Murder Under the Fig Tree Read online

  “So, prove me wrong.”

  She had been enjoying the argument, and suddenly she remembered where she was.

  “How can I prove anything while I’m in here?”

  “You can’t. I can get you out, if you agree to investigate this thoroughly.”

  “You want to make me a collaborator.” She had feared that as soon as she saw him, and she had known better than to sit down with the devil. He had beguiled her with coffee and repartee. But this had gone far enough.

  “Don’t be melodramatic. I just want you to find out the truth.”

  “I found out the truth last time, and look where it got me.” The murder of the foreign woman had officially been his case. He had been content to let a Palestinian boy sit in jail for the crime, while knowing that there were powerful Israeli men who had more cause to want the young woman dead. “You want me to tell you some Palestinian killed this young man, so you can get the army out of trouble.”

  “You think I need you to get the army out of trouble?”

  He had a point there. Killing Palestinians was no problem for the army. It was their job.

  “Why are you here, then?”

  He eyed her half-full coffee cup, and she could tell he wanted to ask if she was going to drink it. She picked it up and drank a few more sips, then put it down again.

  “The West Bank is a tinderbox right now. If some group in the village wanted this kid dead, there will be others who knew it. If his family finds out, it could set off a wave of reprisal killings. We can’t risk that.”

  She had to admire his choice of argument. Palestine, in recent months, had come closer to civil war than anyone had ever thought possible. The only thing that had kept them from extinction all these years was their fierce unity. But, since President Arafat had died, that had started to unravel. And since Hamas was elected to lead the government, the United States and Israel had put their money to good use, financing those who wanted to see the new leadership fail.

  She herself had no use for Hamas. She had joined the Fatah Youth Organization as soon as she was old enough to join anything. She found it painful to watch her people becoming more and more addicted to religion as the seeds of conservatism took root in the soil of isolation and oppression.

  But whatever Rania might feel about Hamas, nothing could be gained by becoming a spy for the Israelis. Benny could say whatever he wanted, but that’s what he was trying to do, make her a spy. Whenever anyone got out of jail without serving a full sentence, the rumors clung to them like smoke. If they seemed too interested in anything or too jumpy around old friends, people whispered that they had been turned into traitors. Sometimes they had and sometimes they hadn’t, but, always, it was dangerous, not only for them but for their families.

  “Forget it,” she said. “I don’t work for you.”

  “No, you work for Mustafa. He thinks you should do it.”

  “Why isn’t he here, then?” She knew the answer as she said it. Her boss had been a fighter in the old days, before Arafat returned to Palestine. He had been captured and, like so many of the men of his generation, had spent years in Israeli prison. He might now be part of the Palestinian Authority, but, to the Israelis, he was still a terrorist. He could never get a permit to go into Israel, certainly not to visit a prisoner in military detention.

  Still, she wasn’t about to take Benny’s word for that or anything else. If Captain Mustafa wanted her to get out of jail and work on this case, he would find a way to make it happen. If he didn’t, she would stay here and prove herself as tough as he had been.

  “I’m not interested,” she said. “Go away and don’t come back.”

  Back in her cell, she stripped off the jilbab which had more or less dried from her body heat. Unfortunately, it had taken all her warmth with it. She lay down on the cot, shivering. She had no blanket, only a thin, moldy comforter. She didn’t feel as proud of herself as she had when she stormed out of the captain’s office. It had seemed so easy then to say, “Forget it, I’ll stay here forever.” But now that she was confronted with the real possibility of a life inside these four gray walls, she felt like creepy-crawly things were oozing out of her pores. She wondered if Bassam would take a second wife. Would Khaled start to call another woman mother?

  “You know that Italian place, Enrico’s?” Chloe said. She was washing the dinner dishes, and Tina was putting them away. “I met some gay men there the other day.”

  “How did you know?” Tina scooped the remains of the lentil and rice dish called mujaddara into a bowl and covered it with a plate.

