The Fourth Assassin oy-4

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Omar Yussef thought of Nizar’s father. “There was one. A writer named Fayez Jado.”

  “Who told you about that? Was it your old friend the police chief of Bethlehem?”

  Omar Yussef’s head cleared, and his eyes snapped to Abdel Hadi’s face.

  “I see the former PLO hit man has been reminiscing,” Abdel Hadi said. “If only he was as good at doing his job today.”

  Omar Yussef’s thoughts came in a rush. Nizar’s father was the only Palestinian official assassinated in New York during the eighties. What did Khamis Zeydan say? It was difficult to organize a hit in New York, but he managed it anyhow. It was him. When he was a PLO assassin, he killed Nizar’s father, and Nizar knows it. That’s why he agreed to come with me after I found him at Grand Central-to see the man who shot his father. Now he’ll try to murder him. What if Nizar goes back to Ala’s place as Hamza thought he would? He’ll find my friend there, and he’ll kill him.

  Omar Yussef jogged to the chair where he had left his coat. Water spilled over his wrist. He drank the remainder quickly, put the glass on the chair, and picked up his coat. He hurried to the exit.

  He stumbled along First Avenue, searching the steady traffic for a vacant taxi. He needed to get to Khamis Zeydan to warn him. There was no time to take the subway. A cab pulled over, and Omar Yussef dived inside. The driver, a Sikh in a black turban, leaned toward the divider for instructions. “Brooklyn, Bay Ridge,” Omar Yussef said.

  The cab raced down the FDR Drive to the Manhattan Bridge. Omar Yussef blinked into the dark as the driver dodged between the brake lights from lane to lane.

  They came off the bridge in Brooklyn and turned onto the Interstate that followed the shoreline. Across the bay, the Statue of Liberty bent her head under the dark clouds moving in from New Jersey. It’ll rain soon, Omar Yussef thought. That’s all right. Finally I’ve started to like this cold weather. It reminds me that my body is warm and alive.

  As he reached Bay Ridge, the rain was coming down hard and thick, like blood from a sheep gutted for the ’Eid. It was six o’clock. The day, which had never been bright, was dark and gone.

  Chapter 32

  Omar Yussef hurried to the shelter of the doorway that led up to his son’s apartment. Raindrops slashed onto the deserted sidewalk and drummed on the awning of the Cafe al-Quds. The skyscrapers and the avenues like canyons and the bridges of the great city of New York were reduced in his mind to this one street in Brooklyn where the Arabs lived. He scanned the darkness, looking for Nizar. It was as if the whole metropolis flooded down like the rain onto this block, a teeming, distracting chaos of noise and smells, flashing lights and video screens. He tried to close the city out of his head and imagined that he was leaving it behind him, watching it recede from the window of an airliner. He backed through the entrance, as though to ensure that neither Nizar nor New York stalked him up the stairs.

  Ala opened the door at his knock and kissed him three times on the cheeks. The boy had been weeping, and his mustache was slick. Rania stood in the kitchen doorway, her arms folded and her big mouth a pouting crescent.

  Omar Yussef stared at her with surprise and disapproval. She dropped her eyes to the floor.

  Ala took his father’s hand. “I asked Rania to come so we could say good-bye. Abu Adel is in the bedroom.” He gestured toward the room where Omar Yussef had discovered the body.

  “Since the local police don’t seem to have been too sharp, I’m looking for evidence they may have missed. Maybe something about the Islamic Jihad cell,” Khamis Zeydan shouted. He grunted, and Omar Yussef heard a sliding sound, as though the police chief had gone under the bed.

  Omar Yussef blew out a long, shaky breath. He realized that he had been worried he might find Khamis Zeydan murdered. He glanced out of the window. The blue glow of a wristwatch briefly illuminated the interior of a car in front of the Community Association. Hamza, on surveillance stakeout, he thought.

  A lone man walked quickly along the opposite sidewalk, his head covered by the hood of his coat, his shoulders hunched. He crossed the street and went under the awning of the cafe.

  The model of the Dome of the Rock sat on the low table by the door. Omar Yussef touched his fingertip to the brown bloodstain on the yellow dome. “You aren’t packing this to take with you, Ala?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I’ll bother. Where I’m going, you know, we have something similar.” Ala smiled, and Omar Yussef wagged his finger at him, nodding.

  The door swung open behind Omar Yussef. As he turned toward it, Nizar stepped into the room, dripping rainwater onto the floorboards. He pushed back the hood of his coat. Around his face his long black hair was wet, clinging to his skin. He shook his head and sprayed water over Omar Yussef.

  “You’re here, Rania, my darling,” Nizar said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. This place was my last hope of finding you.”

  “Ala came to me,” Rania said, poking her hair behind her ear and straightening the embroidered edge of her black headscarf.

  Nizar glared at Ala. “What did you want with her?”

