Khamis Zeydan threw his cigarette into the gutter and retched a wet cough from the bottom of his lungs.
“That’s what people said in Bethlehem. Is it true?”
“Sure, the Mossad,” Khamis Zeydan snorted.
The bitterness in his friend’s voice made Omar Yussef suspicious. “Tell me?”
“While he was in New York, Fayez made contact with a couple of prominent Jews. They introduced him to some left-wing Israeli politicians. Together they came up with a peace plan.”
“I don’t understand. The Mossad killed him to cut off those peace talks?”
Khamis Zeydan made his eyes wide and sarcastic. “Yes, and they also blew up the Twin Towers so that the U.S. would invade Iraq. But they called all the Jews who worked in the buildings first and told them to stay home that day. Oh, and they also exported special chewing gum to Egypt to make all the single men unbearably horny and, thus, destroy Arab morality. Those Israelis have put together quite an amazing organization, you know.”
“So who killed him, if it wasn’t the Mossad?” Omar Yussef shivered and pulled up the collar of his windbreaker.
“We Arabs managed to knock off quite a few of our own during that time.” Khamis Zeydan watched a massive kebab turning on a spit in the window of a restaurant, dribbling fat. “You didn’t have to step much out of line to be dead meat.”
“You yourself-” Omar Yussef halted when Khamis Zeydan turned his glare upon him.
“I myself?”
“Carried out a few such missions. Why are you looking at me like that? Well, you did, didn’t you?”
The police chief stared along the avenue with a malevolent concentration. “It’s going to rain, and it’s already so fucking cold,” he said.
“Did Fayez have the approval of the Old Man for his peace talks?”
“The Old Man never approved anything until it was done. That way he could take credit for it if it succeeded and be absolved of blame for any failure.”
“Did the Old Man rub out Nizar’s father?”
“Don’t you have enough to worry about, with your son in jail?”
“All this could be important to my son’s case.” Omar Yussef spoke quickly. “If Nizar’s father was killed by the Old Man or by another PLO faction or, I don’t know, by the government of some Arab country, maybe the same people wanted Nizar dead. Maybe it was they who cut off his head.”
“Maybe this time it was the Mossad.”
Omar Yussef cursed and marched ahead. His thighs ached with fatigue. He damned the Arab man at the subway station for having recognized that he was too weak to make this walk in comfort. He paused for breath, leaning against a battered yellow newspaper-vending box, then stepped out to cross the street.
He heard the splashing first, then the heavy, threatening groan of a big engine accelerating. A blue Jeep with tinted windows came through the intersection fast, rushing over the puddles. Instinctively Omar Yussef put one foot back on the curb.
The Jeep veered toward him. Khamis Zeydan grabbed him, throwing him backward. He fell in the snow piled around a lamppost. His head struck the ground with an impact like the kick of a donkey’s hoof.
The Jeep jumped onto the curb, its bumper knocking the newspaper box across the sidewalk. A pile of tabloids spilled into the wind. The Jeep disappeared quickly down the side street. A copy of the Daily News blew into Omar Yussef’s face. He pushed it away. Khamis Zeydan helped him to his feet.
“By Allah, that must’ve been the bastard who was tailing us,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“Did you see him?”
“The windows were too dark.”
A middle-aged black woman in a camel-hair coat came across the side street. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said to Omar Yussef.
“Think again, dear lady,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My friend’s a Palestinian.”
When the police chief laughed, the woman gave him an affronted stare and walked on.
“If you couldn’t see him, how do you know that was the man who was following us?” Omar Yussef felt the back of his head where it had hit the snowy ground. It was wet and tender, but the skin hadn’t broken.
“He was out of sight just long enough to get into his vehicle and line us up.”
“Why does he want to kill me?”
“As far as he knows, you might’ve seen his face at Nizar’s apartment.”
Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Anyone in the crowd on the sidewalk might be tracking him. All the cars thundering through the traffic lights were potential instruments of his death. He covered his face with his hands and felt his pulse jumping behind his eyes.
