At the door to Amin Kanaan’s mansion, Khamis Zeydan muttered a curse and expectorated. Omar Yussef frowned at the oyster globule, gleaming in the sun. A servant hurried onto the gaudy fan of marble steps, startled and outraged, as though the phlegm had landed on his cheek. It may have been better to leave Abu Adel in the jeep, Omar Yussef thought. My friend might be saving some spit for Kanaan. Even so, I need the security of the gun on his hip to enter the home of the man who tried to have me killed.
“Tell your boss we know exactly how Ishaq let him down,” Omar Yussef said.
The servant sniffed and showed them across the hall, its polished floor warmed to a pale coral with the first glow of sundown through the tall windows. In the salon where they had sat with Liana, they waited for her husband.
Khamis Zeydan paced across an antique Tabriz rug and opened the glass doors. The distant shooting sounded louder. “Screw your mother,” he said, kicking the wall lightly.
Omar Yussef twisted in his gilt armchair. “Are you going to behave yourself? Because if you can’t keep a lid on your anger, you’d better wait outside.”
“I wouldn’t give him the pleasure.”
“What pleasure?”
“Of seeing me cowering in his garden.”
“You’d prefer him to see you lose your cool?”
“I won’t lose my cool.”
Omar Yussef stared at the police chief. Khamis Zeydan waved his hand impatiently and lit a Rothmans.
The servant entered and held the door open for Amin Kanaan. He came smoothly over the Persian carpets in a pair of claret suede moccasins, wearing a sky blue Italian shirt with the top three buttons open and the collar high at the sides of his neck. He extended a soft handshake to Omar Yussef.
“Before we begin to talk, I warn you that I already know you aren’t really an employee of the World Bank, ustaz.” Kanaan wagged a scolding finger at Omar Yussef.
“I didn’t say I was. You neglected to ask the right question.”
Kanaan smiled. He circled the rococo sofa to greet Khamis Zeydan, spreading his shoulders and pushing out his broad chest. “My dear Abu Adel, welcome to my home,” he said. “You’re in your own home and as if you were with your own family.”
Khamis Zeydan’s eyes dropped to the intricate palmettes on the rug. “Your family is with you,” he whispered, as though the formulaic words were jagged in his throat.
Kanaan clutched the police chief’s shoulders and gave him three kisses. He moved to the sofa and reclined. “Please sit down, Brother Abu Adel,” he said.
“I’ll stand.” Khamis Zeydan played with the handle on the open glass door and held his head just outside, as though to escape the aroma of wealth on his old rival’s body.
“You always did do things your own way,” Kanaan said.
“I disagree. I took orders. I did what the Old Man told me to do.”
“Come on, he didn’t issue orders. He gave hints. You had to interpret them, just as I did. It’s what made him so treacherous. It’s how he kept all of us in his power. You never knew when he was going to pull the rug from under you and deny everything. He did it to you in Damascus once, don’t you remember?” Kanaan turned to Omar Yussef. “Our friend Abu Adel was sold out to the Syrians, who put a bullet in his back.”
“He told me all about that,” Omar Yussef said.
Kanaan glanced at Khamis Zeydan. “Did he?” he said, slowly. “Did he indeed?”
“We’re not here to reminisce,” Omar Yussef said. “I have some questions.”
“I thought you told my servant that you had some information. But, anyway, wait for the coffee, ustaz Abu Ramiz,” Kanaan said. The servant returned with a silver tray and three small cups, each painted with a golden cartouche.
Omar Yussef took his coffee. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said to the servant.
“Blessings,” the servant said.
Omar Yussef turned formally to Kanaan. “May there always be coffee in your home,” he said.
Kanaan watched Khamis Zeydan receive his cup, balancing the saucer between thumb and forefinger. “There certainly will be, ustaz,” Kanaan said. He kept his eye on Khamis Zeydan, smiling at the police chief’s reluctant acceptance of his hospitality. “You can be sure of that.”
By the window, a pedestal of jadecolored marble rose to the height of Khamis Zeydan’s chest. It was designed to hold a bust, but it was empty. He laid his coffee cup on it.
“Your double health, Abu Adel,” Kanaan said, lifting his own cup. “Welcome.”
Khamis Zeydan shifted from foot to foot.
Kanaan licked his lips with pleasure at the policeman’s discomfiture. “Abu Adel-”
“Fuck your mother,” Khamis Zeydan yelled. “I won’t touch your coffee. I won’t pretend I don’t wish you were dead.”
“And I thought you came here to accuse me of killing Ishaq,” Kanaan said. “Instead I discover that perhaps you’ve come here to kill me.”
“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.”
Kanaan’s chin dipped like a man on the verge of sleep. “He was my son,” he said. He pyramided his fingertips at the end of his clumsy, wide nose and closed his eyes. “Liana and I had relations before our marriage. You should have seen her, ustaz. She was brave and intelligent, the most beautiful woman in Beirut. Were you ever there?”
“Not since I was a student.”
Kanaan smiled dreamily. “The spirit of Beirut back then swept me and Liana into each other’s hearts. She rejected the conservative morality of our culture and even convinced me that I could join this rejection. She had spent time in Europe and seen how young couples lived there.”
“You don’t look like a hippie to me.”
“We were radicals, not hippies. In those days, revolution was something creative and idealistic. Artists and theater people used to visit our headquarters. I met the great English actress Vanessa Redgrave more than once.”
Omar Yussef rolled his eyes, but Kanaan appeared not to notice.
“No one knew who would be alive the next day. You could be killed by the Syrians, the Israelis, the Christian militias, the Shiite gangs, by one of the other Palestinian factions, or even by the Old Man himself.” Kanaan gazed into the sun, glinting off the tall windows of his salon. “If you found someone who would love you, you loved her back with all the life you had, all the life that might be snuffed out the next day, the next hour.”