  “I could just tell. Plus, they were joking around about marrying each other.” Chloe ran some warm water into the sticky pot and put it down to soak.

  “They could have just been kidding around. But there’s starting to be a little bit of an underground gay scene here. There’s even a bar in Jerusalem where they have Ramallah Night. Twice a month, these guys from Ramallah perform there.”

  “Ramallah drag queens?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This I have to see.” She thought of Daoud, with his gypsy scarf and dramatic flair, and Elias, who was going to be the next Ammar Hassan. Maybe they were performers. “What night do they have it?”

  “Wednesdays,” Tina said.

  “That’s tonight! Can we go now?” Chloe said.

  She thought Tina was going to argue, but, after a long minute, Tina dropped her dish towel. “Come on, then. We don’t want to miss the show.”

  “What’s the name of this place?” Chloe asked after they showed their IDs to the bouncer. It had been a long time since she’d been carded, but the place was so dark, the guy probably couldn’t see how old she was.

  “Adloyada,” Tina said.

  “Clever,” Chloe said, reaching back to the Hebrew school teachings of her tiny, North Carolina synagogue. The bar stood on Shushan Street, and Shushan was the province in Persia where the Purim story, the Book of Esther, took place. One of the commandments surrounding the holiday of Purim was to drink ad d’lo yada, “until he did not know” the difference between the villain and the hero of the story. Of course, that was exactly how drunk the owner of any bar would want his customers to get. For a gay bar, though, what you “did not know” had a deeper meaning.

  Adloyada was also the name for the carnivals held to celebrate Purim, at which people dressed in costume, making it appropriate for a bar that hosted drag shows.

  The cozy ambiance inside the bar was a sharp contrast with the last bar she had been in with Tina. That had been a seedy dive in a rough-and-tumble section of Eilat, and they went there an hour after Chloe had nearly been raped. Tina squeezed her hand, and Chloe knew she was reliving the same memory. Nothing bad can happen tonight, her gesture said.

  The bar was moderately full, so they did not get a seat on one of the frayed couches that dotted the main room, but they did find a table with a prime view of the stage. It was half a table, actually, which they were sharing with another lesbian couple who was leaning into one another and, more than occasionally, sharing deep kisses.

  Chloe and Tina ordered pints of Taybeh and clinked glasses.

  “To your triumphant return to Palestine,” Tina said. They sipped their beers and ignored the smooching couple until a short, balding man coughed into the microphone.

  “May I have your attention please?” he said in English, then repeated it in Hebrew, and, Chloe was pleased to hear, in Arabic.

  “Who is he?” she whispered to Tina.

  “Mordecai,” Tina responded. “He’s the owner.”

  Chloe chuckled to herself. Mordecai was the hero of the Purim story. She wondered if this guy had changed his name to fit the bar.

  “I regret to tell you,” Mordecai was saying in English, “that there will be no performance tonight.” Groans filled the bar. Mordecai tapped on the mike until the grumbles subsided. “I was just informed,” he continued, “that Daoud al-Khader, known to most of you as JLo Day-Glo, was killed las
t night in the West Bank.”

  Mordecai let the din that followed this announcement go on for a few moments before he signaled for quiet once more. “Some of the guys from Ramallah have gone to pay respects to Daoud’s family,” he said. “So, in his honor, we will observe solemnity tonight. But,” he held up his hand, forestalling a mass exodus, “I invite you all to stay and toast his memory on the house.”

  Cheers greeted his last statement, though people quickly subdued their friends into more appropriate affect. People began drifting to the bar to claim their free drinks.

  “Did you know this Daoud?” Chloe asked Tina. Could it be a coincidence that the flamboyant young man she had met was also named Daoud? It was not an uncommon name, but still.

  Tina shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. Chloe turned to the kissy-faced lesbians, who seemed to have decided that mourning demanded a hiatus in making out.

  “Did you know him?” she asked the butch one, who looked to be about her age and sported a tattoo that said Peace Now in English. She probably got it in the army, Chloe reflected.

