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.”
“Of course, my darling.” She blinked hard. “I just have to tidy my hair and then I’ll join you.”
Omar Yussef smiled at his wife. Beside her black clothes, her skin appeared gray, though it was really a yellowed brown like the flesh inside an eggplant. She blinked frequently when spoken to, an idiosyncrasy she had devel-oped during the years of the intifada. Omar Yussef worried that it was the result of excessive tension, of repressed concern for her family amid the violence of Bethlehem. Perhaps she’s just surprised that she’s still alive, after what our town’s been through, he thought.
Maryam went back into the small bathroom. “I worry about Zuheir,” she said quietly, as Omar Yussef turned the door handle to leave the room.
He took his hand away from the knob. “Because he’s become religious?”
Maryam snapped her face toward her husband. “Because he’s all skin and bones. He isn’t eating well.”
“It’s just the stupid loose clothes he wears, like some Saudi herdsman,” Omar Yussef said. “Or maybe it’s because he’s fasting twice a week like a good Muslim.”
“Omar, don’t criticize the boy. He’s stubborn, just like you. If you tell him he’s taking the wrong path, it’ll only make him more determined.”
She leaned close to the bathroom mirror and, with a finger and thumb, toyed with the sagging skin at the corners of her mouth.
“Maryam, turn away from that mirror,” Omar Yussef said. “When you look at yourself like that, it reminds me how much worse my own reflection appears. Do you want to be cruel to your poor husband?”
Maryam twiddled the brass buttons on Omar Yussef’s blazer and brushed the lapels. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You look smart, as always.”
It wasn’t true that, confronted with a mirror, Omar Yussef examined himself critically. He saw more than a trace of the handsome young man he had been. He even imagined that he might be less bald than in fact he was and that his gray mustache gave him a manly gravity. But he was unsure of himself tonight. The mirror might catch him with haggard, drawn eyelids and new lines scored beside his mouth like scars.
He kissed his wife’s forehead and opened the door. She reached for her hairbrush, as he went out.
In the elevator, the mirror challenged him. He glimpsed a sallow face, streaked with deep gray shadows. He turned his eyes swiftly to the flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling, keeping them there until the elevator doors opened on the lobby and allowed him to escape his reflection.
Jamie King stood in the center of the lobby with her hands resting together in front of her. Her eyes wandered around the room as though she were waiting for someone. She wore her red hair down and Omar Yussef admired its thickness. A surge of purpose overcame his melancholy. I must talk to her before Maryam arrives, he thought. As he approached her, the American straightened her jacket, smiled and extended a firm hand to greet him.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.
“No, in fact, I-”
“Jamie, I need to continue our talk about Ishaq, the Samaritan,” Omar Yussef said, moving close to her. “Ishaq was very young to be in charge of the Old Man’s secret finances, wasn’t he?”
“There weren’t many people the president trusted.” King stroked the soft hairs by her ear. “The people who first told me about Ishaq all used the same phrase: ‘Ishaq was like a son to the Old Man.’ But I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the president simply had something on Ishaq.”
“Some sort of dirt?” His homosexuality, Omar Yussef thought.
“Something that would give him power over Ishaq. So that if Ishaq ever tried to pilfer the cash, the president could ruin his family.”
“He went to Paris with the president, when the Old Man was dying,” Omar Yussef said. “Once the president died, Ishaq could’ve kept all the money.”
The American dipped her head closer to Omar Yussef. “Unless someone else also knew his secret and was in a position to blackmail him.”
“If that were the case, why would he return to Palestine? He was walking right into the arms of his blackmailers.” Omar Yussef shook his head. “What do you think happened to the money?”
“I’ve traced no recent transactions that would suggest the money has been moved. I assume Ishaq still controlled the secret accounts when he was killed.”
“Where’s the money likely to be?”
“What we’ve found so far was in accounts in the Bahamas, Belize, Panama, those kinds of places. There were also investments in companies all over the world. Telecom businesses in Libya, food distribution companies in Saudi Arabia, all sorts of industries. But most of it was in easily accessible cash accounts, to pay for things the president needed quickly. I’ll keep trying to track it all down- my investigators are in Geneva at the moment, following up a couple of leads. But I’m worried. If someone killed Ishaq for the details of the accounts, they might have cleaned them out by the time I catch up.”
“Whatever you discover, perhaps you’ll share it with me?” Omar Yussef whispered. “It might help you to consult someone who knows the culture.”
