The Fourth Assassin

unfinished when Omar Yussef pulled an extra chair up to their table and dropped into it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef extended a finger toward the hostess and said, “Nizar, don’t you want to hear the specials?”

They broke their clinch. Nizar came to Omar Yussef and gave him five kisses on his cheeks. He was as cheerful as an emir watching his hawk bring down its prey in the desert. “Ustaz, I’ll have the crab cakes. In fact, we’ll all have them. I know the menu very well. Rania and I eat here whenever we’re in Manhattan. We like to look down on the entrances to the platforms and imagine we’re going on a journey.”

“To where?”

“Who cares? Poughkeepsie, New Canaan, Wassaic.” Nizar read off the names from the Departures board in the concourse. “They all sound a little exotic to my foreign ear, even if they’re really just boring commuter towns. One place you don’t see up on that list is Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’m never going back there.” He poured a glass of ice water for Omar Yussef. “Drink it, ustaz. You look like you got a little overheated keeping up with my darling Rania.”

“Welcome, ustaz,” the girl said. She seemed not to share Nizar’s pleasure at Omar Yussef’s intrusion upon their romantic dinner.

“She set a good pace.” Omar Yussef swigged from the glass. “She was obviously eager to reach you, and my ankle hurts from our last meeting at Coney Island.”

Nizar showed the gap between his front teeth.

“Who fired at us in Playland?” Omar Yussef asked.

Nizar stroked Rania’s hand against his prominent cheekbones and giggled. “Coney Island is a dangerous place at night, ustaz. But I supplied you with an Omani dagger for self-defense. If someone gave you trouble, you could’ve carved them up.” He made two swift motions of the wrist like a swordsman pressing home a coup. “You had no reason to be scared.”

“Neither did you. You’re immortal. You’re the Mahdi, after all.”

“You liked that stuff? The Veiled Man? The dagger that could’ve been planted ‘in your soft breast’? I knew you’d appreciate it. But don’t worry-I’m not insane enough to think I’m actually the Mahdi, even if I do have the looks for it.”

Rania reached out and touched her fingertip to the boy’s front teeth with a playful smile. “Your appearance is just as it was written in the prophecies.”

He bit down on her finger and snarled, but when he let go he swallowed hard, as though he had tasted a bitterness on her hand. There’s something between them that they’re pretending isn’t there, for the sake of their celebratory dinner, Omar Yussef thought. Is it murder?

Omar Yussef put his palms flat on the glass table and glared at the liver spots, the wrinkled knuckles, the long black hairs on his fingers. He had loved these four boys, his Assassins. His innocence had been tarnished long ago, but he felt its final traces obliterated by the words he had to speak: “You killed Rashid.”

“I had to do it.” Nizar stopped while the waitress uncorked a half-bottle of champagne and poured two flutes. Omar Yussef put his hand over the top of his own glass and shook his head.

“To you, my life, my heart, my love,” Nizar said to Rania, and they drank. “I had to get rid of Rashid, ustaz. He was an assassin. Not the kind of Assassin we pretended to be in your classroom, but a real one.” He cut his hand through the air once more as though handling an epee.

“This is very romantic talk for Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef sneered at the champagne in its ice bucket. “How do you know he was an assassin?”

Nizar mugged like a guilty schoolboy.

The Israeli jail, Omar Yussef thought. As Ala suspected, they joined Islamic Jihad. “You were recruited in prison,” he said. “You came here to kill someone?”

“Rashid was supposed to do the killing. Despite his nervous nature, he showed himself to be a determined little fellow in training. That’s why they picked him. I was ordered to provide him with backup.”

“Why did you murder him?”

Nizar drained his champagne and watched Rania fill his glass. “I lost interest in sacrificing myself. I found my dark-eyed houri right here.” He touched her hand.

“Allah is most great,” she murmured, with a sardonic smile.

He slapped her hand playfully and clicked his tongue. “The streets of Brooklyn at first disgusted me with their commercialism and immorality. But then I walked the same avenues with Rania. She sprinkled the streets with magic. I couldn’t hate the place any longer, because some part of it was hers, and she was all beauty.”

Omar Yussef said, “Rashid didn’t like that, I suppose?”

“It displeased him quite spectacularly.”

“You could simply have taken one of these trains. Gone away with Rania and disappeared in America.”

“And sent my letter of resignation to the men who recruited me? Ustaz, they would kill my brothers and make my mother’s life hell back in Bethlehem if I sabotaged their operation. I had to make them believe I was dead.”

“So you murdered Rashid, dressed him in your clothes, and left your identity cards on him.”

“Rashid threatened me, my family, and Rania.” Nizar watched the bubbles streaming to the surface of his glass. “I realized it wasn’t the Americans or the Israelis I hated; it was us, the Arabs. I despised the mess we’ve made of our struggle, the way we fight each other. My father died at the hands of another Palestinian. After a lifetime of struggle for our freedom, it wasn’t the enemy, the Israelis, who killed him. He was murdered by one of his comrades.”

“Killing your friend doesn’t exactly stop that cycle.”

“Hear me out, ustaz,” Nizar said. “I can’t blame the Israelis for wanting Palestine. It’s a beautiful land. Neither can I fault the Americans for living like pigs-what else would you expect from infidels? But we Palestinians are destroying ourselves, and it makes me sick. So I abandoned our cause.”

“Very fine reasons. But you decapitated your friend and carried off his head. Now you’re sitting here for a Valentine’s Day celebration?” Omar Yussef said. “Are you mad?”

“I was prepared to do anything to be free of Islamic Jihad. I wanted them to think Rashid was psychotic-too crazy to carry out his mission. That way, they’d call everything off, and I’d be in the clear.”

Omar Yussef thought bitterly of the civil war among the Palestinians at the end of the intifada. In Bethlehem, people had tortured each other, because they belonged to one faction or another-people who had grown up together in the same village or refugee camp. Our politics is so extreme, he thought, it drives us to do disgusting things that are against our true nature. Nizar was following our political traditions.

“After you slaughtered Rashid, why didn’t you stay undercover?” he asked.

Nizar touched the end of his finger to the condensation on his champagne flute. “Slaughtered him? It gave me no pleasure. It made me-” He closed his eyes.

Omar Yussef continued: “Why did you reveal yourself to me at Coney Island?”

A waiter swung his hips between the tables to bring the crab cakes. Omar Yussef watched Nizar gather himself, take a bite, and wipe his mouth with his napkin. He was chewing as he replied: “I killed Rania’s father.”

The girl bowed her head, pushing a crab cake across her plate with her fork.

Omar Yussef let out a small wheeze of shock. “Because of the drug business?” he said.

“The drug proceeds were intended to finance the assassination. An operation like that costs money, whether it’s for equipment or bribing people to give you access to secure locations. When I got rid of Rashid, I had to tidy up that last loose end.”

“I still don’t see why you came back from the dead.”

“I feared the police would suspect Rania of killing her father. He often beat her. I thought they might accuse her of murdering him to prevent further abuse.”

Rania covered her face with her hands.

“I didn’t want to give myself up to the police, but I thought that if I confessed to you about Marwan’s murder, you’d tell the cops and they might leave Rania alone,” Nizar said.

“Don’t believe him, ustaz,” Rania said. “I don’t know why he’d tell you this, but it