The Collaborator of Bethlehem (30 page)

“Maryam?”

“You left a message with my desk sergeant. I’m sorry to say that I was drinking after I dropped you at your home. I kept thinking about George Saba’s wife, the way we found her with her children under her arms. I’ve seen so many people dead, Abu Ramiz, but I hated myself for letting that happen to Sofia Saba. So I locked myself in my office and started back on that bottle of whisky. I came out to take a piss, and the sergeant told me you had called. I drove down to your house. Maryam was in a terrible state. She told me you’d gone to the church. It seems I got here just in time.” He came toward Omar Yussef. He pulled Jihad Awdeh’s black vest from the rucksack, stuck his hand in one of the pockets, and pulled out a fistful of shiny copper tubes, a dozen spent MAG cartridges. “Well, look at this.” He let them drop back into the rucksack. “I guess we’ll call this Exhibit A.”

“No, that’s Exhibit C,” said Omar Yussef. From his jacket, he took the old MAG cartridge he had found outside Louai Abdel Rahman’s home and the one from George Saba’s roof. “These are Exhibits A and B.”

The long, thin devotional candle Jihad Awdeh had lit in the cave sputtered to its end. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan went up the stairs. A policeman jogged down the aisle to the dark pool of Jihad Awdeh’s blood.

Khamis Zeydan looked at his watch. “See to it that the blood is gone before the priests come in here. Be quick. They’ll be arriving any moment now. They probably will have heard the shots.”

The policeman saluted and slapped a soapy mop onto the flagstones.

“I found your friend Father Elias outside the church. He was in a bit of a panic, but when he calms down he can make sure none of the priests get too curious about what went on here. Later I’ll dump Jihad’s body and make it look like the Israelis got him.”

Omar Yussef nodded. “It seems miraculous that you saved me just at the very moment he was about to slit my throat. Did you really shoot him, or was he killed by bolts of lightning from heaven?” he joked.

“It might have been divine intervention,” Khamis Zeydan said, as they came out of the Church of the Nativity into the crisp air of dawn. The rain had stopped. The sun was bright on the wet flagstones. The bell rang in the Armenian monastery. “In that church, you were as close to death as it’s possible to be.”

Omar Yussef laughed with deep relief. “Evidently God didn’t want another martyr.”

Chapter 29

K
hamis Zeydan dropped Omar Yussef at his house when the dawn was still new. The police chief leaned across and gripped his hand through the open window. Omar Yussef expected the police chief to caution him to give up the amateur detective game. But Khamis Zeydan said nothing. His handshake and his expression were firm, and he nodded approvingly at his old college friend. Then he drove his jeep away, back toward the church.

Omar Yussef entered his house. Immediately he calmed Maryam with a finger on her lips. He held her tightly and wondered how long it was since he’d grasped his wife so strongly. He lay on his bed until it was time for the UN office in Jerusalem to open. Then he found the telephone message Maryam had written on a scrap of paper the night before and he returned the call to the UN regional director, a Swede named Magnus Wallender.

“Mister Yussef, I’m pleased to hear from you. Sorry to have disturbed your family with my call so late last night. It’s a very worrying time, isn’t it?” Wallender said.

Omar Yussef felt so relieved and elated after his rescue at the church that he paused a moment before he remembered why Wallender should be anxious.

“We are all very sad about Christopher’s death,” Omar Yussef said. The severed hand. The face and chest flayed like a cut of meat in an abattoir. It seemed a long time ago.

“This is why I wanted to talk to you, Mister Yussef. We consulted with New York and Geneva overnight. We think it’s simply too dangerous right now for an American, or any other Westerner, to run the Dehaisha school. Christopher Stead-man’s death was a shock that rippled all the way though the organization, right up to the Secretary-General.”

It was hard to imagine the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his office high above Manhattan hearing the news of an assassination in Dehaisha. Omar Yussef thought that if the killers had struck their true target—namely, him—it would, of course, not have reached the attention of the Secretary-General.

Magnus Wallender continued. “We feel it would be preferable and safer in the current environment to fill the vacancy as head of the Dehaisha school with a local. You’re by far the most experienced of the teachers and a figure respected throughout Bethlehem. So we’d like to offer the position to you.”

“As director of the UNRWA Girls School in Dehaisha?” It was a matter of days since Omar Yussef had thought his time at the school was over. Now he was to take charge? “Well, that’s very kind of you. Do you mind if I think it over for a day?”

“Not at all. We shall send someone down today to pick up your personnel file, just to be sure that there’s nothing to block the appointment. But that’s really just a formality.”

Omar Yussef thought of the sheets of blue paper, the negative reports his former boss, the Spanish lady, had written about him. They were at the bottom of a muddy pool across the street from the school. There was nothing else in the file that would be out of the ordinary. The collection of whining letters from parents would be easily dismissed. He thanked Magnus Wallender and hung up.

Here was Omar Yussef’s opportunity to stand up to the government schools inspector and anyone else who wished to feed hatred to the children of Dehaisha refugee camp. He would take this chance. He had focused on George Saba as the evidence he would leave behind him of his goodness, his morals. Now he wondered if his legacy might not be constantly unfolding, one for which he must fight with each new intake of students at the school.

The thought of retirement from teaching seemed attractive to him. He acknowledged that he had enjoyed the chase that led him to Jihad Awdeh. But what was he going to do? Set up a detective agency in Bethlehem?

Nadia entered the salon carrying a cup of coffee. She wore the sky-blue shirt and long, navy skirt of the Frères School. She came to Omar Yussef, gave him his coffee, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Did you find him?” she said.

“Who? Who was I looking for?” Omar Yussef pretended to search beneath the cushions on the sofa.

“The man who killed George Saba.”

Omar Yussef smiled. He hadn’t known she was aware of the aim of his investigation. “Yes, Nadia, I found him.”

“Good, I knew you’d get him,” she said. “Are George’s children going to come and live with us?”

That’s not a bad idea,
Omar Yussef thought.
I should do that for George.
He decided to ask Maryam.

Nadia looked at the black Bible on the coffee table, where Omar Yussef had left it when he returned from the destruction of George Saba’s home. “What’s this?”

“That belonged to my father. It was a gift to him from a friend of his who was a Christian priest. I gave it to George Saba many years ago. I rescued it from the ruins of his house.”

Nadia flipped the cover open and read the inscription to Omar Yussef’s father from his friend the Catholic priest. She smiled. “It’s a beautiful book,” she said. “I have to go to school now.” She kissed her grandfather again and left the house.

Omar Yussef watched Nadia pass outside the window, leaning forward under her pink backpack. There was a legacy, he thought, that might be found in detective work, just as much as in teaching. It was a mistake to believe that detection was a matter of figuring out what had happened in the past and then taking revenge for it. He understood now that it was about protecting the future from the people who committed evil and who would do so again.

Omar Yussef picked up the slip of paper with the U.N. phone number scrawled across it. His accountant had told him he had the money to retire from teaching if he wished. He looked at the message and dropped it on the coffee table next to George Saba’s Bible.

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