Omar Yussef turned the key in the ignition, revved hard and gripped the wheel as the jeep bounced and stalled. Khamis Zeydan knocked the lever out of gear with his prosthetic left hand. “You’ve uncovered a few dead bodies this week,” he said. “Are you trying to make a corpse out of my jeep, too?”
“I told you I’m a bad driver.” Omar Yussef turned the starter and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. The engine bellowed like a taboun oven when its flames catch a new log.
“You have to put it in gear, my brother.”
The guards at Kanaan’s gate coughed on the thick exhaust fumes. Omar Yussef blushed and fumbled with the gearshift, until the vehicle shook into motion. Once he had rattled into second gear, he stopped holding his breath.
“I can’t concentrate on driving. I keep thinking about what Liana just told us,” he said. “Kanaan and Ishaq had an argument.”
“I heard.”
“Don’t you see what that could mean?”
“Could?” Khamis Zeydan snorted.
Omar Yussef turned the jeep across the road and backed into a threepoint turn.
Khamis Zeydan looked doubtfully over his shoulder at the steep drop down to Nablus. “A hill start? This isn’t a driving test.”
Omar Yussef ran the engine noisily and lowered the hand brake, so that the jeep roared up the hill. One of the guards at Kanaan’s gate put his fingers in his ears.
“I’m turning around because we’re not going back to Nablus yet,” Omar Yussef said.
“What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to the Samaritan village. I want to see the priest.”
“What for? You want to check whether his Messiah came, after all?”
“Amin Kanaan had the dirt files, according to Liana. Then Hamas had them, because Ishaq handed them over. Liana said they were stolen from her husband. Did Ishaq steal them from Amin?”
“Awwadi stole the ancient Samaritan scroll and gave it to Ishaq in return for the files. And Ishaq gave the scroll to the priest.” Khamis Zeydan stared through the dusty windshield of the jeep.
“I don’t see why Kanaan would agree to that. They were important files and he got nothing out of the deal. Unless he wanted the Samaritans to get the scroll back.”
“It seems like that’d only be important to the six hundred Samaritans, not to Kanaan.”
Omar Yussef scratched his chin.
The Samaritan village showed white beyond the windbreak of pines on the ridge.
“Ishaq wanted the scroll back, for the Samaritans. It’s their holiest relic,” Omar Yussef said. “Maybe he was supposed to give something to Kanaan in return for the dirt files.”
Khamis Zeydan leered. “A little fireside companionship on lonely nights?”
Omar Yussef gave a slow, hesitant shake of his head. “It must have something to do with the secret account details.”
The police chief’s leer became a scowl. “Three hundred million dollars.”
“Does that sum of money make your diabetes feel more or less troublesome?” Omar Yussef laughed.
“It makes me want to throw up. That was our money.” Khamis Zeydan pointed toward the houses of Nablus in the valley. “Their money.”
“What would you do for it?”
Khamis Zeydan grimaced. “You want to know if I’d kill for it, schoolteacher? Killing’s not always so difficult, when the cause is just.”
“Are there things more shameful than killing?” Omar Yussef asked. What did his friend’s file contain that would still shame this acknowledged killer? Something worse than murder, he thought.
Khamis Zeydan watched the Samaritan village grow closer. “Are you intending to drive all the way in second gear?” he said, turning a hostile frown on Omar Yussef. “Or are you just trying to annoy me?”
Omar Yussef shifted awkwardly into third gear and the jeep picked up pace. He tensed his shoulders, struggling to hold the next curve, then he braked and let the jeep creep slowly along the ridge.
“The account numbers and passwords-that’s what Kanaan must have received from Ishaq,” Omar Yussef said. “Hamas got the dirt files. Ishaq got the scroll. Kanaan got the money, or at least the details of how to lay his hands on it.”
“Very neat. Everybody’s happy.”
“So why is Ishaq dead?” Omar Yussef thumped his fist against the steering wheel. “Kanaan was supposed to get the money. But he didn’t. The woman from the World Bank said she hadn’t traced any transactions indicating that such a sum of money had been moved. Ishaq must have held out on him, so Kanaan killed Ishaq.”
