“I’m trying to confirm what someone told me about Ishaq.”
“I can’t confirm anything, ustaz. What difference does it make that I thought Kanaan was my husband’s lover?” Roween coughed as though her words choked her.
“But when you asked him to come back to Nablus, he didn’t? He returned from Paris only when Kanaan requested that he do so?”
“Kanaan begged Ishaq to return. He was at Kanaan’s mansion all the time after he came back, although he was there less in the last few weeks.” Roween sniffled, pushed her dry hair away from her eyebrows, and picked up the coffee tray.
Khamis Zeydan crossed the living room to the sofa. He caught Omar Yussef’s eye. His look was a warning, friendly but suspicious. Omar Yussef touched Roween’s sleeve as she passed him with the tray. “My daughter, things weren’t perfect in your marriage, but I’m sure that Ishaq valued a woman like you,” he said. “I always say that a married man’s eye may wander, but his heart does not.”
“You believe that? Anyway, who said I ever had his heart?” Roween took the coffee to the low table in the living room and set it before the police chief.
Khamis Zeydan ran through the same questions with Roween that Omar Yussef had covered on his first visit. He won’t get at the truth about Roween and Ishaq, Omar Yussef thought. His own marriage is a mess and he refuses to address it. He could never understand what was happening in someone else’s relationship.
Omar Yussef thought that if Ishaq hadn’t been killed, he might have been content to live out his fake marriage, because it provided cover for his secret sex life. Could that have been satisfactory for Roween? Surely the needs of an intelligent woman would extend beyond a husband who decorated the bathroom in good taste, he thought.
They were outside Roween’s door, when Omar Yussef blurted over the noise of the crowd at the flame pits in the park: “Do you think Sami really wants to get married?”
Khamis Zeydan grinned. “I’ve told him repeatedly what a nightmare it is to have a wife and kids. Do you know some other filthy secret about marriage that will bring him to his senses?”
Omar Yussef glanced back toward Roween’s house. He saw that Khamis Zeydan noticed his look. “My secrets,” he said, “are of a different kind.”
Chapter 22
Omar Yussef left breakfast the next morning with a fervent promise to Nadia that he would accompany her to eat qanafi later that day. “Even if I have to run through a volley of rifle fire to bring you a plate,” he said. In the lobby of the hotel, he called Jamie King’s room on the house phone and got no answer. He went over to the reception desk and found the manager picking his teeth with the green plastic cover of an official identity card.
“Have you seen the American lady this morning?” Omar Yussef asked.
The manager flinched and tried to slip the identity card into one of the pigeonholes behind him without Omar Yussef noticing. “She went out a few minutes ago, ustaz.”
Omar Yussef glanced at his watch. It was nine-thirty. If I move now, I can be at Kanaan’s place in time to join Jamie for her ten o’clock appointment, he thought, whether she likes it or not.
He hailed a taxi outside the hotel and ordered the driver to take him to the home of Amin Kanaan. The driver wiggled his hand, palm upward, to signal that he didn’t understand.
“Up there,” Omar Yussef said, pointing out of the window toward the mansions on the ridge.
“That Amin Kanaan?” The taxi driver looked Omar Yussef up and down, doubtfully.
“You can stop on the way and buy me an expensive suit, if you’re anxious for me to impress him.” Omar Yussef grated out a scoffing laugh. “But I won’t give you a bigger tip.”
“Even so, ustaz. There’s an Israeli base up there, and Kanaan has his own guards, too. It’s a long way from the town.”
“You’re right. He lives in a very exclusive neighborhood. So you won’t have to worry about traffic.”
The driver pulled off with a sullen glance at Omar Yussef in his rearview mirror.
The guards at Kanaan’s elaborate iron gates sent the taxi driver to wait out of sight behind a stand of pines. One of them remembered that Omar Yussef had been to the mansion before and ushered him through.
As Omar Yussef panted along the arcade of cypresses to the house, a liveried servant came to the front door and waited for him with his hands behind his back, his blue tunic a small blot on the tan surface of Kanaan’s enormous home. The sun glinted into his eyes from the windows of three big jeeps on the gravel lot beside the house. He assumed the boxy, black Mercedes G500 was Kanaan’s. A dusty Cherokee with signs on each side that said TV was parked beside Jamie King’s white Suburban.
“Madame isn’t at home this morning, ustaz,” the servant said, giving his mistress’s title a French pronunciation.
“I’m not here to see madame this time,” Omar Yussef said. He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Tell your boss to get the garden air-conditioned. I expect he can afford it.”
He went into the hall. The morning sun dazzled at the far end of the foyer. A handful of silhouettes moved beyond the glass, but Omar Yussef couldn’t make them out, even when he shaded his eyes.
“Shall I tell my boss you’re here to sell him air-conditioning?”
“I’m with the lady from the World Bank,” Omar Yussef said.
The servant grinned and opened the gilt door to the salon where Omar Yussef had met Liana. “Your colleague is in here, ustaz.”
Jamie King sat on the sofa in her chalk-striped suit. She looked at Omar Yussef with mild reproach. “Usually when I set a meeting with Palestinians, they either arrive late or forget altogether,” she said. “This is the first time a Palestinian has kept an appointment I didn’t even make with him.”
“I promise this won’t be the last time I surprise you.” Omar Yussef smiled.
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
“Where’s the great man?”
“Mister Kanaan is outside. He has company.”
Omar Yussef walked to the window, feeling the quiet air-conditioning cool him. From the shade of the brocaded curtains, he peered at the group he had seen from the foyer. A burly man with messy gray hair held a heavy video camera on his shoulder. A sticker on the side of the camera identified the foreigners as a news team from an American cable channel. A small blonde with a fluffy microphone on a short boom fiddled with the dials on a recorder strapped to her waist.
A pair of men walked toward the camera in conversation. Both were tall. One wore the khaki vest favored by television correspondents to signal a manly taste for action. The other man did the talking, while the journalist frowned with exaggerated concentration. Omar Yussef recognized the second man, in a checked sport jacket and open-necked pink shirt, as Amin Kanaan.
The reporter stepped back so the cameraman could frame Kanaan in a close-up. Omar Yussef twisted the ornate handles of the French doors and opened them enough to hear what was said outside.
“Mister Kanaan,” the journalist asked, in a resonant Midwestern American accent, “what’s your response to the allegations about the death of the former president?”
Kanaan looked grave. “This is a tawdry and perilous allegation by agitators in Hamas,” he said. His English was poised and distinguished. It was clear to Omar Yussef that Kanaan’s full vowels and distinct t had been learned from an Englishman, not an American, and he imagined that Kanaan would see this as a sign of good breeding. “The president was a symbol for the Palestinian people, as well as a father and brother to all of us. Hamas has slandered the morals of the entire Palestinian people with this accusation, and they must be punished.”