The winter undergrowth crackled as the gunman jogged through the lot. The footfalls were slow enough that Omar Yussef knew the man was still looking for him. Then he heard the warning voice of a policeman at the wall. The gunman went into a run.
Omar Yussef wriggled as tightly as he could against the empty oil drum. The gunman ran low and fast through the shadowy edge of the lot. He wore a stocking cap and a quilted black jacket. He went around the back of the fried-chicken stand toward a parking lot filled with yellow school buses.
Peering through the air duct on the hood, Omar Yussef saw one of the policemen disappear along the Boardwalk to try to head off the fleeing gunman. His partner flicked a flashlight across the debris below the Shoot the Freak sign.
Omar Yussef rolled out from behind the oil drum and called to the policeman. “Don’t shoot. I’m not armed. It’s me he was after.”
The policeman held a gun in his right hand. Omar Yussef squinted against the light in the man’s left. He crawled toward the cop, shielding his eyes from the glare. He kneeled in the snow, put his hands on top of his head, and tasted vomit on the back of his tongue.
Chapter 21
Sergeant Abayat pushed two eight-inch-long boxes toward Omar Yussef on a green plastic tray. “Famous hot dogs in traditional sauce,” he said. “Eat them, and you’ll really be American.”
Though he was ravenous, Omar Yussef restrained himself out of politeness. He reached for one of the hot dogs, lifting it from the box with care, so that the sauerkraut wouldn’t fall to the table, and ate. He rarely consumed food that hadn’t been prepared by his wife, because he preferred the most traditional and time-consuming Arab recipes. Still, he had to acknowledge that the faint savor of smoked meat from the spongy hot dog and the spiciness of the sauce were pleasing. Or perhaps I’m even more hungry than I realize, he thought.
“It’s very good, O Hamza.” He swallowed a bite. “Many thanks.”
“We must thank Allah. To your doubled health, ustaz.” The detective checked the luminous blue dial of his watch. “We’ll give the technical team another few minutes to scope out the scene, then I’ll take you to show me around, to describe what happened.”
Omar Yussef wiped his fingers on a paper napkin and took the Omani dagger from his pocket. He gave it to Hamza with the message that had been hidden within. Hamza slipped the knife out of the scabbard to examine the blade and laid it on the tray. He read the message. “If you had only brought this to me right away, we might have captured the man who tried to shoot you.”
“And Nizar.”
“I’m a good detective, but even I couldn’t trap a phantom.”
“I was going to show you the dagger, but I was sidetracked.” Omar Yussef finished the hot dog and took a swig of lemonade. “Why don’t you believe that I saw Nizar tonight? Are you really so sure of the identification of the headless body?”
Hamza fingered the slip of paper that had come with the dagger. Omar Yussef recognized in his face the kind of stubborn stiffness that came over his pupils when they refused to admit an error in the classroom.
“I saw Nizar right here, down the street from this restaurant,” he said. “Then I was chased by a man who tried to kill me. He wanted to kill Nizar, too, I’m sure.”
“To kill him again,” Hamza said.
Omar Yussef ate the second hot dog, glaring over his glasses at Hamza.
“Those dogs are kosher.” The detective’s smile was hesitant, as if he wanted to make up to Omar Yussef for his suspicion and hostility. “That’s almost as good as halal.”
“I don’t care about our dietary laws. I care about these murders in Little Palestine.” Omar Yussef reached into his pocket for the prayer schedule he had taken from the bulletin board in the café. His thumb smeared sauce on the corner as he handed it to Hamza. “I found this in Marwan’s place,” he said.
Hamza’s look was reproachful. “You took it from the crime scene?”
Omar Yussef wiped his mustache with a napkin. “I thought I might need to know what time I should pray.”
“Screw your mother, ustaz. I bet you haven’t prayed since you were a child young enough to believe in djinns.”
“According to you, I still believe in djinns. I saw one tonight.”
Hamza cast his eyes across the top of the sheet of paper. “The Alamut Mosque.”