Jamie King gave a distant smile of politeness that Omar Yussef knew well from years of working with foreigners at the United Nations. I won’t be waiting up for a phone call from her, he thought.
The elevator sounded its electronic tone. When the doors opened, Maryam was close to the mirror, pulling at the bags under her eyes and Nadia was mimicking her grandmother and giggling. The girl hurried across the lobby, beaming at Jamie King. “Grandpa, I invited Miss Jamie to join us for dinner,” she said.
Omar Yussef touched his fingers to his mustache, trying to hide his surprise. “Are you going to talk about your book with her all night, Nadia?”
The girl shook her head. “I won’t give away anything else about it,” she said. “You’re going to have to guess who the bad guy is, first.”
Jamie King shook Maryam’s hand. “Nadia tells me this meal will be a very inferior experience compared with your home cooking, Umm Ramiz,” she said.
Maryam kissed Nadia. Omar Yussef watched the pleasure that overcame her tired face when she held her granddaughter. He couldn’t help but think of his wife as a simple woman whose pleasures were all in the domestic, familial things a woman was supposed to enjoy. Yet, he often felt sure that there were complicated elements of her character about which he knew nothing. He would have enjoyed reading all Maryam’s secrets, if they had been included in the dirt files Awwadi had procured for Hamas.
In the dining room, Nadia spotted her father, Ramiz, and her uncle, Zuheir, near the window and made her way toward them. Maryam stopped to chat with a woman at the next table, where other friends of Sami’s family from Bethlehem were sharing skewers of lamb and chicken.
Omar Yussef greeted the Bethlehem people with some jokes about the rarity of finding Maryam in a restaurant and sat beside his wife. Ramiz stroked his daughter’s long, straight hair and whispered to her. They laughed together and the healthy chubbiness at Ramiz’s jaw rolled. Zuheir cradled a glass of water and stared at the cigarette burns on the white tablecloth. The waiter came over with a wide tray of small salads and spreads. He laid them out on the table.
Ishaq thought he was free, once the president died, Omar Yussef thought. He returned from the safety of France to the village on Mount Jerizim to be with his wife and his adoptive father. He believed the president had taken his secret with him to the grave. But someone knew Ishaq’s shame and used it against him. Could it have been Nouri Awwadi? The Hamas man had told Omar Yussef that Ishaq was gay. He had also managed to obtain the dirt files from Ishaq. Perhaps he had murdered him, after all. Had he squeezed the president’s secret bank accounts out of Ishaq, too, under threat of blackmail? Awwadi may have told me about the scandal dossiers on the Fatah men because he wanted me to believe that they were all he received from Ishaq. Omar Yussef fretted at a small rip in the tablecloth. But when I told Awwadi that Ishaq had the president’s millions, he seemed totally surprised. Unless he’s a very convincing actor, he doesn’t have the money. Not yet.
Sami and Meisoun crossed the dining room. She linked her hands demurely. They were allowed to be together in public before the wedding, but they had to behave with reserve. Sami stopped at the table next to Omar Yussef’s to greet his family friends, grinning sheepishly when they joked about the cast on his arm. He caught Omar Yussef’s eye and his smile wavered. The schoolteacher turned away. Meisoun kissed Maryam. As she hugged Nadia, she quickly appraised Jamie King and spoke to Omar Yussef. “So, ustaz, it seems I’m to be relegated to your third wife.”
Omar Yussef’s face grew hot.
Sami bent to kiss Ramiz and Zuheir, muttering quiet greet-ings. He sat beside them, hunched forward with his eyes on the tablecloth and his broken arm hidden beneath the table.
The poor boy’s ashamed that he isn’t working on Ishaq’s case, Omar Yussef thought.
Maryam dropped a crisp chip of fried flatbread onto her plate, clicked her tongue and folded her arms. “The yoghurt in the huwarna is too thin,” she said in English.
King leaned over the small plates spread across the table. “Which dish is that?”
Maryam pointed at a shallow bowl of plain yoghurt, dotted with tiny dark pods. “All you have to do is wash the mustard seeds and put them in the yoghurt. How difficult can that be? They didn’t even add the slightest bit of mint.” She wanted to be angry, but she couldn’t help smiling as she explained the local food to the foreigner. “I always put fresh mint in my huwarna just before I serve it, to give it a little extra flavor.”
Omar Yussef scooped some of the yoghurt dip onto a bread chip and crunched it in his mouth. “Ignore her, Jamie,” he said. “It’s really quite good.”
Maryam glared.
