The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “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?”

  “They never mentioned his name again. They were too busy praying five times a day.” Ala’s eyes drifted to the damp-stained ceiling, struggling against his fatigue to keep track of his story. “But after a while Nizar changed.”

  “How?”

  “He started dressing more fashionably. You remember the nice boots he was wearing when he—when he was killed?”

  Omar Yussef recalled the luscious black of the leather on the dead body and winced.

  “He stayed out late every night,” Ala said. “Rashid was often angry with him and accused him of betraying his religion for a good time.”

  “A good time? What was Nizar up to?”

  “He told me once, with great relish, that he was having sex with ladies.”

  Khamis Zeydan grinned. “That’s more fun than praying, may Allah be praised.”

  Omar Yussef scowled at his friend.

  “Then suddenly Nizar’s bad behavior stopped.” Ala’s face bore a look of strain as though he had experienced the twinge of a forgotten pain.

  “There’s only one thing that can stop a young man wanting to have sex with everyone in sight,” Khamis Zeydan said. “The poor slob must’ve fallen in love.”

  “At the Arab social club in Bay Ridge, Nizar and I were on the same dabka team,” Ala said. “Some of the younger kids liked to inject break-dancing and other strange American stuff into the traditional Palestinian dances, but Nizar said we should keep our dabka slow, just the way we did it back home. There was a girl who liked that attitude, because she’s also relatively new to the U.S.”

  Omar Yussef imagined the hunched, twitching boy behind the Plexiglas standing straight in a circle of dancers, performing the skipping, kicking, stomping motions of the dabka, lifting his hand to twirl a kerchief above his head. He wondered what it must be like to dance a traditional step in exile. I imagine it might move me to tears, he thought. Lucky I don’t have the breath for it. Ala and his friend Nizar had danced with the same girl, and Nizar had won her. “Rania?” Omar Yussef said.

  Ala’s energy seemed to drain away, and his gaze was as dead as a Ramadan afternoon. “I used to visit her father’s café. It’s right next to our apartment building. I became friendly with her father, and he invited me to dinner. It was the beginning of our courtship.”

  “So you had the father’s approval?”

  Ala brightened, but his smile died quickly. “Nizar also started to go to the café. He knew that I was courting Rania. He told me he wasn’t interested in her. He was just glad to drink mint tea, smoke a water pipe, and talk to her father about Middle Eastern politics and the Koran and Egyptian football. I didn’t object, because it kept him from his wild ways. But then I saw how he and Rania looked at each other. I couldn’t compete with him. He’s handsome. He has that long hair. He’s so charming.”

  “My son, I don’t wish to seem unfeeling, but Nizar is gone. Things have changed. You have your alibi, and perhaps you can still be with Rania after she has mourned for Nizar. Don’t lose hope. You must tell the police where you were and leave this jail so you can claim her.”

  “She’ll never be mine. I saw how it was between her and Nizar. In comparison, she felt nothing for me.” Ala scratched his scalp with both hands. “When Nizar was being murdered, I was with her. But only to tell her that she should go with him. I intended to inform her father too. He was looking forward to meeting you and settling all the details of our engagement. I couldn’t bear to break it off, so I delayed until the last minute, right before you arrived. Then I went to their apartment above the café and I told her that there would be no arrangement between us.”

  “How did she react?”

  Ala sucked in a breath and was silent.

  “Did Nizar ask to marry Rania?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t. Rania’s father would’ve told me. I can’t put my finger on it, but I think the friendship between Rania’s father and Nizar was not entirely simple.”

  “Could Rania’s father have found out about the secret relationship and killed Nizar for the sake of family honor?”

  Ala shook his head. “I never heard bad words between them. With our roommate Rashid, on the other hand, Nizar argued every day, even after he stopped his bad behavior with girls and alcohol.”

  “What were the fights about?”

  “They always spoke in urgent whispers. When I tried to ask them what they were talking about, they told me to mind my own business.” Ala stared distantly beyond his father’s shoulder, as though he were chasing through the permutations that might lie behind the murder, tracking each sign to a point where the death would make sense. “There’s also the veil.”

  The Veiled Man, Omar Yussef thought. The betrayer who must be killed by the messiah.

  “Rashid was fascinated by all the Islamic mythology of the Assassins. He read and reread those stories that we first learned in your class, Dad. He might have believed Nizar had betrayed him somehow. If he killed him, he could’ve left the veil as a sign.”

  “Knowing that only you would understand it.”

  “Or you, Dad. He knew you were coming to visit.”

  Omar Yussef’s jaw shook. A sign for me to interpret, he thought. But why? “Could Rashid really kill a man?”

  Ala winced. “I think that was what he and Nizar used to fight about,” he said.

  “Killing?”

  “I didn’t hear enough to know any more than that for certain. But I believe they planned to kill someone.”

