The Fourth Assassin

Omar Yussef spun around, as though the killer might lurk behind one of the stark winter trees. He shuddered.

Hamza stared south along the avenue, away from the direction in which the patrol car had disappeared. “This isn’t the magical, exciting New York you see in the cinema,” he said. “This is just a quiet neighborhood of Brooklyn. But there are many astonishing things even here, uncle-things we could never imagine back home in Palestine.”

Omar Yussef closed his eyes and breathed deeply, willing his frozen hands to stop shaking. He’s giving me a chance to fumble with the zipper on this jacket without embarrassment. He’s also switched to calling me uncle from the more formal ustaz. He wants to charm some kind of information out of me. Perhaps I can lead him away from the idea that Ala could’ve had anything to do with this. Maybe that’d be more use to my son than waiting in a corridor at the station. “The neighborhood looks very ordinary to me, but I’m ready to be impressed,” he said with a smile.

“Look all the way beyond the end of the avenue, uncle. What do you see?” Hamza stretched out his arm. Perhaps two miles away, past the signs for the Korean bodegas and Arab cafes, the Italian pizzerias and American ice-cream chains, stood the enormous piers of a suspension bridge. Its gray towers loomed with the arrogant symmetry of a Manhattan skyscraper. “That’s the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”

“It’s so big, it’s terrifying.” Omar Yussef finally succeeded in pulling the zipper of his windbreaker up to his chin.

“The engineers had to factor the curvature of the earth’s surface into the design, because it’s so massive. It expands and contracts with the heat of the season so that in the summer the road hangs three meters lower than in winter.” Hamza shook his head in wonderment. “Think of that. Can you imagine our people building something like that in the Arab world? This is an amazing place, uncle.”

“Is it just big bridges and tall buildings that you like about New York?”

“The Arabs in this neighborhood, Bay Ridge, are mainly Palestinian. In the direction of Manhattan, you’ll find Atlantic Avenue, where there’re a lot of Yemenis. Then in Queens you have the Moroccans. Whenever any of them makes enough money, they cross that bridge to Staten Island, and they buy a nice big house.” Hamza turned and swept his arm along the avenue. “Bay Ridge used to be Norwegian and Irish, until about a decade ago. Then our people came, and soon it turned into Little Palestine. Eventually all the Palestinians will have become prosperous and crossed that bridge. This place will be taken over by some other poor immigrant group. Little Palestine is destined to die young.” He looked closely at Omar Yussef and raised an index finger. “But in big Palestine, you’ll still be living in the same dirty refugee camps. There’s no alternative back home, no way up. That’s why I like it better here.”

Omar Yussef jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Unfortunately, your colleagues weren’t taking my son across the bridge to prosperity. They went in the opposite direction.”

“Don’t worry about him, uncle. He’ll be safe at the station. My colleague Lieutenant Raghavan isn’t one of these Americans who believe the Arabs are capable of all evil.”

“What about you? Are you ‘one of those Americans’?”

“If you think I’m being tough on your son because he’s an Arab, you’re wrong.”

“You’re tough on everyone?”

“I’m just tough.”

“You don’t really believe Ala killed that boy upstairs, do you?”

“There’s a snack bar a few blocks down run by a fellow from Beit Hanina,” Hamza said. “Come and let me buy you the best sfiha in Brooklyn.”

He took Omar Yussef’s elbow in his fist. The schoolteacher gave a last look in the direction in which the police car had vanished, whispered the name of his son, and let himself be dragged away.

They went along the avenue, passing a basketball court enclosed by a chain-link fence. In the corner, six Muslim girls played handball against a tall gray wall. They wore their black mendils tight around their heads and with the ends tucked inside their collars.

“Even if a girl wasn’t religious, she might cover her head against the cold here,” Omar Yussef said.

“When the summer comes and they start to sweat, they can’t wait to go home and take them off.” Hamza waved to one of the girls, who blew him a kiss in return. “My daughter,” he said.

“You live here? You didn’t make the trip across the bridge to a bigger house?”

“For the same reason, I would guess, that you didn’t move out of the refugee camp, though you don’t dress like a poor man. I like to live where people know me.”

Omar Yussef observed the detective’s steady gait. The man looked heavy, with shoulders that sloped powerfully to a bulky back, but he balanced easily on the balls of his feet. His body, like his facial features, mirrored that of the dangerous relative Omar Yussef had tangled with back in Bethlehem.

“Your uncle Hussein wasn’t as bad as I at first believed, Hamza,” he said, cautiously, keeping his eyes on the detective’s face. “But under his command the Martyrs Brigades did terrible things in Bethlehem.”

“You think he’d still have been that kind of man if he hadn’t been born into the violence of Bethlehem?” The detective turned back to watch his daughter celebrate victory in the handball game and run for her coat.

Omar Yussef remembered the way Hussein had swaggered around Bethlehem with his massive machine gun on his hip. I’m quite sure he’d have been a gangster wherever he had lived, he thought. Bethlehem only offered him easier opportunities. He recalled the lawlessness of the intifada, the beatings and extortion and murder, and he wondered how much of the viciousness with which Hussein had administered his gang had been passed on to Hamza in his genes. Those had been violent times, but he had never before seen a man’s body with its head cut away.

His shoe slipped on a smear of snow, and Hamza caught his elbow, supporting him in a grip so tight it seemed as strong as the jaws of an animal.

Chapter 5

An awning ran above the slick, gray sidewalk outside the Suleiman snack bar in red, white, and green stripes. “I expect they bought it from the same company that makes all the signs for pizza joints in the colors of the Italian flag,” Hamza said. “Fortunately for them, those also happen to be the colors of the Palestinian flag.”

Omar Yussef squinted at the awning. “They’ve missed a color. There should also be black.”

“The little cartoon is black.” Sketched beside the name of the snackbar, a slim waiter wearing a fez and a waxed Turkish mustache lifted a tall coffee pot. “So they have the correct colors, after all. Since you mention black, why did you ask your son if Rashid wore a black coat?”

“After I found the body, someone else entered the apartment. Whoever it was, he fled as soon as he heard me. I only saw his back as he went out of the door. He was wearing a black coat.”

Hamza scratched his eyebrow. “Yeah,” he said.

Omar Yussef didn’t like the skepticism in the detective’s tone. “You think I made that up to divert suspicion from my son?”

“As soon as we sit down, I’ll take out my notebook and write ‘black coat.’ Let’s go inside.”

Hamza edged past three young men in the doorway. The youths were exchanging elaborate handshakes with each other, snapping their fingers and touching knuckles, then wishing each other courtly Arabic farewells. Hamza guided Omar Yussef to one of the five small tables beside the food counter and went to order.

Omar Yussef peered into the display case, examining the wide dishes of oily vine leaves stuffed with rice and the pyramids of baklava, chopped pistachios green in their nests of phyllo pastry. He was suspicious of changes that might have been made to traditional Arab cuisine in America. But he found nothing wrong with the appearance of the food and, though he remained dubious, he was surprised at how much he wanted to taste it.

Hamza set down a cheap plastic tray laid out with a mezzeh of small spreads and salads. After the stress of the morning, Omar Yussef was calmed by the sight of the hummus, pooled with olive oil, and the sfiha flatbread with its coating of pale ground beef and pine nuts. He picked up the sfiha with both hands and took a bite.

“To your doubled health,” Hamza said.