The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 20

When the D train came to the end of the line at the Coney Island station, Omar Yussef dropped down the steel steps, crossed the cold concourse beneath the elevated rails, and followed the lights to Surf Avenue. He watched a police cruiser roll slowly by, like a heavy eater drifting back to a buffet, sated and gloomy. The wind volleyed piercing pins of ice off the Atlantic. He gazed up at the bright night sky. A jagged cloud streaked across the full moon, and he thought of the passage Nahid Hantash had quoted from the Koran.

“The hour of Doom is drawing near, and the moon is cleft in two,” he murmured.

He looked around at the shuttered amusement arcades and the sad facades of empty hotels. The spindly superstructure of a Ferris wheel was silhouetted above the storefronts like a gigantic machine of torture. The moon doesn’t have to split apart, he thought, for it to seem like the world is ending in this place.

Omar Yussef went along the avenue to a side street beside a rollercoaster. A long sign descending from the tallest part of the ride told him it was the Cyclone. His eyes strained at the rickety mess of wooden struts and whitewashed girders under the tracks, and he rattled the chain on the high corrugated-iron gate. He stared through a chain-link fence across the street at the rides within. Even a coating of snow couldn’t dress the dodgems, pirate ships, and shrimp stands in an aura that might defy their wintry cheapness. Every ride came with a laughable name promising an experience beyond its mere mechanics. He saw that the big Ferris wheel was The Wonder Wheel, as though it turned by some miracle and rose higher than anyone had ever before soared.

He skirted the fence until it brought him up a wooden ramp to the Boardwalk. The wind cut across his face, and a few seagulls hovered black against the moon. The birds were silent, and Omar Yussef wondered if they slept on the wing. The slate sea rolled beyond the strand with a sound like the strangled respirations of a disturbed sleeper. The shuttered pizza stands on the Boardwalk, painted gaudily with signs for Italian sausage and cold beer, seemed to Omar Yussef to be unsanitary places from which to serve food. As he looked along the wide, solitary promenade, he had an impression less of a place to spend leisure time than of a lonely depressive’s recurrent nightmare.

Omar Yussef saw no sign of Playland on the Boardwalk, so he cut back toward the avenue. He gravitated to the green neon lights of a corner restaurant advertising its “famous” hot dogs. Checking his watch, he saw that he was fifteen minutes early for his ten o’clock assignation. Since he had fled the policeman outside the Cafe al-Quds he had eaten nothing, and he was suddenly aware of his hunger. He wondered how a hot dog tasted.

The restaurant was brightly lit, staffed by people in identical striped shirts and green hats. At the tables, clutches of people buried pale rolls lengthwise in their mouths. The bread dripped a livid red sauce onto their hands. Through the window, the scattered shows of bonhomie made Omar Yussef feel isolated. Were he to enter the restaurant, he feared the diners would fall silent, recognizing the loneliness he broadcast like a leper with his bell. He experienced a flash of hate, and he understood how it might happen to him-the resentment that made Arab immigrants like Nahid Hantash, seething in his mosque, despise American society. He recalled the token-booth clerk who had cheated him and felt the man’s insults lingering, a little clot of stress that could suddenly lodge in his brain and destroy him. The diners disturbed him because they were in a place where they belonged with people they liked, and he was outside the window in the cold, alone, far from home.

He went unsteadily along the sidewalk, crunching through a thin, unshoveled layer of snow as the wind turned its surface to ice. The buildings here seemed permanently abandoned rather than merely shuttered for the season. Before a wide facade with red doors that looked like a disused fire station, he stamped his feet against the cold and decided to enter the restaurant after all, but only to ask where he might find Playland. As he turned, he looked up and noticed the sign above the red doors in freestanding art deco-style lettering: Playland.

In the time it took him to read the sign, Omar Yussef sensed the fear that must have lurked within him since he had received the note from the boy with the dagger. It came upon him in a gust of adrenaline that chilled his heart like the wind off the breakers. A man awaited him in this building who had been a nervous, intelligent boy when Omar Yussef had known him in Bethlehem. Now, perhaps, he was a killer. All Omar Yussef’s doubts about Rashid’s ability to have slaughtered Nizar were erased by the flood of tension he felt. He glanced along the avenue, hoping the patrol car would come to save him.

As he hesitated, one of the red doors swung open and slammed against the wall in the wind. It creaked on its rusty hinges and Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Inside his coat pocket, he gripped the Omani dagger in a sweating fist and slid slowly toward the door.

From within, a chilly damp escaped fast on the air, like a breath that had been trapped in a corpse long dead. It surrounded Omar Yussef and drew him inside, shivering. The windows at the back of the building were shattered. Their empty mullions split the moonlight into square shafts glimmering in the pools of still, stinking water on the floor and illuminating the cracked plaster on the pillars across the big hall.

Omar Yussef rubbed his mustache. His breath trailed wispily into the cold.

In the darkness, someone whistled the refrain of the old Lebanese song Omar Yussef had heard on the stereo when he first went to the Cafe al-Quds.

Take me, take me, take me home.

The tune echoed through the silent building. Omar Yussef scanned the strips of moonlight for Rashid.

The whistler trilled the first verse of the song.

The breeze blew at us from where the river split.

The sound seemed to come from the far end of the building. Omar Yussef made for the row of smashed windows there.

“Rashid,” he whispered. “Is that you?”