“My brother,” Khamis Zeydan said quietly, “let’s go to your son.”
The Arab food stores and cafes dwindled as Atlantic Avenue rose into a gentle slope. The Islamic bookstores with pamphlets on Muslim marriage and gold-inlaid copies of the Koran in their windows were replaced by the unsightly offices of bail bondsmen, encased behind bars like their clients. The bondsmen hung gaudy signs above their doors painted with glib slogans, as though temporary release from jail were a purchase no more worthy of deep consideration than that of a slice of pizza.
Across the street, a nine-story tower rose in pink stone. The windows were composites of thick glass bricks molded around a mesh of iron bars that caged the entire building. The branches of the trees along the sidewalk had been cut back to their gray trunks, so that they looked like men with their hands cuffed behind them. The sign above the blacked-out glass in the entrance read: Brooklyn Detention Complex.
Omar Yussef lifted his head, following the bars up through the glass bricks to the top of the jail. His spectacles spotted with water. The rain had started.
Chapter 10
A guard patted Omar Yussef down and ushered him through a chipped metal door painted the soapy blue of swimming-pool tiles. Behind him, the guard found Khamis Zeydan’s cigarettes and took them away. The Bethlehem police chief cursed under his breath and rubbed the back of his prosthetic hand nervously.
“You don’t like being in somebody else’s jail for a change?” Omar Yussef said.
“My station house only has a few cells,” Khamis Zeydan muttered. “It’s not much of a jail. This place is the real thing. You can smell it.”
Omar Yussef inhaled a rough undertone of body odor, clashing with the chemical scent of disinfectant. It bore the disconsolate heaviness of mass sanitation, as though the inmates were bugs or bacilli to be exterminated with industrial acids from a bucket.
A bulky guard awaited them beyond the metal door, his shoulders filling the corridor. Omar Yussef caught a trace of cheap cologne emanating from the guard’s dark blue uniform. He seized upon it to block out the disinfectant, but it came with a hint of the dried sweat it was intended to disguise. He sniffed the French toilet water he always placed on the back of his hand to counter unpleasant odors.
The guard reached for a clipboard passed through the doorway by his colleague. He looked it over with the sleepy eyes of a man who has eaten heavily, and belched. “You’re here to see Sirhan?”
“You’re quite correct, my dear sir,” Omar Yussef said, standing as straight as his little paunch allowed and speaking with a formality born of nervousness.
The guard’s eyes flicked up from the clipboard, as though he thought Omar Yussef were mocking him. “Related to the guy who killed Bobby Kennedy?”
“I see you know your assassins,” Omar Yussef said. “Sirhan Sirhan was from an entirely different clan. I’m sure that the actions of the senator’s killer would be shocking to my son. He’s never been a violent boy.”
The guard rolled his tongue under his bottom lip and turned the clipboard toward Omar Yussef. “Sign here,” he said, “both of you.”
As Omar Yussef handed the clipboard to Khamis Zeydan, he noticed a pin on the guard’s breast pocket. It bore the date of the infamous attack with the digits of the “eleven” thickened and topped by a radio mast so that they resembled the Twin Towers. The
Stars and Stripes ran along the bottom of the design.
“My son would never have approved of that attack, either.” Omar Yussef pointed at the pin.
The tall guard came close enough to Omar Yussef that his big, hard belly touched the schoolteacher’s diaphragm. “I lost a brother in the Trade Center. He was a cop, and he was trying to save people from what you Arabs did to us.”
Omar Yussef breathed slowly. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
“You going to tell me the Nine-Eleven terrorists weren’t ‘really Muslims’? Like all those stories in the papers making excuses for the Arabs?”
“No, they were Muslims, and it’s true that many Muslims approved of what they did.” Omar Yussef looked up at the guard’s double chin, pale, shiny, and smooth. “But I was not among their supporters, and neither was my son.”
“Sure about that?”
“As sure as you are that your brother was a hero.”
The double chin quivered, and the guard stepped back. With the clipboard, he gestured toward an open door down the corridor. “In there,” he grunted.