“A schedule from the same mosque was on the refrigerator in Ala’s apartment, where I found the headless body. Isn’t it worth finding out more about this mosque?”
“Do you think I’m an idiot, ustaz? I already tried. It doesn’t exist. I even asked your son about it during our interview. He said he hadn’t heard of it.”
“Someone just prints up a prayer schedule for the fun of it? I’m sure these prayer times refer to something else. It must be a code or a signal. Look, once a week the time for the Maghrib prayer is wrong by an hour, but always on a different day.”
Hamza stood, pocketing the paper. “If we find Nizar’s head, we’ll ask it the secret of the Alamut Mosque.”
“The message that came with the dagger referred to an incident in the history of the Assassins.” Omar Yussef rose, wincing at the pain in his ankle. “Allusions such as this are everywhere in this case. ‘Alamut’ is another one. It was the Castle of the Assassins. I think this mosque—or at least its listing of prayer times—is connected somehow to the murders.”
Hamza headed for the door. Omar Yussef noticed the knife still on the green tray. He picked it up and called after Hamza, but the detective was already outside. He slipped it into his pocket and took his tray to the trash can by the exit before he went out.
The full moon lit the empty lot behind Playland a chalky blue. A cloud cut across it, and Omar Yussef remembered the prophecy of the end of time from the Koran. He lifted a finger to the sky. “When the Day of Judgment arrives with the splitting of the moon,” he said, “the Mahdi will come as our Messiah, according to the ancient sect of Assassins. He will deliver Allah’s judgment on humankind.”
“You think he’ll come to Brooklyn first?”
“The veil on the corpse in Ala’s apartment is a sign that the killer thinks of himself as the Mahdi, because the Veiled Man is the Mahdi’s enemy.” Omar Yussef’s mouth tingled from the spicy sauce on the hot dogs. He ran his tongue over his teeth.
“What’s the Mahdi supposed to look like? I seem to remember he’ll have gaps in his teeth, right?” the detective said.
Omar Yussef clenched his jaw as the pain in his ankle bit hard. “That’s right. It’s written that he’ll be very handsome, with long hair and a beautiful face—”
“Like Nizar.”
“—and he’ll die and come back from the dead.”
“As you claim Nizar just did?”
“Correct.”
Hamza pointed upward. “Well, that cloud just moved away, and the moon is full once more. So your Mahdi is out of luck.”
“That depends on how deluded he is.” Omar Yussef gave a laugh that came out like a hacking cough. “I caution you, if the world is about to end, it’d be best not to be sur prised by it.”
“I’m a policeman in New York City. Nothing could surprise me.”
“The end of civilization and all humankind?”
“Least of all that.”
Hamza led Omar Yussef into the Shoot the Freak gallery. Floodlights at both ends of the area illuminated the oil drums, the branches, the blocks of concrete. Omar Yussef whispered his thanks for the darkness that had made it possible for him to evade the gunman.
A forensics officer in a blue raincoat slouched toward Hamza. He handed two transparent plastic bags to the detective. Inside each was a bronze-colored lump of metal the size and shape of a piece of well-chewed gum.
“One of them was embedded in that dried tree trunk there by the wall,” the technician said. “The other one was in the base of the oil drum over by the hood of the Mustang.”
The hood of the car, Omar Yussef thought. He shot that cl
ose to me.
“They’re still very slightly malleable, suggesting they were discharged recently. I mean, they certainly haven’t been sitting here a month since some bunch of gang-bangers had a shootout. So I’d guess they’re from the gun of our perpetrator. Of course, it could just be that someone had a real rough game of paintball, eh, Sergeant?”
Hamza handed the bags back to the technician and swallowed hard. He spoke quietly to Omar Yussef, but didn’t look at him. “Where did you say you saw Nizar?”
At the entrance to Playland, Hamza took a flashlight from his pocket. As he pulled the door open, its hinges squealed and echoed through the hall.
“I went in this direction,” Omar Yussef said, leading Hamza by the hand across the puddled floor. “This was where I first heard him whistle. When I got to this spot, I saw him.”
“And the shots came from behind you?”
