The Fourth Assassin

he was surprised by its light weight. The zipper buzzed up to the end of his nose.

“It’s perfect, ustaz,” the storekeeper said, turning Omar Yussef toward a full-length mirror.

All his life, he had worn the finest clothes, European styles that made him feel as though he were a Parisian or a Milanese, not an inhabitant of a Bethlehem refugee camp. Now he was forced to dress himself in the outlandish garments of another kind of ghetto. “I feel ridiculous,” he said.

Khamis Zeydan pulled the zipper down a few inches. “We didn’t hear what you said. It was too muffled.”

Omar Yussef looked in the mirror. The coat came to his knees, and his hands were lost in the enormous sleeves. He had to admit that he already felt warm. If I do up the zipper and wear the hood, no one will even know it’s me in this coat, he thought. I’ll look like any New Yorker wrapped up against the elements.

When they left the shop, they saw a bulky man in a wide-brimmed hat hurrying along the other side of the road, his arms flailing as he tried to propel himself faster. He noticed Omar Yussef and crossed the street.

“Is it you, ustaz?” Marwan Hammiya came close to Omar Yussef. “May Allah grant you grace, my dear sir.”

Omar Yussef pushed the hood of his new coat off his head and ran a palm across his thin hair. “Greetings, Marwan.”

The Lebanese gripped Omar Yussef’s elbow and drew him toward the curb. He leered with an awkwardness that exposed his crooked lower teeth and gave a brief wave to Khamis Zeydan, indicating that he needed to speak to Omar Yussef alone.

“I’m so happy to have caught up with you, ustaz. You’re going to the police station?”

“With the news of Rania’s alibi for my son.”

Marwan’s pressure on Omar Yussef’s arm grew stronger, as though he intended to drag him in the opposite direction, away from the precinct house. “I followed you because I wished to apologize for the scene in my cafe. Don’t be offended by my Rania. You know how girls can be?”

“It’s nothing.”

“After you left, she calmed down and agreed to my proposition. She consents to Ala.”

“Consents?”

“To resume the engagement.”

Omar Yussef blinked. “I’ll see what he thinks once he’s out of jail. Thanks to her evidence.”

“In good time, ustaz.”

Omar Yussef tried to pull his elbow away, but Marwan held onto it and his leer widened.

“You understand that I have fatherly feelings toward your boy, as we may hope that I will soon be his father- in-law. Fatherly, protective feelings. For that reason, I must say that now may not be the right time to free him, my dear Abu Ramiz.”

“Rania can hardly marry him in jail.”

“Maybe not.” Marwan rubbed his face. “She certainly can’t marry him if he’s dead.”

Omar Yussef ceased to resist the cafe owner’s grip.

“If he leaves the jail, ustaz,” Marwan said, “he may be an easier target.”

“A target for whom?”

Marwan watched Khamis Zeydan smoking a Rothmans under the awning of the clothing store. “I can’t-” He sobbed. “They have their teeth into me. I can’t help Ala any more than this.”

“Who’re they?” Omar Yussef pulled the big man’s collar. “Who?”

“Leave him where he is, ustaz. He’ll make a good husband for my Rania. He’ll look after her when I’m gone, and he’s honest-”

“Gone?”

“-and he isn’t involved in bad things.”

“You mean, not like Nizar?”

“Leave him where he is.”

“I can’t do that.”

Marwan’s sobs had become steady tears. “I’m trying to survive; that’s all,” he said. “I’m not a bad man.”

“Marwan, what is it that Ala knows? Why would anyone want to harm him?”

“He doesn’t know anything. But they don’t know that. It’s possible they believe he knows everything. He could be next.”

“Tell me who they are.”

When Marwan lifted his brown eyes, Omar Yussef knew that the man was in the kind of danger from which there was no escape and that the more he struggled against it, the tighter it bound him. In Bethlehem, he had seen men drawn into collaboration for whom the first transactions with the Israelis had seemed harmless, a way to obtain a travel permit or a hospital bed, only to find that gradually they were sunk into an absolute immorality with no choice but to participate in the deaths of others. Who had that power over Marwan?

“I was the one who discovered Nizar’s body,” Omar Yussef said. “A boy I loved was slaughtered. I have to get the police to free my son so they can concentrate on finding the real killer.”

“You were there, in the apartment?” Marwan said. “Then they’ll be after you, as well.”

Omar Yussef remembered the Jeep rushing at him, mounting the curb, and he shivered inside his new coat. “We’re going to the police station. They’ll protect you. Come with us.”

“Leave the boy in jail, ustaz,” Marwan said. He smiled, hopeless and resigned, like a man facing a math problem he knew to be beyond him. “Please come and talk to me. We will discuss the engagement. May Allah lengthen your life and the life of your son.”

Omar Yussef watched Marwan hunch along the street toward his cafe. Khamis Zeydan flicked his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and smiled through one side of his mouth. “It’s tough to be a legitimate businessman in this city,” he said.

Omar Yussef kicked the butt into the gutter and once again turned in the direction of the police station.

Chapter 13

Omar Yussef mounted the bare staircase to the detectives’ bureau at the 68th Precinct, trudging slowly in his soggy shoes as patrolmen and plainclothes officers hurried past. Breathless from the climb, he waved across the gray metal furniture to Sergeant Hamza Abayat, whose desk was crammed into a corner near a high window, and crossed the room.

Holding a phone to his ear, the Arab detective came halfway to his feet, shook Omar Yussef’s hand, and touched his palm to his heart in the traditional gesture of sincerity. From a chair in front of his battered desk, he picked up a large tub of whey protein with a ludicrously muscled man straining to lift a pair of massive dumbbells on the label and motioned for Omar Yussef to sit.

Next to the desk, Khamis Zeydan rested his foot on a pile of bodybuilding magazines. Omar Yussef glanced at the thick sinews in the tanned, oiled chest of the cover model by his friend’s shoe. Beside the magazines was a pile of community newspapers. He read the main headline on the first tabloid: “NY Youth 2nd in Int’l Koran Contest.” The murder of the Veiled Man will push that off the front page of the Muslim press, he thought.

“I’ll send a uniformed officer along to talk to them, Missus Pierre,” Hamza said. He looked impatiently at the telephone in his hand. “Don’t worry. Thank you for your call.”

He put down the receiver and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “By Allah, these people are crazy,” he said. “May Allah preserve you, ustaz Abu Ramiz. How’re you?”

“Thanks be to Allah, Hamza. This is my friend Abu Adel.”

The sergeant rolled a chair from the next desk toward Khamis Zeydan. “Are you the Abu Adel who’s the