A shepherd in baggy Turkish pants and an old blue seer-sucker jacket drove his herd toward the scanty pasture on Mount Jerizim. He maneuvered the goats to the side of the road, making way for Sami’s patrol car. A small black kid sprang stiff-legged from a rock and landed on the shaggy brown backs of the others. Omar Yussef smiled at the little goat’s exuberance. He caught the mustiness of the herd on the cool air of the mountain, an inviting scent after the exhaust fumes and trash-can stink of Nablus. But there had been a murder on this mountain and Omar Yussef narrowed his eyes to look beyond the lively animals toward the ridge where someone lay dead.
Sami called police headquarters to report that he was en route to a murder scene. He held his walkie-talkie with his left hand, steering and changing gear with his right. The car veered toward the drop at the edge of the road when-ever he reached for the gearshift.
The old Samaritan watched Sami cautiously from the back seat with his dazed, faded eyes. Maybe he lied to us simply because he doesn’t trust the police, Omar Yussef thought. By Allah, the law around here doesn’t usually inspire confidence. The priest couldn’t know that Sami’s an honest officer. The odds, after all, would be against it.
Sami slipped the walkie-talkie into its dashboard mounting and looked at the priest in the rearview mirror. “You’re all related up here, aren’t you? All you Samaritans?” he said. “Does this Ishaq have a big family?”
The priest flinched and put his hand over his mouth.
“Well?” Sami turned in his seat. “His family?”
Ben-Tabia leaned forward. “Are you the Sami Jaffari who was one of the Bethlehem deportees exiled to Gaza by the Israelis?” he said.
Omar Yussef saw Sami’s jaw tighten.
“How did you manage to get a job back here in the West Bank?” the priest asked.
“I got a permit,” Sami said. He took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked it out of the window.
“From the Israelis?”
“Obviously.”
“But they deported you to Gaza because they said you were a dangerous gunman.”
Sami ground the gears down into first as the road ribboned around a steep curve.
The priest persisted. “How did you change their minds?”
Omar Yussef knew how. His friend Khamis Zeydan, Bethlehem’s police chief, had convinced the Israelis of the truth about Sami-the young officer had been working undercover among the town’s gunmen when the Israelis arrested him. Khamis Zeydan had even obtained a permit for Sami’s Gazan fiancee Meisoun to join him in the West Bank.
“Don’t you think a job on the Nablus police force is a continuation of Sami’s punishment?” Omar Yussef said to Ben-Tabia.
Sami clicked his tongue. “Abu Ramiz, please, let it rest.”
The priest’s voice became surly. “He must have connections,” he said. “That’s all I mean.”
And connections are suspect, Omar Yussef thought. Tainted links to the crooks at the top, even to the Israelis. “Sami’s like you,” he said. “You have a Torah like the Jews. But you’re defined by the seven thousand differences between your holy text and theirs. It’s the same with Sami and his connections. It’s the differences that’re important.”
The priest folded his arms across his chest, sat back in his seat and stared out of the window.
They reached the Samaritan houses on the ridge. The well-maintained streets were neater than a Palestinian village and empty, except for a few teenagers playing basketball in a small concrete lot. They stopped their game to watch the police car pass. Blinking into the sun, the children bore the unmistakable signs of inbreeding. Their bullet-shaped heads sat askew on their necks and their big ears stuck out.
“Which way from here?” Sami said, quietly.
The priest directed Sami straight through the village. They came around a knoll at the shoulder of the ridge and up to a gravel parking lot. Signs in Hebrew and English welcomed tourists to the Samaritan holy place. Sami cut the engine and a deep silence enveloped them.
A group of five men loitered, peering down a steep slope into a glade of trees. One of them waved when he saw the priest emerge from the police car. Behind the men, the low walls of an old fortress and its domed inner buildings were silvery in the sunshine.
Beyond the Samaritan village, the ridge extended toward the mansions that had been visible from Nablus and, further away, the red and white communication towers of the Israeli army base at Tel Haras.
Omar Yussef shuffled along behind Sami and the priest. Though he was younger than Ben-Tabia, he was conscious that his movements were stiffer, his pace slower. In the silence of this remote peak, without the background racket of the town, his panting sounded prodigious. Sweat formed in his mustache, as he tried to keep up with the others. He promised himself he would take a walk every day to improve his fitness, when he returned to Bethlehem.
The men gathered around the priest as he reached them. Each shook Ben-Tabia’s hand without looking at his face and kissed his cheeks three times, mumbling something to him. A slight hum rolled out of the valley. Omar Yussef heard the regular, echoing beat of a distant pile driver and the call of a single muezzin.
Among the pines on the slope, a lumpy blue and white object was wrapped around the foot of a tree. Omar Yussef pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and squinted at the lifeless body of a man. “Sami, let’s go and look,” he murmured.
Sami put his hand on Omar Yussef’s shoulder and whis-pered. “Abu Ramiz, I took you to the synagogue because I thought you’d be interested in the scroll. I brought you up here because I was in too much of a hurry to drop you at your hotel. But-”
“The scroll was left on the priest’s doorstep and at the same time a body turned up on the edge of his village.” Omar Yussef lifted his finger at the young policeman. “Come on, Sami. You promised me an investigation into the theft of a historic document, but that particular intrigue has been resolved. You owe me a mystery and that body is it.”