Behind a Plexiglas screen, Ala leaned his elbows on a counter. Tiredness seemed to have spread from his red eyes through new lines in his face, sucking the color from his skin. He had the desperate drowsiness of an insomniac after another failed night of sleep, a long day of terrible fatigue ahead of him. He lifted the handset beside the screen, as Omar Yussef sat down.
“Morning of joy, Dad.” His voice was cracked and dry. He smiled weakly at Khamis Zeydan. The police chief folded his arms and inclined his head.
“Morning of light, my son.” Omar Yussef noticed that Ala wore the same dress shirt in which he had been arrested. He had half-expected to see the boy in an orange jumpsuit and thought perhaps it was a good sign that he hadn’t been forced into the anonymity of a prison uniform. “How’ve you been?”
“I was at the precinct house for a long time with the Indian lieutenant and that meathead bastard, the Palestinian sergeant.” Ala’s eyes darted about urgently, as though he were being hunted. “Then they brought me here.”
Omar Yussef was surprised at the force of his son’s anger toward Hamza. “What’s it like?” He lifted his chin. “In there?”
“I’m in a small cell with a lot of other men. Everyone tries to stay close to the bars, staring down the corridor, waiting for someone to come and release them. They look like the people on the street watching anxiously for a bus. Everybody is nervous and irritable and talkative. They all want to describe how they were arrested and keep telling the others they’re sure someone will bail them out. Everything stinks and something in the air is making my asthma act up.” Ala wheezed and scratched the stubble on his face almost vindictively. “And I’m itching all over. It’s driving me crazy.”
“My boy, you can end this now,” Omar Yussef said. “Tell the police where you were when Nizar was killed.”
“I can’t do that, Dad.”
The bruise on the back of Omar Yussef’s head throbbed.
“Don’t you think the police have been asking me that all night?” Ala continued. “That bastard Sergeant Abayat thinks I killed Nizar.”
“Surely not.”
“He’s badgering me to confess. ‘Tell us the real story; tell us how you did it; you went out to get rid of the murder weapon, and when you came back your father was there, so where did you hide it?’ America’s full of Arabs like him. They want to show their American patriotism, so they make out that other Arabs are all bad guys. Why not hang the murder on me? I’m just a stinking Arab, after all.”
“You’re letting your animosity toward that man obscure what you ought to be focusing on. You need to reveal your alibi.”
“I’m sorry to try your patience, Dad, but there’s somebody I must protect.”
“By Allah, you mean that you really know who committed this murder?”
Khamis Zeydan leaned forward and took the second handset. He lifted an eyebrow to indicate that Ala should continue.
“That isn’t what I mean by protecting someone.” Ala rocked his head from side to side. “I was with a woman when the killing happened. I’m worried about her reputation.”
“Her good name is worth more than your freedom?”
“I’ve already told the meathead detective that I waive my right to a lawyer. I don’t want to have to admit where I was, and there’s no other way out of this for me.” Ala sucked his upper lip.
“Without a lawyer, they’ll pin this murder on you. They could put you away forever.” Omar Yussef slammed his palms onto the counter before him. The guard stuck his head around the door with a warning look.
Ala’s voice softened. “I love her. I’m ready to sacrifice for her.” His face was beatific, but his lower lip twitched.
“She’ll surely be prepared to let you tell your story. She’ll corroborate your alibi.”
“She’s an Arab woman, Dad. She can’t just say, ‘Sure, I was with him.’” Ala scratched at his curly black hair and groaned.
He’s worried someone will kill her. To punish her for besmirching the honor of her family by meeting alone with an unmarried man, Omar Yussef thought.
“Tell me who she is, my son. I’ll persuade her to let you speak. Then you can go free. I’ll appeal to her love for you.”
“She doesn’t love me, Dad.”
“Why not?”
Ala snorted a tired laugh. “Am I talking to my father or my excessively proud mother? I’m not irresistible to women, you know.” The boy fretted at his lips with his front teeth. The whites of his eyes were shaded blue and green and shot through with red.
