The Samaritan's Secret Read online

  “The scroll?” Omar Yussef twisted toward the priest.

  “Our greatest treasure was stolen, Abu Ramiz,” Ben-Tabia said. He lifted the tips of his fingers to his beard, as though he might pull it out in despair at the thought of such a calamity. “I felt terrible shame that it should be during my tenure as a priest here in our synagogue that the Abisha Scroll might be lost.”

  “The Abisha?” Omar Yussef’s voice was low and reverent.

  “What’s that?” Sami said.

  “A famous Torah scroll,” Omar Yussef said. “The oldest book in the world, they say.”

  The priest raised his eyes to the ceiling. “The five books of Moses, written on sheepskin three thousand six hundred and forty-five years ago. It was written by Abisha, son of Pinchas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron who was the brother of Moses, in the thirteenth year after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Every year, we bring it out of the safe only once, for our Passover ceremony on Mount Jerizim.”

  “It must be very valuable,” Sami said.

  “It’s beyond all value. Without this scroll, our Messiah can never return to us. Without this scroll, we cannot carry out the annual Passover sacrifice, and if we fail to sacrifice on Passover we cease to be Samaritans and the entire tradition of our religion comes to a terrible close.” The priest’s eyes were moist.

  “You said the thieves told you to keep quiet?” Omar Yussef spoke softly.

  “I was blindfolded and taken to a place where I was shown the stolen scroll. They took me because they knew I would be able to recognize it and tell the rest of the community that it was safe. Then they demanded a million dollars for its return.”

  “Did you pay?” Sami asked.

  “We don’t have a million dollars.”

  “But the Abisha Scroll has been returned?”

  “We asked for help from all our friends in Nablus.” The priest lifted his hand in front of him, fingers pointing upward. “Perhaps one of them was able to influence the thieves.”

  “What friends?”

  “We’re part of the local community. My accent is like everyone else’s in Nablus—I say Oi, when I mean to say I, just like the people in the casbah. We have friends among the business community, wealthy, powerful friends.”

  “Did one of them pay the ransom for the Abisha?”

  “No one told me they did so. I finally reported the scroll stolen during the weekend, because our Passover takes place in three days and, as I told you, the entire ceremony would have to be abandoned if I couldn’t carry this scroll in our procession. But the scroll was returned overnight. I came here this morning to meet you, as your office instructed me to do when I called in the theft. But then I found the scroll on the steps, safe in its box. My prayers had been answered.”

  “Just like that?” Sami spoke calmly, but Omar Yussef heard the suspicion in his voice. “The thieves didn’t tell you they’d returned it?”

  “No one comes here unless they’re accompanied by me. I have the only key to the building. They must have known I’d find it.”

  “Who knew that the scroll was kept in the safe?”

  “Many people in Nablus.”

  “Who knew where the safe was?”

  “We often welcome guests such as you in this synagogue. Then, there are international scholars who come to study our community. Any one of them might know where the safe is kept.”

  “Was the scroll damaged when the safe was blown?”

  “No, it’s in good condition, thanks to Allah.”

  “Let’s take a look.” Sami stood.

  The priest rose with some reluctance and led them to the back of the synagogue.

  At the foot of a whitewashed stone staircase, he opened a heavy metal door and entered a small office. A tall green safe the size of a refrigerator stood in one corner. “A moment, please. The combination,” he said, working his fingers to mime the twisting of a dial. He shut the door behind him.

  When the priest allowed them to enter, he beckoned to Omar Yussef. On the desk, beside a pile of ragged prayer books, was a box with three curved sides covered in dull, blotchy hide and less than two feet in length. Omar Yussef bent close and saw that the case was overlaid with silver panels, oxidized to a dark gray tone. He lifted his hand toward it and glanced at the priest. Ben-Tabia nodded and Omar Yussef touched the box. He felt a thrill of electricity pass through his hand. He smiled at the priest. “It’s one of the most beautiful objects I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “The box was made several hundred years ago on the orders of one of my predecessors in the priestly caste,” Ben-Tabia said. “Inside is the ancient scroll, but I cannot show you that today. Only on Passover may it be seen.”

  “The workmanship is wonderful.” Omar Yussef ran his hand over the raised silver. Under its grimy coating, it was decorated with scenes from biblical stories. At the center of one of the plates was an image of a building that looked like a castle with high walls surrounding a courtyard and a central turret. Omar Yussef stroked a fingertip around the outline of the building.

  “That’s our temple, which once stood on top of Mount Jerizim.” The priest inclined his head toward the place where Omar Yussef’s hand rested. “The Jews say the temple was in Jerusalem, where your famous Dome of the Rock now stands. But we know it was on Jerizim.” He swallowed hard. “May I return the Abisha Scroll to the safe? It makes me nervous even to have it here on the table.”