“From over there, I think. Near where I entered.”
Hamza paced slowly toward the door from which Nizar had made his escape. He peered closely at the shattered doorframe where the third bullet had hit, then went outside.
Without the flashlight, Omar Yussef felt suddenly blind and alone. He struck his shoulder on the crumbling plaster of a pillar. Edging around it, he caught his knee on an old metal garbage can. He cursed and paused. He thought he had heard something move inside the garbage can when he jogged it. He lifted his foot and gave the can a gentle kick. The sound was repeated, a solid, dull connection, not the hollow crackle of trash.
“Hamza, over here,” he called.
When the detective directed his flashlight into the garbage can, he recoiled and braced himself against the pillar.
“What is it?” Omar Yussef said.
Hamza puffed out his cheeks and blinked hard.
I thought nothing could surprise a New York City detective, Omar Yussef said to himself. He took the flashlight from Hamza and shone it inside the garbage can. He gasped and turned his eyes away, as though they might somehow erase the few seconds during which they had focused on this awful sight.
In the bottom of the garbage can, staring up with eyes that seemed to register all the hopeless dereliction of the building where it lay, was the head of Omar Yussef’s former pupil, Rashid.
Chapter 22
A man reeled out of an all-night Korean bodega on Fifth Avenue, sliding on a patch of ice with a Miller in his hand. He took a few comically fast paces on the spot, brought himself upright, and rolled his shoulders back under his red mackinaw to restore his dignity. He sucked a long belt of beer and hurled the can back into the store.
“Fuck you, you fucking gook bastard,” he yelled.
Omar Yussef halted on the frozen sidewalk a few yards from the man, on the edge of the light cast by the storefront. The loud obscenity in the quiet street shocked him. He checked his watch and saw that it was two in the morning. In his hometown, nobody would be out at this time for fear of Israeli undercover squads. Certainly no one would wander drunk in the night. Those who overindulged in alcohol, as Omar Yussef had once done, closed themselves away with their shame and did their cursing in low voices aimed at themselves.
The Korean storekeeper emerged between the plastic sheets that protected his fruit and vegetables from the freezing weather. He held the open beer can between tense fingers. “You pay for beer,” he shouted, “or you fuck off.”
The drunk belched and wiped his heavy beard. “No money for you, gook bastard. No tickee, no laundry.”
“Fuck you, go away.” The Korean went back into his shop. The drunk bent double, breathless, chuckling quietly and repeating his joke.
As Omar Yussef approached the Café al-Quds, he heard the drunk vomit. The Korean came out with a bucket of water to sluice down the plastic sheets on the storefront.
Omar Yussef rang the bell outside the café and waited. He tried to turn his mind from the scene he had just witnessed and the memories it revived of his own ugly, hateful drinking. Murder seemed less distasteful. Did Nizar leave the severed head in the trash can? he wondered. Couldn’t it have been the gunman who dropped the head at Playland? Maybe he slaughtered Rashid and now wants to kill Nizar too. Was he the same man I saw at the apartment? The one who’s been tailing me?
A light came on in the staircase behind the kitchen and then another low bulb behind the bar. Rania weaved between the tables and slid back the bolts. When she opened the door, she stared at Omar Yussef with a brittle glimmer in her eyes, but confrontation in her jaw.
“Greetings, my daughter,” he said.
She stepped aside. “You’re in your own home and with your own family,” she murmured.
He limped through the door and unzipped his thick coat.
“It’s very late, ustaz,” she said.
“But you’re awake.”
“When I sleep, Nizar comes to me and I feel his loss too greatly.”
“Do you feel the loss of your father too?”
Rania clasped her fingers in a fist and led Omar Yussef through the kitchen. Her father’s blood had been scrubbed from the floor tiles, but Omar Yussef smelled something dark in the air, as though the dead man’s final breath lingered. He winced with regret for his critical tone at the door.
He followed her up the narrow stairs into a living room lit only by a single fluorescent strip in the galley kitchen behind the sofa.
She poured ground coffee and water into a small tin pot and set it to boil on a gas burner.
