The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “You built this yourself?” Omar Yussef said.

  “I raised the money and led the work.”

  “By Allah, that’s impressive.”

  “I told you there’s no need to pretend that you’re a believer. You have no bump on your forehead from prostrating yourself in prayer.” Hantash lifted the edge of his stocking cap to show a dark notch like a rough knuckle at the center of his brow. He grinned slowly, so that the black hairs along his jaw seemed to rise one by one as his skin drew back from his mouth. “But I’m proud of this place. Our population is growing, and it needs more mosques.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the sheet printed with prayer times in Ala’s apartment. “Where’s the Alamut Mosque?”

  “I haven’t heard of it, ustaz.”

  “I think it must be nearby.”

  “That’d be a strange name for a mosque around here.”

  “Would it? Why?”

  “Are you telling me you don’t know, or are you pretending once again?” Hantash lifted a finger and faked a frown. “Alamut was the castle of the Assassins—a Shiite sect. Almost everyone in Little Palestine is a follower of Sunni Islam. I don’t see why anyone would name a mosque here after a castle from someone else’s tradition.”

  Is the Alamut Mosque just a joke by my little gang of Assassins? Omar Yussef wondered. Or does it connect them to Marwan Hammiya, a Shiite with his roots in the Lebanese region where drugs are produced? “You don’t know any Shiites in this neighborhood?”

  Hantash gave Omar Yussef a long look through narrowed eyes. “There’s Marwan, who runs the café.”

  “Do you think I should ask him about the Alamut Mosque?”

  “You should ask me some questions to which you don’t already know the answers. That’s what I think, ustaz.”

  Omar Yussef’s spine rebelled against his cross-legged position and he shifted his knees with a grunt. “Let’s get back to what you know about Nizar.”

  The skin below Hantash’s eyes twitched. “Nizar lived a debauched life.”

  “Drinking and women?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Where would he have gone for these wild times?”

  “Maybe Manhattan. Some Arabic clubs there have belly dancers. But we’re not far from Bensonhurst and Coney Island. You can get up to plenty of mischief in those places without having to leave Brooklyn.”

  “Is it easy for an Arab man to pick up a woman?”

  Hantash ran his finger along the narrow line of his beard. “An American woman? No matter how easy it is, ustaz, it always ends in frustration.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “An Arab can drink whisky with Americans and curse every other word as Americans do and even take their women to bed. But, to them, he’s still a stinking Arab.” The young man stared across the gray carpet, his heavy eyes sad and angry. “I don’t think the wild times, as you put it, would’ve made Nizar happy.”

  Does this man know what was in Nizar’s mind, or is he superimposing his own disappointments from the days before he turned to Islam? Omar Yussef thought. “That’s all he was looking for, you think? Happiness?”

  “If Allah has forgiven Nizar’s debauchery, then he’s in Paradise now with the Master of the Universe, so he found happiness anyway.”

  “Was Nizar involved in drugs?” Omar Yussef asked.

  Hantash inclined his head in assent, slowly.

  “How long was he dealing?”

  “A few months.”

  “What did he sell?”

  “Hashish.”

  “Who was his supplier?”

  “Well, where does hashish come from these days?”

  “Lebanon. The Bekaa Valley.”

  Hantash opened his hand and nodded.

  Marwan again, Omar Yussef thought. He glanced at Khamis Zeydan. The police chief stroked the glove on his prosthetic hand.

  Hantash pushed himself to his feet. “I have to leave, ustaz. I’m refereeing a basketball game at the community center. Where can I find you? I’ll be in touch if I discover anything useful. Rashid is a good Muslim, and I want to help find him. Also, I like your son, though we never see him at the mosque.”

  “I’m at the Stuart Hotel in Manhattan.”

  Hantash flicked his fingers together as though he were counting money.

  Omar Yussef gave a laugh that sounded as though he were choking. “We’re not big-money men. My room is paid for by the UN. I’m the principal of their school in Dehaisha. My friend Abu Adel is security adviser to our president.”