  “Not personally,” the woman said. “But I saw him perform.”

  “He did drag?”

  “What else?” said the femme, whose long, frizzy hair boasted a shade of red not found in nature.

  “Was he tall, with thick wavy hair? Did he wear a leather jacket and a lot of jewelry?” Chloe asked the two of them. They nodded.

  “Did you know him, then?” asked Tattoo Woman.

  “He asked me to marry him,” Chloe said. Suddenly cold, she wished she had brought a sweater.

  Chapter 11

  “I should have asked him what kind of bullets killed the young man,” Rania said out loud. Since her visits from Chloe and Benny, she had taken to talking to herself out loud. In a peculiar way, it made her feel less alone. Only when Tali Ta’ali or one of the others came by did she shut up, so they wouldn’t think she was talking to them. Her last conversation with Tali had filled her with sadness when it was over. It had made her think of her grandfather and the village she had never seen. It was too much. She wasn’t a history lesson.

  She imagined she was sitting in the chair opposite Captain Mustafa’s desk, mapping out a strategy for investigating the case. She set her tote bag on the floor in front of the bed and addressed it respectfully.

  “First, we need to know exactly how he died,” she said. “Were the bullets shot from eye level, which could mean they were fired from inside a jeep or was there a downward trajectory, indicating he was lying on the ground and someone stood over him? Probably no one checked the scene right away to see if there were fresh footprints or tire tracks leading away from the body. It will be too late to do that now. But there must be blood on the ground, and Benny will have a report on the caliber of the bullets. If they are the type used by the army, then we can assume the soldiers killed him.”

  What is the first rule of investigation? her pretend Captain Mustafa asked.

  “Never assume,” she answered.

  She wished she knew who in the village Benny suspected of wanting the young man dead. Then she would have a nice puzzle to work on. Was he suspected as a traitor? Had he cheated someone or molested someone’s daughter? But that type of killing was not committed in secret.

  “He was found under a tree,” she continued. “Is there a significance to that? Does it matter that it was a fig tree and not an olive?” Unlikely that someone positioned their victim so carefully, but you never knew. She thought about the portion of the Qur’an called At-Tin, the Fig:

  By the fig and the olive

  And Mount Sinai

  And this secure land

  We have certainly created man in the best of stature

  Then we returned him to the lowest of the lowest …

  Was someone saying that the young man was the lowest of the lowest? That would mean someone who was not righteous. What could make someone not righteous to his neighbors? Many things.

  She heard footsteps in the hallway. It didn’t sound like Tali Ta’ali. These were heavy boots, and there were more than two of them. She didn’t think it was dinner time anyway. She recalled the night they had shot tear gas into her cell and beat her. Were they returning to punish her some more?

  “Please, no,” she whispered. Her injured arm still throbbed whenever she moved it.

  She got up and went to stand by the bars. She would meet whatever was in store face-to-face. Soon, she saw three soldiers and the police captain walking toward her cell. Perhaps they were not coming for her after all. But she had not heard any other prisoners on this hall in a week or more.

  “Hinei he,” Here she is, the police captain said. He took the heavy ring of keys from his belt, and they jangled menacingly as he located the right one. He opened the door and stood aside to let the soldiers do their will. They strode through the gate, filling the tiny space. Two of them aimed their guns at her heart, their fingers poised near the triggers. Were they going to execute her right here, without even a trial? Israel did not have the death penalty, but it carried out plenty of executions.

  She stood straight and as tall as she could make herself, looking into their faces. If they were going to kill her, let their soulless eyes be the last things she saw.

  The third soldier, the one whose gun was still slung carelessly over his shoulder, picked up her tote bag.

  “Don’t handle Captain Mustafa,” she said in Arabic.

  He turned to look at her, quizzically. “Shelach?” Yours?

  A ridiculous question not requiring an answer. Whatever he was going to do with it, he would do whether she answered or not.

  “Tekhase et ha’einayim shela.” Something about her eyes. She had been studying the Hebrew book, but she had not gotten to “Lekhasot.”