“No sugar,” he said, and waited in silence. He savored the cardamom scent of the coffee as she stirred it with a spoon.
Rania brought a tray with his coffee and a glass of water to the low Syrian table in the living room. He ran his fingers over the mother-of-pearl in the tabletop as he waited for the grounds to settle in his cup.
She sat with a straight back on a cheap folding chair and put her hands in her lap. Her eyes were preoccupied and desolate.
Omar Yussef tasted the bitter coffee. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said. “It’s very good.”
“Blessings upon you.”
He put the cup on its saucer and returned it to the tray. “Nizar is alive,” he said.
Her long lips parted, and her head dropped forward. She adjusted her mendil along her hairline and returned her hands to her lap. Omar Yussef saw a little vein pulsing on her neck as though it were trying to creep around the edge of her headscarf.
“He’s alive,” she said, with a bitter note of triumph. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He disappeared again.”
“If you expected to find him here, he won’t come.”
“Why not? Surely he’d want to be with you?”
“The police would be waiting.”
“Why should he be worried about the police? Is it a crime in New York not to have your head chopped off?”
She nibbled at the quick of her thumbnail and watched Omar Yussef so intensely that he felt as though it were him she was biting.
He finished his coffee and wiped his mustache with his handkerchief. “Rania, why did Nizar reveal himself to me? Now that the police know he’s alive, they’ll suspect him not only of killing Rashid, but also of the murder of your father.”
She twitched her head toward Omar Yussef. “That couldn’t be.”
“Murders around here are usually drug-related, so surely the police will assume that the closest man to your father in the drug trade was also the one who killed him.”
Omar Yussef saw a flash of desperation on Rania’s face. “That’s crazy, ustaz,” she said. “Where did you see him?”
“At Coney Island.”
Rania’s eyes were wet. “He took me to Coney Island in the summer. We rode the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.”
“It’s all closed now.”
“Only for the winter.”
“In Brooklyn, that appears to be a long, hard season.” Omar Yussef gazed around the room. On a cheap wicker bookshelf, he noticed a photo of a woman with a deeply lined face and
a wide mouth smiling tiredly between Marwan and Rania. The departed mother, he thought. “Nizar faked his death, but he decided to reveal himself after your father died. What was it about the murder of your father that changed Nizar’s mind?”
The girl looked as near to death as the woman in the photograph. She shook her head.
“I think that whatever Nizar’s doing now, it’s somehow because he wants to be with you,” Omar Yussef said.
“What makes you say that?” Her voice was a whisper.
“His life in Brooklyn seems to have been full of indecision. He was sure of his religion; then he went wild. He was close to Rashid; then they argued. He drove a taxi and worked honestly; then he dealt drugs to make money. The only thing he didn’t doubt was his relationship with you.”
Rania seemed to search Omar Yussef’s face for sympathy. “You’re just like Ala, ustaz. Honest and good.” She glanced at the quilted coat, splayed open across the sofa behind him, and the NYPD stocking cap on his head. “Although he dresses rather better than you do.”
Omar Yussef pulled off the cap.
“I see that you have his sensitivity too,” she said.
The seductiveness had returned to her dark eyes. The eyes of the houri, Omar Yussef thought, as he pushed his hair, rumpled by the cap, into place.
“Ala was too Palestinian for me,” she said. “He was unwilling to venture out of our culture. He wouldn’t enter into American life as Nizar did. No matter how often I said I wanted to break out, Ala thought he knew what was good for me. He’s a typical Arab man.”
“You think I’m like that too?” Omar Yussef lifted his chin.
“Of course you are. No matter how liberal your ideas may be, ustaz, I can smell the Middle East all over you.”
“You’re mistaken. You assume I’m a Middle Eastern man like your father.”
“My father wasn’t like that at all. He hated the Middle East. He wanted to leave it behind, but it followed him here and dragged him down. You, ustaz, can’t wait to leave this city and get back home, can you? Admit it. You want to return to your little town where everyone knows you and respects you.”
The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery Page 15
