The Collaborator of Bethlehem (20 page)

An appeal to cultural sensitivity can have an amazing effect on a clueless, liberal snob,
Omar Yussef thought. If he hadn’t felt so miserable and suspicious, he would have loved to share the joke with Khamis Zeydan, but the fever and the impending execution froze the smile lines around his eyes.

“Steadman even said that your temporary replacement was no longer working and that he was teaching your classes himself until you returned.” Khamis Zeydan stood and slapped Omar Yussef’s leg. “Well, I have to go. May Allah help you to feel better. And go back to work at the school.”

“I will,” Omar Yussef said. “I will be at my old desk in the morning.”

Khamis Zeydan smiled and left.

Omar Yussef willed his back to recover. He had less than two days to save George Saba. Perhaps he could persuade the judge to change the verdict. He would take the old Webley pistol and the MAG cartridge cases to the judge. He had his vague personal connection from their meeting at that UN function a few months back. Maybe the judge would remember him.

The president already had signed the order. No one except Omar Yussef appeared to want to stop the execution. But he had to try.

It was dark and cold. The digital clock on the bedside table glowed red through the gloom. It was 7:00 P.M. precisely. George Saba was condemned to die in forty-one hours. It seemed a matter of seconds, so short was the time Omar Yussef had to work with. He rubbed his face and looked back at the clock. It was 7:01 P.M., and yet it seemed as though the executioners must already be preparing George for death. At 7:02 the crowd would have gathered, a drum roll sounded at 7:03, and by 7:04 Omar Yussef felt it was all over for his friend. Every minute of the next two days he knew he would live through George’s judicial murder, again and again. Those would be the last minutes of George Saba’s life. Unless Omar Yussef could stop the clock.

He wondered how he might push on with his investigation. Perhaps there would be a clue in the way George was arrested, something that would definitively show that Tamari was responsible for framing him. He’d been told repeatedly that George had confessed. That couldn’t be. So far Omar Yussef had heard only the girl Khadija Zubeida’s twisted account of the arrest on that first morning in the schoolroom. What truly was said when the policemen went to George’s house? Khadija’s father was a part of the arresting squad. Omar Yussef would go to the school in the morning and ask the girl where he might find her father. Then he would go to Mahmoud Zubeida and get him to recount the story of George’s apprehension. He must piece together the details of what happened, and who had led the operation.

Chapter 19

T
he rain threatened, darkening the dawn and squeezing cold licks of ice onto Omar Yussef’s face as he hunched along the main road to the UNRWA Girls School. He had fallen asleep early and without dinner, so exhausted was he by the flood in the basement and the night without sleep. He awoke early and showered, spraying hot water on his strained back. It surprised him that he felt so much better than he had when he lay on his bed the previous evening. Even the cold wind and the darkness of the early morning couldn’t dampen his resolve. His deadline was short to save George Saba, and for the first time in days he felt that his body was up to the task. He almost would have said that he felt younger after his long night’s sleep.

It was just before 7:00 A.M. The children would arrive in a quarter of an hour. If Khamis Zeydan’s information was correct, Steadman would be in the history classroom now, looking up a few unknown phrases in an English–Arabic dictionary, preparing to lecture the students in his strange pidgin. The poor idiot was prepared to put himself through the excruciating task of talking to the kids in Arabic and, worse, struggling to comprehend the slurring slang of teenagers, just to avoid the impression of cultural insensitivity. Well, by the end of the month, he would know that it had all been a waste of effort. Omar Yussef would be back at his desk, ready to teach for another decade. He would still be instructing the girls of Dehaisha in the meaning of their history and culture when Steadman had moved on to the kind of distant United Nations posting in which Omar Yussef always imagined him, sweating it out at some hinterland Somali schoolhouse, or teaching Arabic to Bosnian Muslims. Yes, that would be the man’s specialty. Omar Yussef smiled. Steadman would think of himself as an expert on things Arab now.