  Khamis Zeydan whistled and raised his eyebrows. “My friend gives away all my secrets,” he said, standing and shaking his foot to get the blood flowing. “You’ve been very helpful, Brother Nahid.”

  At the cubbyholes in the hall, Omar Yussef fretted the tassels on his loafers. Sergeant Abayat suggested that these former PLO gang people might deal out street justice to a drug dealer, he thought. Hantash knew Nizar was dealing drugs. He also knew that the Alamut Mosque was connected to the Assassins, so perhaps he’d be knowledgeable enough to have left the clue about the Veiled Man. “If you were aware that a Palestinian was pushing drugs to people in this neighborhood,” he called across the carpet to Hantash, “what would you do about it?”

  The young man flicked out the lights in the mosque. In the darkness, his throaty voice was deep. “I’d turn him in to the police, ustaz. That’s all.”

  Omar Yussef waited at the door for Khamis Zeydan to lace up his shoes. “Should we go to Marwan now?”

  “It’s getting late,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Marwan might have customers—even a front has to have a few. He might not be free to talk. Go tomorrow, so you can catch him when the café is quiet.”

  At the top of the steps, the traffic lights dazzled on the wet pavement. Beyond the intersection at the end of the block, the warning blinkers flashed red on top of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Cars rattled down the side street past the green light. Omar Yussef breathed the cold air. The men in the mosque prayed in the direction of Mecca, but the home of Islam in the Saudi desert seemed to be on another planet. He wondered how they even knew which way to turn. Did their prayers rise to the sky and bounce down to the holy city, like a call from a satellite phone?

  Across the road, a man stirred in front of a thick retaining wall by the intersection. The traffic lights changed, and a car made a right turn, its headlights illuminating the man’s face and his black coat. He was watching Omar Yussef. The car moved on, and the man disappeared. Omar Yussef headed toward the end of the block, but when he reached the corner there was no sign of the man. He stared into the darkness along the empty street.

  “Just because you have a new coat doesn’t mean we ought to hang around in the cold,” Khamis Zeydan said. “The subway is in this direction. Hurry up.”

  Omar Yussef followed his friend reluctantly, looking back every few paces to search for the man who had been watching him. His pulse ran fast. Though he had seen it only for a moment, he had recognized the stern, bearded face.

  It was Ismail. The fourth Assassin.

  Chapter 15

  The snow drifted down over First Avenue. In the long UN Conference Hall building, Omar Yussef wiped its traces from his brow with a handkerchief. Delicate flakes attached to the tall, picture window and slipped down the pane as the heat from the hallway seeped through the glass. A new snowflake settled, and he touched his finger to the spot, wondering if the pattern of the ice crystal outside was as unique as the fingerprint he left on his side of the window.

  The brief glimpse the snowflakes gave of themselves before they melted away reminded him of the flicker of light that had illuminated Ismail’s face. The sudden appearance of the fourth member of The Assassins disturbed him. Was Ismail’s presence in New York connected to the murder in the apartment where his three former friends lived?

  A short Latino woman rolled her cleaning cart by him, favoring her left hip as she hefted her heavy buttocks. She halted outside the General Asse
mbly Hall and polished the window where a group of schoolchildren had been pressed against it. Feeling guilty, Omar Yussef rubbed away his fingerprint with his handkerchief.

  He followed the cleaner’s progress down the hallway. Its simple modernist design wasn’t to his taste. He preferred the traditional vaulted ceilings and colorful tiles of the Middle East. But it was a good place from which to watch the snow come down, and he felt its delicate beauty touching his face still.

  He checked his watch. It was almost 10 A.M. He would show himself at the conference this morning—just to keep his boss happy, since he had missed yesterday’s opening session— then he would take the subway to Bay Ridge to talk to Marwan. He turned back to the window, but the magic of the snowflakes was sullied by his memory of the blood he had seen in Little Palestine.

