The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “In UN-speak, we would say we ‘appreciate Mister Abdel Hadi’s involvement,’ but those comments were ‘not productive,’” Wallander said.

  Omar Yussef gave a bitter laugh that rolled in his throat. I came six thousand miles to discuss our children’s future, he thought, and this bastard Abdel Hadi brings the same petty quarrels and grudges that occupy him at home. I can’t escape this stupidity. No Palestinian can.

  It was time he headed for Brooklyn. With a low curse for Abdel Hadi he rose and moved through a crowd of delegates who were eager to escape before the next speech. At first he carried his coat folded over his arm, but it puffed into the flow of oncoming diplomats, catching their arms in its hood and sleeves as they pushed past. He clutched it to his belly with both hands and made for the exit.

  Beside the door, a group of men in dark suits chatted at a bench that bore a small Lebanese flag. When one of them turned, Omar Yussef recognized the same face he had seen fleetingly illuminated by headlights in Little Palestine the previous evening. Ismail is with the Lebanese delegation, he thought, sighing with relief. He’s here as a diplomat. May Allah be thanked, I was wrong even to suspect a connection to the murder.

  Edging sideways through the crowd, he clutched his coat tightly, but its volume still hampered his progress. Each time he looked up, he feared Ismail would be gone. The young man had aged badly—Omar Yussef would have said he was two decades older than his twenty-four years. His hair was thin and graying, and his olive skin had a sickly yellow undertone. But it was unmistakably Ismail.

  When Omar Yussef was almost free of the crowd, he caught Ismail’s eye. He detected a moment of panic in the face of his former pupil. Then Ismail’s gaze narrowed. Omar Yussef raised his hand to wave, but the boy turned and went through the door.

  Chapter 16

  Shivering and hugging his coat to his midriff, Omar Yussef slithered across the plaza outside the UN building as the snowfall lightened. With a shake of his head to free himself of the strange trance that had come over him since he had left the conference hall, he remembered to put the coat on. He was preoccupied with Ismail. Was the boy so ashamed of his betrayal in the Israeli detention camp that he would twice avoid his beloved former teacher? Or could he have some other reason for his flight? Maybe I’m not so beloved after all, Omar Yussef thought.

  He meandered away from the conference, from the banal chatter of the delegates and the overheated rooms that made his head feel fuzzy. He tried to find innocent excuses for Ismail, but with reluctance he acknowledged that the boy had acted suspiciously. Omar Yussef’s loafers slipped in the slush, and he had to throw his arms up to regain his balance. He stood still, breathing hard, sensing the aversion of the passing New Yorkers to a stranger who couldn’t walk on the snow. The UN building disappeared into the low cloud. Surely Ismail’s here on official business, to talk and talk and talk, nothing more than that.

  Omar Yussef made his way across First Avenue. The involvement in this affair of The Assassins, his favorite pupils, bewildered him. It upset the contentment with which he was accustomed to recalling his years as a teacher. How many other pupils whom he had thought innocent had since grown into criminals, gunmen, wife-beaters? Could any of them now be killers? Ala had told him his roommates, two of Omar Yussef’s dearest students, might have been planning to kill. Where had they learned even to consider such things? His classroom was a place of warmth and intellectual inquiry, but when his students emerged into the world, they became infected by its wickedness. It was a corruption that could no more be avoided than the flakes alighting quietly on his coat.

  What good are my teachings? he thought. History was supposed to give his pupils insights into the damage violence had inflicted upon the Arab people through the centuries. He always hoped this knowledge would lead them to reject the ugliness of present Palestinian politics. In spite of himself, he returned to his suspicions about The Assassins and found he was angry that the learning he had passed on in his classroom seemed to be the basis for a conspiracy, perhaps even a murder.

  He reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street and blew out a furious breath. Its tall buildings like the precipitous walls of a canyon, the avenue extended uptown and downtown, gaping into nothingness at each end as though it gave out onto the limits of the earth. Everything in New York seemed alien and outrageous to him. Before he took the subway to Brooklyn, he decided, he needed to reassure himself that there was a place where his relationships were uncomplicated and loving. He went back to the hotel and rode the elevator to his floor, assaulted by a raucous cartoon playing on a video screen above the door. In his room, he sat on the edge of the bed and dialed his wife.