Omar Yussef crossed the road to the school. The tall, gray column carved into the shape of the map of Palestine blended into the oppressive sky, so that at first glance he wondered if it had been obliterated by some nighttime Israeli raid. When he was able to pick it out in the gloom, he wished it had disappeared. He stopped to look at it. He couldn’t help it; each time he saw the sculpture, he fixed his gaze for a moment on the spot where he was born, his father’s village. That was the purpose of the sculpture, of course, to perpetuate the desire for a return to those places, communities that had ceased to exist, memorialized in the sentimental recollections of the old people and weighted around the necks of the youngsters in this massive stone. Omar Yussef hated the sculpture.

The blast pounded like a heavyweight fist into Omar Yussef’s chest. It dropped him onto his backside in the mud outside the school. He was dazed a moment, sitting on the cold ground. A billow of black smoke wafted out of the school entrance with the scent of charcoal on it. Omar Yussef tried to calm himself. At first he thought he must have been in the center of the explosion, so strong was the blow. It felt as though the shock wave had collapsed his ribcage. But his heart continued to beat. He saw that the detonation had been inside the school. Who would be inside now? It was too early for Wafa. The janitor might be in there cleaning—his chair next to the entrance was empty.

Omar Yussef stared into the smoke. He watched the empty plastic chair. Then he heard someone coughing in the corridor, approaching the entrance. The janitor crawled out of the black cloud. Omar Yussef got to his feet and bent over him. He felt a stiffness where his back had throbbed with pain the day before, but he ignored it. The janitor’s face was black with smoke and his nose was bleeding.

“Abu Ramiz, you’re here?” the janitor said, surprised.

“What happened?”

The janitor coughed and spat. “It came from your classroom, Abu Ramiz. Mister Christopher is in there.”

Omar Yussef pulled the janitor out onto the street and left him with two young girls who had come early to school. “Go to the bakery over there,” he said to one of the stunned children. “Tell them to call for an ambulance.” Then he went into the smoky corridor.

The windows of Omar Yussef’s classroom were blown out along the left-hand side of the corridor. His feet crunched on glass. He pulled his handkerchief from his jacket pocket and covered his mouth and nose. With each breath the bitter smell of burned wood overcame the
eau de cologne
he doused every morning on the handkerchief. He coughed.

The door of the history classroom hung from one hinge at a forty-five-degree angle. Omar Yussef pushed it aside and peered into his classroom. The bookshelves were aflame and some of the children’s desks in the front row lay on their backs. His own desk was splintered into so many parts that only the barest frame remained. Beyond it, Omar Yussef saw a hand. Its fingers were bent, as though it were trying desperately to grip the floor, driving its nails into the linoleum. Omar Yussef dropped his own hands to his sides in shock, and choked on a sharp, involuntary intake of breath that was caustic with smoke. He lifted the handkerchief again to his mouth and breathed hard. It was a hand, severed, there on the floor of his classroom. It must belong to Steadman. The janitor had said he was in here, and Omar Yussef, too, had expected that the American would be preparing for his class at that desk.

Omar Yussef stepped past the remnants of the desk. Beyond the hand, the smoke billowed and then cleared, revealing what remained of Christopher Steadman. The American’s shirt was scorched away in the front. His pale chest and stomach were smeared with black and scraped bright red by the blast. He was half upright against the beveled bottom of the burning bookshelf, his head tilted back. He looked as though he might be resting, snoring gently through his slightly open mouth. Omar Yussef thought that perhaps he was alive. He hurried to him and knelt beside him. He must get him away from the bookshelf before it burned down to his head or the smoke suffocated him. He hooked his arms around Steadman’s torso and shuffled toward the door. The American was heavy. As Omar Yussef struggled, he averted his face. The scalp was singed away on the left, which was also the side on which he had lost his hand. Steadman’s eyes jarred open. They were blue and glassy. Omar Yussef almost dropped the American, when the head rolled toward him, the eyes gazing with the emptiness of a drowsy calf. He realized that the man was dead, but he pulled him toward the corridor anyway. Sweat ran into his own eyes and it mixed with the smoke, stinging them.

Three teenage boys rushed into the room and helped Omar Yussef haul the corpse to the corridor and toward the entrance.

“What happened,
ustaz
?” one of them asked. “Is he dead?”

