“No, I’m the translator.” Khatib swept his big revolver toward the young man bound in the chair. The man became shrill. “No, really, I’m only the translator.”
“He wasn’t doing the translation for the president’s speech,” Omar Yussef said.
Khatib spoke through his bared teeth. “Who did that?”
“That was me.” Ismail held himself straight. “I’m thinking of making translation my new career.”
“Translation? You bastard,” Khatib said.
Omar Yussef went toward Ismail. “When Nizar showed me the ad in the newspaper, I remembered the Assassins’ phrase about ‘he who bears in his hands the death of kings.’ I couldn’t stand to think that the happy boy I once knew had become that man. I’m glad you changed your mind.”
Ismail took Omar Yussef’s hand and rubbed the bones along his wrist affectionately. Omar Yussef smiled and squeezed back, but the boy went pale as he looked over his old teacher’s shoulder. He whispered the declaration of faith: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”
Omar Yussef followed Ismail’s eyes and saw Colonel Khatib stepping forward with his Colt raised. The blast was tremendous. Ismail’s hand wrenched out of Omar Yussef’s grip as his body lurched back onto the desk, shot through the chest, slamming against the window of the booth. A few delegates in the hall looked up at the smear of blood on the glass. Ismail pitched to the floor, spraying his papers under his body.
“Allahu akbar.” Colonel Khatib sneered at the corpse. “Translate that, you son of a whore.”
“Allah is most great,” Omar Yussef murmured. He went to his knees and took Ismail’s lifeless hand. Trembling, he averted his eyes from the boy’s wounded torso. His breath caught in his throat. Is any speech, any political declaration, worth this death, O Ismail? he thought.
“He’d surrendered,” he said to Khatib. “Why did you shoot him?”
Khatib shoved the big Colt into his shoulder holster. “Unlike your friend the Bethlehem police chief, I don’t take chances.”
Blood seeped into the pages from which Ismail had read, strewn across the carpet. Omar Yussef looked down at them. The paper was soaked, and the words were all illegible.
Chapter 31
Khamis Zeydan bent to stroke Omar Yussef’s hand and spoke with unaccustomed gentleness. “You don’t have to make this speech if you don’t feel up to it,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Magnus?”
Omar Yussef’s boss nodded with such fervor that his chair creaked. “Stay here in your hotel room and rest,” he said. “You’ve had a dreadful shock. It’s only been a few hours since that poor fellow was shot right in front of you.”
The schoolteacher lay on his bed, propped against the pillows, his shirt open to his navel. The sweats had stopped since he had taken some aspirin, but he couldn’t get enough water down to cut the dryness in his mouth. He tried to talk, but only croaked and choked. He drank another sip from the glass on the nightstand. “I’m determined,” he said, with a cough.
Khamis Zeydan settled on the edge of the bed. “Our president’s already on his way home. His flight left JFK an hour ago. I have no more responsibilities here. I can stay and look after you.”
“I’d prefer a prettier nurse.”
“I have a duty to your wife, who is also my friend, to protect you from such temptations. Even so, I’m not offering to give you a sponge bath.”
The mention of his wife made Omar Yussef think of his family and of his son, who was alone in Brooklyn. “Go to Ala,” he said to Khamis Zeydan. “He’s leaving with me tomorrow. Help him pack his things. He likes you-try to cheer him up.”
Khamis Zeydan patted Omar Yussef’s wrist. “If Allah wills it, your son’ll be on the plane with you.”
“Go now. Magnus can take me over to the conference, after I tidy myself up.”
Khamis Zeydan went to the door. “Come to Ala’s place after you give your speech. I’ll see you there.”
When the police chief was gone, Omar Yussef dressed and allowed Magnus to help him on with his coat. At the entrance to the hotel, he pulled the hood over his feverish head and bent into the wind.
They crossed the plaza at the side of the UN building. The East River was choppy and charcoal all the way across to the opposite bank. A barge glided past a derelict smokestack and an old-fashioned Pepsi-Cola sign on the roof of a red brick factory on the Queens shore. The air was cold on Omar Yussef’s clammy face, and he smiled. For the first time since he had come to New York, he felt comforted by the freezing weather. He took Magnus’s hand as they went toward the low door in the green marble facade.
In the Economic and Social Council, a Moroccan delegate completed his speech with some hopeful cliches. The Egyptian chairman let his bored stare drift over to Magnus Wallander, who gave him a thumbs-up. He called Omar Yussef to the podium.
“Do you have your speech ready?” the Swede said.
Omar Yussef grinned and coughed hard.
He shuffled up the steps to the stage and squinted over the heads of the UN staff in the pit below him. Abdel Hadi leered from the row of Palestinian delegates, his yellow teeth glowing in the low light of his desk lamp. The envoy from Libya picked his nose, and the leader of the Mauritanian delegation was asleep in his colorful robes. Omar Yussef had addressed more attentive groups of twelve-year-olds in his classroom on the last day of a semester.
“We’ve heard this week the political statements of all the Arab countries on the subject of the Palestinians. As a resident of the Dehaisha Refugee Camp, I’ve been asked to tell you about the reality of Palestinian life.” Omar Yussef’s voice sounded thin in his head, but when he heard it through the amplifiers after a moment’s delay it seemed stronger. He laid his hands flat on the podium so that they wouldn’t be seen to shake. “Let me begin by saying that whatever you already know-the suicide bombs; the battles with the Israeli soldiers; the names of the factions, Hamas, PLO, PFLP, DFLP-these are nothing but background. The real story is the smell of cardamom in the sacks outside a spice shop in the casbah. It’s the laughter of little schoolgirls in their blue-and-white-striped smocks going home after a day at an overcrowded school. It’s the noise of the lathe in a single room in Bethlehem where men are making olive-wood beads for tourist rosaries. It’s the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street. Let me flush away the rhetoric of the last three days and show you the Palestine I know.”
Abdel Hadi shook his head with disdain. The Syrian delegate rose and, taking a cigarette from his pocket, beckoned for his Lebanese counterpart to follow him to the back of the room. Magnus Wallander smiled his encouragement.
Omar Yussef surveyed the hall. He realized that he wanted very badly to prick the complacency of the diplomats lounging before him. “You wonder how these people, whose lives you think are so full of victimhood and despair, get up in the morning. Perhaps people are killed beside them, or homes are destroyed, or relatives are held without charge for months. But they do rise in the morning, and they work and eat and laugh, and then they sleep. You don’t know how they go on, because you don’t know what’s in their heads. You only know the political cliches, the stereotypes. They don’t spend their days longing for an independent state-they know their politics is too corrupt and divided for that to be achieved. They aren’t all determined to sacrifice their children for this struggle, either. It may be hard for you to understand, but what ordinary Palestinians want and what they battle for every day is precisely what’s denied to most of your citizens in the Arab countries: freedom and economic prosperity.”
The Libyan delegate removed his finger from his nose and flicked it angrily. The Syrian strode down from the rear of the hall, dropping his cigarette. The Lebanese stepped the butt into the carpet as he followed. The Americans glanced toward the translation gallery, fearful that this was another hoax.