  “Omar, why didn’t you call me?” Maryam said. “I left you a message yesterday.”

  Omar Yussef glanced at a flashing red light on the phone. Now I know what that means, he thought. “I didn’t receive the message, my darling, but I’m so very happy to hear your voice.”

  “I’ve been worried.”

  He was about to ask how things were at home when Maryam spoke again, with an excited quaver: “But tell me, how’s my dear son?”

  Omar Yussef touched his fingers to his brow. I’m an idiot, he thought. I didn’t prepare a reply to this question. All I considered was my own loneliness. I shouldn’t even have called her. “Thanks be to Allah, he’s well, my darling. I visited him in Brooklyn, and I expect to see him again soon.”

  “What’s his news, may Allah bless him?”

  “It’s snowing here, Maryam. Sometimes very heavy snow. I’m up high in my hotel and looking down on the snow as it settles on the street.”

  Maryam giggled. “Looking down on the snow. You must be in a skyscraper. But I asked about Ala’s news.”

  “Abu Adel is here, too, with the president.”

  “Don’t let him take our Ala to a bar, and make sure Abu Adel eats correctly. He has to take care of his diabetes. What have you been eating, Omar?”

  He sighed, relieved that he had diverted her from their son. “I had Lebanese food. It wasn’t so bad.”

  “How did you find a Lebanese restaurant in New York?”

  I went with the man who put our boy in jail, he thought. “An acquaintance of Ala’s took me. How’re the kids?”

  “Miral and Dahoud are downstairs with Nadia. She’s helping them with their homework.”

  He smiled fondly at the mention of his granddaughter and the two children he had adopted after the death of their parents during the intifada. When he returned to Bethlehem, he would give Nadia the NYPD cap. She loved detective stories, and she would be excited by the gift. He felt less foolish for buying it now. “I have a present for Nadia,” he said.

  “I should hope so, but don’t forget to buy something for Miral and Dahoud, too, and for Ramiz’s other two. I know she’s your favorite, but you have to be fair.”

  “You’re my favorite. Shall I find something to bring back for you, my darling?”

  “Just a husband hungry for his wife’s cooking after eating American fast food for a week. Did you give Ala the present I sent with you?”

  Omar Yussef coughed. “Not yet. Later today, if Allah wills it. I’m sure I shall see him.”

  “If Allah wills it. Give him my love, and tell him I want to speak to him and to see him soon.”

  When Omar Yussef hung up, he let his wife’s soothing voice linger in his head. But the comforting words faded, and he heard her speaking the name of their son like a guilty mantra, Ala, Ala, Ala, rebuking him for his deception. The message light on the phone seemed to blink out the boy’s name, an alarming semaphore. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.

  The phone trilled. Startled, Omar Yussef stared at it a moment. He picked up. “Maryam?”

  “Ustaz Abu Ramiz? May merciful Allah bless you, O ustaz. This is Nahid Hantash. How’re you?”

  “Thanks be to Allah, O Nahid.”

  The PLO gang leader ran through a series of blessings and good wishes. He’s
been a long time in America, where they always get right to the point, Omar Yussef thought, but when he speaks Arabic he’s as formal and courtly as the mukhtar of a village back in Palestine. “May Allah bring you peace,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Have you heard from Sergeant Hamza Abayat today?” Nahid asked.

  Down to business, Omar Yussef thought. “No.”

  “He didn’t call you?” Nahid chuckled. “I thought perhaps he wouldn’t.”

  “What has happened? Is it something to do with my son?”

  “It’s connected to our discussion yesterday.”

  “Nahid, please. Spit it out.”

  “You could say the Café al-Quds is under new ownership. Marwan Hammiya is dead.”

