Murder Under the Fig Tree Read online

  Ten months ago, Rania had learned dangerous secrets held by two of Israel’s top military men. She thought she had outsmarted them, but, all this time, they had been waiting for their chance to lock her away with their secrets. When Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election, the Israelis had rounded up dozens of Palestinian police and others they considered dangerous. She should have been spared; she had been a member of Fatah, President Abbas’s party, since she was fifteen. Her enemies, though, had seized the opportunity to put away someone they personally considered dangerous. She had no idea how long they could hold her. If her enemies had anything to say about it, it could be forever.

  That thought brought the tears to her eyes again, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand. However long she was going to be here, she would not spend it moping. She stood and stretched up on tiptoe, then bent and touched her toes. Her body felt uncharacteristically stiff, her back aching with inaction. In the normal course of her life, she got lots of exercise, but now she thought maybe she should do some of the calisthenics they used to do in school. She removed the heavy, dark jilbab, revealing a red, long-sleeved pullover and black, stretchy pants. She felt ridiculously exposed, though there was no one here to see. She did a few jumping jacks, ran in place for five minutes. While she ran, she hummed one of the marching songs that had played everywhere during the First Intifada.

  “Singing is forbidden.” Tali was back.

  “Why?” Rania was not in the mood to be conciliatory. What more could they do to her?

  “Those are the rules.”

  “If you care about rules, why do you break international law by keeping me here?”

  The policewoman walked away, shaking her head. Rania felt surprisingly cheered. In those few minutes, she had recouped a little piece of herself she had been missing since the night they took her away. She would spend the day crafting a campaign of minor resistance.

  Chapter 2

  As if swept along on a tidal wave, Tina and Chloe followed the crowd to the place where they could catch a shared taxi, called servees in Arabic and sherut in Hebrew, for Jerusalem. They joined a line of about thirty people who must have had collectively two hundred bags. They clung to carts laden with instrument cases and duffel bags, huge sets of matching, black leather suitcases, ratty backpacks leaking T-shirts, trunks, furniture boxes, and strollers.

  A white van with Hebrew writing on the side screeched to a halt next to the curb where they waited. The driver did not get out but opened the doors automatically and yelled at the people to hurry and get in.

  Chloe counted the seats. There was room for eleven, plus the driver, but would there be room for all their luggage? She started to count the line by elevens. If seats weren’t needed for excess baggage, they would make the next van after this.

  Suddenly, a surge of humanity pressed forward, running at the van. The neat line that had formed to wait for the sherut was, apparently, merely a formality. Now that it was here, it was every person for himself. A hunched-over, old woman was using her massive suitcase as a battering ram to clear a path to the door. Chloe and Tina stood aside, mouths agape, watching the van fill up like an inflatable mattress. In seconds, the van was flying out of there, loaded to bursting with people and possessions.

  “We’re never going to get out of here,” Chloe murmured to Tina, as the automatic double doors of the airport opened to eject another fifty or so travelers into the line which, improbably, had formed up again.

  The man standing in front of them turned around. He was big and beefy and wore a bright-blue polo shirt. Sweat poured down his bulbous nose.

  “This is Israel. You have to push,” he said.

  “It’s Israel to you,” Tina said, under her breath.

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  “That’s because I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Shhh,” Chloe whispered, stroking Tina’s feathery hair. “Let it go.”

  “Don’t shush me!”

  Chloe dropped the handle of her rollaway bag and let it list onto its side. The handle brushed the leg of the man Tina had snapped at, who turned around to glare at them.

  “Did I do something to piss you off?” Chloe asked.

  “No, sorry.” Tina picked up the rollaway. Chloe wished she had reached for her hand instead. “I’m just tired.”

  That was a plausible explanation. Tina would have had to get up early to make it from Ramallah to Lod in time for Chloe’s ten o’clock arrival. Still, how much did she really know about this woman? Their face-to-face relationship probably hadn’t comprised more than forty hours—a standard work week. Since Chloe had gone back to the States, what they had been doing could best be described as sexting, supplemented by an occasional phone call or email rant.