“He murdered his boyfriend?” Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “I’m prepared to believe almost anything about that bastard, but would he kill a kid he loved?”
“For three hundred million dollars? That’s real money, even to one of the richest men in Palestine.”
Khamis Zeydan raised his eyebrows.
“Ishaq said something to his wife about burying the financial details behind the temple, and he told the American from the World Bank that he had put the documents where anyone could find them,” Omar Yussef said. “Maybe they’re hidden on Mount Jerizim. Up there. Where Ishaq’s body was discovered.” He pointed toward the gray, square stones of the Byzantine fortress overlooking the Eternal Hill, the rock at the center of the ancient Samaritan temple.
As the jeep entered the village, a teenager scratched his misshapen ears and stared at Omar Yussef, his mouth wide and dumb, a basketball jammed between his elbow and his ribs.
“We’ve got one day to figure this out,” Omar Yussef said. “Or the World Bank is going to make this mess a problem for every Palestinian.”
They came to the small park beside Roween’s house. Charcoal blackened the rows of concrete flame pits, still smoking from the Passover feast, and the dry grass had been shredded by the feet of celebrating Samaritans.
Omar Yussef let the engine stall and stepped onto the curb in the silent village. When he swallowed, the movement of his Adam’s apple seemed loud in his throat.
A resonant thump cut the quiet. The boy with the strange ears shambled down the road. Every few paces he bounced his basketball, clutched it with both hands, and pulled it to the side of his head. Omar Yussef listened: the ball made a shadowy metallic chime after the deeper impact. The boy bellowed, frustrated that he couldn’t grab the ball quickly enough to hear that high note close to his ear. He senses that it would be beautiful, Omar Yussef thought.
He lifted a hand and called to the boy: “If you please.”
The boy held his basketball in front of his thighs. He slumped his shoulders and stared at Omar Yussef, his head twitching and his jaw hanging low.
“Where is the house of Jibril the priest, my boy?” Omar Yussef stepped closer.
The boy jerked his eyeballs up into his head and made a choking sound.
“Abu Ramiz, remind me not to marry my grandsons to my granddaughters,” Khamis Zeydan said, pointing a finger at the boy.
The teenager’s head jerked to the side. Omar Yussef felt a burst of pity for the kid, playing alone on this quiet mountaintop. It made him angry with Khamis Zeydan. “If what you say about your family relations is true, no one will care to ask your opinion on the matter of marriage,” he said. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, bent close to his face and spoke gently. “Clever boy, the house of Jibril the priest?”
The boy bounced his ball and shuffled toward a white house with pink window frames on the corner of the street. Omar Yussef followed him, smelling urine and stale sweat. At the lacquered cherrywood door, the boy put his ball under one arm and shoved down on the handle. He went inside, leaving the door ajar.
Omar Yussef waited in the shadeless street. He mopped the back of his neck with his handkerchief and glanced at Khamis Zeydan. “I apologize for my temper, Abu Adel,” he said. “If I weren’t a schoolteacher, perhaps I wouldn’t care. But I’ve been around so many children in my time, I hate to see them mocked. I know how much they suffer.”
“I’ve lived in a world of men,” Khamis Zeydan said. “We didn’t have our children with us when we were on operations in Europe or during the war in Lebanon. I never learned the first thing about kids. Maybe that’s why mine hate me.”
“Wasn’t it a world of women, too? Liana was there, after all.”
“No, I never understood women. Least of all Liana.”
The boy loped out of the house onto the pavement, head down. He bounced his ball and grabbed for it, then he ran between Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan and disappeared into the trees beyond the park. Omar Yussef looked up at Roween’s house. A curtain on the second floor fluttered, as though it had just been dropped by someone watching from the window. He kept his eye on it, until the curtain was still.
A sturdy woman in a long red embroidered gown appeared at the door of the priest’s house. The skin of her fat, wrinkled face was the color of wet sand. She lifted her arm for them to enter.
The sun filtered through lightweight pink curtains in the reception room. Along the wall, black-and-white photographs of white-bearded men wearing the tarboosh of the priesthood stared down. The earliest portraits were distinguished by the priests’ lack of spectacles, but all the men looked otherwise alike-high foreheads, long noses, innocent eyes.