  Chapter 17

  Trees reached up from the road to hedge the elevated section of the subway, their bare silvery branches stark against the flat white sky, like a diagram of a bronchitic lung in a medical textbook. Through the trees, Omar Yussef stared out at the apartment buildings on the avenues and their rooftop water towers decorated with bulbous graffiti. The colorful characters seemed to puff out their chests, posturing like the writers who made them declarations of individuality. The houses on the side streets, their yellow planks layered like baklava, were shrunken and shunted close, parodies of spacious American suburbia. In the distance, the towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, stern and monstrous, rose over the low Brooklyn skyline.

  Back underground, Omar Yussef checked his watch impatiently as he reached his station. He needed to get to Hamza, to tell him what Marwan had said when he stood in the street weeping—about the danger “they” posed. It had proved real enough for Marwan, and the poor man had warned that Ala might be next.

  From the train, he rushed toward Fifth Avenue. Around the Café al-Quds, blue police barriers blocked the sidewalk. He approached an officer who was slapping his hands against his ribs to keep warm while he stood guard.

  “Is Sergeant Abayat here?” Omar Yussef asked. “I need to see him.”

  “Who’re you, sir?” the officer said. Beneath his peaked police cap, he wore a close-fitting black felt headband designed to cover his ears. It came low over his brow and gave him the look of a medieval Crusader.

  “My name is Sirhan. I’m involved in the case of this man who is now dead.” He flicked his fingers toward the café. “May Allah have mercy upon him.”

  The officer muttered into the radio clipped to his collar. A voice crackled a response, and the policeman shoved the wooden barrier aside with his foot to let Omar Yussef pass.

  Inside the café, he recognized the agitated crime-scene technicians he had seen at Ala’s apartment. Hamza Abayat leaned against the bar with his back to the door. The female lieutenant emerged from under the bar and spotted Omar Yussef. The big Arab detective turned and frowned.

  Omar Yussef made his way between the tables. The lights, which had been dimmed when he visited Marwan Hammiya the day before, were bright on the busy technicians. He remembered Khamis Zeydan’s suspicion that the Café al-Quds was a front with few real clients. Murder has turned it into a bustling café, he thought.

  “Hamza, why didn’t you call me?” he said.

  “Are you a detective on the case?” Hamza rolled his neck, and Omar Yussef heard a vertebra click as the big muscles moved. “I know that you like to play the sleuth back in Bethlehem, but what makes you think I’d need your help here?”

  “I was in this café yesterday talking to Marwan. He even followed me along the street to plead with me. Maybe he told me something that might be useful to you.”

  “Take him into the kitchen,” the lieutenant said, ducking behind the bar once more.

  The lights glared off the stainless-steel counters in the kitchen. The floor was smeared with blood, like a butcher’s shop on the day of the Eid al-Adha. Omar Yussef put his open hand flat against the doorpost and imagined he had left the bloody print with which he had seen Egyptians mark their entryways during that feast of sacrifice.

  “Where’s the body?” he asked, conscious that he spoke with a little extra force to compensate for the tremble in his stomach.

  Hamza rubbed the back of his hand across his nose. “Gone. For autopsy.”

  “You’re sure it’s Marwan?”

  “The daughter refused to identify the body. Says she’s too traumatized. It’s him. I’d seen him around.”

  “When did it happen?”

  Hamza lifted his sleeve and glanced at his wristwatch. It was silver with a luminous blue dial, glowing even under the kitchen lights. In the dark, it would be very bright. “The middle of last night. About eight hours ago.”

  “You should’ve called me.”

  The detective blew out a breath of impatience and resignation.

  Omar Yussef remembered Rania’s testimony. “Did the girl confirm Ala’s alibi?”

  “She did.”

  “So you can release my boy?”

  “It’s done.”

  Omar Yussef felt relief flooding his chest, as though tension had constricted his breathing for days.

  “But your son wasn’t too pleased that Rania decided to speak up,” Hamza said. “I think he preferred to play the wounded romantic hero.”

  Omar Yussef blamed himself for his son’s stubbornness. It was an unfortunate trait the boy had inherited from him. “What did you find here?”

  “What do you think? A dead man on the kitchen floor.”

  Omar Yussef averted his eyes from the bloody tiles. “How did he die?”

