The Fourth Assassin

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 cafe.” Omar Yussef pointed out the smoked-glass window and heavy brown drapes. In English and Arabic, the purple awning announced the Cafe 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 cafe 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 cafe. 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 Cafe, 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.”

“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 cafe 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.”

“A terrible thing. The whole neighborhood is sad.” Marwan shook his head. “Why won’t he give an alibi?”

Omar Yussef stared at Rania. She polished the bar, her eyes following the cloth over the surface of the wood with great concentration.

“Rania?” he said.

She turned her deep, black eyes to the mirror behind the bar.

“Ala knew about you and Nizar.” Omar Yussef stood and went to the bar. “That’s why he met you yesterday. To release you from your arrangement, to set you free to be with Nizar.”

Marwan scraped his chair as he came to his feet and spoke with a rough edge of assaulted authority. “Rania, is this true?”

“What does it matter? Nizar is gone.” Her voice quavered, but it didn’t quite break. She ran her hand along the shelf behind the bar and rubbed away the dust from her finger pads.

Marwan laid his heavy hand on Omar Yussef’s wrist and led him to the door. “Let me persuade my daughter, ustaz. She’ll help Ala, I’m sure of it.” He patted Omar Yussef’s shoulder as he saw his visitors out.

Omar Yussef sheltered in the doorway of the boutique next door while Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette and cursed the weather. As they walked along the sidewalk, his scalp chilled and the sleet dribbled into his eyebrows.

“I forgot my cap,” he said.

They doubled back and entered the cafe again. The barroom was empty, and Omar Yussef headed for the table where he had left his woolen cap. As he picked it up, he heard Rania’s voice from the kitchen.

“Yes, I was with Ala yesterday morning. From about eight until half-past nine. He was-”

“Isn’t that when Nizar was killed?” Marwan’s words rumbled beneath his daughter’s faltering voice.

“You ought to know.” There was sudden hate in her tone. It seemed to free her, and she wailed a deep, hoarse moan.

“Rania, what’re you saying?” Marwan brought a hand down hard on a metal surface.

“Nizar and I were in love,” she cried. “I never had that with Ala, no matter what you wanted, Daddy.”

“Silence,” the man bellowed. “Ala is too good for you. He’s a good Arab, not like that flashy bastard Nizar who had you under some kind of spell.”

“And may Allah have mercy upon him, the dear boy,” Khamis Zeydan whispered, with a sarcastic grin.

Omar Yussef gestured for quiet and crept to the kitchen door. He peered into the room.

Marwan leaned heavily over the steel kitchen counter, his wide back to the door. “He made you love him, and then he took advantage of you, my darling. You followed him to places where it wasn’t right for you to go, because he had made you love him.”

Rania’s black eyes were angry and beautiful behind their tears. “I loved him because he went with me to Manhattan. He helped me to experience a new life there. We were going to go away, anywhere away from here.”

“Now you’ll go nowhere.” Marwan’s fist came down on the counter. “You’ll stay here and learn to behave yourself, or you’ll pay a heavy price.”

“I paid the highest price when my Nizar died.”

Marwan snorted through his nose. “This is my reward for taking you away from Lebanon. For bringing you to this city.”

The girl clicked her tongue dismissively and, in the same moment, dodged backwards as her father’s hand swung through the air where her face had been. Her movement knocked a nargileh from the shelf behind her, and its water bulb smashed on the tiles.

Omar Yussef went through the door and grabbed Marwan’s hairy wrist as he raised it once more to strike his daughter. “Enough,” he grunted. The wrist jerked and Omar Yussef needed to lay his other hand across it, too, before he could still it.

Marwan pointed to the broken nargileh and growled at his daughter, “Clean that up.” He staggered into the cafe and leaned over the bar with his palm on his shaven head. When Omar Yussef touched his thick shoulder, he realized the man was sobbing.

Rania came to the doorway with her arms folded and her jaw quivering and no more secrets to protect. “Can we suggest to the police that they come and talk to you?” Omar Yussef said to her. “To confirm Ala’s alibi?”

As the girl bowed her head in assent, Omar Yussef couldn’t help but think what a fine couple she and Nizar would have made. The girl’s beauty was of the flaring, sensuous sort that would force most men into unhappy appeasement. She needed a lover who could laugh off her passions because he was daring enough to risk inflaming them still further. A man like Nizar.

Omar Yussef’s glasses fogged when he left the cafe. He pulled his NYPD cap over his ears. “What’s so special about 1998?” he asked.

Khamis Zeydan lifted the collar of his trench coat and cupped his hand around his cigarette. “That was the year the Lebanese government amnestied a thousand convicted drug traffickers. Marwan’s from the Bekaa, the center of Lebanese narcotics production.”

“You’re saying Marwan was a drug trafficker?”

“He knew what I was suggesting, and he didn’t like it. It was a shot in the dark, but I think I nailed him.” Khamis Zeydan exhaled, and the smoke came to Omar Yussef damp on the cold air.

“Why would he leave Lebanon if he had been amnestied?”

“He might’ve had no choice. He could’ve been on the wrong side of the local bad guys.”

“Gangsters?”

“Worse, maybe. Hizballah, Islamic Jihad. Perhaps he came here to get away from them.”

“He’d have had to lie about his drug conviction on his immigration forms. Otherwise the Americans would’ve denied him a visa-amnesty or no amnesty.” Omar Yussef crossed the road and walked close to the buildings, sheltering from the light sleet under the storefront awnings. “If Nizar found out about that deception, Marwan could’ve killed him to protect himself from blackmail.”

“If Marwan murdered Nizar, it might just as easily have been to protect the reputation of his daughter,” Khamis Zeydan said. “It was all the fellow could do not to call her a whore to her face.”

“Just because she followed her heart.” Omar Yussef shook his head. He wondered who was most pitiable: the girl who had lost the man she loved, or the boy who tried to protect her though she had rejected him. “Poor Ala.”

A police patrol car glided slowly down the empty street, squelching through the rivulets of sleet. Khamis Zeydan pointed at the police department logo on Omar Yussef’s stocking cap and gave a thumbs-up. The officer in the passenger seat touched the peak of his cap, and the car rolled on.