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.