The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 18

Ala stepped out of the cafe and hurried between the low snowbanks on the sidewalk. Omar Yussef would have gone after him, but he was breathless even before he reached the door, and he knew he couldn’t keep up. He returned to the kitchen and grabbed Hamza’s thick arm. “You have to protect my son,” he shouted.

“You think I should follow him?” Hamza settled back against the steel counter.

“I told you someone’s been following me. They tried to run me down on Atlantic Avenue. Whoever they are, they think I know something I shouldn’t about these murders. Now they’ll try to kill my boy too.” Rania had solved Ala’s problem with the police; but without the protection of the jail, he would now be in greater danger. Unless I can find the killer before he gets to us, Omar Yussef thought.

“Your son won’t go far.” Hamza jerked his thumb at the back stairs. Slow feet descended. Rania came to the door. “You get what I mean, ustaz?” the detective said.

Rania was so pale that her veins showed blue through her skin, seeming to write across her face the fears she held within. She wore a long black coat cut tight around her upper body and a black mendil with a trim of gold sequins around her face. Her lips pouted and her big sullen eyes were edged with the slack purple skin of unhappiness and fatigue.

The detective reached into a large tin of olives, fished in the vinegar, and pulled out a handful. He fed one into his mouth. “Where’re you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to work,” she replied.

Omar Yussef sensed the girl’s horror as she crossed the floor, skirting the smears of her father’s blood. “Long life to you, my daughter,” he said. “May Allah be merciful upon him, the deceased one.”

Rania opened her mouth to speak the traditional response to these condolences, but her breath caught. “The Community Association will help me to arrange the funeral,” she whispered. “It’s best for me to go there as usual. I need to be with good people, Arab people.” She turned away from Hamza with a sneer.

It seemed unnatural to Omar Yussef that her father’s murder appeared to anger Rania, rather than sadden her. Perhaps it’s only her grief that makes her rage, he thought, or the detective’s suspicion.

She let Hamza see her curled lip again. “People with a heart,” she said. Her voice stammered on a strangled sob.

Hamza chewed another olive.

Rania left the kitchen, her chin up and her glassy eyes straight ahead. If Omar Yussef couldn’t keep pace with his son, he could at least follow this girl across the street. Perhaps she could tell him something that would help track the killer who now seemed a menace to Ala. Omar Yussef took a final look at the blood on the floor and went after her.

“I’ll walk you to the Community Association,” he said, rushing to reach the door before it closed behind her.

On the snowy sidewalk, Rania’s back was very straight and she balanced easily beside Omar Yussef, who was tense and unsteady. “Your father will find forgiveness in Paradise, my daughter,” he said.

“For what must he be forgiven?” Her voice was dismissive, clipped.

“Only you can know that.”

Her neck twitched backward, and her eyes rolled like a thoroughbred in the moment of restraint before its rider lets it gallop.

“And only Allah knows your father’s reward,” Omar Yussef added, “whether Paradise or Hell.”

“If it’s Hell, then my father was paid in advance long ago.” The girl crossed Fifth Avenue toward the Community Association, pulling her shoulders back. She stopped at the sidewalk to wait for Omar Yussef, something regretful in her face. “I’m certain he won’t go to Hell,” she said. “He’ll receive the reward of the martyrs.”

“If Allah wills it. But it’ll be hard to convince people that your father is honored in the Gardens of Delight, once it’s revealed that there were drugs in his kitchen,” Omar Yussef said. “It’ll damage your reputation too.”

The girl folded her arms against the cold. “Do you mean even Ala wouldn’t have me as a wife now?” she said, with a scornful smile. “Perhaps that will be his martyrdom.”

“What about Nizar? What was his reward?”

Rania turned in the doorway of the Community Association and slapped her pale hand against her breastbone. “I was his reward,” she sobbed.

She sucked in a breath to steady herself and entered the building. Omar Yussef kicked the snow off his loafers and followed.

Cheap couches fringed the reception room. Each seat was filled by an Arab waiting quietly for one of the counselors. They huddled in their heavy coats, the old men with their Astrakhan hats pulled low, silent and sleepy in the heat. A middle-aged woman turned a hostile glare on Omar Yussef. Her fat chins rubbed against her headscarf with each flexing of her jaw, chewing her gum. She’s already angry and defensive because she expects me to jump the queue, he thought. Even in America, where everyone’s polite, we Arabs can bring the unfairness of the Middle East with us.

