“Don’t be ridiculous, Your Honor Amin,” Omar Yussef said. He raised a finger at Khamis Zeydan. “Be careful, Abu Adel.”
“Ridiculous? I wouldn’t be the first one to die because your friend decided to settle a score,” Kanaan said. “This fellow was the party’s top assassin for two decades. He hates me because I know him for who he really is.”
“What do you mean?” Omar Yussef said.
Khamis Zeydan gripped the head of the marble pedestal and stared fiercely at the tiny coffee cup in its center.
“Since he returned from exile to live in Bethlehem, I’ve kept an eye on Abu Adel. I had to. I never knew when he might try something against me, given our history.” Kanaan sneered. “He portrays himself as an honorable policeman. But men like him gave Palestinians a bad reputation, with their terrorist attacks all over Europe and their airplane hijackings and their war in Lebanon.”
Khamis Zeydan backhanded his coffee cup off the pedestal. It smashed onto the floor. “If it was down to me, there’d have been peace decades ago,” he shouted. “But people like you made too much money out of the chaos, the lack of rules, the opportunities for corruption. You kept me fighting and others dying, so you could exploit our people and get rich.”
“But we both got what we wanted out of it in the end. I got rich, and you got excitement, the chance to be a tough guy.” Kanaan raised his eyebrows mockingly. “We both got what we wanted.”
Khamis Zeydan lurched toward Kanaan and grabbed the sofa. Kanaan jerked back, expecting a blow.
“No, we didn’t,” Khamis Zeydan said. His breath came loud through his nose. He leaned close to Kanaan, his lips spread, showing his teeth, like a dog preparing to pounce. “I didn’t get what I wanted.”
Kanaan composed himself. “I suppose you didn’t,” he grinned.
Liana, Omar Yussef thought. My friend didn’t get her, and now it seems to him she was all he ever wanted. “Abu Adel, perhaps it would be best if you waited in the garden,” he said.
Khamis Zeydan rolled his pale eyes. He slammed the French doors behind him and hobbled across the lawn to the gazebo.
Omar Yussef drained his cup and laid it on the Armenian tiles of the coffee table. He wiped the dregs from his mustache. “Abu Adel is a dear friend and I don’t think it’s fair of you to continue this animosity from so long ago,” he said.
Kanaan put his hand to his heart. “Isn’t it your friend who harbors the grudge?”
Omar Yussef leaned his elbows on his knees. “You sent Mareh to kill me, but you’re lucky that I’m more forgiving than Abu Adel. I’m not after you. I have a different aim. I want to know the truth about you and Ishaq.”
Kanaan shrugged.
“Aren’t you going to protest that you already told me the truth?” Omar Yussef said. “That you’re offended I should suspect you of covering something up?”
“I have nothing to hide,” Kanaan said. “You’re welcome to ask me whatever you want.”
“You gave Ishaq files of dirt on all the top Fatah people,” Omar Yussef said. “In return he was supposed to give you the information on the Old Man’s secret bank accounts. But he backed out.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Why did he back out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ask the priest Jibril why the deal wasn’t completed?”
Kanaan blinked and spoke slowly. “Should I ask him?”
“What did you want the money for?” Omar Yussef said.
“I don’t understand your question. Does one need a reason to want money?”
“What I mean is, don’t you already have plenty of it?”
“The money wasn’t for me. I wanted it to go into the official Palestinian treasury, where the international donors intended for it to be in the first place.”
“Do you think I’m naive enough to believe that?”
“After your last visit, I thought it best to learn more about you, ustaz.” Kanaan aimed his index finger at Omar Yussef. “First I discovered that you weren’t with the World Bank. Then I heard that you have something of a troublesome background.”
“What do you mean?” Omar Yussef felt a jolt of adrenaline. What does this man know about me? He experienced a surge of guilt for things he knew he had done wrong and anger at false accusations that had been made against him over the years.
“You were fired from your job at a nice school. Why was that? Was it your alcoholism? Or did something happen with one of the pupils? For some men, a school is full of sexual temptation.”
“How dare you.”
“You had some trouble with the Jordanian authorities when you were a student radical, too, didn’t you? Murder, wasn’t it? You’re probably going to tell me that the charges were dropped. But in an Arab country, with our corrupt justice systems, that doesn’t exactly clear your name. I also gather you had some dubious connections in Damascus, when you were a student there.”
“You’re just rehashing old nonsense.”
“Then why are your cheeks burning?” Kanaan stroked his gray sideburns. “Really, as you point out, I don’t need this money for my personal use. I’ve made many millions in construction and banking. But the Palestinians are poor.”
“Because of men like you.”
Kanaan waved his hand as though wafting away a bad smell. “I wanted to collect all the money hidden around the world by the old president and use it to build hospitals and schools for our people. If you insist on seeing me as entirely selfish, then look at it this way: if I could help cleanse Palestine of corruption and build good infrastructure, international investors would put money into the economy and my holdings here would appreciate in value.”
Omar Yussef dropped his gaze to his knuckles. Have I been blinded to this man’s better intentions by the animosity Khamis Zeydan feels for him? Perhaps he’s telling me the truth now.
“If I tried to put you out of the way, it was because I didn’t know your objectives,” Kanaan said. “You can’t blame me for assuming that if you’d found the money you would have kept it for yourself, or for some faction allied to your friend Abu Adel. I already paid off everyone else who might have considered going after the money, because I wanted to make sure that I’d be the one to trace it. Then I planned to deposit it in the Palestinian treasury.”
“If someone refused to be paid off, then you employed Mareh and his own special methods?”
“I used extreme measures, because the fate of our nation rests on the recovery of this money.”
“How about Suleiman al-Teef? Did you buy him?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“If this is true, why didn’t you coordinate your search with Jamie King. The World Bank could’ve helped you.”
“Foreigners like her just get in the way.”
Omar Yussef flexed his fingers. “Ishaq took the dirt files. Then he failed to hand over the account documents?”
“Correct.”
“So you killed him?”
Kanaan’s eyelid fluttered and something beneath his suave calm quivered. “I could never have done such a thing. I loved him.”
“You can’t kill someone you love? Love’s usually the most popular reason for murder.”
Kanaan glanced out of the window toward the gazebo where Khamis Zeydan sat, hunched and sullen. “Don’t you think that if I was that kind of man I’d have killed other people who were close to me? Ishaq wasn’t the first person I loved who betrayed me.”
His wife, with the dashing young field officer who’s now sulking in his garden, Omar Yussef thought. “Liana?”
“In Beirut, I had an understanding with her. We were promised to each other, though not formally engaged. Then I discovered that she had loved another man, too.”
Kanaan took Liana as his wife even after that betrayal, Omar Yussef thought. His attraction to her wasn’t only a matter of sex. He loves her as if she were his own flesh. Omar Yussef raised his head. His own flesh. “Ishaq was your son.”