The Fourth Assassin

Ala held the gift as though it were his mother’s hand, his eyes tearing up and his lips quivering.

“Open it, quickly,” Omar Yussef said.

Inside, Ala found the Mont Blanc pen in its plush black box. “It’s marvelous,” he said. “It’s like the one you have, Dad.”

“Now you can write proper letters to your mother, instead of sending her e-mails through Nadia.”

Heavy footsteps came up the stairs. The pen held Ala’s attention, but Omar Yussef turned toward the door as the bell rang. At the entrance, he noticed a brown smudge on the matchstick model of the Dome of the Rock. He remembered that it was blood from the corpse in the bedroom and that he had smeared it there as he tried to repair the model. His hand shook as he opened the door to find Sergeant Abayat shaking the rain off his parka.

“Greetings, ustaz. Morning of joy.”

“Morning of light, O Hamza,” Omar Yussef said gloomily. The detective brought murder firmly back into the room, and Omar Yussef knew that Ala’s comforting thoughts of his mother would be crowded out. “Come in.”

Hamza lowered himself onto the couch and slapped his thighs. “I’ve just been in the gym doing squats. My quads are dead.”

Ala stepped out of the kitchen, the pen balanced like an offering on his fingertips.

“Are you going to write a confession for me?” Hamza asked.

Ala shoved the pen into his pocket.

“It’s you who must confess, Hamza,” Omar Yussef said. “You failed to identify the body I found in this apartment as Rashid’s. Even though it had no head, surely you could’ve checked the fingerprints.”

Hamza let his shoulders slump. “It was a mistake. We should’ve matched his prints against his visa application, but we would’ve had to call in the INS. Those guys treat anything involving an Arab like a big terror scare, and to tell you the truth, they aren’t respectful to me, because I’m a local cop.”

“Your performance is about what I’d expect from an Arab detective,” Ala said. Omar Yussef saw the dangerous intensity on his son’s face and gestured toward him with a calming motion of his hand.

“I thought you said I was no longer an Arab. Infidels can mess up, too, I suppose.” Hamza looked hard at Ala. “The identification was a mistake, and it cost us a couple of days. But now Nizar appears to want to make himself known to us anyway.”

“You think Nizar will come here?” Omar Yussef asked.

“Remember what you said yesterday-your boy’s the bait. Any kid fishing for sprats off a jetty in Gaza could tell you it’s no good baiting your hook if you’re not going to keep your hands on the rod.”

“Does that mean you have this apartment under surveillance?”

The policeman rolled the big muscles in his back. “Did Nizar sound friendly when he spoke to you at Coney Island? Or do you think he was intending to kill you?”

Omar Yussef remembered the fear that had been upon him like the cold air inside Playland. Beneath his initial shock at seeing Nizar, he realized that he had been comforted by the presence of his old pupil in the empty amusement arcade. “I’m quite certain Nizar wanted to talk. He gave me a friendly greeting before the shooting started. I’m sure he wouldn’t have harmed me.”

“You think so? Rashid was his best friend, and that proved to be no protection. Maybe you’ll hear from him again. You or Ala-the Old Man of the Mountain and the third Assassin.”

Omar Yussef ignored the detective’s mocking smile. The mention of the childhood gang drew his thoughts to the fourth Assassin. Had Ismail followed him to Coney Island? Though he was confused by the boy’s behavior, Omar Yussef couldn’t believe that Ismail would have fired the shots at Playland. He narrowed his focus to the one member of The Assassins he was sure he had seen alive there. “If Nizar appears again, I’m convinced he’ll try to contact Rania.”

Hamza pursed his lips. “Why? To ask forgiveness, perhaps? You see, I think we’ll discover that Nizar killed Rania’s father, as well as Rashid.”

“Over drugs?”

Hamza scratched his groin. “No better reason for murdering someone-apart from being married to them.”

“You’re a real romantic.”

“I’ve already given my wife her Valentine’s Day present this morning, so I’m free to say what I really feel about love.”

Ala brought a coffee cup to Hamza.

“May Allah bless your hands,” the detective said.

“Blessings.” Ala choked on the word. He stepped into the kitchen and stared into the coffeepot, all his rage seeming to collapse into hopelessness. Omar Yussef watched him with pity as he listened to the heavy breath through Hamza’s mouth. Ala wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. He poured the thick coffee dregs into the sink.

After Hamza left, Omar Yussef stayed all day with Ala. The tears he had seen the boy shed in the kitchen convinced him that his son was in shock. He also considered that Hamza could be right-if he waited here, Nizar might come to him. He found a backgammon board in the bedroom and forced Ala to play until the boy had won many games in a row and Omar Yussef, in spite of himself, became annoyed at losing.

“Sorry, Dad,” Ala said. “I haven’t had much to do lately, so I’ve become very good at sheysh- beysh.” He went into the kitchen.

Omar Yussef watched him soaping the plates in the sink. “Did the police finish in the bedroom?”

His son scrubbed hard at the smears of hummus and fava bean foule that had dried on the plates. “I guess so. They took away the body and left the room in a mess.”

Omar Yussef was shocked. “So, inside that room-”

“You’d better be glad it’s not summer, or we’d have a lot of flies, Dad.”

Omar Yussef gasped at his son’s callousness. “How’re you going to live in this apartment with your friend’s blood all over the bedroom?”

Ala reached into a dirty coffee cup and rubbed hard at the grounds. “I’m not staying. I’m going home to Bethlehem, Dad. The woman I loved betrayed me. My friends are dead or destined for jail. New York is too harsh for me. I’m going back to the Middle East.” He snorted a bitter laugh. “At least with the Israeli occupation, you know where you stand.”

Omar Yussef eased his son aside and knelt to open the cupboard beneath the sink. He pulled out a bucket, a pair of rubber gloves, and a bottle of floor cleaner. In the bathroom he filled the bucket with warm water and hauled it to the bedroom.

He pushed the door open and held his breath against the humid, coppery stink in the room. Lunging for the window, he shoved the frame until the old wood squeaked a few inches away from the sill, admitting clean, chilly air. The blood on the cold floor hadn’t decomposed yet, and Omar Yussef was glad he didn’t have to smell that. He remembered the places in Bethlehem where people had been killed in a gunfight or smashed by a tank shell and their blood had remained plastered on the wall or pooled black and sticky in a corner. Even outdoors, the sharp fermented scent of rotten blood was repulsive. In this room, it would have been unbearable.

He went onto his knees and scrubbed hard at the blood- in part to keep himself warm, as the cold air swept through the gap he had forced in the window.

Omar Yussef wrung the cloth. Rashid’s blood spattered into the bucket. In Bethlehem, his nightmares were racked by violent death, stalking his pupils as they walked home from class down streets where the Martyrs Brigades and the Israeli army met. Even in those distressing dreams, I never imagined that it would be one of my little Assassins who’d become a victim, he thought.

He sat on the second bed and stared at the empty space across the room where the corpse had lain. So many difficult nights Nizar must have passed there, unable to sleep, wrestling with his religious beliefs and his desire for Rania.

Peeling off the rubber gloves, Omar Yussef ran his finger along the bookshelf at the foot of the bed. He pulled out the Koran, bound in imitation brown leather, and let it fall open. The spine dropped and the pages settled at the thirtieth sura, al-Rum. Omar Yussef read two sentences that had been underscored with a fingernail on the delicate paper: “He created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you might live in peace with them, and planted love and kindness in your hearts. Surely there are signs in this for thinking men.” He closed the book.