  Chapter 11

  Khamis Zeydan glowered at the Arabic signs above the shopfronts and the thick-set women bustling along the street, their round faces framed by cream polyester mendils. The rain was turning to a gelatinous gray sleet, and he spat on the slick sidewalk. “Little Palestine,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “That’s the café.” Omar Yussef pointed
out the smoked-glass window and heavy brown drapes. In English and Arabic, the purple awning announced the Café al-Quds. In Arabic, it promised tea, coffee, fruit juices, pastries, and nargileh water pipes. “We have to make this girl Rania go to the police. We have to make her provide an alibi for my son.”

  “Make her do it? Who’re you, the chief of secret police?” Khamis Zeydan grinned bitterly.

  “All right, then we have to—persuade her.” Omar Yussef heard the sinister edge to his words. He evaded Khamis Zeydan’s smile with a guilty flicker of his eyes. “Let’s get out of the cold.”

  The air in the empty café was stale with lingering traces of apple-scented nargileh smoke. The control panel of the stereo behind the bar pulsed lurid pink and turquoise with the driving baladi rhythm of a famous song. Omar Yussef recognized the voice of a Lebanese singer a few years older than himself.

  What happened to us, my love? she sang. The love of my country still wails: Take me, take me, take me home.

  The music was loud, as though the staff didn’t expect customers and had turned up the volume to listen to the song while they worked in another room. Omar Yussef went behind the bar to a door that leaked a dim light into the café. He knocked against the cheap wooden frame.

  The Lebanese star sang on: The breeze blew at us from where the river divided.

  A young woman answered Omar Yussef’s knock in Arabic. Wiping her hands on a dishcloth, she came out of the kitchen, wearing tight jeans, a black T-shirt, and a short purple smock that dropped loosely from her breasts to her hips. Her black mendil was drawn around her face and folded under the collar of the T-shirt.

  “Greetings, ustaz,” she said. Her voice was quiet and husky, as though it had been worn out.

  I’m afraid, O dear, to grow old in exile. . . .

  “Greetings, my daughter,” Omar Yussef said. “I’m Abu Ramiz, the father of Ala Sirhan.”

  . . . and that my home would no longer recognize me.

  She put her hand to her breastbone. “You’re with your family and as if in your own home, ustaz.”

  Take me, take me, take me home.

  “You’re Rania?”

  Her eyes were deep and big, haughty and critical behind long lashes, but the whites were a blurred pink, tired and recently tearful. They closed slowly to indicate that Omar Yussef had been correct. A lick of hair so black that it seemed polished had escaped her headscarf. It stroked softly against her pale throat. She smiled briefly with her wide, shapeless mouth.

  Take me, take me, take me home.

  “I need to speak to you about Ala. He refuses to tell the police that he was with you when Nizar was killed.” Omar Yussef saw the big eyes wince at the name of the dead man. “The police may blame him for the killing unless he reveals your meeting. Won’t you go to the police station and confirm his alibi?”

  The girl raised her eyebrows. “Excuse me, ustaz, but I only have your word that you’re Ala’s father.”

  “Of course I’m his father. Try to imagine my face thirty years ago.” Omar Yussef removed his spectacles. “With more hair and better eyesight. I think you’ll see the resemblance.”

  “Imagine he’d never developed a taste for whisky and blown his health on bad living.” Khamis Zeydan laughed, beating his hand on the bar to the four-four time of the song. “Come on, my daughter. We need to be serious here. If you don’t go to the police, the police will come to you.”

  The girl pushed out her lips, affronted by the police chief’s bluntness.

  “We’re asking you politely,” Khamis Zeydan said. “But do you think we’re going to let Ala go to jail just to save your blushes?”

  “I can’t help you,” she said.

  Khamis Zeydan looked at her hard. “You have no choice.” Omar Yussef saw a flicker of fear on her face. Then came an angry twitch of her long lips, and Rania blew out an exasperated breath. “A moment, ustaz,” she said to Omar Yussef, and she went back into the kitchen.

  Khamis Zeydan picked a green olive from a bowl on the bar and ate it with a nod of approval. “Reckon this place is a front?”

  “What?”

  He dropped the olive pit tinkling into a ceramic ashtray. “I know it’s still not yet noon, but they aren’t exactly fighting off the customers, are they?”

  “A front for what?”

  The girl returned with an older, shaven-headed man who wore a blue apron.

  Take me, take me, take me—

  He pushed the OFF button on the stereo, switched on the lights above the bar, and wiped his thick hands on the apron. He looked with narrowed eyes at Omar Yussef and rubbed the fleshy grooves that ran from his wide nose to the corners of his mouth. His lips were purple and pursed and disapproving, like a sybaritic pharaoh. When he turned to take in Khamis Zeydan, Omar Yussef saw that short black hairs grew in the fat fold where his scalp met the back of his neck, out of reach of his razor.

