dropped toward Rafah. The town lay like a pile of rocks strewn carelessly across the sand by a wrecking ball. The dark corrugated metal of the border fence slid past the town like a serpent, silent, muscular and venomous. The shot-up buildings on the edge of Rafah looked like the grin of a streetfighter, teeth punched away, broken and blackened.
They drove along the southern rim of the town to the Saladin Gate. Sami pulled the car into the shade of an awning outside a shuttered grocery. A boy of about three stood on the roof of the store, throwing tiny stones at Omar Yussef as he stepped out of the car. He wagged his finger at the boy. Another stone tapped the hood of the car. The boy’s chubby, tawny face was resentful and fierce and his legs were planted wide. He’s working on his arm for the battles to come, Omar Yussef thought. He breathed slowly and got back in the car to wait for Abu Jamal’s summons.
Sami toyed with his cellphone. The tapping of stones continued on the roof of the Jeep, a counterpoint to the constant impacts of the sand volleying out of the hot wind. Omar Yussef’s head dipped forward and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was to the ringing of Sami’s cell-phone and a sense that the light had dimmed. Sami listened and murmured agreement into the phone as he started the car’s engine. He hung up and took off along the town’s main street.
“Was I asleep?” Omar Yussef asked, yawning. His mouth was dry.
“For about three hours.”
“We’ve been waiting that long? Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You needed sleep, and I didn’t need company.” Sami peered into the dust. The street was almost empty. The town was hiding from the dirt in the air. The few pedestrians were sinister shadows in the dust storm. Ghostly fluorescent light shivered from the shopfronts.