“Peace be upon you,” he said.

The two dozen people around the edge of the room murmured their response: “Upon you, peace.”

He hurried across the gaudy floral carpet into the offices behind the reception counter. He found Rania in a small room papered with informational posters about the New York school system, basketball camp, and local businesses that offered satellite dishes with Middle Eastern stations. The desk was spread with pamphlets on health services and kindergartens. Her coat was draped over a filing cabinet, and she sat behind the desk in the same black smock and tight jeans he’d seen her wearing the day before. When she shuffled her mouse on its pad, the screen of her computer prickled into life.

Bitterness seemed to course through her movements and tremble beneath the tight set of her face. Omar Yussef wondered if it was more than the deaths of her father and her lover that ate at her, more than the loneliness of a girl with no family to console her. An unspoken anger underlay her grief, so that Omar Yussef found himself a little scared of her.

She clicked the mouse, and a photo expanded over the screen of the computer. Rania and Nizar were at a table in a restaurant which appeared to be part of a bigger public space. They were laughing for the camera with three smiling waitresses who wore white shirts and black ties. On the table, a short tube shot sparks from the center of a pink cake.

“Nizar made everyone love him, ustaz,” Rania said. “This picture was taken on my birthday. He asked the waitresses to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ He taught them the words in Arabic. They thought it was very funny.” She murmured the refrain, “Sana hilweh, ya jamil. Sana hilweh, ya jamil.”

Now I know why she wanted to come to her office, Omar Yussef thought, as Rania clicked through more photos of Nizar on the computer. But I’ve never heard the birthday song sound so broken-hearted.

He tried to think of words to comfort her. He recalled the argument he had overheard between Rania and her father when he had returned to the cafe for his forgotten hat. The usual appeal to trust in Allah might not console a girl who had dreamed of Manhattan, he decided. “I’ve always had faith, my daughter,” he said softly. “Not in Islam, I must admit, but in human qualities. Of course, my faith in love and humanity and intelligence is tested by life in the Middle East. There I see events in which these qualities are entirely lacking. But the times when they go missing only make me believe more strongly that they must exist.”

Though Rania’s wide eyes moistened, they made no appeal to Omar Yussef. He could read her only as clearly as he might have made out a goldfish at the bottom of a fountain, distorted and out of proportion.

“I had an opportunity,” she said. “I seized it. Then it was destroyed. It’s gone forever. Knowing that it was real does no good, because the joy was in having it. Thinking of it or dreaming about it only makes its absence harder to bear.”

“Are you talking about Nizar?”

She slammed her hand down on the desk. “I’m talking about me.” Something sensuous and strong reached out from her gaze. It seemed to Omar Yussef that it touched his cheek and stopped his breath.

“‘We created the houris and made them virgins, living companions for those on the right side,’” he murmured. He grunted, only then realizing that he had spoken the words of the Koran aloud as he watched Rania’s face.

“That’s what Nizar used to call me-his houri,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be ‘perfect companions,’ so I’m no houri, and Little Palestine is no Paradise.”

“You must allow yourself to mourn without being too hard on yourself.”

“I disappointed my father, and Ala too. I even disappointed Nizar. I’m a faithless woman, ustaz.”

“Faith in human qualities is like faith in Allah-”

“I don’t mean faithless in that way.”

“Faithless in love? Disappointment is a part of love. You will overcome-”

“I disappointed them.” She shook her head, and she hammered her palm onto the desk again. “But I didn’t disappoint myself. I went to Manhattan, and there I did things that are forbidden. I did them for myself. I didn’t want to wait until Paradise to be happy. I loved the things I did that were supposed to be barred to me, and I loved the man I did them with, though he also was forbidden to me. That’s what infuriates me. I live here among people who’d condemn me for the only things in my life that’ve been worthwhile.”