Sami shook his head with a gloomy smile and stepped down the rocky slope toward the trees. Omar Yussef followed awkwardly. He bent to support himself with his arm and descended sideways. Slipping in the loose dirt, he struck his knee on a rock. His elbow shook, taking his weight. He sensed the group of Samaritans watching him, but he didn’t look up. He was sweating with embarrassment at his frail condition. When he reached Sami, he wiped his forehead and neck with his handkerchief.
The dead man was of medium height and wore a white shirt and blue slacks. His feet were bare. His midriff folded around the tree trunk, his legs falling down the hill on one side of the pine and his torso curved around the other. His hands and knees were bound with electrical wire. Omar Yussef breathed heavily. He caught Sami’s eye. The young man whispered: “He’s been tortured, Abu Ramiz.”
Sami pointed out the contusions around the corpse’s neck and head. The thin chest was purpled with bruising where the bloodied shirt had been pulled open. The finger-tips had been scorched.
The dead man was probably in his midtwenties. His sky blue eyes were open and stared at Omar Yussef with some-thing that looked like recognition. Omar Yussef had the feeling that he had seen them before, but that didn’t seem possible. He blinked and averted his face, unnerved by the familiarity in those eyes. He cleared his throat and examined the bruises. “Was he beaten to death?”
“I don’t see any other wounds, at least not the kind that would be fatal. There could have been internal bleeding. Perhaps the beating damaged his organs.” Sami leaned closer to the man’s head. “I suppose the neck could be broken. It’s at an awkward angle.”
Omar Yussef pointed to where the Samaritans stood. “He either fell or was thrown from up there. This tree blocked his fall.”
“There’s no blood around,” Sami said. “I expect he was killed before he dropped down here.”
They made their way back to the ridge, Sami following behind. Omar Yussef was grateful to him for waiting. By the time they reached the group of Samaritans, his shirt was heavy with sweat and the wind across the mountain chilled it against his shoulders and belly.
“Who found the body?” Sami said.
A short, thick man in a dirty blue shirt and a baseball cap that bore the logo of a cheap Israeli cigarette brand raised his hand. “I came up here to open the site for the tourists and I saw it,” he mumbled.
“What time?”
“A little before eight. It wasn’t there last night, I’m sure of that. An American arrived just before I left-someone who works with one of the international organizations-and she was surprised that there are pine trees up here.” The caretaker smiled. “You know these foreigners; they only expect to see olive groves, real Middle Eastern stuff. I told her the pines were planted not long ago to reduce the wind on the mountaintop and we both looked very closely at them. I would’ve seen the body.”
“When were you and the foreigner looking at the trees?”
“Just before sunset. About six o’clock.”
“So you came along the ridge this morning and looked over the edge of the path and saw the body?”
The short man shook his head. “I saw blood on the Eternal Hill first. I thought a jackal had brought its prey here, so I looked around because I didn’t want the tourists to stumble onto a half-eaten goat. Then I found Ishaq dead in the trees.”
“Where’s the Eternal Hill?”
The caretaker pointed across the path to a sloping rock ten yards square. Sami and Omar Yussef stepped toward it. Blood puddled black at its center. A gory trickle ran to the bottom of the gentle, rippling slope of granite. Thicker daubs led up to the top.
“He was tortured there in the middle of the rock,” Sami said quietly. “These other marks must be where the body was dragged over the rock, before he was thrown into the trees. Some time during the night.”
Omar Yussef turned to the priest. “The Eternal Hill is where the ancient Samaritan temple stood?”
“This rock is the peak of the mountain,” the priest stammered, “the home of Allah.”
“It looks just like the stone inside the Dome of the Rock,” Omar Yussef said.
“The Jews say that Abraham bound Isaac there on the peak of Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. You Muslims just took over their tradition. But Mount Jerizim is where it really took place and that’s why we built our temple here and made it the center of our faith.”
Omar Yussef stared at the priest. “And now it’s covered in blood.”
The priest made a sound that was both a gasp and a sob.
A police jeep pulled into the parking lot and six officers got out. One of the officers pulled a rucksack from the jeep and walked purposefully toward Sami.
“Who was this Ishaq?” Omar Yussef said. “He was one of you? A Samaritan?”
“He’s one of us,” the priest said.
“What did he do?”
“He works-worked for the Palestinian Authority. He lived in the village with his wife.”
The policeman with the rucksack went down the slope toward the body. He slipped in the dirt and landed heavily on his backside. The other officers laughed as they followed him over the lip of the incline. The embarrassed policeman grabbed at one of his colleagues and tried to trip him. Sami called to him sharply.
Omar Yussef rubbed his chin. “Who would want Ishaq dead?”
The priest lifted his arms and let them drop to his sides. “No one, no one.”
“That can’t quite be true, can it?” Omar Yussef sucked one end of his mustache. “What does the Samaritan religion say about evil things such as murder, Your Honor?”
The priest looked at the blood on the broad rock. “One of our holy books says, ‘The sinner goes to the flames and I have no compassion for him.’”
Omar Yussef raised an eyebrow. “You mean the dead man was a sinner?”
“What?” Jibril Ben-Tabia blinked. “No, I mean the murderer. The murderer goes to the flames.”
“He’ll have to die first. The only one in danger of the flames right now is Ishaq. Do you have compassion for him?”
The priest’s head dropped forward. In the quiet of the mountaintop, he whispered: “Compassion? Yes. He was my son.”