She doesn’t love me. Omar Yussef remembered the pink sheet of writing paper in the bony hand of the police lieutenant, the love letter from the corpse’s pocket with the graphic language. He recalled the pain in Ala’s face when the Arab detective read the name “Rania” from that letter. It must have been the same girl, the one Ala was with when Nizar was murdered. But it had been Nizar she had wanted. Omar Yussef felt his son’s desolate loneliness through the Plexiglas. “You and Nizar were rivals for a woman’s love?”
Ala looked up sharply, his haunted, unhealthy eyes wide and defiant. Omar Yussef recognized something of the strength and desperation that must have seen the boy through the long police interrogation. “You think I killed Nizar because he beat me in love, Dad?”
“Of course not. But I want to know the truth. Tell me.”
The boy leaned back in his cheap plastic chair, gazing around at the whitewashed walls and the posters advising prisoners’ relatives of their visiting rights. “You remember Nizar and Rashid as bright young students, Dad, but they changed.”
“Why?”
Ala gave a vague wave of his hand. “You know, the intifada.”
“I know about your intifada.”
“It wasn’t much, was it? Going out with the guys to throw stones at the Israelis. The Assassins, as we used to call ourselves, all four of us.” Ala turned to Khamis Zeydan. “We stoned an army jeep at the edge of the camp.”
“I don’t know why you did it,” Omar Yussef muttered. “It just wasn’t like you, or the other boys.”
“Everyone did it.”
“Other kids at least would’ve run away before the second army jeep came up behind them and arrested them.”
Ala bit the nail of his thumb. “Somehow I think we wanted to be arrested. So we could feel part of the struggle like everyone else. Throwing stones? Well, as you say, it wasn’t like us.”
Arrested and held in a tent on a cold hillside near Ramallah, Omar Yussef thought. The cells here in the Detention Complex must seem like a hotel room with a mint on the pillow compared to the Israeli camp. “It was a terrible time, my son. But you said that it changed Nizar and Rashid. How?”
“In the Israeli jail, they became close to a sheikh from Hebron. The Israelis had picked him up for running an Islamic Jihad mosque.”
“The boys joined Islamic Jihad?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t know that.”
But it’s what you think. “It made them radical?”
Ala shook his head. “It made them religious. It was something else that made them radical.”
“What?”
“Ismail.”
Ala’s classmate, my old pupil, Omar Yussef thought. The fourth Assassin. “I don’t understand.”
“The Israelis offered Ismail a deal.”
“I see where this is going.” Khamis Zeydan clicked his tongue.
“They told Ismail that if he informed on the sheikh, they’d let the four of us go free,” Ala said. “You remember what Ismail was like, Dad. It was easy to sway him. He loved The Assassins. He’d have done anything for us.”
Omar Yussef remembered Ismail as a shy boy who’d always been on the periphery of the class and of the games in the schoolyard, until he had come into the circle of The Assassins. He recalled the habitual trace of fear and nervous supplication in Ismail’s eyes, even when he was smiling; the way he trained his attention on Nizar and Rashid, the gregarious leaders of the gang, laughing at their jokes a beat too late and just a little too loudly.
“So Ismail did what the Israelis demanded?”
“In prison, he talked with the sheikh every day,” Ala said. “We all thought he was becoming religious too. Then suddenly the sheikh was gone. The Israelis put him on trial and sent him away for life.”
“Using Ismail’s evidence?”
Ala’s nod was reluctant, as though he were acceding to a sentence of death against his friend. “That’s why the Israelis released the four of us.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“After our release, Ismail confessed to us. He was ashamed, but he thought we’d understand. I hugged him and told him that it wasn’t his fault, that the interrogators had put him under impossible pressure. But Rashid and Nizar called him dirty names and refused ever to speak to him.”
“What happened to Ismail?”
Ala puffed out his cheeks and lifted his eyebrows. “I lost track of him when I came to New York.”
“Did Nizar and Rashid ever forgive him?”
The Fourth Assassin oy-4 Page 7