  A slim Russian blonde led a party of tourists toward the mural of Norman Rockwell’s Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Omar Yussef whispered. Behind the tour group, he stared at Rockwell’s mosaic faces filling the wall. They were supposed to represent all the nations of the world. They looked back at him like the mélange of ethnici-ties that stared through the window of any crowded New York subway car. None of them, he thought, looked like him.

  The Russian guide led the tourists past Omar Yussef. They broke around him as though he were a rock in a stream. When they were gone, only one man remained beneath the mural, leering at him.

  “Morning of joy, Deputy Director-General Abdel Hadi,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Morning of light, Abu Ramiz.” The schools inspector approached Omar Yussef and reached out to touch his quilted coat. “This isn’t up to your usual fashionable standards.”

  “Perhaps I could borrow one of your polyester suits, instead.”

  “Or your son could lend you some prison fatigues.”

  Omar Yussef’s head went back as though he had been jabbed on the nose.

  “Your friend Khamis Zeydan was trying to get the president to intervene with the New York police last night. On behalf of your son. I just happened to be in the president’s suite at the time.” Smug at his proximity to power, Abdel Hadi’s breath shivered sensuously, like a cat’s purr. “Sadly, the president decided there was nothing he could do.”

  “There’s no need for interventions. My son will soon be released.”

  “Perhaps your UN pals would do something for the boy. I’m sure it would interest them to learn that their keynote speaker is the father of a murder suspect.”

  Even if we were part of the same delegation, this man might undermine me. That’s the way of Palestinian politics, Omar Yussef thought. With me attending as a UN delegate, I’m truly fair game. “My son isn’t a suspect.”

  “How do they put it—he’s helping the police with their inquiries? Is that it?”

  Omar Yussef clicked his tongue.

  “As he once helped the Israelis?” Abdel Hadi said.

  “He did nothing of the sort. The Israelis arrested him along with hundreds of other youths from Bethlehem. It was a big intifada sweep. Almost every male below the age of thirty was taken in. There was nothing to it. You know that.”

  Abdel Hadi flattened a lick of black hair over his dark, bald scalp. He brushed the dandruff that adhered to his fingers onto the tail of his jacket and licked his lips with the tip of his yellowish tongue. “Your son is accused of murder—”

  “Not accused of anything—”

  “—yet you maintain that circumstances will soon enough reveal him to be harmless.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Perhaps he’s even been framed. Does that sound familiar?”

  Omar Yussef clenched his fists in the deep pockets of his coat.

  “My government work has led me to examine the archives of the old Jordanian administration. Mainly documents concerning education,” Abdel Hadi said. “But I also came across a police report from 1965 regarding the arrest on a murder charge of a young Ba’ath Party activist from Bethlehem. He was expected to go on to great things, to be a leader of his generation, but he lost his nerve and ended up teaching in a backwater UN school.”

  Son of a whore, Omar Yussef thought. I didn’t think anyone knew about that old case. “Maybe his generation was polluted by back-stabbers like you, so he turned his focus to the next generation—the one that’ll shape a better future.”

  Abdel Hadi sneered at Omar Yussef with triumphal calm. “Your son may escape justice this time, just as you did forty years ago. But one day I shall use this information to protect our schoolchildren from your wicked ideas. Perhaps this week. Perhaps even today.”

  Omar Yussef tasted a splash of bile at the back of his tongue. “You should be in a profession more appropriate to your talents than education,” he said. “Try the secret police.”

  Abdel Hadi dropped his hand as though waving away a compliment. “In a spirit of solidarity between Palestinian brothers, I hope for the best for your son.” He gave a smile of compassion, as if he had felt some dull pain. Then he peeled away the expression like a price tag stamped over an earlier, outdated one, revealing a cheaper smirk beneath it.

  The schools inspector pushed through the hazelwood doors of the Economic and Social Council. Omar Yussef held out his palm as the door swung back at him. It jarred his elbow, and he winced. Leaning a shoulder against the door, he entered the conference room.

