The Fourth Assassin

“What was Nizar like as a boy, ustaz?” Her voice was suddenly clear and free from bitterness, like a child’s.

“I thought you said joy was a present happiness, not a future Paradise or a memory of a good time.”

She smiled through her tears, and Omar Yussef felt the touch of her gaze against his cheek again.

“Nizar was a bit of an operator, I remember,” he said, “but never malicious. He was one of those devilish types who surprises you by how caring he can be.”

“Was he religious, as a boy?”

“Not so much.” Omar Yussef was unsure if her curiosity was a diversion or a true desire to track the intimate traces of a lost love. “Did your father kill Nizar to protect your good name?”

“You think my father worried so much about my reputation? Just because he lost his temper about me being with a man, when you were at our cafe?” She shook her head. “He was all talk.”

“It’s true that drug dealers aren’t usually so concerned with the family image.”

Rania flinched, and her tears stopped. “My father wasn’t a bad man.” The girl blew her nose into another tissue. As she tossed it into the wastepaper basket, the end of her nose was briefly red. Omar Yussef watched its pallor return. If someone were to attack her with a knife as they had assaulted her father, this spot on her nose confirmed that she would bleed, perhaps until her veins emptied. He thought she had cried out all her capacity for pain, and with it had gone the healing that scabs over a wound.

“He was in jail in Lebanon, wasn’t he?” he said.

She ran her tongue over her lips, pale pink like a fingernail.

“Could his killer have been someone from his past?”

“He was forced into the drug business during the civil war,” she said.

“Forced?”

“By Islamic Jihad people. They came to the Bekaa to train with the Iranians, the Revolutionary Guards, and they recruited local people like Dad to do their dirty work. He had no choice. They didn’t ask him nicely, if you see what I mean. When the government wanted to jail some drug producers, Islamic Jihad sacrificed my father, because they knew he wasn’t one of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t believe in Islamic revolution. He didn’t love the Iranian mullahs or want Hizballah to take over Lebanon, and he didn’t care at all about the Palestinian cause. He just loved me and my mother.”

“Then he was freed in the government amnesty.”

“Amnesty.” Rania laughed scornfully. “We left Lebanon right away, so that he could forget how he’d been forced to live. We came to the U.S.”

“But someone back home would’ve known he lied on his U.S. immigration forms about his drug conviction,” Omar Yussef said. “If he’d told the truth, the Americans would’ve never allowed him to become a citizen. They wouldn’t even have given him a visa as a tourist. Isn’t that right?”

Rania fingered a plastic paperweight in the shape of the Dome of the Rock. The dome was painted in a garish egg-yolk yellow. “Someone from Islamic Jihad found him here. I don’t know who it was. My father called him ‘the little bastard.’ Excuse my language, ustaz.”

“That’s all right. I’m not a fan of the Jihad. This man forced your father to sell drugs here in Brooklyn?”

Rania’s chin dropped to her chest.

“Can you forgive him?” Omar Yussef asked.

She was briefly confused. “For selling drugs?” she said.

“This is the day that you’ll bury your father. Make your peace with what he did.”

“I can forgive him for the drugs, ustaz. That was the fault of the son of a whore from Islamic Jihad. But I can’t forgive him for letting Nizar work with him.”

“Is that why Nizar died? Because of his connection to the drugs?”

Rania shook her head, and tears brought a higher sheen to her black lashes. She waved Omar Yussef out of the room. He shut the door behind him.

Chapter 19

As Omar Yussef went out through the waiting room, the woman chewing her gum looked him up and down with disdain. Calm yourself, dear lady, he thought. This was one queue I’d rather not have jumped. He stepped outside, fumbling with the zipper of his parka. A boy of about seven years nipped through the glass door as it closed behind him and pulled at the coat.

Omar Yussef came slowly down onto his haunches to face the boy. He smiled. “What is it, clever boy?”

The boy gave a cry and lifted a knife. Reflexively Omar Yussef threw himself against the wall, sliding onto his backside. The boy giggled and waved the knife. It was an elaborate Omani dagger with a curved eight-inch blade.

In his shock, it took Omar Yussef a few seconds even to be angry with the crowing child. “Where’s your mother?” he said.

“It’s for you, ustaz,” the boy said.

“What is?”

“The knife.” The boy dropped the dagger. Omar Yussef gasped as it landed flat on its side in his lap. The hilt was carved into an hourglass shape from a mottled olive-green length of rhino horn.

“This is also for you.” From his pocket, the boy took the dagger’s scabbard, embroidered with silver and gold thread. “Isn’t it nice?”

The boy’s appreciation for a traditional art soothed Omar Yussef. “Very.” He took the scabbard and went to sheath the dagger, but he found a paper rolled inside. He pulled it out. Before he could read it, the boy giggled and ran off. Omar Yussef slithered to his feet. The boy was already around the corner and gone.

Omar Yussef unrolled the paper and read: “‘If I had wished you dead, this dagger would’ve been in your soft breast.’ Come and see me. Playland, near the Boardwalk, Coney Island, 10 P.M.”

He brushed the slush from the back of his coat. The swift pulsing of his heartbeat filled his head. He rustled the paper in his hand and ran through the message once more-he knew what it meant.

Rashid was inviting him to meet.

He crossed the avenue and headed for the police barricade outside the Cafe al-Quds. He held the knife in his right hand, the scabbard and note in the other.

Your soft breast.

You remembered your lessons, Rashid, he thought. In the twelfth century, the leader of the Assassins had bribed an enemy’s servant to deliver a note while his master slept. The man awoke to find the very words Omar Yussef had read nailed to the floor beside his bed with a dagger. Fleetingly, Omar Yussef considered that Ismail might have sent him the message after he had glimpsed him on the street and at the UN. But this was the block of Fifth Avenue where Rashid had lived, and Rashid had always been more interested in the historical Assassins than Ismail had been. It had to be Rashid.

If Rashid was indeed the killer, then meeting him was a terrible risk. But this message is a signal to me that he wants to talk, Omar Yussef thought. If he had wanted me dead. . He fingered the dagger.

“What happened here?” A man in a brown bomber jacket, a Mets cap, and thin, gaudy pants with a burst of flame drawn around the ankles passed Omar Yussef and approached the policeman guarding the barrier around the cafe.

“Guy got killed,” the policeman said.

“Murdered?”

“That’s right.”

“You catch the terrorist?”

“Say again.”

“Catch the terrorist?”

“It’s not terrorism, sir.”