His feet sloshed through a puddle. He cursed low as the freezing water filled his loafers.

The refrain came again, closer this time: Take me, take me, take me home. Omar Yussef turned. A foot scraped against the concrete floor. A man in a black cashmere overcoat stepped from behind a pillar. He lifted his head, pushed up the brim of his gray cap, and shook his long hair from his collar.

“Greetings, ustaz,” he said.

Omar Yussef reached out with the terror and compulsion of somebody who has seen the ghost of a loved one. “Nizar? Is it you, Nizar? You’re alive.”

He saw a flash of white teeth as Nizar smiled, and the moonlight caught the young man’s high cheekbones. Omar Yussef stepped forward, but a sudden gunshot roared from across the empty hall. Nizar’s eyes shifted toward the shadows where the shot echoed. He ducked behind the pillar.

Omar Yussef flattened himself against the wall as another shot came. He heard Nizar’s feet on the concrete, running, splashing through a puddle. A door opened along the back wall and Nizar went through it. The moonlight flickered as the door swung in the wind.

A great weight seeped into Omar Yussef’s limbs. His old body surely couldn’t keep up with Nizar or elude whoever had fired the shots. He felt stupid for putting himself in this danger. Did you think that simply because you were invited to Playland, this would be a game? he thought. He clenched his fists and pounded them against his thighs.

He bent low as he made for the exit. His soaking socks squelched and his loafers slipped. Another shot splintered wood from the doorframe. Running footsteps sounded in the building. He went through the door and pulled it shut.

The empty lot in the rear of Playland was a thicket of brown winter scrub. Omar Yussef plunged into the stiff, fawn bushes. Plastic Fanta bottles and bucket-sized Coke cups littered the ground like the seed pods of a virulent weed, hidden by the new snow, tripping him. He cut toward the fence and tumbled into a ditch.

Scrambling to his feet, he went along the depression, slipping on the snow that drifted deeper there. He halted to listen for Nizar’s footsteps ahead of him or the gunman’s chasing him. He heard only his own wheezing. A shot sounded. The snow kicked up a few yards behind him. He scampered along the ditch and dragged himself up a slope toward a six-foot fence.

It truly was Nizar, he thought. He’s alive. But someone wants him dead.

He shook the fence until he found a loose section and edged through. His coat caught on the ragged chain-link. He twisted to free himself. Another shot, and he dropped on his hip beyond the fence. Pain burned red-hot in the small of his back, so intense that he was sure he had taken a bullet.

He bellowed as he shambled toward the beach. Rubbing his back, he discovered there was no bullet wound, only a wringing sensation that gripped his spine deep beneath the meager muscles.

If Nizar is alive, whose body did I find in the apartment? he wondered. Rashid is still missing. Could it have been his?

Between his irregular, limping footfalls on the concrete, he heard the gunman crashing through the undergrowth parallel to him. Cheap signs covered the fence, painted with fat letters advertising clam bars and knishes, candy apples and shish kebab, screening Omar Yussef from the shooter. He touched an ad for a seafood restaurant with his fingertips and whispered his thanks.

Omar Yussef turned on to the Boardwalk and hobbled past the shutters of a fried-chicken stand. He came to a waist-high wall at a gap between the food booths, and collapsed against it. The wall was painted in blue characters on an orange background: Shoot the Freak-Paint Ball. Live human targets. Behind the low wall, there was a drop of ten feet to a derelict lot spread with empty oil drums, dried-out branches, and sections sheared off a car’s body. Omar Yussef frowned. This was a game? He imagined a summer’s day, the Boardwalk crowded, people eating ice cream and cotton candy, coughing up a dollar to shoot pellets filled with paint at men paid to dodge behind the concrete blocks and packing crates. It seemed to him like something from ancient times of human sacrifice and mortal entertainments.

Footsteps mounted the ramp to the Boardwalk. A man came to the corner of the fried-chicken stand, the moon behind him. He lifted his gun.

It’s not a game and I’m not going to be the freak, Omar Yussef thought. He jumped the low wall and fell into the dark lot.

His ankle twisted when he landed. It hurt badly, but he had to move. He hobbled toward a car hood propped against two oil drums and dropped behind it.

The shooter halted by the wall and was still.

Is he going to come down here? Omar Yussef rubbed his ankle and fought to calm his breathing. He peered through the air ports on the car hood and saw the gunman silhouetted against the moon over the Boardwalk. The man lifted his arm and Omar Yussef ducked.

A shot smacked into a tree trunk a few yards from him. He recoiled, pressed his back against the car hood, and hoped that the oil drums would hide him if the gunman descended to search at close quarters. In his pocket, he ran his fingertips over the scabbard of the Omani dagger. Should the gunman come near enough, would he be able to use it?

Another shot hit a crate of bottles, and a third connected with metal somewhere very close. Omar Yussef figured he might escape if he could reach the shadow of the fried-chicken stand and work along to the rear of the lot. But he wasn’t sure he could walk well enough on his twisted ankle. He might end up flat on his back, immobile in the moonlight, an easy target.

He was about to make a break, when flickering red and blue lights illuminated the side wall of the fried-chicken stand and he heard the low hum of a police patrol car’s engine.

The muffled voice of a policeman burst from a loudspeaker: “Put down the gun, and put your hands in the air.”

There was a crunch of undergrowth and a grunt in front of Omar Yussef. The gunman has jumped. He’s in here with me, he thought.

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.