The Fourth Assassin

subway line altogether and you’d have come up much closer to the jail. Anyway, you ought to take a bus now.”

Omar Yussef resented the old man for pointing out his mistake. “I think we’ll walk.”

The man gave Omar Yussef a doubtful look. “If you don’t get tired from the long walk, you’re certainly going to freeze. You ought to have a hat. This isn’t the Naqab desert, you know.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Khamis Zeydan said, patting the warm cap on his own head.

“I’ll buy a hat then,” Omar Yussef said, impatiently. “Over there.”

Across Fourth Avenue, they came to a stall hung with keffiyas, baseball caps, and woolen hats. The vendor stood beside it, leaning against the wall of a red-brick Gothic building that housed a mosque, his hands so deep in the pockets of his thick quilted coat that his elbows were locked.

“Take this one,” Khamis Zeydan said, pointing at a woolen cap emblazoned with a white skull and crossbones. “That’s your style. It ought to appeal to your interest in history.”

Omar Yussef felt his cheeks reddening with irritation, but his scalp was numb with cold. Some of the hats bore only a few colored letters, so he reached out for the first one that came to hand and gave the vendor three dollars. When he pulled the hat over his head, the lancing pain of the freezing wind on his baldness left him, and he sighed with relief.

Khamis Zeydan read the letters on the hat. “NYPD? The design’s not quite up to your usual standard of elegance, but it might get us into the Detention Complex a little quicker.”

Beyond the mosque, they passed a row of Arab mini-markets stocked with buckets of sumac and cardamom, the price of halal meat advertised in the windows. Outside a store selling greeting cards and bumper stickers, Khamis Zeydan stopped to read aloud: “Hatred is not a family value-Koran 49:13. The Koran says that?”

“In that verse, Allah says he ‘made you into nations and tribes, so that you might get to know each other,’” Omar Yussef said.

“So this is the dumb American version?”

“What do you want from them? It’s only a bumper sticker.” Omar Yussef tried to pick up their pace. “Did you ever meet Nizar, may Allah have mercy upon him?”

Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “Only briefly. He was out walking with Ala near the Nativity Church. They were with those other two boys who were always close to them.”

“The other members of The Assassins.”

The police chief grimaced. “I don’t know why you encouraged them with that name.”

“It was just a historical interest, a little bit of fun.”

“I don’t see that there’s so much fun to be found in a bunch of medieval drug addicts.”

“History was never your strong subject when we were together at university, Abu Adel.”

“Screw your sister, schoolteacher. I majored in women and whisky.”

“With a minor in cursing. The Assassins weren’t drug addicts. Their leaders used the promise of Paradise to train fanatical killers.”

“So not drug addicts, but insane murderers.”

“Their leaders weren’t insane. They were ruthless and manipulative. They used the men they sent on suicidal missions to eliminate political enemies and to protect their particular strain of Islam.”

Khamis Zeydan picked at his back teeth. “Even so, a bunch of kids named ‘The Assassins’ is the kind of thing people take seriously in the Middle East. If the Israelis had found out there was a group with that name in Bethlehem, they’d probably have assassinated them.”

Omar Yussef took a sharp breath. Could that be what happened to Nizar? he wondered. People believed it was the Mossad that killed Nizar’s father, after all.

“They were very important to me, all those boys,” he muttered.

“I don’t know why you get so close to your pupils. Emotional involvement only causes trouble.”

“There you see the difference between a teacher and a professional killer.”

Khamis Zeydan clicked his tongue.

Omar Yussef hurried across Third Avenue, stepping aside for a pair of stout Arab women, their mendils tight beneath their plump chins. “Maybe you knew Nizar’s father. He was a PLO guy back when you were running around on missions for the Old Man.”

Khamis Zeydan cupped his hands to light another cigarette. “Yeah, I knew Fayez.”

“What was he like?”

“Arrogance is a weed that mostly grows on a dunghill, as they say. The PLO was a real dunghill, and that’s how all those assholes were-arrogant as cockerels, every one of them.” The police chief hunched his shoulders against the wind. “Fayez ran off to study in Baghdad and joined the PLO there. He prospered on the dunghill. He had his own little commando group within the PLO for a while and used to write heroic essays about their exploits against the Israelis.”

“I’ve read some of his political essays. I seem to remember they were mainly critiques of the Arab nations.”

Khamis Zeydan sneered. “When he merged his fighting unit with the main PLO forces, the Old Man rewarded him by making him a special ambassador.”

“What did that involve?”

They crossed another side street. “We’re being followed,” Khamis Zeydan said.

Omar Yussef spun around in surprise, but his friend grabbed his arm and pulled him along.

“A man in a black coat.”

“Where?” Omar Yussef turned his head.

“Stop it. If he knows we’ve seen him, it might force his hand.”

“Force his-You mean, he might try to-”

“Steal your new hat.” Khamis Zeydan took Omar Yussef’s arm more casually, linking their elbows so that he could watch over his shoulder.

“Can you see him?” Omar Yussef whispered.

“His face is covered by a scarf.” Khamis Zeydan’s eyes glittered with intensity.

“It’s him, isn’t it? The one I saw at the apartment, and I’m sure he followed me back to the hotel, too.”

“Well, he’s gone now. He went down the side street.”

“Should we follow him?”

Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “He might be armed.”

“We have to get away.”

“I don’t expect he’ll follow us into the prison. Keep walking.”

The police chief seemed to enjoy exercising his old skills from his time as an undercover operative. He became expansive. “You asked about the special ambassador? It sounds like a bullshit title, but the Old Man actually sent Fayez on secret diplomatic missions. He stationed him here in New York for a while.”

Omar Yussef remembered the lieutenant holding the plastic evidence bag with the dead boy’s passport. “But Nizar wasn’t born in exile.”

“Fayez sent his wife to his parents in Bethlehem whenever she was pregnant, so that the kids would be real Palestinians, as he saw it, born on the land. That’s why she was able to get permits from the Israelis to live there with them, after the- when Fayez died.”

Khamis Zeydan pulled Omar Yussef to a halt in front of the display window of a lingerie store.

“What’re you doing?”

A skinny mannequin in high heels and thigh-high stockings pushed her lacy ass toward the two men. Khamis Zeydan squinted into the glass. “I’m checking to see if there’s anyone across the street,” he said.

Omar Yussef looked at the figures reflected in the window. A line of people waited at a bus stop with an appearance of innocent boredom.

“How did Fayez die?” he asked.

“Assassinated.”

“He really was murdered?”

“You sound shocked. Come on, you’re a history teacher. Without assassination, history would be a dull subject. Murder is your business.”