Omar Yussef heard Jibril approach, his legs swinging against the loose skirts of his robe.
The priest took Omar Yussef’s hand in both of his own. “Greetings, pasha.”
“Double greetings.”
“You are with your family and as if in your own home,” Jibril said. The top of the light cotton robe he wore next to his skin was ripped from the neck to the breastbone-a sign of mourning for his son. He smiled restrainedly and extended the same greeting to Khamis Zeydan.
“Are you also a policeman?” he asked.
Khamis Zeydan’s eyes swung toward Omar Yussef, who cleared his throat, uneasily. “I’m the police chief in Bethlehem,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“Welcome.” The priest swept his hand above the couch, as though spreading a silk upon it. He sat in an armchair that commanded the room. “Welcome to our village.”
“I’m sorry for the loss of your son,” Khamis Zeydan said. “May Allah be merciful upon him. If that’s what you say in condolence. You Samaritans, I mean. Pardon me.”
“It’s an acceptable wish. May you be granted a long life.” The priest fingered his robe. “It has been an exhausting week. We must mourn my son Ishaq for seven days, as is our tradition. But we also had to celebrate our Passover festival.”
“We saw the rites,” Omar Yussef said. “It was very interesting.”
The priest pulled his beard. “I admit, this was a difficult festival for our people, because of the murder,” he said, softly. “But I’m pleased you found it of interest.”
The thickset woman entered with two tiny coffee cups, breathing loudly through her wide nostrils like a heavy sleeper. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan each drank a bitter slug. The woman looked at the priest, who closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. She shut the door behind her.
“Do you have developments to tell me about?” Jibril asked.
Omar Yussef frowned.
“About the investigation into the death of Ishaq?” the priest went on. “Did you not come here to tell me you have found the killer?”
“I’m sorry to say that we’re far from that stage, Your Honor,” Omar Yussef said. “We have some further questions which we believe are important to the progress of the investigation.”
Jibril nodded slowly.
Omar Yussef sat forward. “The scroll that was returned on the same night as Ishaq’s death-”
“The Abisha Scroll.”
“Yes. Tell me exactly how it was returned to you?”
“I found it on the steps of the synagogue.”
“Was there any message attached?”
“Nothing.”
“Isn’t it odd that such a valuable object should be placed there, where anyone could have picked it up?”
“But no one else could have found it. You’ve seen that the doors are set back some distance from the street. No one goes up the steps, unless it’s one of us on our way to the synagogue, and they’d almost always be accompanied by me, because I’m the only one with a key.”
“Even so, it seems a strange way to return the scroll.”
The priest poked his tongue into his cheek and rolled it around.
“Was there any damage to the Abisha?” Omar Yussef asked.
“Thanks to Allah, no. I examined it thoroughly.”
“Where is the scroll now?”
“After the Passover celebration here on Jerizim, I returned it to the safe in our synagogue.”
“When we were together in the synagogue, I believe you told me that most of your people’s important historical documents are kept here in your house.”
“One of the leading priests traditionally safeguards these documents in his home.”
“May we see them?”
The priest gripped the side of his armchair, pushing himself to his feet. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan followed him into a spartan study, darkened by rolling blinds lowered halfway to block the bright morning sun. Against the nearest wall was a desk, its surface covered in brown leather nicked with light scratches. Across the room, a tall wooden cabinet displayed a series of tubular casings behind glass doors.
Omar Yussef put his face close to the glass. His breath misted it. “These are amazing,” he said.
“We keep twenty-six copies of the Books of Moses here,” Jibril said. “This one is the oldest, from the fifteenth century.”
Omar Yussef followed the priest’s gesture. The Torah was encased in a tube of goatskin about eighteen inches in length. The handles at the top were of tarnished silver and the front of the case was decorated with a silver panel molded to its curve. Omar Yussef looked more closely and tapped the glass. “This silver is embossed with the same image of the ancient temple as the Abisha Scroll,” he said.