  An observers’ gallery ten rows deep sloped down to the delegates’ area. The chairman’s table faced the hall, beneath a wall decorated with white concentric ovals on a dark wooden background, like a magnified section from an inlaid Syrian table. It rose to a ceiling that had been left incomplete to represent the UN’s unfinished work in poor countries. Below the chairman, the recorders and clerks huddled, absorbed in their preparations with the businesslike energy of an orchestra in its pit. The delegates sat at long tables, and behind them were five rows of staff seats. From one of these rows, Magnus Wallander waved to Omar Yussef and gestured him toward a seat of ragged lime-green corduroy.

  “What did I miss yesterday?” Omar Yussef asked when he reached his seat.

  “The first day of the conference was what you Palestinians call heki fadi, empty talk,” Wallander said. “It’s only during the breaks that one can have interesting conversations and make some progress.”

  “Progress has no place in the Committee on Palestine.”

  The Swede slapped Omar Yussef’s shoulder as the chairman brought the meeting to order. He was a thick-featured Egyptian diplomat in an expensive gray suit with the lazily watchful eyes of a bazaar trader. He rested his forefinger across his mouth even as he spoke into his microphone, as though he might later deny his words and challenge anyone to claim they had seen his lips move.

  Omar Yussef blocked out the Egyptian’s hard consonants and procedural ramblings. Focusing on his next steps to help Ala, he thought through his conversation with Hantash at the mosque. At first, it had been hard for him to accept that Nizar had been dealing drugs, but as he ran over his memories of the boy, he realized the revelation made sense. Nizar had always been intelligent, but not solely in an academic way. There had been something of the raffish con man about him. His sharpness had led him to understand that New York held no place for anyone who wasn’t on the way up, on the make. So he had gone for fast, illegal money. Like the girl Rania, drugs were forbidden to Nizar, and Omar Yussef recalled the mischievous student who had always wanted what he wasn’t allowed to have.

  He came out of his reverie when he heard the chairman call on Abdel Hadi. He glanced at Wallander in surprise. The Swede fiddled sheepishly with the dial on the arm of his chair that controlled the choice of language for the simultaneous translation. “He is part of the Palestinian delegation, Abu Ramiz. I couldn’t really stop him speaking,” he said.

  Abdel Hadi stammered through his introductory remarks. Omar Yussef swore he could hear static from the man’s cheap suit crackle over the microphone. Some of the delegates left the room. A smok
e break and a chat about the fun at the belly-dancing club last night, no doubt, Omar Yussef thought. He almost felt pity for the stuttering functionary at the podium.

  “Our new Palestinian Curriculum Plan at the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education is the result of five years of brainstorming, the collection of much data, reviewing of the data, and the exploration of experiences with curricula in other countries in the region,” Abdel Hadi read from his notes.

  With material like this, I’ll soon be the only one in the room, Omar Yussef thought.

  In a monotone, Abdel Hadi recited the details of the education plan he had designed. Omar Yussef had read the curriculum and hadn’t been enthused. He was even less impressed now that he knew it had been Abdel Hadi’s work.

  “The pressure of the international community is constantly applied to the Palestinian curriculum, through the activism of sinister Jewish groups which accuse our schools of inciting children to hatred of Israel and Jews,” Abdel Hadi said. “We ask, why is this pressure applied only to the Palestinian side, and why is an examination not made of what is taught in Israeli schools?”

  Omar Yussef shook his head. Take care of your own responsibilities, he thought. Let the Israelis teach what they like.

  Abdel Hadi’s reading grew more fluent as his subject became harsher. “But it isn’t only these shadowy Zionist groups that threaten our children. Within our schools, there are dangerous agents who pervert our children’s minds with divisive propaganda.” He cast his eyes over the delegates until they rested on Omar Yussef. “Later this week, you will hear from one such man. I will be present to rebut his accusations against the honor of the Palestinian people. I hope you will join me in rejecting his ideas.”

  Abdel Hadi descended from the podium to lackluster applause. Omar Yussef felt a loop of tension squeeze his skull. At least I know now what I’ll be talking about when I address this august body in three days’ time, he thought.