The Fourth Assassin

hand that held his gun. He pushed her headscarf back and kissed her black hair.

The door of the apartment slammed back against the wall. Hamza burst through and took up a firing position. “Put down your weapon,” he shouted. “Let her go.”

Waving his hands at the detective, Omar Yussef stepped toward the two young people on the floor. “Hamza, it was my fault,” he called. His voice trembled and faltered.

Nizar stroked the girl’s long hair with the wrist of his gun hand.

Hamza fired and Nizar recoiled. He clutched at Rania, but her body slipped lifeless from his arms. Nizar let his gun hand rest on the floor and sobbed.

“Hamza, no.” Omar Yussef reached Nizar. “The shooting you heard was a mistake.”

“I thought she was a hostage.” The detective dropped his hands.

“Get an ambulance.”

Hamza went to the phone and dialed.

Omar Yussef pushed Nizar’s pistol away and held the young man’s head against his shoulder.

“Rania’s gone, my boy,” Omar Yussef said. “I’m so terribly sorry. When I threw the knife, I didn’t mean-”

Ala stared at the dead girl. “So soon after her father,” he murmured.

Omar Yussef remembered that Ismail had watched the cafe the night of Marwan’s murder and been sure Nizar couldn’t have killed him. “Rania murdered her father, didn’t she?” he said to Nizar. “It wasn’t you. She killed him because he had beaten her so often.”

Nizar gave a weak shake of his head. “Not for the beatings. The body in the bedroom-she thought her father had killed me to prevent us marrying. She murdered him to avenge my death.”

Omar Yussef had thought Rania’s anger incongruous in a bereaved daughter, when she sat in her office with him the day of her father’s murder. But now he saw that it had been her rage toward the man she’d killed, simmering even after his death.

“That’s why you claimed his killing?” Omar Yussef said. Nizar was already a murderer, after all- he had killed Rashid, he thought. As long as Rania was free, he could still dream of his reward here on earth.

“My Paradise, my dark-eyed houri.” Nizar’s breath stuttered, and his deep eyes bulged.

Khamis Zeydan slumped onto the sofa. “I didn’t kill your father, Nizar.”

The young man struggled to turn his eyes on the police chief. They were defeated and ready to believe anything.

“One of his articles portrayed the Syrian president as a coward and a traitor. So a Syrian agent assassinated him.” Khamis Zeydan pushed his pistol into his shoulder holster. “The Old Man sent me to America to avenge your father’s death. I killed the Syrian assassin. That was my operation in New York.”

Nizar’s eyes slid toward the ceiling. Omar Yussef felt the boy shivering. He held him tighter. “What was my father like?” Nizar whispered.

Omar Yussef caught Khamis Zeydan’s eye and glared. “He was a brave man,” the police chief said. He turned away.

Nizar shuddered.

“You can go now to your reward, my boy.” Soft as a lullaby, Omar Yussef sang the refrain of the Lebanese song that Rania had listened to in the cafe: Take me, take me, take me home. He thought of the two lovers whose joy had been suffocated and crushed by the sinister presence of the Middle East in their family histories. It was the subject he taught at school-he ought to have known that it would surely kill them. In this, he saw, they were tragic.

Ala knelt in front of his friend and the woman he had loved. He tucked a strand of Rania’s hair behind her ear and took Nizar’s hand. He kissed it and wept as it grew cold.

Chapter 33

A heavy truck ran over a speed bump, rustling the two flags at the center of Dehaisha Street in its draft. The Iraqi tricolor, with its stars and its imprecation of the greatness of Allah, flapped across the lamppost toward the red, white, black, and green of the Palestinian banner. Omar Yussef grimaced at the din of the stones rattling in the back of the truck as it turned up the hill toward the limestone quarries. He waved to the last of the girls leaving through the blue gate at the front of the schoolyard and wondered when his budget would permit him to plaster over the bullet holes in the perimeter wall. It was his first day back at work since his return from New York. He felt at home behind his scratched old desk.

He wore a short-sleeved light-blue shirt in the warmth of late February. He loved the final weeks of winter, when the clear desert days were mild because the nights were still cold, but the sun was hot enough for him to detect the laundry scent of his shirt on the air, as though it were fresh from the spin-dryer.

By the time he reached the other end of the camp and came onto the porch of his gray-stone Turkish house, his armpits were damp, and he was glad to put down his mauve leather briefcase. His favorite granddaughter Nadia rounded the dining table in the foyer, setting a deep dish of broth at its center. The cool air filled with the scent of lentils and fried onions.

“A wife is supposed to cook this rishtaye when she makes a wish for something,” Omar Yussef said, pointing at the dish. “What does your grandmother desire today?”

“Maybe she’s hoping that Uncle Ala will stay for good and that you won’t have to go to any more UN conferences.”

Then I’m glad she cooked this, Omar Yussef thought.

His youngest son came out of the sitting room with Dahoud over his shoulder and Miral playfully punching his stomach. Ala pretended to wrestle with the ten-year-old boy Omar Yussef had adopted after his parents’ death, then he let the thin child slip down his body to the floor and ushered him to his seat.

Ala smiled, and the exuberance in his face was a deep relief to Omar Yussef, who had worried for him so much. “Mama made musakhan, Dad,” the young man said.

Maryam brought in a plate of chicken, fried and baked, served over flatbread with sauteed onions and purple sumac, slick with olive oil. “Sit down, Omar, my darling. I want to serve Ala first in honor of his return. I made his favorite dish.”

“To your doubled health, O Ala.” Omar Yussef took his seat at the head of the table. His eldest son Ramiz brought his boy, Little Omar, from the apartment in the basement, and Ramiz’s wife laid out plates of green olives, parsley salad, and a cold mutabbal of eggplant and sesame paste. Omar Yussef rolled his tongue in his mouth, anticipating the delicate smokiness of the eggplant and the sesame’s milky flavor.

Ala closed his eyes and groaned with pleasure as he ate, making the children laugh. Maryam piled more chicken onto his plate. “Americans are supposed to be fat,” she said. “Why did you come home from New York so skinny, Ala?”

“He was pining for his mother’s cooking,” Omar Yussef said. “And so was I. I nearly starved.”

Maryam patted Omar Yussef’s little paunch. “The UN should pay for you to stay there another month, then.”

When the meal was over, Ala tickled Nadia as she carried the plates to the kitchen and Little Omar fell asleep on his father’s lap. I may never see a houri, Omar Yussef thought as he watched them, but this family is the part of Paradise for which I would sacrifice myself.

In the sitting room, he rested on the gold brocade sofa, waiting for his tea, and tuned the television to an Arabic satellite news station. During a report on the long peace negotiations with the Israelis, Omar Yussef’s attention wandered. After his tea, he decided, he would pay condolence calls on the families of Rashid, Nizar, and Ismail. He would talk only of the days when he had been their teacher. Their relatives didn’t have to know that they had planned to murder the president or that one of them had killed his oldest friend. He would reminisce about the days when they had been a gang of innocent Assassins.

The phone rang on the Syrian mother-of-pearl side table. Omar Yussef fumbled with the remote until he