The Fourth Assassin

Omar Yussef mumbled his gratitude as he chewed. He dipped a corner of the bread into a plate of labaneh and scooped the white paste into his mouth. He had been expecting the inferior, mild flavor of strained cow’s milk, but this had the sharpness of goat’s yoghurt particular to the best labaneh. He savored the taste of his home as though he had been absent a year rather than a single day. Am I a child, that I should be so homesick? he thought.

Hamza called to the heavy, mustachioed man behind the food bar. “Abu Hisham, we’ll have some kousa mahshi, please. My friend here has had nothing but airline food for a day. He needs to recover.” He rubbed the back of Omar Yussef’s hand affectionately with the pad of his thumb.

A plate of zucchini stuffed with ground beef, rice, and diced tomato came over the counter. Omar Yussef cut into one and chewed. It was hot on his tongue. “Your double health, ustaz,” Abu Hisham said.

Omar Yussef felt himself warming and he shared a smile with Hamza. “You’re not eating?”

“Abu Hisham will bring me some chicken in a minute.” The detective checked his watch. “I’m careful about my diet. It’s time I ate some protein.” He took a dull green squash ball from his pocket and squeezed it between his thick fingers.

“Do you have a health problem?”

“I’m competing next month to be Mister Arab New York.”

Omar Yussef wiggled his hand, palm upward-a question.

“I’m a bodybuilder,” Hamza said. “I’m training for the bench press and the clean and jerk. But my specialty is the dead lift.”

“A good exercise for a homicide detective.”

Hamza ran his thumb over the keypad of his mobile phone and turned the screen toward Omar Yussef to show a photo of himself smiling in tight trunks, his massive body oiled and hairless, his biceps riddled with thick veins, like a map of the Nile Delta. “That’s me winning another competition a couple of months ago,” he said.

Omar Yussef squinted at the heavy muscles and recalled the strong grip on his elbow. “Excuse me if I don’t wait for you to eat. I’m training for nothing more strenuous than lifting a pile of exercise books filled with essays on the history of the Fatimids in Egypt.”

“That sounds heavier than my dead lift. Enjoy the food. To your doubled health.”

The kousa mahshi stuck in Omar Yussef’s throat, and he coughed. He knew why. “What’s the food like in the cells at the police station?” he asked.

Hamza rolled the squash ball from hand to hand across the tabletop. “How was your flight? You departed from Amman?”

“I see the food in the jail is too disgusting to talk about.”

“The food is fine. It’s the cells that I prefer not to discuss.”

Omar Yussef’s mouth was dry. “The plane was almost empty,” he said, “except for a troop of New York National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Iraq. They were thin and stiff, like ghosts draped in desert fatigues.”

Abu Hisham brought over a plate of grilled chicken that appeared to be plain except for a little lemon juice. Hamza tore a strip from a breast and stuffed it into his cheek. “They must have seen some terrible things over there.”

Omar Yussef thought of Nizar’s headless body and wondered if the image would let him sleep when he closed his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said.

He went into the bathroom at the back of the snack bar, removed his glasses, and splashed water over his face. He felt the water dribbling from his brows and nose, but when he looked in the mirror his myopia blurred the image and it appeared as though his face were melting. He gripped the sink and yanked at it, as though he might pull it from the wall, and he let his forehead drop against the mirror. “Ala, my little Ala,” he whispered.

When he returned to the table, he pulled a wad of napkins from their metal dispenser. He tore them absently into strips, laying them next to his plate.

Hamza watched the arrangement of the shredded napkins, then drew a long breath. “How does your son come to know these roommates of his?”

Omar Yussef balled up the napkins in his fist. “He was in their class in school.”

“High school?”

“All the way through. He’s known them since he was three years old.”

“The Freres School?”

“How did you guess?”

Hamza lifted one side of his mouth into a grin. “I can’t imagine you letting your son go to a crappy UN school in the camp.”

“Be careful. You know I’m the principal of one of those UN schools. I have some professional pride.”

“What’s the quality of the education where you work?” The detective smiled with one side of his mouth again and lifted his chin knowingly.

Omar Yussef tapped his plate with a stiff crust of sfiha. “Funds are very limited.” He looked at Hamza. “Ala studied at the Freres School because, at the time, I was a history teacher there.”

“Why did you leave?”

I was fired because the government schools inspector believed I was too much of a free-thinker, too critical of the fight against the Israelis, Omar Yussef thought. How would that sound to this man? He’s an American now, but he’s also the nephew of a dead resistance leader. “It’s not important,” he said. “The boys were all in my class. They were very close. They even had a little gang.”

“A gang?”

Omar Yussef flicked his fingernail against his plate. Its ring sounded like the distant echo of an alarm bell. “Gang” had been the wrong word.

He took another bite of the sfiha and chewed it without enthusiasm. When he looked up from his plate, he caught Hamza glaring at him with hard, narrow eyes. The detective’s expression quickly reverted to affability. Omar Yussef watched the thick fingers pulsing on the squash ball.

Hamza waited while Abu Hisham placed two coffees and a plate of baklava on the table. A young Arab woman in a black headscarf and a pink fur coat entered, greeting the staff and smiling at Hamza and Omar Yussef. Hamza tested the heat of the small coffee cup with his fingertips. “What kind of gang was it that these boys formed?”

“It was more of a secret society. They called themselves The Assassins.”

The detective raised an eyebrow.

“When the boys were fourteen, I taught them about the medieval order of the Assassins in my history class. They named their club after that sect. It was an intellectual society, an innocent little secret.”

“These three roommates were the members?”

“There was another boy. But he doesn’t live in New York.”

“What about that sign on the door of the apartment: The Castle of the Assassins?”

Omar Yussef remembered what Ala had said about the Veiled Man, the betrayer with the disguised features who would battle the Mahdi. He was an essential part of the historical Assassins’ beliefs. Is Hamza right to wonder about this connection?

“Why are you frowning, ustaz?” the detective asked.

“If you want to cheer me up, release my son.” Omar Yussef pushed his chin toward Hamza and saw instantly that aggression had no effect on the detective. Hamza ran his tongue along his bottom lip and stared at Omar Yussef with eyes as blank as a funeral shroud. He’s tough, Omar Yussef thought. Even if I were the type to bully people, I’d have no success with this man. “The sign about the ‘Castle of the Assassins’ is just some sort of nostalgic joke. The apartment is hardly a castle.”

“If this little gang was secret, how do you know about it?”

Omar Yussef lifted his coffee cup by its delicate handle and sipped. He grimaced at its sweetness. Son of a whore, I forgot to ask for mine bitter, he thought. He rattled the cup into its saucer petulantly. “I was a part of the club. Well, in a sense.”

“You were one of The Assassins?” Hamza gave a deep, slow giggle. “Forgive me,