The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 14

The Arab men wished each other evenings of joy and light as they departed Maghrib prayers, pulling the hoods of their parkas over their white skullcaps. Omar Yussef leaned on the onyx balustrade by the sidewalk and looked down on the concrete staircase to the basement mosque. The last of the worshipers zipped their coats and shook hands at the door. As they reached the street, Omar Yussef called to one of them: “Peace be upon you.”

“Upon you, peace, ustaz.”

“Will we find the Honored Nahid Hantash inside?”

“He’s always the last to leave after prayers, ustaz.”

Omar Yussef descended past boarded-up basement windows and entered a short corridor. The wall was covered with posters of Palestinian children, hackneyed images of defiance and suffering, and political slogans that fatigued Omar Yussef with their posturing and sentimentality. He glanced over a photo of a burned-out car, three victims of Israeli helicopter missiles lying within, their bearded faces vaguely nauseous in death, empty eyes staring past the camera. Is this meant to promote the correct frame of mind for prayer? he thought.

He slipped out of his loafers and slid them into a wooden cubbyhole still wet from the last worshiper’s shoes.

At the end of the corridor, a sheet of prayer times laid out the schedule of devotion like a dense page of logarithms. The time for every prayer advanced by a minute or two each day as the moon shifted over the course of the month. Khamis Zeydan rapped his knuckles against the notice. “I don’t know how they have time to do anything else,” he said. “I can think of only a few things that’re worth doing five times a day, and praying isn’t one of them.”

Beyond the door, low stools surrounded a big circular water fountain tiled in fake jade and marble, where worshipers would sit to wash their feet, hands, ears, and nostrils before prayer. Khamis Zeydan turned on one of the shiny copper faucets and scooped water into his mouth. Wiping his mustache, he looked along the narrow mosque. “Do you think that’s our man?” he said.

Omar Yussef peered into the dim light from the scalloped glass light fixtures along the wall. The basement was painted white, and its carpet was gray with diagonal green stripes. At its far end was a niche decorated with the same fake marble as the water fountain and the chair from which the imam would deliver his sermons. On the floor beside the niche, his head leaning back against the wall and his legs stretched out before him, sat a dark man in his early thirties.

As they came toward him, the man brought his palm to his heart and bowed his head. “Peace be upon you,” he whispered, hoarse and calm, with the accent of Palestine.

“Upon you, peace,” Omar Yussef said. “Are you his Honor Nahid?”

The man held up his hands modestly. He wore a light suede baseball jacket, baggy jeans, and white socks. A blue stocking cap was pulled low on his brow and over his ears. He had shaved his facial hair into a thin line along his jaw and around his mouth, as though it were the scaffolding upon which a beard would later be constructed. In one eyebrow, a small scar, pale and hairless, made his eyes look ready for a scrap.

“May you feel as though you were with your family and in your own home,” Nahid Hantash murmured.

“Your family is with you.” Omar Yussef sat on the floor in front of Hantash. “Brother Nahid, I’m the father of Ala Sirhan, a friend of Nizar Jado.”

“Ah, Nizar, may Allah have mercy upon him.”

“May Allah grant you long life.”

“I’ve met your son.”

“Here in the mosque?”

Hantash’s smile was forbearing. “You don’t need to pretend that your boy is religious, nor will you have to quote the Koran to make me like you, ustaz. If you’re Ala’s father, you must be from Dehaisha Camp. I know it well. You and I are linked by our struggle to liberate Islamic land from the Occupation. That’s all that counts.”

“I saw your posters in the corridor.”

“We still must play our part, even if we’re thousands of miles from home.”

“It has more to do with playing a part than with reality.”

Hantash twitched his head with puzzlement.

“Those posters have no place in a house of worship,” Omar Yussef said. “Such images are no good for the soul. It’s sick.”

“O Allah,” Khamis Zeydan sighed.

“They’re the truth,” Hantash said. “Facts.”

Omar Yussef had vented his frustrations on the young Iraqi in the street, but he couldn’t afford to be so harsh with Hantash. Calm down, Abu Ramiz, he told himself. You need this man on your side. “What would you expect an American to think if he saw your posters?”

“Americans don’t come here.” Hantash swung a languid arm around the basement. “They wish we didn’t exist. We aren’t even allowed to broadcast the call to prayer on loudspeakers, because of their noise laws. But if they did come, I’m sure these images of martyrdom would remind them of their Christian churches. They have a big model there of a man being tortured to death. They call it a crucifix. Some of them hang it over their beds when they sleep-and you say I’m sick?”

Hantash drew his legs up and linked his fingers around his shins. The knuckles were pink and white and scarred, like the skinned knee of a child, reminding Omar Yussef that the man had done battle with the gangs of Brooklyn.

“Americans aren’t innocent of crimes against Muslims,” Hantash said. “In Iraq, they kill thousands. The U.S. government’s secret jails are full of men whose only offense is to have obeyed Allah. On the streets, Islam is mocked and hated. It’s hard for us to live here.”

Khamis Zeydan offered a cigarette to Hantash, who waved it away with a gesture that showed he didn’t object to his guest smoking. “Where are you from, Brother Nahid?” the police chief said.

“I was born in Hebron. My family left the West Bank when I was a teenager.”

Hard-headed and stubborn by reputation, the Hebronites, Omar Yussef thought, and violent.

“May Allah bless your town. Forgive my friend for his ill humor,” Khamis Zeydan said. “His son has been arrested, and he’s very nervous about him.”

“Arrested?”

“He won’t give an alibi for the time when his roommate was killed.”

“He’s a suspect? That’s ridiculous,” Hantash said. “Ala wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

Omar Yussef forgot his antagonism and warmed to Hantash with a desperate swiftness. “I want to find out more about Nizar and Rashid,” he said. “My son tells me there was some sort of conflict between them.”

Hantash was silent. His eyelids were low and lazy.

“The police also think Nizar’s death may have had something to do with drugs,” Omar Yussef said, “and that you might be able to give us some leads.”

The young man’s eyes flickered with hostility.

Khamis Zeydan whistled impatiently. “My friend means that, as a community leader, you know what happens on the streets,” he said. “Certainly he doesn’t mean that you’re involved in drugs.”

“No, of course.” Omar Yussef cringed and wrung his hands.

Hantash focused hard on his scabbed knuckles. “The police have been here already,” he said. “We’re accustomed to their harassment.”

“Do they suspect you?”

“The Arab detective Abayat suspects all Arabs. You ought to remember that, ustaz. Don’t trust him just because he calls you ‘uncle.’” Hantash stroked his fingers across the carpet. “In truth, the police have no reason to suspect me. I used to be a gang leader. I led the PLO. We thought that was a good joke- to name ourselves after another gang of Palestinian hard men. But I put an end to it after the attack on the Twin Towers.”

“Why?”

Hantash held up his index fingers, parallel to each other, almost touching. “The hour of Doom is drawing near, and the moon is cleft in two,” he said, parting his fingers. “In the Holy Koran the splitting of the moon into two is a sign of the Day of Judgment. When I saw the two towers explode, they were like the sun and the moon, and their destruction was an image of the end of the world. And everything happened twice- both towers exploded, both fell, and there were attacks in two cities, here and in Washington.”

“A sign?” Omar Yussef couldn’t disguise the doubt in his voice.

“Call it a reminder, if you prefer. The same verse says: We have made the Koran easy to remember; but will anyone take heed? I took heed of that day. I brought the gang to an end. The boys of the PLO became active in the community, instead of running around at night doing unwholesome things. My part was to found this mosque.”

“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 cafe.”

“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 cafe 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.