“I was with a Samaritan priest when he heard there had been a murder in his community,” Omar Yussef said. “We found the body of a dead Samaritan man at the site of their ancient temple just along the ridge from here.”
“Allah will be merciful upon the deceased one,” Liana murmured.
“May Allah preserve you,” Omar Yussef said.
Ishaq had worked for Liana’s husband. Omar Yussef wondered if Liana would betray anything that might be useful to Sami’s investigation. “The dead man was an associate of your husband, I believe.”
Liana sat up and flattened her pink skirt against her thighs. A trace of fear crept across her eyes. She blinked, and the eyes came back as dead and dull as the surface of the water in a neglected well. “Who?” Her voice was cautious and throaty, as though she feared Omar Yussef might reach out to catch the word and slap her face with it.
“Ishaq, the son of Jibril the priest.”
Liana turned her face away from Omar Yussef and examined the diamond rings on her hands.
“Did you know him?” Omar Yussef said.
“Ishaq?” She spat the word down toward her rings and her jaw shivered. “I was acquainted with him.”
“Your husband’s acquaintance with Ishaq was quite a close one, I believe.”
“My husband makes friends easily. Most multimillionaires do.” Liana threw back her head and her face contorted as though she wanted to prevent a tear from escaping her eye. She sighed and thrust an arm out straight to Khamis Zeydan. “Give me a cigarette, Abu Adel.”
Khamis Zeydan pulled a cigarette from his pack. She took it and leaned forward for him to light it. Her hand shook and the cigarette missed the flame. Khamis Zeydan gently steadied her wrist with his prosthesis, while he lit the tip.
Liana sucked on the Rothmans and blew out a stream of gray smoke. Khamis Zeydan glanced with confusion at the leather glove covering his prosthetic hand.
Omar Yussef watched Liana take another long drag and shiver as she exhaled. Is it merely the mention of her husband and his money that made her suddenly so edgy? he thought. “Your husband attracts friends only because he’s rich?” he said.
She swallowed hard and looked at Omar Yussef. “My husband is charming and charismatic. But there’s no way to make hundreds of millions of dollars and remain a nice guy, ustaz. The more money a man makes, the greater his egomania and childish brutality, and the more so-called friends he requires to allow him to indulge such traits.”
“Doesn’t that depend on whether the money is made legally, or through crime?”
“I was a student radical in the late 1960s and a campaigning journalist in the 1970s, ustaz. I believed then that for one man even to possess a million dollars would be a crime. No matter how much the Prophet Muhammad is said to have praised the life of the merchant, I always believed there would have to have been some sort of crime involved in the acquisition of such a sum. That opinion hasn’t changed.” She looked at Khamis Zeydan. “Being with my husband hasn’t changed many of my opinions since those days.”
Ishaq’s name seems to make her furious and nervy, Omar Yussef thought. He wondered if Amin Kanaan and Ishaq, the homosexual, had shared more than just a business partnership. “Was your husband especially close to Ishaq?”
Liana looked sharply at Omar Yussef. Her eyes were wide and fierce. “It was undoubtedly one of my husband’s closest relationships,” she said, her bright lips quivering. “Brother Abu. .?”
“Abu Ramiz,” Omar Yussef said.
“Brother Abu Ramiz, I would like to discuss something privately for a few moments with my old friend Abu Adel,” Liana said. “If Allah wills it, we shall meet again soon, at your friend’s wedding perhaps.”
“If Allah wills it,” Omar Yussef said.
Dismissed, he raised himself from the couch. Khamis Zeydan lifted his hand hesitantly, as though he might pull Omar Yussef back onto the sofa for protection. Protection from himself, Omar Yussef thought. He gave a peremptory grin to his nervous friend and made for the door.
Omar Yussef crossed the hall to a pair of high glass-paneled doors at the back of the house. He touched a smooth pillar of green Indian marble and looked down at the scattered lights of Nablus in the valley. Dull and orange, they nestled between the mountains like the final glowing coals of a dying campfire. In five days, even those few lights will be turned off, if the World Bank flips the switch, he thought. Face it, Omar, there’s nothing you can do about it. It isn’t that you don’t care, but you’re just a schoolteacher. If you try to keep the lights on, it could easily be you who’s snuffed out.
Something moved in the darkness outside the window, flickering in front of the distant city lights. Omar Yussef put his face close to the glass and cupped his hands around his eyes to block out the lights of the hall. Among the cypresses bordering the lawn, a group of men was gathered. Omar Yussef watched for a minute, but could make out very little in the dim radiance cast from the mansion. Within a minute, most of the men moved away from the house into the dark and went over the buttresses at the edge of the garden. As they jumped, one of them lifted his arm for balance and Omar Yussef saw that he was holding an assault rifle.
The last man turned and strode across the grass to the house. He was tall and his thick white hair fluttered back from a wide forehead, swept by the wind that came over the hilltop. He padded quickly up the steps. Omar Yussef hid behind the pillar, but the man turned along the terrace toward the mansion’s northern wing without looking around. Omar Yussef had seen him clearly enough to recognize a face familiar from the newspaper’s business page.
It was Amin Kanaan.
The door opened behind Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan came into the hall. Omar Yussef folded his arms and leaned against the pillar, as though he had been waiting casually for his friend to emerge.
Khamis Zeydan waved his arm impatiently and headed for the door.
“What was the secret chat about?” Omar Yussef asked.
“She wanted to sing me a few lines from our favorite old love song. She’s sentimental like that,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Let’s go. I need a drink.”
They drove in silence along the avenue of cypresses to the gate. Khamis Zeydan unscrewed the cap of his Johnnie Walker but he didn’t drink until they were on the road. Does he wish to present a dignified front while still on Kanaan’s property? Omar Yussef wondered. Khamis Zeydan turned downhill, sped up and slugged hard from the bottle, his gulping throat working rhythmically, like a part of the engine.
He wiped his hand across his mustache. “What do you think you’re doing, grilling Liana about some dead Samaritan?”
“He wasn’t just any Samaritan. You seemed to know exactly who he was when I told you about him earlier.” Omar Yussef grabbed for the whisky, wrested it with both hands from Khamis Zeydan’s grip and tossed it in the glove compartment. “You must have met Ishaq on your visits to the Old Man’s office in Ramallah.”
“I’m not finished with that bottle,” the policeman said.
“You can drink after you’ve negotiated this dangerous road.” Omar Yussef swept his hand toward the boulders at the roadside, menacing in the stark beams of the headlights. “I asked her about the Samaritan, because I wanted to help Sami with his investigation.”
Khamis Zeydan sighed, impatiently. “Help Sami? If you want to help Sami, keep your mouth shut.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sami’s not investigating. He’s in danger.”
“He’s a policeman. Even Palestinian policemen are supposed to trace criminals.”
“Not if it means ending up dead.”
“If those men wanted to kill him, they could have done it in the alley.”