Chapter 29
Omar Yussef cut the engine and waited for something in the silence to ambush him. When Khamis Zeydan wheezed, he realized that they had both been holding their breath, anticipating the momentous discovery they hoped to make up the hill and fearful that they would find someone else, someone murderous, searching there too. Stepping out onto the dried pine needles around the jeep, he skirted the woods until he found the path to the Byzantine fort winding around a patch of rocks. Khamis Zeydan’s pistol glinted in the moonlight.
“Put that gun away,” Omar Yussef said. “We might walk into someone perfectly innocent and you’ll have shot them before we get a chance to see who they are.”
“I’ll aim to wound,” Khamis Zeydan whispered. “If there’s anyone up there now, after the gates have been locked, I doubt that they’re innocent.”
“We’ll probably be searching for hours for the place where Ishaq buried those secret documents. If you shoot at some shadow, the whole village will come and catch us. We won’t be able to do this by day without being noticed, and tomorrow the World Bank cuts off its aid. We have to do this tonight. Don’t blow it.”
Khamis Zeydan puffed out his cheeks. He kept his gun hand raised, the barrel pointing at the branches above, and paced carefully ahead of Omar Yussef, as though he expected the ground beneath each advancing step to blow up.
They passed through the break in the fence and the pines started to thin. Stones, long tumbled from the old walls of the fortress, spread irregularly over the hillside like a shoreline wavering in the shifting moonlight.
“Can you make it up here with your foot in that condition?” Omar Yussef asked. “It looks like a rough climb over these fallen blocks.”
“You’d prefer me to wait at the bottom for your corpse to come rolling down?” Khamis Zeydan shook his foot and slapped his thigh to get the blood moving.
“Since you put it that way, my brother,” said Omar Yussef, “stick close.”
He stepped onto one of the stones and saw that his leg shook with fear. His apprehension made him feel foolish. He was a schoolteacher, not a man of action like the policeman who walked behind him, pistol at the ready. Yet here he was, ascending a pile of ancient stones in the night, unsure of what awaited him at the end of his climb.
His ankle turned and his shoe slipped off. He winced, bending to pull it back on, and leaned against a stone to right himself. It was rough with lichen and the weathering of ages. “Now we both have a bad foot,” he said.
“At least I had some fun boozing and eating badly to get mine into the condition it’s in,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“Aren’t we having fun now?”
Khamis Zeydan bent low, the pistol still raised. “I’m loving every minute.” He smiled grimly. “I’m starting to hope there’s actually someone up there.”
“There isn’t.” Omar Yussef flexed his ankle. “The documents Ishaq hid are up there, somewhere near the flat stone where the ancient temple stood. That’s all.”
“It never pays to be surprised. Get yourself ready for a welcoming committee.”
They climbed side by side over the stones. Omar Yussef bowed to use both hands where the slope was most acute. Khamis Zeydan kept his gun in his hand and balanced with his prosthetic limb. They moved quietly, though Omar Yussef thought their labored breathing might as well have been a shout in the hush around them. His pulse thundered in his neck like a Ramadan firecracker.
The spray of rocks on the hillside brought them to a rise at the foot of the fortress’s walls. Beyond a soft dip in the ridge, the stone that had been at the center of the ancient Samaritan temple angled down the slope from the peak of the mountain, a silvery charcoal. At its center, a darker spot marked it. Omar Yussef squinted. The spot on the rock seemed to roll to one side. Is that a shadow cast by the clouds passing across the moon? he wondered. Something stretched out of the darkness at the center of the flat stone. It jerked upward, then it bent. It was an arm.
“Someone’s there,” Omar Yussef said.
They hurried over the grass toward the temple stone.
Omar Yussef stepped onto the holy rock and felt electricity rise through his feet and into his legs. The charge quickened his breath, squeezing his heart between two pounding fists of adrenaline.
The body moved again. An arm flapped, then collapsed with a crack of knuckles against the rock. The forearm, which fell out of a blue gown, was lightly covered in black hair. Omar Yussef went onto his knees and held the outstretched limb, rubbing its cold fingers between his hands.
“Roween, can you hear me?” he said.
The Samaritan woman opened one eye, as far as the contusion surrounding it would allow. A bloodied slash flayed her skin from the bone of her cheek and concealed the other eye. She sucked air desperately over smashed teeth. Her gown rode above her knees, showing her stocky legs, bruised and scratched. She exhaled and Omar Yussef thought it was the death rattle.
Khamis Zeydan turned a full circle. “There’s no one around, as far as I can see,” he said, holstering his pistol.
“Who did this to you, Roween?” Omar Yussef asked, squeezing her fingers.
Roween choked and dribbled blood from the corner of her mouth. “Abisha,” she spluttered.
“The scroll? Did a man named Abisha do this?”
“Abisha.” She gagged again and the force of her coughing almost brought her upright. She grabbed at a pain in her belly and rolled onto her side.
Omar Yussef felt moisture chill his face. He wiped the back of his hand across his cheek and it came away dark. Roween had coughed a spray of blood over him.
“Where are the account details?” Khamis Zeydan knelt beside the battered woman. His voice was harsh and clear. “Where are they?”
They’re in the Abisha Scroll, Omar Yussef thought. She knows we came here to find the secret bank documents. She’s telling us Ishaq hid them inside the scroll’s box. That’s what he meant by ‘behind the temple.’ It has nothing to do with the location of the ancient temple. He meant the silver image of the temple decorating the Abisha’s box. He lifted a hand to restrain Khamis Zeydan. “Let her rest,” he whispered. “She’s nearly gone.”
Khamis Zeydan shook his head and leaned closer to Roween’s face. “Where?” he said.
“Synagogue.” Roween’s voice was barely more than a breath. Her glassy eye fought to focus on Omar Yussef’s face. He came closer, took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from her cheek and mouth. “He knew,” she said. “Kanaan.”
“What? Kanaan knew what? That Ishaq was his son?” Omar Yussef whispered gently.
“He knew about Kanaan,” she said.
“Ishaq knew he was the son of Kanaan?”
“Ask her about that other guy.” Khamis Zeydan nudged Omar Yussef. “What’s his name?”
“Roween, do you know who Suleiman al-Teef is?” Omar Yussef asked.
The woman’s lip twitched, as though she wished to smile. “My brother,” she murmured.
Omar Yussef thought of the handicapped boy bouncing his basketball alone and of the kind brother-in-law he had lost. Now he was to be robbed of the sister who had loved him.
Roween’s eye closed. Her body convulsed and she grasped Omar Yussef’s hand until he felt the bones in his fingers might shatter.
He looked helplessly at Khamis Zeydan and grabbed his friend’s collar and pushed him close to the dying woman’s face. “Can’t we do something? You’re always bragging about assassinations and battles,” he wailed. “Haven’t you ever tried to save someone’s life? Can’t you stop her bleeding?”
The police chief removed Omar Yussef’s hand from his shirt and held it softly in his own. He stayed close to Roween’s face, waiting for one final word.
The word didn’t come. Khamis Zeydan closed his lips, as if to avoid inhaling Roween’s dying breath. Omar Yussef traced his fingertips tenderly over the woman’s scabby acne. A cloud shaded the moon and the bruises and cuts on her face became no more than shadows. She looked like a girl merely asleep.