The Fourth Assassin

spot dappled his olive skin. He felt aged and frail. His body was decaying-but still it lived. He gasped, thinking that his son might never grow old.

When he turned off the water, he heard footsteps on the stairs. He went into the living room, fearing that the man in the black coat had returned. But the steps were casual and loud. It must be the police, he thought. Looking down at his brown trousers, he wondered if the bloodstains at the knees were obvious. He became suddenly afraid that he might be blamed for the murder. His hands may have left blood on his face before he washed them, so he removed his glasses and rubbed at his brow with the cuff of his windbreaker.

He put his spectacles back on and saw Ala in the doorway.

“Dad, peace be upon you.” The boy smiled, opened his arms, and approached Omar Yussef. The immobility of his father’s face stopped him. “What’s that on your trousers, Dad?”

“My boy, you’re alive.” Omar Yussef stroked the light curls of Ala’s black hair and felt the thin bristles of his mustache. At five feet seven, Ala was only an inch taller than his father, but he seemed to tower over the nervous, hunched man before him.

“Thanks be to Allah.” Ala grasped his father’s elbows and kissed his cheeks. “But what do you mean? Are you making a joke? Some parts of Brooklyn are dangerous, but Bay Ridge isn’t such a bad neighborhood.”

“My son, there’s a body in your bedroom.”

Ala gripped Omar Yussef’s arms harder. “What? Dad, be serious. What’s happening?”

Omar Yussef gestured toward his son’s bedroom and lowered his head. The young man stepped into his room.

“May Allah have mercy upon him,” Ala mumbled. “It’s Nizar.”

“My son, I thought it might be you.” Omar Yussef shuddered as he came to the doorway.

“That shirt.” Ala’s voice, edged with tears, broke. “Those shoes, he was very proud of them. He called them his ‘Armani boots.’ They’re expensive. It’s Nizar.” He took Omar Yussef’s hand, still pink and warm from the scrubbing, squeezed it with tremulous fingers, then turned back to his dead friend with glassy eyes.

Omar Yussef let himself fall to the sofa and tried to find a way to sit that would hide the blood on his trousers. He covered his lap with a cushion. It was embroidered red on black with the geometric tribal pattern customary in Bethlehem. He ran his forefinger over the thick stitching and wondered if Maryam had made it for her son. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize his wife, but Nizar’s face came to him instead. My old pupil, he thought. My dear boy.

Ala came out of the bedroom. The tears and the trembling were gone. His face was stern. Omar Yussef thought he detected pity and hate in his son’s narrowed, hazel eyes.

“The son of a whore,” the boy said. “Rashid. He finally did it. He killed Nizar.”

“No, he was his best friend.”

Ala shoved the front door hard. While its slam still echoed, he shouted, “Things have changed since we were all together at the Freres School, Dad.”

“Even so, murder? What could’ve driven Rashid to something like that?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I won’t believe it. You can’t be sure of a thing like that.”

Ala turned to the window, pulled back a corner of the net curtain, and looked down at the gray street. His jaw stiffened, and his voice was sharp when he spoke. “He made it as clear as he could.”

“What do you mean?”

The young man rubbed the thin curtain between his fingers. “The Veiled Man.”

“What?”

Ala’s eyes stayed on the window, furious. “That bit of material placed over the pillow, where Nizar’s head would’ve been. It’s a veil. Like the veil worn by a woman.”

“But a veiled man?”

“You know as well as I do, Dad. You taught us about it in history class.”

“The veil worn in the messianic stories by the traitorous man, the enemy of the Mahdi.”

“That’s it. When our messiah, the Mahdi, comes, the man who opposes him is supposed to wear a veil, and the Mahdi will battle him and kill him.”

A siren sounded nearby.

“What does that have to do with Rashid?” Omar Yussef asked.

Ala shook his head. “Rashid and Nizar-”

The siren drew closer.

“Little Palestine isn’t as I’ve led you to believe, Dad,” Ala said. “America is very harsh. No one cares about my computer degree from Bethlehem University. I couldn’t find a decent job. It’s been the same for Rashid and Nizar. We’re just another gang of Arabs to the Americans, terrorists or supporters of terrorism, anti-American bigots who deserve bigoted treatment in return.” He slapped his hands against his hips and let his shoulders drop. “I’m not a programmer. I work as a computer salesman in a shop run by another Palestinian guy. To make ends meet, I drive a cab a few nights a week. Rashid and Nizar drive for the same company. I share this apartment with them because I can’t afford a place of my own.”

“What does that have to do with this? How does that prove that Rashid killed Nizar?”

“I’ve been here with them, close to them. I know how difficult life was for them here in America, and I know what went on between them.”

“Which is what?”

Ala rubbed his hand across his eyes and let the curtain drop over the window. “The police are here,” he said.

Chapter 3

The crime-scene technicians called out details about the body, its position and condition, its distance from the objects surrounding it. Their vowels were nasal and their tongues slapped distorted consonants into their front teeth, so that it was hard for Omar Yussef to understand them. Slumped in the corner of the couch, he wondered how he might explain to them why the dead boy had fled Bethlehem for Brooklyn. His hometown seemed distant and would surely be alien to these detectives. He feared they might misinterpret whatever he said for the worse, as those confronted by foreign situations usually do.

At the other end of the couch, Ala no longer appeared to be listening to the police. He stared at the scratches on the floorboards with his jaw clamped angrily. What is it that he knows? Omar Yussef thought. How can he be so sure this killing was the work of his roommate? He fought a resentful urge to lash out at someone for causing this disturbance to his visit. Despite himself, he blurted out, “Ala, what’ve you become involved in?” He instantly wanted to apologize, but Ala’s eyes were bitter and forbidding.

Omar Yussef tugged at his spectacles and sighed. “Do you remember,” he asked, “how Nizar used to tease Father Michel at the Freres School? How he used to imitate his accented Arabic?”

Ala touched his fingertips to his brow, covering his face and refusing to engage his father. But when Omar Yussef mimicked the shrug and pout of the Catholic priest who had taught the boy French as a teenager, his son giggled and joined in. “The Father used to say, ‘My boy, if I wished to offend you, I would call you a heretical Protestant, but instead I will stick to the facts and say you are merely a stupid child, eh?’ Nizar impersonated him perfectly.”

“Nizar was always the funniest boy.” Omar Yussef’s gaze was distant, lost in enchanted memories.

“When Father Michel was sick one time, Nizar took him a pot of his mother’s mouloukhiyeh to warm him,” Ala said.

“Yes, his mockery was always loving.”

Their laughter subsided, both of them drifting through their reminiscences of the man whose body lay in the next room.

A short, dark-skinned woman with straight black hair spraying across her narrow shoulders hurried through