The Fourth Assassin

A group of teenaged boys stopped to giggle before the store window.

“Was it the Mossad?” Omar Yussef glanced over his shoulder, but Khamis Zeydan grabbed him and led him along the sidewalk. “Did they kill Fayez?”

Khamis Zeydan threw his cigarette into the gutter and retched a wet cough from the bottom of his lungs.

“That’s what people said in Bethlehem. Is it true?”

“Sure, the Mossad,” Khamis Zeydan snorted.

The bitterness in his friend’s voice made Omar Yussef suspicious. “Tell me?”

“While he was in New York, Fayez made contact with a couple of prominent Jews. They introduced him to some left-wing Israeli politicians. Together they came up with a peace plan.”

“I don’t understand. The Mossad killed him to cut off those peace talks?”

Khamis Zeydan made his eyes wide and sarcastic. “Yes, and they also blew up the Twin Towers so that the U.S. would invade Iraq. But they called all the Jews who worked in the buildings first and told them to stay home that day. Oh, and they also exported special chewing gum to Egypt to make all the single men unbearably horny and, thus, destroy Arab morality. Those Israelis have put together quite an amazing organization, you know.”

“So who killed him, if it wasn’t the Mossad?” Omar Yussef shivered and pulled up the collar of his windbreaker.

“We Arabs managed to knock off quite a few of our own during that time.” Khamis Zeydan watched a massive kebab turning on a spit in the window of a restaurant, dribbling fat. “You didn’t have to step much out of line to be dead meat.”

“You yourself-” Omar Yussef halted when Khamis Zeydan turned his glare upon him.

“I myself?”

“Carried out a few such missions. Why are you looking at me like that? Well, you did, didn’t you?”

The police chief stared along the avenue with a malevolent concentration. “It’s going to rain, and it’s already so fucking cold,” he said.

“Did Fayez have the approval of the Old Man for his peace talks?”

“The Old Man never approved anything until it was done. That way he could take credit for it if it succeeded and be absolved of blame for any failure.”

“Did the Old Man rub out Nizar’s father?”

“Don’t you have enough to worry about, with your son in jail?”

“All this could be important to my son’s case.” Omar Yussef spoke quickly. “If Nizar’s father was killed by the Old Man or by another PLO faction or, I don’t know, by the government of some Arab country, maybe the same people wanted Nizar dead. Maybe it was they who cut off his head.”

“Maybe this time it was the Mossad.”

Omar Yussef cursed and marched ahead. His thighs ached with fatigue. He damned the Arab man at the subway station for having recognized that he was too weak to make this walk in comfort. He paused for breath, leaning against a battered yellow newspaper-vending box, then stepped out to cross the street.

He heard the splashing first, then the heavy, threatening groan of a big engine accelerating. A blue Jeep with tinted windows came through the intersection fast, rushing over the puddles. Instinctively Omar Yussef put one foot back on the curb.

The Jeep veered toward him. Khamis Zeydan grabbed him, throwing him backward. He fell in the snow piled around a lamppost. His head struck the ground with an impact like the kick of a donkey’s hoof.

The Jeep jumped onto the curb, its bumper knocking the newspaper box across the sidewalk. A pile of tabloids spilled into the wind. The Jeep disappeared quickly down the side street. A copy of the Daily News blew into Omar Yussef’s face. He pushed it away. Khamis Zeydan helped him to his feet.

“By Allah, that must’ve been the bastard who was tailing us,” Khamis Zeydan said.

“Did you see him?”

“The windows were too dark.”

A middle-aged black woman in a camel-hair coat came across the side street. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said to Omar Yussef.

“Think again, dear lady,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My friend’s a Palestinian.”

When the police chief laughed, the woman gave him an affronted stare and walked on.

“If you couldn’t see him, how do you know that was the man who was following us?” Omar Yussef felt the back of his head where it had hit the snowy ground. It was wet and tender, but the skin hadn’t broken.

“He was out of sight just long enough to get into his vehicle and line us up.”

“Why does he want to kill me?”

“As far as he knows, you might’ve seen his face at Nizar’s apartment.”

Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Anyone in the crowd on the sidewalk might be tracking him. All the cars thundering through the traffic lights were potential instruments of his death. He covered his face with his hands and felt his pulse jumping behind his eyes.

“My brother,” Khamis Zeydan said quietly, “let’s go to your son.”

The Arab food stores and cafes dwindled as Atlantic Avenue rose into a gentle slope. The Islamic bookstores with pamphlets on Muslim marriage and gold-inlaid copies of the Koran in their windows were replaced by the unsightly offices of bail bondsmen, encased behind bars like their clients. The bondsmen hung gaudy signs above their doors painted with glib slogans, as though temporary release from jail were a purchase no more worthy of deep consideration than that of a slice of pizza.

Across the street, a nine-story tower rose in pink stone. The windows were composites of thick glass bricks molded around a mesh of iron bars that caged the entire building. The branches of the trees along the sidewalk had been cut back to their gray trunks, so that they looked like men with their hands cuffed behind them. The sign above the blacked-out glass in the entrance read: Brooklyn Detention Complex.

Omar Yussef lifted his head, following the bars up through the glass bricks to the top of the jail. His spectacles spotted with water. The rain had started.

Chapter 10

A guard patted Omar Yussef down and ushered him through a chipped metal door painted the soapy blue of swimming-pool tiles. Behind him, the guard found Khamis Zeydan’s cigarettes and took them away. The Bethlehem police chief cursed under his breath and rubbed the back of his prosthetic hand nervously.

“You don’t like being in somebody else’s jail for a change?” Omar Yussef said.

“My station house only has a few cells,” Khamis Zeydan muttered. “It’s not much of a jail. This place is the real thing. You can smell it.”

Omar Yussef inhaled a rough undertone of body odor, clashing with the chemical scent of disinfectant. It bore the disconsolate heaviness of mass sanitation, as though the inmates were bugs or bacilli to be exterminated with industrial acids from a bucket.

A bulky guard awaited them beyond the metal door, his shoulders filling the corridor. Omar Yussef caught a trace of cheap cologne emanating from the guard’s dark blue uniform. He seized upon it to block out the disinfectant, but it came with a hint of the dried sweat it was intended to disguise. He sniffed the French toilet water he always placed on the back of his hand to counter unpleasant odors.

The guard reached for a clipboard passed through the doorway by his colleague. He looked it over with the sleepy eyes of a man who has eaten heavily, and belched. “You’re here to see Sirhan?”

“You’re quite correct, my dear sir,” Omar Yussef said, standing as straight as his little paunch allowed and speaking with a formality born of nervousness.

The guard’s eyes flicked up from the clipboard, as though he thought Omar Yussef were mocking him. “Related to the guy who killed Bobby Kennedy?”

“I see you know your assassins,” Omar Yussef said. “Sirhan Sirhan was from an entirely different clan. I’m sure that the actions of the senator’s killer would be shocking to my son. He’s never been a violent boy.”

The guard rolled his tongue under his bottom lip and turned the clipboard toward Omar Yussef. “Sign here,”