The Butcher's Theatre (69 page)

An angry, isolated woman, thought Daniel, no friends, no family. Stripped of the security of marriage, she’d have been as helpless as Fatma, as rootless as Juliet.

Picking off the weak ones.

But where had the herd grazed?

“Let’s go back to Monday,” said Daoud. “The last time you saw her, what time was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Approximately.”

“In the morning.”

“Early in the morning?”

Barakat tapped his tooth with a fingernail and thought. “I left for work at eight. She was still there …” The sentence died in his throat. All at once he was crying again, convulsively.

“She was still there what, Abdin?”

“Oh, oh, Allah help me! I didn’t know. Had I known, I never…”

“What was she doing when you left for work?” Daoud pressed softly but insistently.

Barakat kept crying. Daoud took hold of his shoulders, shook him gently.

“Come, come.”

Barakat quieted.

“Now, tell me what she was doing the last time you saw her, Abdin.”

Barakat muttered something unintelligible.

Daoud leaned closer. “What’s that?”

“She was … Oh, merciful Allah! She was cleaning up!”

“Cleaning what up, Abdin?”

Sobs.

“The kitchen. My dishes. My breakfast dishes.”

After that. Barakat became withdrawn again, more mannequin than man. Answering Daoud’s questions but perfunctorily, employing grunts, shrugs, nods, and shakes of the head whenever they could substitute for words, muttered monosyllables when speech was necessary. Pulling the information out of him was a frustrating process, but Daoud never flagged, taking the husband over the same territory time and time again, returning eventually to the issue that had driven a wedge between him and Shahin.

“Did she ever take steps to correct her defect?” Phrasing it so that all the responsibility rested on the woman’s shoulders.

Nod.

“What kind of steps?”

“Prayer.”

“She prayed, herself?”

Nod.

“Where?”

“Al Aqsa.”

“Did others pray for her as well?”

Nod.

“Who?”

“My father petitioned the waqf. They appointed righteous old men.”

“To pray for Shahin?”

Nod. “And …”

“And what?”

Barakat started to cry again.

“What is it, Abdin?”

“I—prayed for her too. I recited every surah in the Quran in one long night. I chanted the zikr until I fainted. Allah shut his ears to me. I am unworthy.”

“It was a strong djinn,” said Daoud. Playing his part well, thought Daniel. He knew what Christians thought of Muslim spirits.

Barakat hung his head.

Daoud looked at his watch. “More water, Abdin? Or something to eat?’

Shake of the head.

“Did Shahin ever consult a doctor?”

Nod.

“Which doctor?”

“A herbalist.”

“When?”

“A year ago.”

“Not more recently?”

Shake of the head.

“What’s the herbalist’s name?”

“Professor Mehdi.”

“The Professor Mehdi on Ibn Sina Street?”

Nod.

Daoud frowned, as did Daniel, behind the glass. Mehdi was a quack and illegal abortionist who’d been busted several times for fraud and released when the magistrates took seriously his lawyer’s claims of ethnic harassment.

“What did Professor Mehdi advise?”

Shrug.

“You don’t know?”

Shake of the head.

“She never told you?”

Barakat started to throw up his hands, got midway to his shoulders, and let them drop. “He took my money—it didn’t work. What was the use?”

“Did she see a medical doctor?”

Nod.

“After she saw Professor Mehdi or before?”

“After.”

“When?”

“Last month, then later.”

“When later?”

“Before she …” Barakat chewed his lip.

“Before she left?”

Nod.

“When before she left?”

“Sunday.”

“She saw this doctor the day before she left?”

Nod.

“Was she going for treatment?”

Barakat shrugged.

“What was the purpose of her appointment?”

Tension, then a shrug.

Daoud tensed also, looked ready to throttle Barakat. Tapping the table with his fingertips, he sat back, forcing a reassuring smile onto his face.

“She saw this doctor the day before she left, but you don’t know for what.”

Nod.

“What was the doctor’s name?”

“Don’t know.”

“Didn’t you pay his bill?”

Shake of the head.

“Who paid the doctor, Abdin?”

“No one.”

“The doctor saw Shahin for free’.

Nod.

“As a favor?”

Shake of the head.

“Why, then?”