  “Greetings, my dear sirs,” he said. “I’m Rania’s father, Marwan Hammiya. Please sit while we prepare coffee for you.” Marwan muttered to his daughter and invited his guests to the table nearest the bar.

  On the wall above the table, an Ottoman sultan and his courtiers chased a stag through a clearing, and six tall Corinthian columns rose over the ruins of Jupiter’s Temple at Baalbek. Omar Yussef leaned forward to admire the prints before he sat.

  “Forgive me,” Marwan said, running his thick, hairy fingers over the chips in the Formica, “but may I see your identification?”

  Khamis Zeydan opened his mouth to protest, but Omar Yussef halted him with a hand on his knee. He took his passport from the inside pocket of his windbreaker and handed it to Marwan Hammiya. The café owner bowed his head as he returned it.

  “I apologize, gentlemen. Please understand the suspicion. During the last few years, the FBI has sent many people into our neighborhood pretending to be someone else. They were very keen to prove all kinds of bad things about us Arabs.”

  “If the FBI had half an hour with my friend here—” Omar Yussef waved at Khamis Zeydan “—they’d have plenty of evidence of the wickedness of the Arabs.”

  Khamis Zeydan spat another olive pit into the ashtray. “Maybe you’d be warmer in an FBI hat,” he said.

  Omar Yussef removed his NYPD cap, put it on the table, and straightened his hair.

  “May it be displeasing to Allah.” Marwan smiled. “I had hoped to meet you in happier circumstances, ustaz.”

  Rania brought a tray of ajweh cookies, then returned to the bar. Her face was tight, but something trembled around her lips. She blew her nose, wiped her finger beneath her eyes, and set to making coffee. Omar Yussef nodded his approval as he bit through the cookie’s buttery shortcake and tasted the date paste within. “Excellent,” he said. “Not too sweet.”

  “Rania knows exactly how much rose water to add to the filling.” Marwan pushed the tray toward Khamis Zeydan. “She learned the secret from her dear departed mother, may Allah have mercy upon her, before we left Lebanon.”

  “Your daughter runs the café with you?”

  “She’s a counselor at the Community Association across the street. But she helps me, too.”

  From the bar, Rania called: “With sugar, ustaz?”

  “No sugar,” Omar Yussef said.

  “And you, ya pasha?” she asked Khamis Zeydan.

  “Sugar, please,” he replied. “How do you know I’m a pasha, a military man?”

  Marwan intervened quickly: “Rania grew up in Lebanon. There one learns early to recognize a fighter, even when he wears his civilian clothes. It can be dangerous not to do so.”

  Khamis Zeydan watched the girl closely as she poured the coffee. He took a sachet of sugar from the pot on the table and read the label. “The Maison du Café, Khaldeh Highway, Lebanon.” He snorted a laugh. “I was shot in the shoulder once on the Khaldeh Highway.”

  “Israelis?” Marwan said.

  “Shiites. Near the airport.”

  “The bad old days of Beirut.”
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  “Where are you from, Marwan?” Omar Yussef asked. He tried to make his question sound friendly, but something sharp in his voice took the smile off Marwan’s sensuous lips.

  “Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, ustaz.”

  “So you’re Shiite?”

  Marwan directed a thin, apologetic smile at Khamis Zeydan and stroked his shoulder, as if to salve the police chief’s old wound. “I’m not religious. I’m modern. Here we sit, with my unmarried daughter standing right next to us. I don’t worry about keeping her out of the sight of men. We’re no longer in the old country, are we?”

  Rania set the coffee cups on the table.

  Omar Yussef detected the scent of lavender water when she bent close to him. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said, touching the saucer of his cup.

  “Blessings,” she murmured.

  “Marwan, how long have you been in New York?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “Since the end of 1998. Sadly I brought only my Rania, who was then barely a teenager. Her dear mother rests in Baalbek, may Allah have mercy on her, and I have no other children.”

  “You’ve had the café since then?”

  “Only a year or two.”

  “It’s not very busy.”

  “It’s early. Later in the day,” Marwan hesitated, “we have many clients. They come to hear Arabic spoken and to enjoy the tastes of their homeland.”

  Rania watched her father from behind the bar, her broad mouth turned down at the ends, her shining eyes impatient.

  “What did you do in Lebanon?” Khamis Zeydan said over the rim of his small coffee cup.

  “A merchant. Trade, business, different things.”

  “Business got bad in 1998, did it?”

  Marwan looked hard at Khamis Zeydan. Omar Yussef was surprised by his friend’s sarcastic tone. Khamis Zeydan winked at him. That year means something to him, Omar Yussef thought. He needed to break the tension between the two men, to turn the conversation to Ala’s alibi. “I’ve been to see my son at the jail,” he said.

  Marwan’s eyes were stern when they moved to Omar Yussef. “The jail?”

  “He refuses to give the police an alibi. He won’t tell them where he was when Nizar was killed.”