  One of the gun-wielding soldiers dropped his gun to his side and took the black scarf from his commander’s extended hand. He tied it tightly around her eyes, making her glasses dig into her face. She heard a rattling of chains and felt steel shackles being fastened around her ankles, and her wrists were bound tightly behind her back, wrenching her arm again. She gritted her teeth and did not let herself cry out.

  They were propelling her somewhere, and she had no choice but to move.

  “Where are you taking me?” she demanded in English.

  “Shut up,” in Hebrew.

  “I have a right to know.” She stopped walking. A yank on her aching arm got her moving again.

  “You have no right to anything.” Wasn’t that a lesson she had learned thoroughly by now?

  “Do you want me to hit her?” one of the other soldiers asked. She didn’t understand the answer, but the way they laughed sent shudders through her body.

  They walked rapidly for what seemed like a kilometer, and then they were opening doors and pushing her into a jeep. Two of them piled in nearly on top of her. The commander said something to a fourth man who must have been waiting in the driver’s seat, and then the doors slammed, and the vehicle leapt forward. She concentrated on breathing. Wherever they were taking her, it couldn’t be worse than where she was coming from. At least, she didn’t think it could. Her friend Samia, who had been imprisoned during the First Intifada, had been in a big prison camp in the desert, open to the elements, boiling in the summer, wet and freezing in the winter. If they were taking her to a prison camp, at least there would be other women there. Rania would gladly accept physical discomfort to have companionship.

  They were stopping now. She tried to recall how long they had been driving. It didn’t seem like very long, but her sense of time was all off. They certainly were not in the desert, which was four hours away. Someone opened her door and yanked her out. She hit her head on the way out.

  “Hey, be more careful,” she said.

  “Shut up.” The commander didn’t seem to have a big vocabulary.

  “Do you want me to hit you?” asked the soldier who was now manipulating her cuffs. She knew better than to answer a rhetori
cal question.

  He unlocked the cuffs holding her arms behind her back. She stretched them gingerly. He was kneeling in front of her now, taking off the shackles. She so wished she could kick him in the head, but she couldn’t take another beating—yet. In the distance, a donkey brayed. The air was cool and smelled fresh. She had not been outside for over a month. She smelled rosemary, sage, and burning wood. The ground was soft under her feet. It smelled like home.

  “Tash’iri et ha’einayim shelakh mekhusot l’od khamesh dakot!” the commander’s voice said. She understood “eyes” and “five minutes.” The jeep’s engine revved with a mighty din and something flew past her head. The jeep swooshed by and was gone. She tore the blindfold from her face.

  The first things she saw were her clothes and toiletries, strewn around like snow on the brush. The second was that she was standing in a garbage dump. She knew exactly where she was and wondered if the soldiers had planned this little bit of irony. This was the exact spot where she had found Nadya Kim’s body ten months ago, beginning the saga that would land her in prison. The twin minarets of Azzawiya and Mas’ha loomed above her to the left and right. It was mid-evening. A half moon hung low over the horizon.

  Garbage had never smelled so sweet to her. She picked her way through Styrofoam cups, half-crushed furniture, and long-abandoned car doors. Some of her clothing had landed in the pools of sludge that flowed down from the hillside settlements of Elkana and Sha’arei Tikva. She left those where they were, to end their days in this de facto landfill, but those that had fallen in the dirt and beneath the scrawny olive trees, she gathered up and put back into the empty bag, which had landed in a ditch. Even the Hebrew textbook was there, spread open on a fallen olive branch. She debated for a minute then put it in the bag. Fortunately, the bag had a shoulder strap. She swung it over her left shoulder and climbed the embankment. Using the spring fires as her guide, she set off toward Mas’ha.

  Um Bassam was sitting in Rania’s favorite chair. The leftovers of a Friday meal, mansaf with fresh lamb, bread, salad, olives, and date cookies, still adorned the plastic mat on the floor. Khaled picked up a cookie, and his father wagged a finger at him.