  Sami left the room with Omar Yussef, while the priest again worked the combination on the safe.

  In the stairwell, Sami pursed his lips. “He’s lying,” he whispered.

  “You’re right,” Omar Yussef said. “Why would someone steal the scroll and simply give it back?”

  The priest came out of the office and shut the metal door. He straightened his fez, gave a brittle, polite smile and gestured for them to lead the way up the stairs.

  “Forgive me if I seem to be overprotective of the scroll, pasha,” he said.

  Omar Yussef blanched at the unearned senior rank mistakenly accorded him by the priest. Thanks be to Allah that he doesn’t expect me to arrest anyone, he thought.

  “It truly is important to the redemption of the entire world,” the priest continued. “You see, our holy texts tell us that the Messiah will be born to the tribe of Levi or Joseph. We Samaritans are all that’s left of those two tribes. But what makes us Samaritans? Only that we celebrate Passover and also the Feast of Tabernacles in the way taught by our tradition.”

  “With the Abisha Scroll at the head of your procession.”

  The priest opened a hand to acknowledge that Omar Yussef’s understanding was correct. “If we were to miss both these festivals for a single year, we would no longer be Samaritans. The lines of Levi and Joseph would come to an end, and there would be no possibility of a Messiah being born to redeem mankind.”

  Omar Yussef stroked his chin with his knuckles. “Were there other ancient documents in the safe?”

  “A few, but nothing else was taken.” The priest looked out of the window at Mount Jerizim. “Most of our ancient documents are kept in my house on top of the mountain. Some are almost a thousand years old. But none are nearly as old as the Abisha Scroll. Only the most valuable are stored here in the safe.”

  “Do you preserve all your people’s old texts?”

  “The Torah scrolls and original manuscripts used in religious services.” Ben-Tabia pointed toward the blue curtain above the dais. “When they can no longer be used, these documents are packed away there inside the holy ark.”

  “Why don’t you throw them away?” Sami asked.

  “For the same reason you Muslims don’t use pages from the Koran to wrap falafel.” The priest smiled, but Omar Yussef saw a glint of hostility behind the old man’s outmoded spec-tacles. “Each page from a prayer book must be preserved, even if it’s beyond repair.”

  He lifted a corner of the velvet curtain to reveal a low box built into the wall. At first it looked like a benc
h, but Omar Yussef saw that it was hinged at the back. “In here we safe-guard many fragments of documents, all unusable, but still filled with the holy word. We call them ‘Allah’s secrets.’ ”

  The priest dropped the curtain. “If you would like to see the Abisha Scroll itself, not just its box, please come to our Passover celebration on Jerizim later this week. I am happy to invite you.”

  “Do we have to convert to Samaritanism to attend?” Omar Yussef laughed with a short, coughing exhalation. “Neither Sami nor I are particularly committed to Islam.”

  “Conversion to our religion is only possible for women who wish to marry our men, pasha,” the priest said. “But we should be honored to have men like you share our celebration.” He laid his hand over his heart. “People come from all around the world—foreign journalists and international academics—to watch our ancient rites.”

  “It’ll be a great pleasure, Your Honor,” Omar Yussef said.

  The priest went out onto the wide top step at the entrance to the synagogue. As Omar Yussef and Sami followed him to the door, they heard footsteps hurrying outside. Ben-Tabia froze, his eyes wide.

  A breathless voice called to the priest from the steps: “Long life to you.” Ben-Tabia looked quickly at Sami, then dropped his eyes to the floor. Omar Yussef took a short breath and felt the muscles in his back tighten. The traditional greeting meant someone else’s life had ended. The voice came again: “Your Honor, we have to call the police.”

  Sami stepped through the door. Omar Yussef followed. A tall young man with a thick mustache stood at the foot of the last flight of steps. His thin chest heaved with the effort of running from the street. He flinched when he saw Sami’s uniform.

  “Who’s dead?” Sami spoke sharply.

  The young man glanced at the priest, but Sami descended a few steps and leaned toward him.

  “Come on, what’s happened?”

  The breathless man looked over Sami’s shoulder and called to the priest. “It’s Ishaq, Your Honor. Ishaq is up on top of Mount Jerizim, at the temple.”

  “Why shouldn’t he be?” The priest spoke slowly, as though his tongue were prodding through a minefield.

  The young man coughed hard. “Your Honor, Ishaq has been murdered.”

  Chapter 3

  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 fiancée 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 an
d 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.”