“The scrolls themselves are from different historical periods, but it’s possible that the cases were made and decorated around the same time,” the priest said.
“Has there ever been an attempt to steal these scrolls?”
Jibril shook his head. “The Abisha is much more valuable. That’s why we keep it in the safe at the synagogue, rather than here in my home.”
Omar Yussef tapped his finger against the glass once more. “Before he died, Ishaq said something to his wife that I think might be important.”
The priest regarded Omar Yussef expectantly.
“He told her he was involved in something very dangerous. So dangerous that he wanted to bury it behind the temple and forget about it.” Omar Yussef looked at the monumental towers of the temple on the weathered panel encasing the scroll. “Those were his precise words, according to his wife.”
Jibril puffed out his cheeks. “What does that mean?” he said, slowly.
“I hoped you might have an idea.” Omar Yussef watched the priest run a hand through his short beard and shake his head. “Roween said you argued with Ishaq over something immediately before his death. What was the argument about?”
“It’s not appropriate for me to say bad things about my son after his death.”
“Why does the argument reflect badly on Ishaq?”
“To curse his father is a shameful thing.”
“He cursed you? Why?”
The priest moved toward the window. He yanked on the chord, pulling the blind open. Omar Yussef blinked in the strong light.
“I told him to divorce Roween,” Jibril said.
“Were they unhappy?”
“I wanted a grandson.”
“Ishaq was your only son. But you told me you have two daughters. Are they childless?”
The priest shook his head. “You Arabs have a saying: ‘The son of a son is dear. The son of a daughter is a stranger.’ The male line is most important. You understand that.”
“I understand that this is what convention dictates, Your Honor, but I can’t agree with you,” he said.
“Easy for you to say,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You only have sons.”
Omar Yussef looked with irritation at his friend. He turned back to the priest. “You argued with Ishaq. Did he refuse to end his marriage?”
“He refused.” Jibril leaned his face on the windowpane, squinting into the sunlight.
“Because he loved Roween?” Omar Yussef stepped toward Jibril in the corner. “Or because he knew a change of wife wouldn’t make him any more likely to father a child?”
The priest straightened quickly to his full six feet and raised his chin. He glared at Omar Yussef.
“You know what I mean, don’t you?” Omar Yussef said.
Jibril slackened his fingers and let the blind rattle down. In the sudden darkness, the priest’s voice was raw and dry. “Roween is a very plain girl. If Ishaq had a more beautiful wife, he might not have become a Louti, a sodomite,” he said.
“How harshly did you criticize him?” Omar Yussef moved close to the priest. He smelled raw onion on the man’s breath. “Did you tell him you hated what he was? Did he blame you for his unhappiness? For making him live on this lonely hilltop with a wife to whom he could never be a real husband?”
“I’m a priest of our people.” Jibril’s voice was quiet. “I’m a symbol. My family must be above reproach.”
“So you made him return from Paris. Don’t you think he might have been happy there? In the liberal West, he might have found love.”
“What kind of love? A filthy, sinful love.”
“You made him pay a fine to rejoin the community. You made him come back to this remote, conservative place, where he would be isolated. Where he would fall under the spell of the only other cosmopolitan character around.”
“What’re you talking about? Whom?”
“Amin Kanaan.”
“What does this have to do with Kanaan? Ishaq did some work for him, that’s all.”
Khamis Zeydan snorted. “Hard work for you or I, maybe. But quite to Ishaq’s taste, it seems.”
The priest shook his head, his misty eyes rolling.
“If it were Roween’s fault that they had no children, everyone would expect Ishaq to divorce her. But he refused to end the marriage. No divorce and no kids: people in the village would have realized Roween wasn’t the cause of the childlessness.” Omar Yussef raised his voice. “Did Ishaq tell you about his secret life? Did you kill him because of that? Because of the scandal there would be if people found out that the priest’s son was gay, that he was having an affair with a powerful businessman?”
Jibril’s slender shoulders shook. “It wasn’t that way,” he said. “I loved him.” His words became a moan and his legs gave way. He slipped down the wall onto his haunches and crouched with his hand on his forehead. His other hand gathered the skirts of his robe and twisted them.