  “To say good-bye and to be sure she wasn’t alone,” Ala mumbled. “I’ve been worried about her since her father-”

  “She’ll never be alone. She’ll be with me.” Nizar’s teeth were set, and his lips rolled back.

  Omar Yussef glanced toward the bedroom, nervously. “Take Rania and go, Nizar,” he said. “Make a break for it now.”

  Khamis Zeydan emerged from the bedroom. “Nizar, what did you run off for?” he said.

  Surprise registered on Nizar’s face, but it was replaced instantly by a dark satisfaction. He reached for his coat pocket.

  “Wait,” Omar Yussef called.

  Nizar drew out a pistol. Khamis Zeydan’s eyes widened, and he pulled his own gun from his shoulder holster. They held their weapons on each other, arms tensed and breathing shallow. Nizar’s tongue flicked against the gap between his front teeth. “This is what the Americans call a Mexican standoff,” he said.

  “It’ll be a Palestinian standoff when you both kill each other,” Omar Yussef said. He fingered the Omani dagger in his pocket. Take your hands off it, he thought. You’ll never use it. “Nizar, you can’t win. Let us help you. Abu Adel can still get you immunity.”

  “Help from the man who killed my father? No, thanks, ustaz.” Nizar sneered. “I would’ve killed the bastard at the hotel if I could’ve done it and got away.”

  Khamis Zeydan stepped toward Nizar. “Drop the gun.”

  “That’s close enough.” Nizar’s handsome face flushed with panic, and his finger tightened on the trigger. The sweat lay in beads on his face.

  Stop sitting in your car checking your watch, Hamza, Omar Yussef thought. Get in here.

  Rania reached for the young man’s arm. “My darling, forget all this. Take me away from here, please.”

  Inside his pocket, Omar Yussef wiped the perspiration from his palm. He grasped the dagger. If he distracted the boy, Khamis Zeydan could overpower him, and the danger would be over.

  He tossed the dagger. The stones in its scabbard flashed garnet and green, as it twisted through the air. He shouted, “Nizar.”

  The dagger struck Nizar on his gun hand. His arm jolted to the left. The pistol discharged, and Rania spun back against the wall.

  The reverberations of the shot died away. The room was silent but for Nizar’s horrified moan and Rania’s desperate breaths. He went down on his knees, lifting her torso with his free arm and stroking her head with the 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 found the mute button and silenced the television.

  “Greetings, ustaz Abu Ramiz.” The hearty voice sounded distant on the crackling phone line.

  “Hamza? Double greetings. How’re you?”

  “Thanks be to Allah. May Allah bless you, dear ustaz Abu Ramiz.”

  “His blessings be upon you. What time is it where you are?”

  “It’s six in the morning in New York, but I’ve been up all night. We’ve busted the Islamic Jihad drug-trafficking ring.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “A thousand congratulations to you, my dear friend.”

  “Why to me?”

  “It was your discovery of the Alamut Mosque prayer timetable that led us to t
hese men. You saw that every week there was one prayer time that seemed to be off by an hour and guessed that this was some kind of code.” Hamza’s voice was raw with excitement and fatigue. “You found the mosque’s schedule in the apartments of Nizar and Marwan. Both men were involved in the drug trade, so I figured that the off-schedule prayers might mark the times when the drugs would be delivered to Marwan’s cafe. Yesterday evening, three Lebanese guys came to the cafe with a case full of hashish, right on schedule, and I was waiting for them.”

  “My congratulations to you.” Omar Yussef sensed that Hamza had something else to talk about. He waited.

  “I’m still very sorry to have shot that boy, ustaz,” Hamza said. “I heard the gunshot and-”

  Omar Yussef detected deep contrition in the detective’s voice. He had wished many times that Hamza hadn’t shot Nizar, though he also felt the boy wouldn’t have wanted to survive after Rania had been killed. His part in the girl’s death troubled him, too. Remorse is a heavy thing for a man to carry, he thought, but to give a little kindness will make my load lighter. “I insist you feel no regret over that, Hamza. You were doing your job.”

  Hamza’s voice became wistful. “By Allah, what is it like to be home, ustaz?”

  “Praise be to Allah, it’s wonderful.”

  “What’s Bethlehem like now? How is my hometown?”

  It’s the same as it always was, Omar Yussef thought, though I’ve changed. I’ve seen people I loved do dreadful things, yet I’ve also come to love one of them even more. I’ve seen New York, a city I never imagined I’d visit, and I’ve experienced it at its worst. But I also found people there to trust. “Bethlehem has no policemen as dedicated as you, Hamza.”

  “Thank you, uncle. Let me reminisce about the old town with you a little. You’ve eaten lunch, I assume. Where will you go now for the afternoon?”

  Omar Yussef glanced at the muted television. The satellite channel was broadcasting footage of the president’s abortive speech at the UN. Over the politician’s shoulder, Omar Yussef noticed the green windows of the translators’ gallery. He caught the outline of a dark head through the glass of the last booth. “This afternoon,” he said, “I’m going to visit the parents of a friend.”