  When the next van pulled up, Tina was ready. Rolling the suitcase in one hand, she grabbed Chloe’s arm with the other and barged through the mush of people. Chloe never quite knew how her bag ended up in the luggage compartment and her body jammed against the window, but somehow it had happened. Seconds later, they were rolling toward Jerusalem.

  She gazed out the exhaust-streaked window, reliving the drama of the last time she had traveled this road. She had been in a police van, trying to figure out how to keep them from tossing her unceremoniously onto a plane. That night she had come closer to dying than she ever had before or since. Rania had risked her life and freedom to save Chloe’s. Chloe was here to settle that debt.

  But she had also come to be with Tina. She turned to face her lover. Tina was leaning back against the seat, her eyes closed. The dimples around her mouth were slack in her smooth, olive skin, and she looked like she belonged in a Modigliani painting. Chloe stretched out her index finger and brushed the other woman’s cheek lightly. Tina opened her eyes.

  “Sorry mate,” she said with a half smile. Her Australian accent made “mate” sound like “mite.” “I get you to come all this way, and then I crash out on you.”

  “That’s okay,” Chloe said. “How are things at the center?” Tina worked at a counseling center for abused women and their children. Her salary was paid by a fellowship which sent diasporic Palestinians to work in their homeland.

  “They’re okay,” Tina said. “People are worried about money, because of the embargo. And they’re worried a little about Hamas, that they will try to restrain what we do in some way. But really, we haven’t heard anything from the government in months.”

  The van rumbled into the outskirts of Jerusalem. Chloe’s body tingled awake, from her nose to her toes. She forced open the window, basking in the warm air and ignoring the driver’s protest about the air conditioning. She drank in the sight of spindly, dust-scarred olive and lemon trees and strained for the scent of the wild herb called zaatar. Even the military jeeps and the soldiers hitchhiking made her happy. She felt more like she’d come home now than she had when she landed in San Francisco ten months ago. Her time in Palestine, which had ended so abruptly and come so close to disaster, had tested her and taught her who she really was.

  She reached for Tina’s hand. Tina squeezed hers, but then looked around at the other passengers and pulled her hand away. What was that about? Chloe wondered. She perused the other occupants of the van. She saw no hijabs—traditional Muslim headscarves—or other evidence of Palestinians on board. Had Tina changed so much since she had left, that she was concerned about Jewish Israelis judging her sexual orientation? Or was it her feelings about Chloe that had changed? Had Chloe become more attractive in memory than she actually was? She had gained a few pounds during her time back in the States. Was Tina a closet fat-phobe?

  For the first time since getting on the plane, Chloe wondered if she had made a huge mistake in rushing over here. She had no real plan for getting Rania out of prison. It was at least as likely that she would land in an Israeli jail herself. But Tina had sent her the text about Rania, and she had encouraged Chloe’s plans to return to Palestine. Chloe’s typical insecurities must be playing
with her head, making her read too much into casual interactions. She determined to take Tina at her word: she was just tired.

  “What about Rania?” she asked. “Have you heard anything new?”

  Tina shook her head. “No. I called Ahlam yesterday to tell her you were coming. She didn’t know anything else.”

  Chloe had rented an apartment from her friends, Ahlam and Jaber, the last time she had been in Palestine. Chloe and Rania had gotten information that freed Ahlam’s son, Fareed, from Israeli prison. That investigation had gotten Chloe thrown out of Palestine ten months ago, and now it had gotten Rania locked up.

  “How did Ahlam know about the arrest?”

  “I think she read it in the paper.”

  The van was pulling up to a series of nondescript apartment buildings surrounded by manicured lawns.

  “Is this a settlement?” Chloe asked.

  “I think so,” Tina answered. A family of six climbed over the rest of the passengers to exit the van, the father in long, black coat and high, black hat, the boys’ dangling side curls marking them as part of one of the ultra-religious Hasidic sects. They claimed fully half of the luggage piled into the back, and, as the van drove off, Chloe watched out the window as each little boy pulled along a suitcase nearly his size.

