Rania placed the little brass coffee pot on the flame, resting one hand on the long handle so she could snatch it up before it boiled over. Her mouth tingled in anticipation as she inhaled the cardamom-laced steam.

"The boss wants you," said Abdelhakim at her elbow. The man must wear sheepskin soles, he crept up on her so silently. His cherubic good looks were spoiled by a permanent smirk.

Rania reached for the knob to quench the flame, but he held out a hand to stop her. He grasped the pot's handle as she let it go, taking care that their hands did not touch. She tried not to let the thought of him drinking her coffee gnaw at her, as she went into the captain's office.

"There is a situation in Azzawiya," Captain Mustafa said. His roly-poly frame spilled out of his overstuffed leather chair.

"What kind of situation?" asked Rania.

"One requiring great tact."

Rania knew the captain well enough to take this as a warning, not a compliment. She was not known for her tact.

Captain Mustafa cleared his throat. Suddenly self-conscious, Rania removed her head scarf. The men were still learning to accept her in this job. Traditionally, women were nurses, engineers and teachers, more recently a few were doctors. Women as police detectives was a new concept. Wearing the hijab made the men she worked with feel like they were talking to one of their sisters or cousins; taking it off made it possible for them to treat her like a colleague. To her it was not important. Sometimes she told her friends, "I think more clearly without something between my brain and the sun," but in fact she felt the same, whether she was wearing it or not.

"A car is abandoned on top of the bridge," Captain Mustafa said.

"A Palestinian car?"

"Yellow plates," he answered.

An Israeli car on an Israeli road. Why should the Palestinian police care about that?

"The Yahud say that the car is stolen," her boss continued. "The jesh have closed the road under the bridge and no one can pass on foot or by car."

Rania understood now why she was being sent on this errand. Mas'ha was her adopted home, her husband's village. If the Israeli army had closed the road between Mas'ha and Azzawiya, it would be necessary to find another way to approach, and she knew the land. She would know many of the people waiting to pass the roadblock and would have a plausible excuse for being there. A woman could surreptitiously gather information, while a Palestinian man moving around an army roadblock asking questions would not last long. The captain hoped she could find out who did what with that stolen car before the army did. She would deliver, if it killed her.

She tied the scarf around her hair again, grabbed her purse and removed a bag of supplies from her desk drawer.

"Tread lightly," Captain Mustafa called after her.

Rania didn't bristle at the caution. It was his job to remind her of things she was likely to forget. On the other hand, she was unlikely to heed his advice.

* * *

She walked out into the street, squinting in the bright spring sunlight. She wondered if she had time to run into the shop for a coffee. Every night, she told herself she would get up early enough to make herself a cup. But every morning when her alarm rang at half past five, she shut it off and did not get up until six. By then she just had time to get Khaled up and ready for school before she had to leave. Since the Israelis put up the roadblocks, she often suggested to Bassam that they rent a little house in Salfit City so she could walk to work. She would love to be away from her mother-in-law's prying eyes, but Bassam did not want to leave his village. He liked being the center of his mother's universe.

She spied a collective taxi, a seven-seat orange Mercedes, at the corner, so she gave up on the coffee and dashed to the car. Two men sat silently in the middle seat, one reading a newspaper, the other talking on his mobile. The one on the phone scooched forward so she could climb awkwardly into the back, gathering her jilbab in one hand to ensure she didn't show anything improper. The fiftyish driver stood next to the open front door, smoking and joking with a friend.

"I am in a hurry," she called out the window. "I can pay the rest of the fares." It could take ten minutes or more to fill the three empty seats. She couldn't afford to wait that long. At least, she didn't want to.

"No problem," the driver said. He ground out the cigarette on the side of the car and climbed into the front seat.

The drive was one of her favorites in Palestine, giving a spectacular view of beautifully groomed olive terraces, the stately buildings of the city visible in the distance. The best thing about the view of the hills was that there were no Israeli settlements in sight. For those few kilometers, which took about twenty minutes to pass, she could almost believe that Palestine was as it had always been.

Today, she was too nervous to enjoy the drive. She wanted to justify her boss's confidence in her by finding something to keep him one step ahead of the Israelis. But she hated working so close to home. Mas'ha, where she lived, and neighboring Azzawiya were small villages with a lot of inbreeding. If anyone from Bassam's family were involved in shady activities, she could end up handing someone a weapon against her husband. His family, in turn, would use that against her, to prove once more that she was a bad wife and mother, that she should be home taking care of Khaled and making more babies to work in their olive groves and two dry goods stores.

Eventually, this argument would lead her to make the point no one wanted to hear — that with the Wall enclosing Mas'ha from both sides, their olive groves would soon be theirs no longer, and no one would be able to come from the nearby villages to shop at their stores. When that happened, her income from the police might stand between her family and starvation, and it could be an advantage to have fewer mouths to feed.

The road was thankfully free of the flying checkpoints that dotted the roads at commute hours. She changed to a private cab at the first roadblock and in fifteen minutes, the bridge loomed before her.

Azzawiya Bridge was really an overpass, where the new Israeli highway ran on top of the old Palestinian road. Normally taxi drivers lined the road under the bridge, waiting to ferry people back and forth between Deir Balut checkpoint and Biddia roadblock. Today, though, a row of medium-sizedstones fifty meters in front blocked the entrance. Rania wondered what good the boulders would do, if the four jeeps and two Hummers under the bridge did not deter someone from trying to drive through. Eight soldiers patrolled the dark underpass, four facing in each direction. All of them caressed the triggers of their M-16s.

Rania's driver stopped a respectful distance from the command center, where the paved road gave way to a dirt track. The track went both ways around a mound of old tires and car parts, as if people whose cars were damaged by the jutting stones simply ripped off the offending part and drove their crippled cars on until they stopped running altogether.

She paid the driver and walked toward the dozens of taxis and vans jammed together pell-mell, waiting to cross the roadblock. Men sat on the hoods and stood in clusters, smoking and craning their necks for a better view. A young boy...