“It’s not as good as yours, of course, darling,” he said, in English. Then he switched to Arabic. “Nadia, tell your Grandma that she’ll starve in Nablus if she refuses to eat the rotten food in this restaurant.”
Maryam lifted a small dish of greens and spooned some onto King’s plate. “Jamie, try this. It’s jarjeer. It’s a very traditional part of Palestinian meals. It’s a leaf that in English I think you call ‘arugula.’ To make the salad, you add lemon juice and this purple ground spice, which we call sumac. I don’t know what it is in English.”
King ate appreciatively. “It has a very zesty taste.”
“The lemon highlights the fresh flavor of the arugula leaves,” Maryam said.
“Jamie, they say this salad makes a man vigorous in bed,” Omar Yussef said with a laugh. “Which is why Maryam hasn’t given me any.”
Maryam dropped the dish of jarjeer on the table in front of Omar Yussef. “Eat it all, and see if I care,” she said.
Nadia sniggered and blew some of the cola she had been drinking out of her nose, which made her fall to the table in a fit of giggling. Omar Yussef watched her and chuckled. He stroked the back of Maryam’s hand and smiled at her until she, too, laughed.
Zuheir picked at a few spoonfuls of baqdounsiyya on his plate. The seething intensity with which he avoided looking at King seemed to draw the American to him.
“And what kind of salad is that one?” she asked him.
Zuheir barely looked up as King pointed to his plate.
“Chopped parsley and sesame paste,” he mumbled.
Maryam leaned toward him. “And what else?”
Zuheir gave a reluctant smile. “Salt and olive oil and lemon juice, Mama.”
Maryam bowed, proudly.
“Zuheir, when we spoke earlier over coffee, our conver-sation was all about politics,” King said. “I forgot to ask if you also live in Bethlehem.”
Zuheir sucked on his bottom lip and glanced at his father. “I’ve been living in Britain for some years, studying and teaching,” he said. “But I’m returning to the Middle East now. I’m going to teach in Beirut.”
“I love Beirut. It’s a wonderful city,” King said.
“Westerners always love Beirut. That’s its problem.” Zuheir pushed his plate away. “In reality, it’s full of all different kinds of extremists. I hope that by teaching there, I can do something to reduce their fanaticism.”
“Why not do the same thing here?”
“My father is the one who’ll have to deal with the Palestinian extremists.”
Sami looked sharply at Zuheir.
“What are you trying to say, Zuheir?” Omar Yussef said, through a mouthful of baqdounsiyya.
Zuheir lifted his eyebrows. “The Palestinians have isolated themselves once again, and you’re the only one who wants to lie down in the filth so they can step to safety on your back.”
“If we’re dependent on the strong back of our dear father to save the Palestinians, then may Allah protect us all,” Ramiz said. “He’s no bodybuilder.” He laughed and reached for the hummus.
Zuheir and Omar Yussef watched each other silently, as the waiter removed the salads and brought the grilled meats of the main course.
“Do you have any vacancies for a business graduate at the World Bank?” Maryam touched Jamie King’s arm and pointed at Meisoun.
Ramiz shook his head. “Mama, don’t let the World Bank steal away my new partner.”
“I’m going to open a franchise of Ramiz’s cell phone business in Nablus, after my wedding,” Meisoun told King.
“Great. Where did you study?”
“In Cairo. I intended to obtain a higher degree, but the border between Egypt and my family home in Gaza was closed because of the intifada. I had to find work in a hotel in Gaza City.”
“That’s too bad.”
Meisoun smiled. “Not so bad. That’s how I met my future husband. Otherwise, I might have married some puffed up little Pharaoh in Cairo.”
“But at least Cairo’s not a war zone.” Ramiz slapped Sami on the shoulder.
“If a woman doesn’t choose the right husband, she creates her own war zone.” Meisoun lifted a finger to scold Ramiz. “Sami and I will have peace, no matter what troubles engulf Nablus.”
“So when’s the big day?” King asked.
“Friday. But it isn’t a big day quite like the American weddings I’ve seen on the television,” Meisoun said. “It’s a big party.”
“But no religious ceremony?”
“Some religion, but we already made our vows to each other.”
“The main thing was getting her father to agree,” Sami said.
“Evidently her father said yes.” King raised her glass of juice as if in a toast.
“Well, he didn’t actually say yes. He gave Sami sweetened coffee.”
Nadia took Meisoun’s hand to signal that she wanted to explain. “When a man goes to ask permission to marry a woman, the host serves coffee at the end of the visit. If the coffee is sweetened with sugar, it means the family agrees to the marriage. If it’s bitter, the answer is no.”