“A U.N. doctor—she had a refugee card. They saw her for free.”

Daoud edged his chair closer to Barakat’s.

“Where is this U.N. doctor’s office?”

“Not an office. A hospital.”

“Which hospital, Abdin?”

There was an edge in the detective’s voice and Barakat heard it clearly. He pressed himself against his chair, shrinking back from Daoud. Wearing an injured look that said I’m doing the best I can.

“Which hospital?” Daoud said loudly. Getting to his feet and standing over Barakat, abandoning any pretense of patience.

“The big pink one,” said Barakat, hastily. “The big pink one atop Scopus.”

Patients began arriving at the Amelia Catherine at nine-thirty, the first ones a ragtag bunch of men who’d made the walk from the city below. Zia Hajab could have started processing them right then, but he made them wait, milling around the arched entry to compound, while he sat in his chair sipping sweet iced tea and wiping his forehead.

This kind of heat, no one was going to rush him.

The waiting men felt the heat, too, shuffling to avoid baking, grimacing and fingering their worry beads. Most of them bore obvious stigmata of disease or disability: bandaged and splinted limbs, sutured wounds, eye infections, skin eruptions. A few looked healthy to Hajab, probably malingerers out for pills they could resell—with what they were paying, pure profit.

One of them lifted his robe and urinated against the wall. A couple of others began grumbling. The watchman ignored them, took a deep breath and another sip of the cool liquid.

What they were paying, they could wait.

Only ten o’clock and already the heat was reaching deep inside Hajab, igniting his bowels. He fanned himself with a newspaper, peered into the tea glass. There was a lump of ice floating on the top. He tilted the glass so that the ice rested against his teeth. Enjoyed the sensation of chill, then nibbled a piece loose and let it rest upon his tongue for a while.

He turned at the sound of a diesel engine. A UNRWA panel truck—the one from Nablus—pulled up in front of the hospital and stopped. The driver got out and loosened the tailgate, disgorging twenty or thirty men who limped down and joined the grumblers from the city. The groups merged into one restless crowd; the grumbling grew louder.

Hajab picked his clipboard off the ground, got up, and stood before them. A sorry-looking bunch.

“When may we enter, sir?” asked a toothless old man.

Hajab silenced him with a look.

“Why the wait?” piped up another. Younger, with an impudent face and runny, crusted eyes. “We’ve come all the way from Nablus. We need to see the doctor.”

Hajab held out his palm and inspected the clipboard. Seventy patients scheduled for Saturday Men’s Clinic, not counting those who walked in without appointments, or tried to be seen with expired refugee cards or no cards at all. A busy Saturday made worse by the heat, but not as bad as Thursdays, when the women came—droves of them, three times as many as the men. Women were weak-spirited, crying Disaster! at the smallest infirmity. Screeching and chattering like magpies until by the end of the day, Hajab’s head was ready to burst.

“Come on, let us in,” said the one with the bad eyes. “We have our rights.”

“Patience,” said Hajab, pretending to peruse the clipboard. He’d watched Mr. Baldwin, knew a proper administrator had to show who was in charge.

A man leaning on a cane sat down on the ground. Another patient looked at him and said, “Sehhetak bel donya”—“without health, nothing really matters”—to a chorus of nods.

“Bad enough to be sick,” said Runny Eyes, “without being demeaned by pencil pushers.”

A murmur of assent rose from the crowd. Runny Eyes scratched his rear and started to say something else.

“All right,” said Hajab, hitching up his trousers and pulling out his pen. “Have your cards ready.”

Just as he finished admitting the first bunch, a second truck—the one from Hebron—struggled up the road from the southeast. The engine on this one had an unhealthy stutter—the gears sounded worn, probably plenty else in need of repair. He would have loved to have a go at it, show what he could do with a wrench and screwdriver, but those days were gone. Al maktoub.

The Hebron truck was having trouble getting over the peak of Scopus. As it lurched and bucked, a white Subaru

two-door came cruising by from the opposite direction—from the campus of the Jews’ university. The Subaru stopped, rolled several meters, and came to a halt directly across the road from the Amelia Catherine. Probably a gawker, thought Hajab, noticing the rental plates and the yellow Hertz sticker on the rear window.