Omar Yussef sneered. “Liana became pregnant.”
“Shortly after we became engaged, I sent her to Nablus to have our baby,” Kanaan said. “I had to get her out of Beirut, where all the other PLO people were, to avoid a scandal. She couldn’t go to her family in Ramallah, because everyone knew her there. Nablus is my home. When she gave birth here, I paid the Samaritan priest to adopt the boy. I chose to hide my son with people so much on the fringe of the town that no one who knew me would ever discover the truth, but he would still be close enough that we could watch him grow up.”
“Why didn’t you go to live in Europe with him?”
“That’s what Liana wanted. But I realized that it was only she who could live outside our people’s morality and traditions. Only she could leave Palestinian society. I was too weak.” The sickly yellow around Kanaan’s irises glowed with desolation in the fading light. “After our marriage, it was too late to get the boy back without admitting what had happened. It would have been a dreadful slur on my wife’s reputation, to have acknowledged that we had physical relations before our wedding.”
Omar Yussef understood the dilemma. Many women had been killed for staining the honor of their families with even the suspicion of sex outside marriage, let alone an illegitimate birth. Liana’s family might have been a little more modern about it than that, but they could easily have disowned her, he thought. Certainly Kanaan’s business career would have been destroyed by the scandal.
“But I funded Ishaq’s schooling and I promoted him in the party,” Kanaan said. “How else do you think an obscure Samaritan kid became the financial adviser to our president? I propelled Ishaq as I would have my legitimate son.”
Kanaan stared at the shining marble floor. For a moment, Omar Yussef wondered if he was still breathing, then the man covered his face with both hands and groaned. Omar Yussef knew that now, when Kanaan was weak, he had to push him. “Ishaq died as his biblical namesake Isaac was intended to die,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Isaac was bound, ready for sacrifice, on the peak of the mountain where the temple would later be built. His father, the Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, as the Jews call him, was to carry out the killing.”
“You think I’m Ibrahim? Ibrahim didn’t kill Isaac in the end, and anyway that’s just an old story.” A wave of Kanaan’s cologne floated across the coffee table to Omar Yussef. “Ishaq threatened to blackmail me if I made a fuss about him failing to give me the account documents.”
“He put the bite on you?”
“What’re you talking about?”
Omar Yussef thought of Nadia and her American detective story and he hid his smile behind his hand. “He threatened to reveal who his real parents were?”
Kanaan ran his fingers through his hair. “It would have destroyed my wife.”
“And you?”
“By now I’ve made too much money for any dirt to stick. Too many bastards need me on their side. They stifle their moral outrage easily enough. But my wife is more vulnerable than I am. She couldn’t have taken the scandal.”
“How did you respond to Ishaq’s blackmail?”
“I gave in. I agreed that he could keep the secret bank documents. I told him it would be dangerous for him to hold on to that information, that deadly people would discover the truth and force him to hand over the account details. I had paid people to leave the secret funds to me, but if I didn’t get hold of the accounts quickly enough, those same people would consider the field open once more.” Kanaan spread his hands wide and let them slap down onto his tastefully cut linen pants. “And of course they-whoever they are-found him and killed him.”
“Who has the secret account details now?”
“I don’t know. Whoever killed Ishaq, I suppose.”
“And the files of dirt on the Fatah people?”
Kanaan smiled bitterly. “I reclaimed them.”
“You saw no reason to be bound by your agreement with Ishaq once he was dead.”
“I didn’t receive what I was supposed to get out of the deal. I sent my people to Awwadi’s place and took the files back.”
“Why did you have Awwadi killed, too?”
“I only wanted the files. Mareh had some private reason for murdering Awwadi, so he killed him.”
The quarrel over Awwadi’s bride, Omar Yussef thought. He rubbed his chin. “Why didn’t Ishaq stay in Paris?”
“He came back because he thought he was a Samaritan. He was lonely and he wanted to be with them. Even though he didn’t have to hide his sexual proclivity in Europe, he didn’t feel at home. A few weeks ago he discovered the truth about his birth and came here in a rage. He didn’t look like himself at all.” Kanaan winced. “There always used to be something in his eyes at times of action that suggested he enjoyed danger. But not then. His eyes were exploding. It terrified me.”
Omar Yussef frowned and stroked his chin. “I know what you mean,” he said. “How did Ishaq find out?”
“I assume the priest gave us away, because no one else knew. I told Ishaq I had kept his birth a secret for Liana’s sake, but that only made him furious with her, too. The person we loved most in the world turned against us.”
“That leaves you with only one person to love.”
Kanaan flushed beneath his even tan. “I’ll give you anything to keep this quiet.”
“You’re still worried about scandal? The boy is dead.”
“I have to think about my wife. Ishaq’s death has made her-” he looked for the right word “-fragile. I’ll give you anything in my power.”
Omar Yussef stood and stepped toward the French doors. Why does everyone want to conspire with me? he wondered. Do I seem dishonest? Or am I their confessor, like the priests to whom Roman Catholics go for remission of their small, venial sins. A priest can’t forgive mortal sins, though. He tapped his knuckle softly on the glass. Can I?
Khamis Zeydan paced across the lawn with his back to the house. A hoopoe dipped its long, thin beak into the grass and came up with a worm. It skipped a few paces and dropped the worm, picked it up again, extended its wings to show its black and white stripes, and flew into the branches of a sycamore.
Omar Yussef put his hand over his mouth and stroked his chin. He smiled at the stricken face of Amin Kanaan. “There is something I can think of that you can get for me,” he said.