  The next stop was on Emek Refaim Street, where Jewish hipsters shopped for handmade crafts and sipped coffee in sidewalk cafés. Only a few blocks away on the Bethlehem Road, vans like this one, but older, would be carrying people to the village where Tina’s aunt lived and Aida refugee camp, where Rania grew up. Now they were skirting the Old City, its ancient, stone walls as breathtaking as the first day Chloe glimpsed them. The van stopped opposite Jaffa Gate. This would be the end of the official route, the place where West Jerusalem blurred into East. What should they do from here? They could negotiate with the driver to take them close to Damascus Gate, where they could get a car to Ramallah, or they could off-board here and look for a cheaper Arab taxi to go the last three-quarter mile.

  “What do you want to do?” Chloe turned to Tina.

  “I don’t know; what do you think?” Tina never went to West Jerusalem and spoke no Hebrew. She would be expecting Chloe to take charge of this situation.

  “L’an atem?” Where are you going? The driver asked impatiently.

  “Shaar Shchem,” Chloe said, giving the Hebrew name for Damascus Gate. “Kama?” How much?

  “Shaar Shchem? Ma yesh lakhem b’Sha’ar Shkhem?”

  None of your business why we want to go there, Chloe bit back.

  “Come on,” she said to Tina. “Let’s find another cab.”

  “Esrim shekel,” the driver said before she had gotten both feet onto the ground.

  “Forget it.” Twenty shekels to go a few blocks? Thirty would get them all the way to Ramallah.

  “How much?” Tina asked.

  “Twenty. Forget it. He’s just screwing with us.”

  “Offer him fifteen.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It shouldn’t be more than five.”

  “I want to go. Offer fifteen.”

  “Chamesh esrei,” Chloe said to the driver. He nodded laconically, ground out his cigarette against the side of the van, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Tina nearly threw the money at him as he gunned the engine. When he deposited them on the sidewalk in front of the Faisal Hostel, Chloe almost kissed the ground. The Faisal was the unofficial gateway to the West Bank for international solidarity activists. It was there that Chloe had begun her first adventure in Palestine. She breathed in the heavy aromas of cardamom and burned sugar from the coffee stand, the grease from the falafel place next door, and the warm smell of bread baking down the street. She soaked up the busy to-ing and fro-ing of head-scarved women pulling their kids along to the vegetable and fish markets, the old women sitting cross-legged near the bus station hawking their herbs and fruit, the cries of peddlers warning people to get out of the way of their carts as they plunged into the Old City.

  “I’m hungry,” she told Tina. “Let’s go to Abu Emile’s for breakfast.” Abu Emile’s, where they had eaten the morning after they first made love. She hoped returning to the elegant, cave-like restaurant would rekindle the almost painful closeness they had had that day.

  “I have food at my house.”

  “It could take us an hour to get there.”

  “Not anymore. We don’t have to stop at Qalandia. We can drive straight through.”

  “I can’t leave Jerusalem yet. I just got here. I thought I might never see it again.”

  “I don’t want to go into the Old City. It’s crawling with settlers.”

  “How about the Jerusalem Hotel?” Chloe said. “Just for a cappuccino, and then we’ll go home.”

  “Okay.” Tina’s face cracked a small smile for the first time since they had left the airport. “Maybe I’ll even have a Taybeh.”

  “Beer at eleven in the morning?”

  “Don’t be a wowser. I’ve been up since five. In Melbourne, I’d be ready to quit work for the day.”

  Happily full of a delicious omelet and a satisfactory cup of coffee, savored in the Palestinian chic of the Jerusalem Hotel’s screened-in patio, Chloe could enjoy the journey to Ramallah. As Tina had promised, they sailed through the checkpoint and were dropped at the bustling al-Manara, the central square of Palestine’s most modern city. Young professionals and students darted into cafés, and patrons overflowed from shops selling sweets or Broaster chicken. In Ramallah on a good day, you could forget that Palestine was an occupied country.

  Tina led them to a sunny garden apartment on the edge of the business district, across the street from a hotel that had seen better days. As Tina put the key into the lock, a buxom, middle-aged woman dashed out of the hotel and hurried to greet them.