The door of the Subaru opened and a big guy in a dark suit got out and started walking toward the Amelia Catherine. The sun bounced off his chest and reflected something shiny. Cameras—definitely a gawker—two of them, hanging from long straps. From where Hajab sat they looked expensive—big black-and-chrome jobs with those oversized lenses that stuck out like noses.

The gawker stopped in the middle of the road, oblivious to the approaching truck despite all the nose it was making. He uncovered the lens of one of the cameras, raised the machine to his eyes, and started shooting pictures of the hospital.

Hajab frowned. That kind of thing just wouldn’t do. Not without some sort of payment. His commission.

He pushed himself out of his chair, wiped his mouth, and took a step forward, stopped at the sight of the Hebron truck coming over the peak and headed straight for the guy with the cameras, who just kept clicking away—what was he, deaf?

The driver of the truck saw him late, slammed on the brakes, which squealed like scared goats—another job for an expert mechanic—then leaned on his horn. The guy with the cameras looked up, waved hello like some kind of mental defective, and stumbled out of the way. The driver honked again, just for emphasis. The guy with the camera bowed and trotted across the road. Headed right for Hajab’s chair.

As he got close, Hajab saw he was a Japanese. Very big and broad for one of them, but Japanese just the same, with the goofy tourist look they all had: ill-fitting suit, wide smile, thick-lensed eyeglasses, the hair all slicked down with grease. The cameras hanging on him like body parts—Japanese babies were probably born with cameras attached to them.

They were the best, the Japanese. Rich, every one of them, and gullible—easy to convince that the commission was mandatory. Hajab had posed for a group of them last

month, gotten five dollars from each one, money he still had in a coffee can under his bed in Ramallah. His own bed.

“No pictures,” he said sternly, in English.

The Japanese smiled and bowed, pointed his camera at the rose garden beyond the arch, snapped a picture, then swung the lens directly in line with the front door.

“No, no, you can’t take pictures here,” said the watchman, stepping between the Japanese and the door and wagging his finger in the big yellow face. The Japanese smiled wider, uncomprehending. Hajab searched his memory for English words, retrieved one Mr. Baldwin had taught him: “Forbidden!”

The Japanese made an O with his mouth, nodded his head several times, and bowed. Refocusing his camera—a Nikon; both of then were Nikons—on Hajab. The Nikon clicked and whirred.

Hajab started to say something, was distracted for a moment by the rattle of the Hebron truck’s tailgate chains, the slamming of the gate on the asphalt. The Japanese ignored the noise, kept shooting Hajab’s portrait.

“No, no.” Hajab shook his head.

The Japanese stared at him. Put the first camera down and picked up the second. Behind him the Hebron truck drove away.

“No,” Hajab repeated. “Forbidden.”

The Japanese smiled, bowed, started pressing the second camera’s shutter.

Idiot. Maybe “no” meant yes in his language—though the ones last month had understood. Maybe this one was just being obstinate.

Too big to intimidate, Hajab decided. The best he could do was disrupt the photographs, follow up with a little pantomime using his wallet.

He told the idiot: “U.N. say, must pay for pictures,” put his hand in his pocket, was prevented from proceeding by the swarm of Hebron patients hobbling their way to the entry.

Aggressive bunch, they pushed against him, tried to get past him without showing their cards. Typical Hebron animals. Whenever they were around, it meant trouble.

“Wait,” said Hajab, holding out his palm.

The Hebron patients pressed forward anyway, surrounding the big Japanese and beginning to stare him with a mixture of curiosity and distrust as he kept taking pictures.

“Cards,” announced Hajab, spreading his arms to prevent any of them from getting through. “You must show cards! The doctors won’t see you without them.”

“He saw me last month,” said a man. “Said the card wasn’t necessary.”

“Well, it’s necessary now.” Hajab turned to the Japanese and grabbed hold of his arm, which felt huge under the suit sleeve: “Stop that, you. No pictures.”

“Let the man take his pictures,” said a man with a bandaged jaw and swollen lips, the words coming out slurred. He grinned at the Japanese, said in Arabic: “Take my picture, yellow brother.”

The Hebron ruffians laughed.

“And mine.”

“Mine, too, I want to be a movie star!”

The Japanese reacted to the shouts and smiles by snapping his shutter.