Something whipped through the air above him and struck the wall with a sudden hiss. His hand still on the ancient stone, he glanced behind him. That was a bullet, he thought. What have I walked into?
He stood, and another bullet cut away a chunk of the Roman capital, spraying dust onto his shoes. In the alley behind him, he heard feet approaching fast. Only one pair of boots, he thought. I haven’t stumbled into a gunfight. Someone’s after me.
A shot came out of the alley. Omar Yussef saw the muzzle flash orange in the shadows and threw himself to his right. He landed on the steps and rolled into the darkness, protecting his head with one hand and clasping his glasses with the other.
He held himself rigid, as he fell. He would have ugly bruises, but so long as he didn’t allow his body to bend nothing would break. He slammed to a halt against a box of rotting chicken bones and a startled cat fled the impact. He lay groaning, until he heard the shooter coming along the alley toward the steps. He pushed the box to the center of the passage, groped fast along the wall and turned a corner. He saw light through an arch ahead and he hobbled toward it.
When he emerged from the dark, he was in the empty souk. On any other day he would’ve been safe in the crowd, but everyone had shuttered their shops to attend the big wedding. Behind him, he heard someone tumble over the box of chicken remains and curse.
Across the souk, an iron fence caged some old tombs. A building had been erected behind and above the graves, but the wall beside the fence lay in a pile of smashed bricks. The Israelis must have entered on one of their night raids, blowing a gap to search for weapons hidden behind the tombs. Omar Yussef edged through the hole.
Stumbling on a loose brick, he grabbed for the nearest grave. The stone was smoothly dimpled like an orange. He scrambled behind it and squatted, pressing his face against a decorative rectangle of Koranic verse carved in stately thuluth calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the text and picked out the Touqan name engraved on the limestone. It’s the tomb of a wealthy man who once inhabited the palace where Awwadi lives, he thought.
Omar Yussef stared at the stone until the face of the corpse within seemed to glow through it. Please be quiet, he told the corpse. I’ll forgive you any sins you committed centuries ago, so long as you don’t give me away now.
He heard someone running through the souk. With a limp. Probably from falling over the box of trash, he thought. He tried to emulate the dead beneath the gravestones, who obliged him with their silence.
The footsteps halted outside the iron fence. Omar Yussef heard a man breathing hard. He thought he smelled the scent of cardamom and recalled once more that same spice on the breath of the man who had slapped him. The metal fence squeaked. He’s coming inside, he thought. But then he heard the feet move along the souk.
A door swung open, slamming against a wall some distance away, and cheerful voices rushed into the street. Omar Yussef heard his stalker curse in a low voice and turn back toward the casbah.
Omar Yussef dropped to the ground, his back against the Touqan tomb, and breathed desperately, like a swimmer surfacing from a long dive. He closed his eyes and shivered. Whoever that was, he probably saw me with Nouri Awwadi. Whatever I know about the dirt files or Ishaq’s murder, that man must suspect I know even more. He’ll try to kill me again.
A strong wind swept through the casbah and the evening sun dropped behind Jerizim. A deep chill emanated from the old tombs. It was too late to return to the Touqan Palace to hunt for the files. Omar Yussef climbed over the rubble, lowered himself onto the worn flagstones of the souk and rushed away.
Chapter 15
Omar Yussef disliked restaurant food. He suspected professional chefs of cheating, adding extra fat or too much salt, rather than taking the time to follow traditional recipes. Anticipating such second-rate fare at the hotel restaurant, he waited sullenly by the window of his hotel room, tapping his finger on a book he had been trying to read, while Maryam dressed for dinner.
Isolated blue lights were scattered across the hillside below. The people of Nablus had eaten early and gone to bed, leaving the streets to the gunmen and the Israeli patrols. And to the man who tried to kill me.
The stillness outside his hotel window seemed illusory to Omar Yussef, like the quiet of a corpse. A dead body appears motionless, he thought, but the serenity of death is only a mask for the assiduous decaying of flesh. I would have said Ishaq’s cadaver was lifeless when I inspected it on the mountaintop. In reality, it was being eaten away by countless awful microscopic organisms. This peaceful cityscape, too, is no less riddled with destructive undercurrents than a putrefying carcass. He clasped his hands anxiously. Perhaps if I just talked to the American woman again, I could get a better idea of why Ishaq died. I might be able to guide her toward the money, without really being involved.
Without taking any more risks.
“I hope the hotel doesn’t overcook the shish tawouk.” Maryam stepped out of the bathroom, slipping a small gold earring into her earlobe. “These restaurants always ruin chicken, so that you have to drown the food in lemon juice to give it any life.”
Omar Yussef laughed. “Next time we travel, I’ll rent a hotel room with a kitchen for you,” he said. “That way we’ll be able to avoid restaurants entirely.”
Maryam pulled on a black woolen jacket. “Omar, these restaurant people do all kinds of terrible things with food. They don’t love the food or the people who eat it.”
Omar Yussef noticed Maryam had left his short-sleeved shirt hanging from the shower rail in the bathroom, damp across the chest where she had scrubbed away the hummus stain. The food at Abu Alam’s snack bar had been good, even if it had offended Maryam that he ate there. Perhaps he shouldn’t be so quick to condemn restaurant meals. “My darling, tonight’s dishes may not be so bad.”
His wife raised a scolding finger. “Yes, maybe the meal will be as good as the hummus in the casbah.”
Omar Yussef’s mouth dried up, like the overdone chicken on which he imagined he’d soon be choking. Can she read my thoughts, he wondered, or just my guilty conscience?
“I’m going to taste the salads,” Maryam said, “and if I don’t think they’ve made them correctly, I won’t even touch the main course.”
She frowned, lifted his hand, and inspected a greenish bruise on his wrist. “Did that happen when you stumbled after that scum slapped you?”
Omar Yussef hoped there was a limit to his wife’s ability to see through him. “That must be when it happened,” he said. He pulled back his hand. He ached all over from his tumble down the steps, but he didn’t want to alarm Maryam.
“I still don’t understand why they would hurt Sami.”
“He’s a policeman. They’re criminals.”
“I’m proud that you tried to stop them.”
Omar Yussef set his book on the dresser. He had tried to reread some poems by a famous Nablus writer, but the book had frustrated him. The poet struck a heroic tone that seemed to Omar Yussef as false as the melodrama of a news-caster. The poems praised people who, instead, ought to have been shaken to their senses before they made useless sacrifices of themselves. Even our artists can’t tell us the truth, he thought. It’s no wonder our politicians find it so easy to lie. “I’m going down for a quick coffee while you finish getting ready, Maryam,” he said. “It’ll relax me.”