  “Tina, habibti, weyn bakeeti?” Tina, my love, where were you?

  “I went to the airport, Um Malik. This is my friend, Chloe. She’s going to be staying with me for a little while.”

  “Miit marhaba, ahlan w sahlan, ahlan w sahlan.” Um Malik grabbed Chloe’s shoulders and planted two wet kisses on each cheek.

  “Ahlan fiiki,” welcome to you too, Chloe replied. A hundred greetings, the woman had wished her, when one would do. Um Malik seemed prepared to follow them into the house, but Tina deftly blocked the doorway.

  “Chloe’s very tired,” she told the older woman in Arabic. “She has just come from America.”

  “Oh, Amreeka,” Um Malik bubbled in Arabic. “I love American people. Welcome, welcome.”

  “Welcome to you,” Chloe answered. She wondered how many times the ritual call and response would have to be repeated before she would get to be alone with Tina.

  “If you need anything, anything at all, you just tell me. I’m like your mother,” Um Malik told Tina.

  “Thank you, Um Malik, you’re so very kind.”

  “I’m like your mother, I’m like your mother,” to Chloe this time.

  Not in the least, Chloe thought. She couldn’t even imagine what Ruth Rubin would think of being compared to a hijab-wearing, Arab woman with a giant mole on her nose.

  “Shukran,” thank you, she said. Apparently that satisfied Um Malik, because she backed out of the gate, mumbling something about needing to get back to the hotel, there was a group arriving from Sweden today. At least, Chloe thought that’s what she said, but it could have been any number of other things. Her Arabic, which had never been fluent, was definitely rusty.

  “Who is she?” she asked Tina when they were finally alone. “Our landlady.” Chloe’s heart leapt up to embrace the word “our.” “She and her husband also own the hotel.”

  The apartment was a single bright room, with a slightly ragged, floral couch, scratched coffee table, and five or six foam mats stacked in the corner to be extricated for sleeping or sitting. The kitchenette at one end comprised a two-burner stove and a first-generation frost-free refrigerator whose constant whirring sound Chloe supposed might, over time
, become soothing. A tiny breakfast nook, with a drop-leaf table and two straight chairs of the same vintage as the coffee table, separated the “kitchen” from the main room. The best thing about the place, from Chloe’s perspective, was the venetian blinds which offered some measure of privacy. The worst was that she could hear pretty much every word being uttered by the children in the house upstairs, which didn’t bode well for things they might want to do.

  “Don’t worry,” Tina said, reading her mind. “I have a plan.”

  She picked up two rainbow-striped sleeping mats and opened the door to what appeared to be a closet opposite the kitchen area. Well, it was a closet, but it was a closet Carrie Bradshaw would die for. Only a few dark skirts and multicolored, long-sleeved pastel blouses hung there alongside a gray, wool blazer. Neat stacks of T-shirts, pullovers, and jeans fit on two low shelves, while the two higher ones awaited whatever clothing Chloe might unpack. Tina laid the mattresses side by side, and they fit perfectly. Once they were nestled into the womb-like space, the voices upstairs were reduced to a faint hum. Chloe reached for Tina, who had already taken her jeans off. Lying on her side, in only a tank top and skimpy underpants, she was as gorgeous as Chloe remembered. Chloe reached down to unbutton her jeans, but Tina swatted her hand away. She pushed her lightly onto her back and knelt over her. Her body blocked the light and Chloe saw only a silhouette looming above her. She lay still, concentrating on the remembered gentleness of Tina’s hands on her breasts, now moving down to her hips and legs. Chloe dug her fingers into Tina’s slender buttocks, and instantly they were moving in sync, like a dance they knew well.

  Why had she doubted only an hour ago that Tina still loved her? She could feel the love in each feathery stroke of her fingertips, sending electric currents down her spine and up to her earlobes. She plunged her tongue wetly into Tina’s mouth, and they melted together. Like butter and sugar came into her mind, and she giggled. Food was never too far from her thoughts. Tina didn’t seem to notice, only intensified her exploration of Chloe’s intimate parts, and soon there was no room for thought, but only feelings.