  “He was stabbed repeatedly. With venom, I’d say. Someone wanted him dead, but they didn’t do it efficiently with a single cut through the jugular.”

  “Do you have the knife?”

  Hamza looked with curiosity at Omar Yussef. “The murder weapon? Yes. No prints on it. But I didn’t say it was a knife.”

  “Is it a knife?”

  “Sure, but how did you know?”

  Omar Yussef let out a dismissive sigh. “Come on, you said he’d been stabbed. It’s the same murderer, isn’t it? The one who killed Nizar.”

  “We haven’t established a definite connection between the two killings.”

  “Two murders within a few steps of each other in a couple of days. No connection?”

  “Not a clear one. Nizar’s killer didn’t descend into the frenzy of the person who stabbed Marwan over and over again. And Marwan wasn’t decapitated, as Nizar was.”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence. What do you think this was—a random robbery that went wrong?”

  “A robbery? No.” Hamza let a nasty sarcasm into his voice. “If robbers had done this, they’d probably have taken the case full of hashish and the used twenty-dollar bills we found in that cupboard behind the tubs of hummus.”

  Hantash knew what he was talking about, Omar Yussef thought. Marwan was involved in drugs, after all. “Nizar was dealing drugs too. Nahid Hantash told me.”

  Hamza sucked his upper lip. “That’s why I don’t deny that there’s a possible connection between the two deaths. If they worked together, maybe someone in their drug ring is tying up loose ends.”

  “Surely someone from the drug ring would’ve taken the hashish and the money after they killed him.”

  “Right.” The skinny lieutenant came to the kitchen door. “And drug dealers usually don’t kill with a bread knife. They like big, big handguns.”

  “A burglary gone wrong?” Hamza said.

  “The techs don’t think there’s any sign of a break-in,” she said. “It must be someone known to the victim, someone he’d allow to enter his kitchen with him.”

  “That could be a member of the drug ring, even if it doesn’t add up that they didn’t take the drugs and the money.” Hamza rubbed the black stubble of his close-cropped hair.

  “They could’ve left that stuff behind to throw us off.” The lieutenant removed her spectacles, breathed on them, and cleaned them with the end of her sweatshirt. “What’d you get from the girl?”

 
“The victim’s daughter was sleeping upstairs in the family apartment at the time of the murder. She didn’t hear anything.”

  “I guess it’s possible she could’ve slept through it.” The lieutenant replaced her spectacles. “Despite the repeated stab wounds, there’s no sign that the victim fought back.”

  “The girl says she got out of bed in the middle of the night—bad dreams about headless boyfriends. She saw that her father’s bedroom was empty. She came down here, found the body, and called nine-one-one.”

  The lieutenant tipped her chin. Her cell phone rang, and she went back into the café.

  “Why wouldn’t Marwan defend himself?” Omar Yussef said. “When he came after me on the street, he was terrified. I’m sure he’d have been prepared for an attack.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like to hit anyone except his daughter,” Hamza said. “Although she doesn’t have any bruises today.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Hamza rubbed his bottom lip with a coarse thumbnail. “You said Marwan came after you, to plead with you? About what?”

  “He said it was safer for Ala to stay in jail. He thought my son would be in danger—and perhaps me too—because whoever killed Nizar might believe we knew something we shouldn’t. He wouldn’t tell me who they were, but he seemed to know who had murdered Nizar. Now Marwan’s dead. That’s why I think his killing is connected to Nizar’s.”

  “Don’t touch anything, ustaz,” Hamza said. “Wait here.”

  The detective went up the stairs behind the kitchen. Marwan Hammiya’s blood was swirled and smudged on the white floor tiles. For a second, Omar Yussef thought he heard the dead man screaming. It’s your imagination, he told himself, and in any case Rania heard nothing from upstairs. Marwan must’ve died quietly, despite the violence of the attack.

  The thought of death dizzied him. He turned from the bloody floor and braced his arm against the wall. His heavy breath rustled some bills in a bulldog clip pinned to a board beside him. His vision clouded, red like the blood on the tiles, and he staggered. His shoulder knocked the papers to the floor. They landed face down, so that the page at the back presented itself to him when he picked them up.