The Fourth Assassin

When he left the bedroom, the sudden warmth of the living room made him dizzy. He put his hand to his eyes, and the Koran slipped to the floor. The pages fluttered open to the same verse. Ala came out of the kitchen as Omar Yussef bent to retrieve the book.

“Isn’t that Nizar’s Koran?” Ala asked.

“Do you think I carry a copy around in my back pocket? Of course it’s Nizar’s.” Omar Yussef laughed with a rough choking sound. “He seems to have a penchant for al-Rum.”

Ala smiled wistfully. Omar Yussef was relieved that his son could still visit at least the furthest edges of pleasure. “That’s his favorite verse,” the boy said. “He liked the lines about spouses for us to live in peace with.”

“Rania?”

Ala’s smile took on a brittle edge. “When he was religious, Nizar used to talk about achieving martyrdom. He seemed to think he’d be able to have endless sex with the houris in Paradise if he was killed fighting for Islam.”

“Come on, that’s how village boys think. Nizar was too clever for that.”

“I think he was trying to convince himself of something- of the rightness of religion, perhaps-so he boiled it down to that simplistic concept.”

“Did he change those views when he stopped praying?”

“When he met Rania. They fell in love, Dad. That’s why he liked that verse so much.”

The sheikhs cite that passage as evidence the houris aren’t heavenly beauties at all. They’re our earthly wives, polished up by Allah in Paradise, Omar Yussef thought. Which would’ve made it even more important for Nizar to have Rania now.

“He stopped talking about martyrdom then too,” Ala said. “He didn’t need the seventy-two virgins up in Paradise. All he wanted was the girl next door on Fifth Avenue.”

“And you, my son? What reward do you expect to receive here or in Paradise?”

“I want to taste Mamma’s hummus and see my nephews and nieces,” Ala said. “I’m not speculating about Paradise, but I know it’s not here in Brooklyn.”

Chapter 24

As Omar Yussef stood by the window, the pallid twilight put him in mind of the charcoal skin of a heavy smoker. He wondered if that was why the sky lacked breath to shift the flat clouds. Ala snored on the sofa, overcome by his sleepless nights in the cell at the Detention Facility. His asthma gave each exhalation a coda of wheezing high notes like the cries of a frightened dog.

Omar Yussef blinked as the streetlamps flickered into a purple glow. A bell rattled on the door of a shop below, and he glanced down. A woman hunted in her handbag for her keys, a placard resting against her leg. She wore a black head-scarf edged around with gold. As she locked the cafe, Rania looked up. Omar Yussef stepped behind the curtain. He noticed that she was smiling.

End the criminal Israeli siege of Gaza, her placard read. Omar Yussef was surprised that she cared enough about politics to be on her way to a demonstration. He had thought she detested the Middle East. With the placard under her arm, she cut left onto Bay Ridge Avenue. She’s going to the subway, he thought. At the corner, a red ribbon, pinned at head height, stood out bright against the trunk of a bare gray tree. Omar Yussef stared at the tight bow. Hamza said it was Valentine’s Day today, he recalled. Is Rania on her way to a pro-Palestinian demonstration, or is she meeting her lover?

He limped down the stairs on his aching ankle, struggling into his coat. He turned the corner, heading toward the subway station, and hurried to catch up with Rania. Under the antiseptic light of the Manhattan-bound platform, he pulled his stocking cap low over his brow and affected the slouching, fatigued immobility of the other passengers. On the R train, he ran the zipper on the front of his coat up past his mustache and pretended to doze in his seat. Rania sat a few places over from him, the printed side of the placard pressed to her legs, as though she were embarrassed by its slogan. A lock of black hair fell from under her headscarf and lay across her brow. She rolled it around her forefinger and half-smiled. She was the only person on the train who didn’t appear to be at least partially asleep.

Rania left the train at Pacific Street. Omar Yussef hobbled behind her through the underground passages toward the Atlantic Avenue station. He caught up with her just as she stepped aboard a 4 train. He was perspiring in his coat, but he wasn’t the only one in the crowded subway bundled as though he were still out in the cold, so he kept his hood up. Rania paid him no attention.

They left the 4 train at Grand Central. Rania went through the early evening commuters to a side exit onto Lexington Avenue. She rushed to the corner of 42nd Street and ducked under a blue police sawhorse to join a group of two dozen people waving placards similar to hers. Omar Yussef was disappointed-perhaps she simply intended to join the protest.

A few of the demonstrators wore red-and-white keffiyas around their necks or on their heads. About half of them seemed to Omar Yussef to be Arabs. A couple of converts to Islam wore white skullcaps low on their brows. The rest were white men and women with hair shaved short, the raddled sallow skin of extreme vegetarians, and eyes gleaming with outrage. A press photographer knelt to get a low shot of the demonstrators, and a television reporter in a tan trench coat bellowed into his microphone.

Rania went quickly to the center of the demonstration, brandishing her placard and crying her willingness to sacrifice for Palestine. The photographer snapped her repeatedly, because she was the most vociferous of the women wearing a picturesque headscarf. The television man raised his voice to be heard above the insults Rania brought down on Israel. He clearly enjoyed being in the midst of the mayhem, like a grandfather joining in when the children bawl and scream.

Within minutes, the television crew was packing up. The reporter shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat with a shiver. The photographer clicked through his images to check that he had one good enough to transmit on the wire. Rania handed her placard to the man beside her and edged back through the crowd of demonstrators. Omar Yussef strained to see where she had gone. With the journalists no longer attentive to them, the demonstrators turned their slogans on the commuters, who avoided the protest with the same harsh disapproval Omar Yussef had noticed on the faces of subway passengers when a beggar entered their car. It was as though a mere whiff of something bad might let in the full stink of the city. He felt sorry for the demonstrators, so animated and passionate, and so ignored. The commuters were the only people he had ever seen who looked as unhappy as the refugees sweating in the Palestinian camps back home.

A woman wearing the same black coat as Rania came around from the back of the crowd, shaking her long hair free of her collar. She turned her face from the demonstration like any other commuter. Her skin was pale against the shining blackness of her hair, and her eyes were big and full of anticipation. Rania had taken off her headscarf. Omar Yussef was surprised to discover that this breach of Muslim propriety shocked him, even though his own wife wore her hair uncovered. As he wove through the crowd behind her, she checked her reflection in the window of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, squeezing and lifting her hair with both hands to give it body, and he smiled because he knew that his suspicion about Valentine’s Day had been correct.

He followed her through the swinging wooden doors into the main station concourse and almost lost her when he gazed up at the famous ceiling. He traced the looping gold lines linking the stars across the concave emerald roof and saw that, indeed, they were misplaced, as he had once read, because the Frenchman who painted them had made a mistake and set them out backward. Hurrying to catch up, he reached the foot of the steps to the mezzanine restaurant just as Rania skipped to the top.

When he had climbed to the hostess’s lecturn, he was breathing heavily. The restaurant was open to the elaborate ceiling of the concourse and to the drifting shafts of orange light through the tall windows. Omar Yussef recalled the photo on Rania’s computer and her sad rendition of the birthday tune, as he watched the girl arrive at her table. A man stood, jumped into a few laughing steps of dabka, and hugged her, stroking her hair with his hand.

It was a long embrace, as the hostess waited with a frozen smile to leave their menus, and it was still