Omar Yussef shuddered. He saw in Rania’s dark eyes confusion, copulation, prohibited things he had renounced, and things not even known to him because they were so blameworthy. It was as if he found in one of her eyes the restrained life of a conservative Arab girl and in the other the world that pawed at her as she passed along the streets of Brooklyn-the advertisements displaying half-naked bodies, the crude language, and the disrespect. He wondered which eye had the better vision.

He watched her sob, her fingers knitted together before her eyes, her face lowered to the papers on the desk. He recognized the guilt in her then, visible on her pale flesh like a bruise. He knew he had to push her now, before the tears washed away the signs.

“What’s the Masjid al-Alamut?” he said.

She shrugged without looking up.

“The Alamut Mosque?” he repeated. “You’ve never heard of it? Your father didn’t pray there?”

Rania blew her nose on a tissue. “He didn’t pray, ustaz.” She dabbed at her eyes. No makeup had run, and Omar Yussef realized that the shining ebony of her long lashes was natural.

“What was Nizar like as a boy, ustaz?” Her voice was suddenly clear and free from bitterness, like a child’s.

“I thought you said joy was a present happiness, not a future Paradise or a memory of a good time.”

She smiled through her tears, and Omar Yussef felt the touch of her gaze against his cheek again.

“Nizar was a bit of an operator, I remember,” he said, “but never malicious. He was one of those devilish types who surprises you by how caring he can be.”

“Was he religious, as a boy?”

“Not so much.” Omar Yussef was unsure if her curiosity was a diversion or a true desire to track the intimate traces of a lost love. “Did your father kill Nizar to protect your good name?”

“You think my father worried so much about my reputation? Just because he lost his temper about me being with a man, when you were at our cafe?” She shook her head. “He was all talk.”

“It’s true that drug dealers aren’t usually so concerned with the family image.”

Rania flinched, and her tears stopped. “My father wasn’t a bad man.” The girl blew her nose into another tissue. As she tossed it into the wastepaper basket, the end of her nose was briefly red. Omar Yussef watched its pallor return. If someone were to attack her with a knife as they had assaulted her father, this spot on her nose confirmed that she would bleed, perhaps until her veins emptied. He thought she had cried out all her capacity for pain, and with it had gone the healing that scabs over a wound.

“He was in jail in Lebanon, wasn’t he?” he said.

She ran her tongue over her lips, pale pink like a fingernail.

“Could his killer have been someone from his past?”

“He was forced into the drug business during the civil war,” she said.

“Forced?”

“By Islamic Jihad people. They came to the Bekaa to train with the Iranians, the Revolutionary Guards, and they recruited local people like Dad to do their dirty work. He had no choice. They didn’t ask him nicely, if you see what I mean. When the government wanted to jail some drug producers, Islamic Jihad sacrificed my father, because they knew he wasn’t one of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t believe in Islamic revolution. He didn’t love the Iranian mullahs or want Hizballah to take over Lebanon, and he didn’t care at all about the Palestinian cause. He just loved me and my mother.”

“Then he was freed in the government amnesty.”

“Amnesty.” Rania laughed scornfully. “We left Lebanon right away, so that he could forget how he’d been forced to live. We came to the U.S.”

“But someone back home would’ve known he lied on his U.S. immigration forms about his drug conviction,” Omar Yussef said. “If he’d told the truth, the Americans would’ve never allowed him to become a citizen. They wouldn’t even have given him a visa as a tourist. Isn’t that right?”

Rania fingered a plastic paperweight in the shape of the Dome of the Rock. The dome was painted in a garish egg-yolk yellow. “Someone from Islamic Jihad found him here. I don’t know who it was. My father called him ‘the little bastard.’ Excuse my language, ustaz.”

“That’s all right. I’m not a fan of the Jihad. This man forced your father to sell drugs here in Brooklyn?”

Rania’s chin dropped to her chest.

“Can you forgive him?” Omar Yussef asked.

She was briefly confused. “For selling drugs?” she said.

“This is the day that you’ll bury your father. Make your peace with what he did.”

“I can forgive him for the drugs, ustaz. That was the fault of the son of a whore from Islamic Jihad. But I can’t forgive him for letting Nizar work with him.”

“Is that why Nizar died? Because of his connection to the drugs?”

Rania shook her head, and tears brought a higher sheen to her black lashes. She waved Omar Yussef out of the room. He shut the door behind him.