The Fourth Assassin

so do I. I’m asking you as an American to give me the right to see my son.”

The detective grinned mirthlessly. “If Allah wills it.”

“Damn it, Hamza. I want to see him.”

“Take the R train one stop and change to the N,” Hamza said. “It’ll get you back to Manhattan quicker.”

“Do you think I’m so eager to escape Brooklyn?”

As Omar Yussef descended the grimy steps beneath the subway-station sign, he heard Hamza’s voice, slow and deep: “No, ustaz. In any case, you certainly can’t escape me.”

At the bottom of the steps, Omar Yussef considered that he might have to make a number of trips out to Brooklyn to see his son. He decided to buy ten rides. He pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the tray of the token booth and received a yellow-and-blue ticket in return. There was something familiar about the ticket clerk, who dropped his eyes when Omar Yussef wished him a good day.

Omar Yussef swiped the card at the turnstile. As he pushed through to the other side, he noticed the little electronic screen read “$2.00/$16.00 Bal.” The machine had deducted the two-dollar fare, but there were only sixteen dollars remaining on the card. Omar Yussef stopped and looked back at the clerk in his booth. The man held Omar Yussef’s glare. He was in late middle age with a pinched sour face and a thin, mean mouth. He wore thick, black-framed glasses, and his gray hair was slicked back. He looks like the man who used to be the American Defense Secretary, Omar Yussef thought, the one who blew the war in Iraq.

He went back through the turnstile. The clerk made a show of counting bills as he approached the booth.

“I bought a ticket for twenty dollars, sir,” Omar Yussef said, “but you gave me a card worth only eighteen.”

The clerk spoke, but Omar Yussef heard nothing. He repeated his complaint, and the clerk lifted his head to his microphone. “Sold you a twenty-dollar card, sir.” His voice drawled through the speaker as though it were cut roughly from metal.

Omar Yussef decided to be generous. “Then there has been a computer error, because the machine says I only have sixteen dollars remaining.”

“Sold you a twenty-dollar card, like I said.”

“You took my twenty and kept two dollars for your pocket.” Omar Yussef had the familiar feeling of his heartbeat quickening, drowning all sense of moderation and leaving him full of anger. “This is a damned outrage.”

“Watch your mouth, buddy,” the clerk said.

“You cheated me, sir.”

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you another ticket for nothing.”

Omar Yussef took a long breath. “Very well.”

“One-way, non-stop back to Baghdad, Osama.” The clerk sniggered, as he licked his thumb to count a pile of twenties.

Omar Yussef brought his fist down beside the change tray. The quarters jumped on the clerk’s desk. “You may keep my two dollars,” Omar Yussef said. “I don’t wish to sell my dignity as cheaply as you do.”

The clerk sneered.

Omar Yussef swiped his card in the turnstile again and followed the signs for the Manhattan platform.

Chapter 6

The windows of the N train were scratched and daubed in an ugly paste graffiti, the translucent letters dripping like a sugar glaze on a cake. The floor was black and speckled to disguise the dirt, but pink smears of vomit and red chewing gum and the explosions of dropped soda cups stained it.

As Omar Yussef rattled toward Manhattan, fewer than half the slippery, unwelcoming seats in the car were taken. Encased in voluminous coats, the passengers hunched their shoulders, crossed their arms, and coughed into their collars, though it was warm in the train. Omar Yussef let his eyes drift across the smiling faces in the advertisements just below the ceiling of the car. The ads pushed training courses for para-legals and court reporters, the services of doctors who would give you better skin or allow you to commute on the train without hemorrhoid pain. He imagined the ads might have been there to torment the riders with the Siberian gloom of their journey, allowing them to glimpse the mediocre extent of the improvements they might pursue. Enclosed in plastic, strip lights flickered over the ads and across the immobile faces of the passengers. Their glow gave the train the somnambulant aura of a midnight bus station.

He felt a rush of loneliness. He missed his wife and wondered if he ought to have insisted on waiting for his son at the police station after all, despite Sergeant Abayat’s dissuasion. On the wall beside him, the N train snaked its yellow trail across a subway map. To distract himself from his worries, he lifted a finger to the map and tried to trace his path to his destination, but he lost track of the route in the mess of different lines converging on lower Manhattan. He realized that he’d forgotten Abayat’s instructions and was unsure if he needed to change trains again to make it back to his hotel. The variegated twirls on the map made no more sense to him than the wires in a diagram of an electrical appliance. He glanced nervously around the train. To ask directions might, he feared, invite a mugging.

A fur-lined hood bracketed the face of the girl on the bench opposite Omar Yussef. She was slight, even in her quilted brown coat, but her cheeks had an Andean broadness. Omar Yussef heard a jangling pop tune, and the girl pulled a mobile phone from her pocket. When she flipped it open, to his surprise she answered the call in Arabic. She squirmed in her seat with enjoyment as she whispered into the phone, smiling to reveal a row of teeth imprisoned behind heavy orthodontic apparatus.

“I’m on the train,” she said, giggling. “I might be cut off in the tunnel, so I’ll call you back.”

Despite the relentless thundering of the train and the quietness of the girl’s hurried voice, Omar Yussef detected the soft consonants of the educated Palestinian. When she returned the phone to her pocket, he smiled at her. “Where in Palestine are you from, my daughter?” he asked.

She opened her eyes in surprise. Is it, perhaps, so odd for a stranger to talk to another on this train? Omar Yussef wondered. Or did she simply not take me for an Arab, just as I mistook her for a South American?

“Jerusalem, O Hajji,” the girl said.

I look so old, youngsters assume I must by now have fulfilled the obligation to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, he thought. “I’m not a Hajji, my daughter, though may it be the will of Allah to grant you the honor of such a journey to the holy places in Arabia.”

“If Allah wills it, ustaz.”

Allah might will it, Omar Yussef thought, but I’d no more go on the Hajj than I would enter a mosque to pray in Brooklyn. He recalled the page on Ala’s refrigerator with the prayer times for the Alamut Mosque. He wondered which of the boys worshiped there. He didn’t remember any of them being religious. Maybe it was only the name-with its connection to their old Assassins gang-that had led them to display it.

“Which neighborhood of Jerusalem?” he said.

“Sheikh Jarrah.”

It had been many years since Omar Yussef had visited that quarter north of the Old City where the leading Arab families had their mansions, dilapidated now that their owners no longer were the power in the town. “How long have you lived in New York?”

“I was born here, O Hajji.” She corrected herself: “Sorry, I mean ustaz. My parents came when my mother was carrying me. And you, ustaz?”

“I’m-visiting my son in Bay Ridge,” Omar Yussef stammered. “I’m from Bethlehem, from Dehaisha Camp.”

“May you feel as if you were in your own home and with your family in New York.”