“I guess that’s an effective signal.”
“Everyone prefers sweet coffee. Except Grandpa. He always drinks his coffee bitter.” Nadia made a sour face at Omar Yussef.
King excused herself after the coffee at the end of the meal. As the American left the dining room, Omar Yussef noticed Khamis Zeydan crossing the lobby. The police chief swayed and rested his shoulder against the door of the restaurant. He took a big, rasping intake of breath through his nose, coughed up some phlegm and spat on the floor. The waiter glanced at him nervously.
Omar Yussef touched Maryam’s arm. “I’ll see you upstairs, after you’ve finished dessert,” he said. He raised his eyebrows toward Khamis Zeydan. Maryam followed his sign and her lips parted in pity.
Sami stood and rounded the table. Omar Yussef rose. “Sit with your fiancee a little longer,” he murmured. “This is one thing that I hope you’ll allow me to take care of.”
“Just this one thing,” Sami said stiffly.
Meisoun beckoned for her fiance to sit. The skin of the young man’s face grew tight until it looked stony and inhuman.
Chapter 16
The waiter headed reluctantly for the drunk at the door, but Omar Yussef shook his head and gestured for him to return to his station by the kitchen. “Let’s go to your room,” he said, catching Khamis Zeydan by the arm.
“I haven’t had a proposition like that in years, darling,” Khamis Zeydan said. He slurred his words and laughed bitterly with an exhalation that smelled like a dirty ashtray doused in scotch. Omar Yussef held his breath.
At the elevator, Khamis Zeydan needed two hands to get his lighter to the end of his cigarette and, in the corridor to his room, he leaned so hard on Omar Yussef that the schoolteacher’s knees almost buckled.
“Amin Kanaan’s a fucking bastard,” Khamis Zeydan said. He dropped his keys outside his door.
Omar Yussef held his listing friend against the doorjamb with one hand and bent to pick up the keys. He opened the door and maneuvered Khamis Zeydan inside.
The room smelled of cigarettes and urine. Khamis Zeydan pulled a pint of scotch out of a tubular olive kit bag on the bed. He propped himself against the headboard and drank. Omar Yussef flushed the stinking toilet and glanced with distaste at the cigarette butts floating in a mug by the sink.
“Kanaan stole your girlfriend twenty-five years ago,” he said, sitting in an uncomfortable desk chair at the foot of the bed. He leaned back in it. It creaks almost as much as me, he thought. “Isn’t it time you put all that behind you?”
“Everything’s behind me. Everything good.” Khamis Zeydan wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and stared with hate at the glove covering his prosthesis. “They’re all fucking bastards.”
“Who?”
“All of them, the whole fucking bunch.”
When you’re sober, no one is more boring than a drunk, Omar Yussef thought. He had never seen Khamis Zeydan this far gone and he wanted to get out of the room.
“My wife is a bastard,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My sons, my daughters, everyone. Fucking bastards.” He shook his head and drank. He considered the bottle for a moment and his eyes became teary. “Not Sami. Sami’s like a son to me.”
Omar Yussef stood. “I’ve had enough of this stupidity. Pull yourself together.” He heard the words, angry and harsh, and paused. It seemed as though another man had entered the room to yell at the sot on the bed. Yet no one else was there, only the bottle and his feeling of how much he hated to want it as he did, and then he recognized the voice as his own.
Khamis Zeydan waved his scotch at the schoolteacher. “He’s like a son to me. The son I should’ve had instead of those milquetoast little shits in Jordan. Fucking mama’s boys. How dare they. . they called me a. . I’m not a. .” He lost the thread of his anger, took another swig of scotch and came back at full volume: “How dare they?”
“My brother, don’t blame your children for resenting you. You were always away from home while they were growing up.”
“Fighting for our people.”
“And they’re fighting for their mother, who was the only person who seemed to care for them.”
“It’s easy for you to say that. You’re a good man and everyone tells you so.”
Omar Yussef sighed. He sensed tears coming and he blinked hard. “You’re a good man, too, Abu Adel.”
“People always seem to like me better than I like myself,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“Is that because they don’t have as much information as you do?”
Khamis Zeydan paused with the bottle halfway to his lips, examining the schoolteacher.
Omar Yussef thought of the file of dirt about his friend that Awwadi had hidden somewhere. He looked at the police chief’s pale eyes. He knows what’d be in his file, he thought. He can’t imagine anyone could love a man who’s done such terrible things, no matter in what cause he was fighting.
