The Fourth Assassin

Yussef thought, as he pushed his hair, rumpled by the cap, into place.

“Ala was too Palestinian for me,” she said. “He was unwilling to venture out of our culture. He wouldn’t enter into American life as Nizar did. No matter how often I said I wanted to break out, Ala thought he knew what was good for me. He’s a typical Arab man.”

“You think I’m like that too?” Omar Yussef lifted his chin.

“Of course you are. No matter how liberal your ideas may be, ustaz, I can smell the Middle East all over you.”

“You’re mistaken. You assume I’m a Middle Eastern man like your father.”

“My father wasn’t like that at all. He hated the Middle East. He wanted to leave it behind, but it followed him here and dragged him down. You, ustaz, can’t wait to leave this city and get back home, can you? Admit it. You want to return to your little town where everyone knows you and respects you.”

Omar Yussef covered his mouth with his hand. He liked to think of himself as a cosmopolitan, educated man, but each day in New York made him long for his family, for the traditions and routines of Bethlehem. The girl had judged him correctly.

“But you cover your head like a Muslim believer,” Omar Yussef said.

“You see, you can’t imagine that a woman might retain some of our traditions and reject others. You assume that if I bend the rules a little bit, I’ll soon be a whore. You think it’s easy to wear this headscarf in Brooklyn? Once I leave these couple of blocks in Little Palestine, people laugh and curse at me. ‘Look at the ninja,’ they shout. But I decide who I am. I follow our traditions of dress and modesty, but I don’t want to live as though this was the Bekaa instead of Brooklyn.”

“I understand.”

“You didn’t understand my father, and you don’t understand me.” Her voice quivered with the force of so much emotion finally uncovered. She spoke with the pace of one who mustn’t cease talking for fear that her words would be stopped by sobbing. “You’re a refugee. Everyone in the Arab world at least pays lip service to your human rights and says they respect your cause. My father and I had to flee Lebanon, but no one calls us refugees and no one respects us. We had to slink away from Lebanon like criminals.” Rania reached out a finger toward the photo on the wicker shelf. “My mother died while my father was in prison. He was convinced no decent man would marry me, because he had been jailed for the shameful act of dealing narcotics, which is against the laws of Islam. We left my mother’s grave behind and came to America. My father thought we could start again. He opened a new business and tried to find me a suitable husband.”

“May Allah have mercy upon your mother,” Omar Yussef murmured.

“May you have a long life.” Rania picked at the hem of her black smock. “Maybe hatred and violence are just part of being an Arab. Maybe you can’t escape them. Maybe the mistake is to try. Anyway, they’ve got me.”

“You’re still young, my daughter. Don’t give up hope for a better life.”

“I deluded myself, visiting the Broadway theaters with Nizar, going to movies, to expensive Italian restaurants. All the time, the Middle East was in me like the cancer that killed my mother.” Rania rubbed a tear from her eye and stared at the moisture on the back of her hand. “I dreamed that Nizar had returned. But he came to you, not to me.” She spoke petulantly, like a thwarted child. Her shoulders dropped, as though the anger had seeped out of her and left only an inanimate sadness. “For me, it will be as though that body in his apartment really was Nizar’s corpse.”

“I can’t believe that you’d rather think of him as a corpse than a living man,” Omar Yussef said. “You told me you wanted to experience happiness now, not in the hereafter.”

“His memory will always be with me.”

“Do you believe he killed his friend?”

“That wouldn’t make him the worst man I ever met. I’m from Lebanon.”

Omar Yussef left her in the glow of the kitchen light. He went through the cafe and pulled the door shut behind him. He took a few painful steps on his swollen ankle, pushed through the entrance next to the boutique, and mounted the stairs to Ala’s apartment. The handwritten sign with the words The Castle of the Assassins written across it had been removed, but the tape that had affixed it to the door remained, like the frame of a painting cut away by thieves.

His son’s face was gray and tired when he opened the door. He barely spoke as he showed Omar Yussef to the single bed. The door to the next room, where the corpse had lain, was closed. Omar Yussef wondered if the police had finished their work in there.

“My son,” he said, “I saw Nizar tonight. He’s alive.”

Ala sat on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his palm against the cheap blanket and tried to speak, but he managed only a stuttering gasp.

“I saw him at Coney Island.”

“Saw him?” Ala croaked.

Omar Yussef turned away from his boy. “I also saw Rashid’s head. It was his body we found in this apartment, not Nizar’s. I’m sorry to be so blunt, my son.”

Omar Yussef heard his son whisper the name of his dead roommate. The sound seemed like a cold wave in the air, chilling Omar Yussef’s throat and lungs, and he wondered if that was the way a final breath might feel.

Ala stared at his father, as though it were he, not Nizar, who had come back from the dead. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Go and rest. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

The boy shuffled out of the bedroom and flopped onto the couch.

After Omar Yussef had turned out the light, he heard the sibilant whimpers of his son in the other room, shivering through a nightmare.

Chapter 23

In the dull dawn, Ala’s hand dangled off the sofa and a trace of saliva glistened on his jaw. Omar Yussef lifted the boy’s wrist, laid it on his chest, and went to the kitchen. The coffeepot was wedged beneath a tangle of dirty dishes and pans. He grappled with it, but the crockery shifted noisily as he brought the pot out of the sink.

Ala sat up on the couch and rubbed his face. “Let me do that, Dad,” he mumbled. He took the coffeepot from his father and rinsed it.

Omar Yussef leaned against the windowsill. He watched the rain erase the snow on the sidewalk and thought about the man who had returned from the dead the night before.

Ala measured ground coffee into the battered pot and ran some water. He put it on the heat. The smell of burning gas was comforting and homely.

“I dreamed about severed heads,” Ala said. “Not just Nizar’s or Rashid’s. Everyone’s head, cut off.”

The coffeepot ticked gently against the stovetop as Ala swirled the thick liquid. “The meaning of the severed head, the Veiled Man-it’s so strange and mystical,” he said, his voice raw and dry. He smiled at his father with a twitchy concentration that made Omar Yussef worry for his sanity. “Somehow it’s most appropriate for death to come that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Death is spiritual. But murder is usually so ordinary. It should take something more mystical than a bullet to kill a man. We’re created through a miracle, formed in the image of Allah from the clot of blood that he used to make humankind, according to the holy Koran. Then the end comes-a plain little chunk of lead, red hot, flying through the air, shattering your body, breaking your skin and bone, all in a second.”

“What’s more mystical than a piece of metal that can fly?” Omar Yussef rasped out a grating laugh. “It’s no wonder religious extremists love bullets so much. They’re Allah’s greatest miracle.”

Ala took a small cup from the cupboard, wiped it with his forefinger, and poured Omar Yussef’s coffee. He added a long stream of sugar to the coffee that was left in the pot and heated it some more.

Omar Yussef left his cup in the kitchen and went to the bedroom. He lifted his coat from the bed, took the package Maryam had given him from the pocket, and brought it to his son. “I’ve been carrying this around. It’s time you had it,” he said. “Your mother spoils you.”