“Your foot’s bothering you?” Omar Yussef said. “It’s the diabetes.”
Khamis Zeydan stamped. “It just went to sleep with all this standing. The body, please?”
Omar Yussef pointed to the sloping stone where the ancient Samaritan temple had stood. “That spot behind the priest was covered with blood,” he said, “but the body was actually found on the hillside there, in the pines.”
Khamis Zeydan elbowed through the crowd to get a better look at the place where Ishaq’s corpse had lain. Omar Yussef struggled to catch up to him.
“The body came to rest against that tree,” he whispered, pointing.
“Witnesses?”
Omar Yussef shook his head. “The caretaker confirmed that the body was left here three nights ago. There was nothing here when he closed up at night and then he found the body in the morning.”
“That’s not much to go on.”
“Not so little. We have the body and the site of the murder, and we spoke to the victim’s wife, who told us he was doing a deal with Amin Kanaan.”
“So he was doing a deal and it wasn’t necessarily clean.” Khamis Zeydan raised his chin impatiently. “He was a Palestinian. Do you think it unusual that he should operate outside the law?”
“Sami wants out of this investigation and you don’t seem to take it very seriously, either,” Omar Yussef said. “Can I really be the only one interested in this poor man’s death?”
“If you don’t want to be the only one interested, perhaps you ought to drop it. Then you won’t be alone anymore.”
Omar Yussef stared at the police chief. He remembered the way Roween had touched her fingertips to the acne beside her lips and the pity he had felt for her in her lonely house of mourning. “I misspoke. I’m not alone,” he said.
Khamis Zeydan rolled his tongue behind his mustache. “We can’t make too much of the location of the body,” he said. “It must be pretty deserted up here most nights. You could kill someone without anyone hearing. But chances are that Ishaq was killed elsewhere and the body was dropped here later. Murderers like to move their victims. They leave fewer clues that way.”
“He died up here, I’m sure of it. There was blood all over the rock.” Omar Yussef turned toward the Samaritan men in their white robes flanking the priest. They were gathered at the edge of the sloping gray stone, the center of their temple.
“What rock?” Khamis Zeydan followed his gaze.
“That’s the stone where Abraham bound Isaac. It’s where the ancient temple was built.”
“What are you talking about? That’s in Jerusalem.”
“This is where the Samaritans believe it was. Ishaq must have been alive when he was brought to the mountain, or he couldn’t have pumped out so much blood.”
Khamis Zeydan scratched his chin with the yellowed nail of his thumb.
“I think Ishaq was brought here and killed on that stone. His body was then thrown over the edge of the hillside into the darkness, and it rolled down into the trees.” Omar Yussef peered into the pines.
“He knew about the Old Man’s money. Did someone get the secrets of those accounts out of him and then silence him? Or is there something else?” Khamis Zeydan made a quick, summoning gesture with his fingers. “Give.”
The schoolteacher exhaled deeply. “I was about to tell you when we heard Nouri Awwadi cry out at the baths,” he said. “Those files of dirt on the Fatah leaders-Awwadi got them from Ishaq.”
Khamis Zeydan’s eyes seemed to recede into his head. “That’s very interesting. Awwadi bought them from Ishaq?”
“Awwadi stole the oldest Samaritan scroll and swapped it for the dirt files.”
“A straight swap? The scroll for the files? Nothing to do with Ishaq’s knowledge of the Old Man’s money?”
“Awwadi didn’t seem to know about that. When he showed me the files, I told him about the three hundred million dollars Ishaq had hidden and I got the impression that it was news to him.”
“If you were eager for the World Bank to get its hands on that money first, it wasn’t so smart to tell Hamas about it.”
“Don’t you think someone else who was after the money might have killed Awwadi? After I told him about the secret account details, he must’ve started trying to find them. Someone probably killed him to stop his search.”
Khamis Zeydan made a hissing sound and spat a gob of phlegm over the handrail toward the pines. “So this time you set him up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on, my brother, it was a nice trick. You knew there were ruthless people who wanted to be the first to get at that money, and you also knew that they were on your scent. So you set Awwadi on the trail of the secret accounts, knowing that he’d be a greater danger than you to the bad guys, whoever they are. They had to turn their attention to him. It was a nice distraction.”
Omar Yussef blinked. “You can’t possibly think I’d do something so wicked?”
“You’re right, I’m giving you too much credit. I was hoping you’d wised up.” Khamis Zeydan spat again, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and stared into the crowd. “Isn’t that the American woman from the World Bank?”
Omar Yussef squinted toward the crowd of foreigners. At first he failed to recognize Jamie King, dressed casually and with her red hair pulled under a baseball cap. He shuffled through the throng and greeted her.
“Hey there,” King said. “I wondered if you’d be here.”
“I wouldn’t miss it. I’m hedging my spiritual bets, in case the Samaritans are right,” Omar Yussef said.
“If the Messiah comes to Jerizim tonight, do you think the Samaritans will put in a good word for you?”
“I don’t like change, so I’m not interested in Paradise. I prefer to be sent straight to Hell, before all the worst punishments are taken.” Omar Yussef grinned. “I want to burn for eternity in a place that’s just as bad as Palestine.”
“Good evening, dear lady,” Khamis Zeydan said. He bowed slightly to King with his hand over his heart.
A nearby diplomat gestured for quiet. King whispered to Omar Yussef: “I was up here to look around a few days ago, but the caretaker wasn’t much good at explaining the history. Is that the Samaritan temple?” She pointed to the ruined walls and domed turret, bright in the moonlight beyond the group of Samaritans.
“That’s a Byzantine fortress,” Omar Yussef said. “The heart of their temple is the flat stone beside where the Samaritans are standing. The temple would’ve been built around it, here on the peak of their holy mountain.”
“Who destroyed it?”
“Religious rivals. Then the Greeks built a temple of Zeus over it.”
“When the Samaritan Messiah comes, he’ll rebuild it?”
“That’s the idea. Although their Messiah is only a prophet, not the son of God, so I can’t say how far his powers extend. He, too, may need a permit from the Israelis.”
“I’ll be up here again in the morning.” Jamie King pointed along the ridge. “I’ve got a meeting with the businessman Amin Kanaan at ten. One of those big houses belongs to him.”
The voice of the priest quieted the crowd. In a nasal tenor, he chanted from Exodus, the story of the first Passover. In the darkness, the Abisha seemed nothing more than an oblong blot across his white robe. The priest led the Samaritans down from the peak of Mount Jerizim. The crowd followed.
Omar Yussef detained King with a hand on her elbow. “Jamie, may I accompany you to your meeting with Kanaan?”
King hesitated. “It’s World Bank business, ustaz. I can’t just turn up with a private individual.”
“Kanaan worked with Ishaq. That means he could provide important leads in tracking the money.”
“My discussion with Mister Kanaan may include such topics. But there’re a number of World Bank development projects that involve him, too. Anyway, I imagine he’d prefer to be interviewed about the case by the police.”
Omar Yussef hid his frustration with a hand over his mouth. “I believe I would be able to extract certain information from him that you might not. It might be easier to question him in Arabic.”