They lay Christopher Steadman flat on the step of the school’s entrance. Omar Yussef felt hopelessly for a pulse in the man’s neck. He took off his coat and laid it over the naked torso, the abraded scalp, and the handless arm, so that the other children would not see. That was the second coat he had given up in two days. The first he’d surrendered to a man who was as good as dead. This time it was for an actual corpse. Omar Yussef’s sweat chilled now that his exertions were over and he was away from the heat of the fire. This was too much death for him to have clothed. It was as though his overcoats had become shrouds. He wondered if his last remaining coat, back on a hook by his front door, would be his own winding sheet. It was a black anorak, a good color to die in.

The siren of the camp ambulance wailed to the front of the school. Three medics cut through the gathering crowd of children. They were about to remove the coat from the corpse, but Omar Yussef stopped them. “Wait until he’s inside the ambulance,” he said. “For his dignity.”

The medics nodded and slipped Steadman’s body onto a lightweight orange stretcher. Two of them took him to the ambulance, while the other checked the janitor’s wounds. Omar Yussef wondered that death caused him to consider Steadman’s dignity. The dead man felt his own pride too much when he lived, so Omar Yussef hadn’t cared about it then. Now he was the only one who would protect it.

The fire truck arrived. The firemen took a hose down the corridor and began pouring water into the history classroom.

A few of the children cried, though most were morose and silent. Omar Yussef stood on the step of the school. “Director Steadman has been killed. We can’t say yet what happened, but as you can see the school cannot operate today. Go home now, and tell the children from the afternoon shift not to come to school today.”

As the crowd of children slowly cleared, Khamis Zeydan arrived with two jeeps. Omar Yussef watched the police chief approach him. Something in the way Khamis Zeydan looked at him suggested that he hadn’t expected to see his old university friend standing at the entrance to the school issuing orders to the children. Then Omar Yussef understood. Someone had intended to kill the teacher in the history classroom. There was no reason anyone would have wanted Steadman dead. The bomb—and this surely had been a bomb—was intended for Omar Yussef.

“Abu Ramiz, what happened here?” Khamis Zeydan said.

“There was a bomb. It exploded in the history classroom. Steadman was preparing to take my class. The explosion killed him. The ambulance took him away just a minute ago.”

“Why was the American taking your class?”

Omar Yussef thought Khamis Zeydan spoke with a hint of disappointment. He remembered that he’d told the police chief yesterday that he would be back in the classroom this morning. Could it be that Khamis Zeydan had set the bomb? Or that he had passed on the information, just as Omar Yussef suspected he did in the case of Dima Abdel Rahman’s death? Omar Yussef felt the smoke in his throat again and coughed until his eyes wept. Khamis Zeydan reached out to touch his arm, but he pulled away.

“He was taking my class,” Omar Yussef spluttered, “because I told him it would be an insult to me in the eyes of the camp if he continued to employ a replacement.”

“He was in the classroom at your request?”

“No, not directly. But partly, yes.”

“Is that so.” Khamis Zeydan stared at him, hard, his head turned to the left, but his eyes looking straight at Omar Yussef.

“Are you suggesting that I had him killed?” Omar Yussef was furious.

“He was trying to get rid of you, wasn’t he? Despite his recent public denials, he still intended to force your retirement.”

“You’re insane.”

“Listen, Abu Ramiz, you’ve been getting involved in some crazy things lately. I don’t know with whom you’ve been associating or what they’re doing for you, but I do know that you went to Hussein Tamari’s headquarters two days ago.”

“Are you having me watched?”

“I keep an eye on who goes in and out of Tamari’s hideout. What were you doing there?”

“You know perfectly well that I was trying to help George Saba. Do you really think I went to Tamari to arrange for the American to be killed? Why don’t you arrest the people who killed Louai and Dima Abdel Rahman? They’re the ones who framed George Saba, and they’re the ones who set this bomb. Can’t you see they wanted to kill me? They thought I’d be in that classroom. You, in particular, know that very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I told you last night that I’d be teaching this morning.”

“I didn’t believe you for a minute. I didn’t even think you’d be on your feet this morning. You’re tougher than I thought.” Khamis Zeydan stepped aside as the firemen came out of the corridor. He stopped one of them. “Is the fire under control?”