The Fourth Assassin

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 Cafe 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 cafe. “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 cafe, 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 Cafe al-Quds was a front with few real clients. Murder has turned it into a bustling cafe, 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 cafe 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 cafe.

“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.

It was the prayer schedule of the Alamut Mosque. The same sheet he had seen affixed to the refrigerator in his son’s apartment. The page bearing the name of a mosque that even Nahid Hantash hadn’t heard of. Marwan had hidden it at the back of a pile of unremarkable invoices, turned to the wall so that even someone looking through the other papers would miss it.

Omar Yussef ripped the sheet away from the stack and lifted his spectacles to read the columns of prayer times for the month. He ran his gaze across from Fajr at 5:26 A.M. to Isha at 6:50 P.M. At first he could make out no special significance to it, but then he noticed that once a week the time of the Maghrib sunset prayers was off by an hour. “Five thirty-five, five thirty-seven, six forty, five forty-two,” he read, rubbing his chin in puzzlement. Something’s wrong with this schedule, he thought. But the mistakes are too regular-one each week. It’s no accident.

Footsteps descended behind the kitchen. Omar Yussef stuffed the prayer schedule into his jacket pocket. Hamza entered, ducking his head beneath the low lintel. He stood to one side, and Omar Yussef saw his son in the doorway, his face gray and heavy with exhaustion. Ala stared at his father and some color came to his cheeks, as though he were angry to see him there.

“My boy, you’re safe.” Omar Yussef stepped forward. “Thanks be to Allah.”

Ala pushed past his father. “I’m not safe, Dad. Was Nizar safe?” He pointed at the blood on the floor. “Was Marwan?”

“But they were involved in something bad. Drugs.”

The young man turned his intense stare on Hamza. “You’re a bastard, Abayat.”

“Another satisfied customer.” Hamza smiled with an indifference that puzzled Omar Yussef.

“A real bastard,” Ala said. “You and your tribe of gunmen have ruined my hometown and now you’re going to destroy what’s left of my life here in Brooklyn.”

Omar Yussef wanted only to get his boy away from the police. He knew Ala’s temper and realized that he’d soon explode beyond all control. “My son, what’re you talking about? Let’s go.”

“He brought me here to see what would happen when he put me in a room with Rania,” Ala said. “To see if she’d let slip some secret, and to see if I’m a part of all this.” He gestured at the blood on the floor.

“Why?”

“He thinks we killed Marwan and Nizar, of course. Me and Rania.”

Omar Yussef frowned at Hamza. “Where’s Rania?”

Hamza’s indifference seemed deeper still. “Upstairs.”

“We sat up there in silence, Dad, which must’ve disappointed this bastard.” Ala threw a hand out toward Hamza. “What did you think we’d say to each other? Two days ago I gave up the woman I loved, and at the same time her beloved was murdered. Now her father is dead. Did you think we’d put our heads together and figure out who to kill next, while you were eavesdropping?”

“It was worth a try.” Hamza made his eyes hard and empty.

Ala slapped his hand down on a steel counter.

“But, my boy, it’s over,” Omar Yussef said. “Now you’re free.”

“Free? Dad, I’m ordered not to leave the city until the police finish their investigation.” Ala’s foot slid on the smeared floor and he grabbed at his father’s shoulder to right himself.

“Don’t fall over,” Hamza said. “You’ll get covered in blood.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you son of a whore,” Ala said. “You’d be happy if this was my blood all over the tiles.”

“I’m not taking bets on whose blood will be the next to spill,” Hamza said. “But that isn’t because I don’t have a good guess. It’s only because gambling is an ‘abomination devised by Satan.’”

“Don’t quote the Koran at me. You’re not even really an Arab any more. You’re an American. Infidel bastard.”

The boy clutched Omar Yussef’s arm, like a baby who fears slipping from his parent’s embrace. His son’s tension fed through his body. Marwan Hammiya had warned him to leave Ala in the safety of the jail. In this room where Marwan had died, Omar Yussef understood that his son would be in jeopardy until the killer of Nizar and Marwan was caught. He glanced at Hamza. The meaning of the cynical smile on the detective’s lips came to him, and his eyes widened in outrage. “You’re gambling, after all-with Ala’s life. You’re releasing him because you think he’s next,” he yelled at Hamza. “You’re setting a trap for this murderer.”

“A trap?”

Omar Yussef thrust his forefinger at his son and shouted, “My boy is the bait.”