The Fourth Assassin

“It’s an Arab cafe, buddy. You think there’s no terrorist link?”

The policeman wandered slowly to the other side of the area enclosed by the blue barrier.

“This is how it starts,” the man continued. “They carry out an attack here, and no one cares because, hey, it’s only Brooklyn. Next thing you know they’ll blow up the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, and then you assholes will have to pay attention.”

Omar Yussef reached the barrier. “My dear sir, it’s not a terrorist attack. The dead man is an Arab,” he said.

“They’re killing each other, eh, buddy? Less of them for us to deal with.” The man turned a fat face on Omar Yussef. The unshaven flesh around his neck rolled over the upturned collar of his bomber jacket. He glanced down and noticed the dagger in Omar Yussef’s grip.

“Shit, man,” he said. He held his hands above his head and backed away. “Oh shit, man.”

Omar Yussef thrust the dagger into the scabbard and buried it in his pocket.

“Officer, hey officer,” the man called.

The policeman turned at the shrill note in his voice. “Will you quit it?” he said. “It’s not a terrorist case.”

“This guy over here-Jesus, oh Jesus.”

Omar Yussef ducked onto the side street. He walked, fast. He could’ve explained, but he would surely have sounded ridiculous trying to make the policeman understand that a seven-year-old boy had given him the dagger. He was an Arab and, despite himself, he was overcome by images of blindfolded men shuffling with their hands and ankles cuffed under the guard of American soldiers. He searched within himself for some calm, but he found only a hunted, terrified foreigner. He feared that if he tried to take the knife to Hamza, he would be arrested before he could speak to the detective. He looked at his watch. It was almost five in the evening.

In a few hours, he would go to Rashid. Alone.

Chapter 20

When the D train came to the end of the line at the Coney Island station, Omar Yussef dropped down the steel steps, crossed the cold concourse beneath the elevated rails, and followed the lights to Surf Avenue. He watched a police cruiser roll slowly by, like a heavy eater drifting back to a buffet, sated and gloomy. The wind volleyed piercing pins of ice off the Atlantic. He gazed up at the bright night sky. A jagged cloud streaked across the full moon, and he thought of the passage Nahid Hantash had quoted from the Koran.

“The hour of Doom is drawing near, and the moon is cleft in two,” he murmured.

He looked around at the shuttered amusement arcades and the sad facades of empty hotels. The spindly superstructure of a Ferris wheel was silhouetted above the storefronts like a gigantic machine of torture. The moon doesn’t have to split apart, he thought, for it to seem like the world is ending in this place.

Omar Yussef went along the avenue to a side street beside a rollercoaster. A long sign descending from the tallest part of the ride told him it was the Cyclone. His eyes strained at the rickety mess of wooden struts and whitewashed girders under the tracks, and he rattled the chain on the high corrugated-iron gate. He stared through a chain-link fence across the street at the rides within. Even a coating of snow couldn’t dress the dodgems, pirate ships, and shrimp stands in an aura that might defy their wintry cheapness. Every ride came with a laughable name promising an experience beyond its mere mechanics. He saw that the big Ferris wheel was The Wonder Wheel, as though it turned by some miracle and rose higher than anyone had ever before soared.

He skirted the fence until it brought him up a wooden ramp to the Boardwalk. The wind cut across his face, and a few seagulls hovered black against the moon. The birds were silent, and Omar Yussef wondered if they slept on the wing. The slate sea rolled beyond the strand with a sound like the strangled respirations of a disturbed sleeper. The shuttered pizza stands on the Boardwalk, painted gaudily with signs for Italian sausage and cold beer, seemed to Omar Yussef to be unsanitary places from which to serve food. As he looked along the wide, solitary promenade, he had an impression less of a place to spend leisure time than of a lonely depressive’s recurrent nightmare.

Omar Yussef saw no sign of Playland on the Boardwalk, so he cut back toward the avenue. He gravitated to the green neon lights of a corner restaurant advertising its “famous” hot dogs. Checking his watch, he saw that he was fifteen minutes early for his ten o’clock assignation. Since he had fled the policeman outside the Cafe al-Quds he had eaten nothing, and he was suddenly aware of his hunger. He wondered how a hot dog tasted.

The restaurant was brightly lit, staffed by people in identical striped shirts and green hats. At the tables, clutches of people buried pale rolls lengthwise in their mouths. The bread dripped a livid red sauce onto their hands. Through the window, the scattered shows of bonhomie made Omar Yussef feel isolated. Were he to enter the restaurant, he feared the diners would fall silent, recognizing the loneliness he broadcast like a leper with his bell. He experienced a flash of hate, and he understood how it might happen to him-the resentment that made Arab immigrants like Nahid Hantash, seething in his mosque, despise American society. He recalled the token-booth clerk who had cheated him and felt the man’s insults lingering, a little clot of stress that could suddenly lodge in his brain and destroy him. The diners disturbed him because they were in a place where they belonged with people they liked, and he was outside the window in the cold, alone, far from home.

He went unsteadily along the sidewalk, crunching through a thin, unshoveled layer of snow as the wind turned its surface to ice. The buildings here seemed permanently abandoned rather than merely shuttered for the season. Before a wide facade with red doors that looked like a disused fire station, he stamped his feet against the cold and decided to enter the restaurant after all, but only to ask where he might find Playland. As he turned, he looked up and noticed the sign above the red doors in freestanding art deco-style lettering: Playland.

In the time it took him to read the sign, Omar Yussef sensed the fear that must have lurked within him since he had received the note from the boy with the dagger. It came upon him in a gust of adrenaline that chilled his heart like the wind off the breakers. A man awaited him in this building who had been a nervous, intelligent boy when Omar Yussef had known him in Bethlehem. Now, perhaps, he was a killer. All Omar Yussef’s doubts about Rashid’s ability to have slaughtered Nizar were erased by the flood of tension he felt. He glanced along the avenue, hoping the patrol car would come to save him.

As he hesitated, one of the red doors swung open and slammed against the wall in the wind. It creaked on its rusty hinges and Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Inside his coat pocket, he gripped the Omani dagger in a sweating fist and slid slowly toward the door.

From within, a chilly damp escaped fast on the air, like a breath that had been trapped in a corpse long dead. It surrounded Omar Yussef and drew him inside, shivering. The windows at the back of the building were shattered. Their empty mullions split the moonlight into square shafts glimmering in the pools of still, stinking water on the floor and illuminating the cracked plaster on the pillars across the big hall.

Omar Yussef rubbed his mustache. His breath trailed wispily into the cold.

In the darkness, someone whistled the refrain of the old Lebanese song Omar Yussef had heard on the stereo when he first went to the Cafe al-Quds.

Take me, take me, take me home.

The tune echoed through the silent building. Omar Yussef scanned the strips of moonlight for Rashid.

The whistler trilled the first verse of the song.

The breeze blew at us from where the river split.

The sound seemed to come from the far end of the building. Omar Yussef made for the row of smashed windows there.

“Rashid,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

His feet sloshed through a puddle. He cursed low as the freezing water filled his loafers.

The refrain came again, closer this time: Take me, take me, take me home. Omar Yussef turned. A foot scraped against the concrete floor. A man in a black cashmere overcoat stepped from behind a pillar. He lifted his head, pushed up the brim of his gray cap, and shook his long hair from his collar.