Khamis Zeydan took a slow swig of the scotch, as though he had suddenly lost his taste for it. “I’ve been betrayed all my life,” he said. “Maybe I overreact to my family’s complaints about me. Whenever I’m criticized I feel like it’s the prelude to some greater betrayal. That’s how it was in exile with the Old Man. People like Kanaan would scheme behind my back, smear me, create rumors to discredit me. I had to be at headquarters all the time to cut off the plots before they went too far. That’s why I could never be with my family, never experience the love everyone else gets from their children.”
“That’s finished now. You’re not in exile anymore.” Omar Yussef lowered himself once more into the uncomfortable chair.
“It’s not over. I saw that much in Kanaan’s face when I bumped into him yesterday at the police headquarters.” Khamis Zeydan put the bottle on the nightstand. “I’ll never be free of it. Now it’s happening to Sami, too. People suspect he must’ve done something for the Israelis. They think that otherwise he wouldn’t have been given a permit to return to the West Bank from Gaza.”
Omar Yussef remembered the Samaritan priest’s ques-tions and the angry embarrassment in the young man’s response. If Sami’s story had made its way to the Samaritan village on the peak of Mount Jerizim, how much more suspicion must surround him down in the casbah? “It won’t be the same for Sami,” he said. “He’s in love with Meisoun. They’ll have a good marriage. He’ll be happy.”
Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “He needs me to be a father to him.”
“He has a father. In Bethlehem. Hassan’s my neighbor, and I can tell you that he’s a good man.”
“Then Sami needs me to be his godfather. So that he doesn’t end up like me.”
“You’re drunk, my brother.”
“His hand.” Khamis Zeydan stared at his prosthesis. “Even Sami’s hand is the same as mine. Broken, useless.”
“He only has a broken arm. It’ll heal. And, believe me, you’re an admirable man. Sami would be proud to be like you.”
Khamis Zeydan dabbed away a tear with his fingertip. He tried to hide the motion by wiping his nose with the back of his hand, but Omar Yussef saw it.
“Sami shouldn’t take any risks,” the police chief said. “You know what I mean, don’t you? This dead Samaritan. Forget about him.”
Khamis Zeydan’s voice was suddenly firm and intense. Omar Yussef wondered if his friend had faked his drunken self-pity to soften him up for this. He straightened in his creaking chair. “If you’d seen the Samaritan’s corpse, beaten and bloodied, could you forget it?” he said.
“Sami has a chance to live a secure life here in Nablus with his new wife-to have the kind of family I never had. Don’t try to make him investigate this case. It’ll force him to confront powerful people. They’ll finish him. At best they’ll destroy his career and send him to swelter in a crappy one-room village police station chasing goat thieves for the ignorant Bedouin down south. But they might even kill him or Meisoun.”
“Sami isn’t involved. Don’t worry about him.”
“Should I worry about you?”
“I’m not involved either.” Omar Yussef stood and stretched his back. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to the Turkish baths in the casbah. Does that sound like the action of someone obsessed with tracking down a murderer? Why don’t you come?”
“Sweat out the hangover?”
Omar Yussef squeezed Khamis Zeydan’s shoulder. “More than just the hangover. You can purge yourself of all the suspicion and loneliness.”
“I might flood the entire casbah, if I start to sweat that out.”
“Why not? I need to cleanse myself, too. I just hope our pores are big enough for the job.”
The two men smiled as Omar Yussef left. He went along the corridor to his room and found Maryam in a pale blue nightdress, spreading cold cream over her cheeks and fore-head. “Is he all right?” she asked.
Omar Yussef hung his blazer on the back of the door and went to the window. “He’ll never be all right.”
His wife layered a final smear of cream around her lips and raised her eyebrows, questioningly. “What is it?”
“Why did you stay with me, Maryam?”
“Omar?”
“It isn’t so many years ago that I was like our dear friend Abu Adel.”
“You were never quite like that.”
“I was a drunk. I was easily angered. I couldn’t believe that anyone really liked me and I suspected everyone of mocking me behind my back.”
“But I never allowed you to be lonely, as he is.” Maryam linked her hands behind Omar Yussef’s neck.
He smelled the rosewater in her lotion and kissed her. When he came away from her, there was cold cream in his mustache. She smoothed it into the white hairs and twisted the ends upwards.
“I would never leave you, Omar,” she giggled. “Not even if you oiled your mustache like a stuffy old Turkish pasha.”