The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 24

As Omar Yussef stood by the window, the pallid twilight put him in mind of the charcoal skin of a heavy smoker. He wondered if that was why the sky lacked breath to shift the flat clouds. Ala snored on the sofa, overcome by his sleepless nights in the cell at the Detention Facility. His asthma gave each exhalation a coda of wheezing high notes like the cries of a frightened dog.

Omar Yussef blinked as the streetlamps flickered into a purple glow. A bell rattled on the door of a shop below, and he glanced down. A woman hunted in her handbag for her keys, a placard resting against her leg. She wore a black head-scarf edged around with gold. As she locked the cafe, Rania looked up. Omar Yussef stepped behind the curtain. He noticed that she was smiling.

End the criminal Israeli siege of Gaza, her placard read. Omar Yussef was surprised that she cared enough about politics to be on her way to a demonstration. He had thought she detested the Middle East. With the placard under her arm, she cut left onto Bay Ridge Avenue. She’s going to the subway, he thought. At the corner, a red ribbon, pinned at head height, stood out bright against the trunk of a bare gray tree. Omar Yussef stared at the tight bow. Hamza said it was Valentine’s Day today, he recalled. Is Rania on her way to a pro-Palestinian demonstration, or is she meeting her lover?

He limped down the stairs on his aching ankle, struggling into his coat. He turned the corner, heading toward the subway station, and hurried to catch up with Rania. Under the antiseptic light of the Manhattan-bound platform, he pulled his stocking cap low over his brow and affected the slouching, fatigued immobility of the other passengers. On the R train, he ran the zipper on the front of his coat up past his mustache and pretended to doze in his seat. Rania sat a few places over from him, the printed side of the placard pressed to her legs, as though she were embarrassed by its slogan. A lock of black hair fell from under her headscarf and lay across her brow. She rolled it around her forefinger and half-smiled. She was the only person on the train who didn’t appear to be at least partially asleep.

Rania left the train at Pacific Street. Omar Yussef hobbled behind her through the underground passages toward the Atlantic Avenue station. He caught up with her just as she stepped aboard a 4 train. He was perspiring in his coat, but he wasn’t the only one in the crowded subway bundled as though he were still out in the cold, so he kept his hood up. Rania paid him no attention.

They left the 4 train at Grand Central. Rania went through the early evening commuters to a side exit onto Lexington Avenue. She rushed to the corner of 42nd Street and ducked under a blue police sawhorse to join a group of two dozen people waving placards similar to hers. Omar Yussef was disappointed-perhaps she simply intended to join the protest.

A few of the demonstrators wore red-and-white keffiyas around their necks or on their heads. About half of them seemed to Omar Yussef to be Arabs. A couple of converts to Islam wore white skullcaps low on their brows. The rest were white men and women with hair shaved short, the raddled sallow skin of extreme vegetarians, and eyes gleaming with outrage. A press photographer knelt to get a low shot of the demonstrators, and a television reporter in a tan trench coat bellowed into his microphone.

Rania went quickly to the center of the demonstration, brandishing her placard and crying her willingness to sacrifice for Palestine. The photographer snapped her repeatedly, because she was the most vociferous of the women wearing a picturesque headscarf. The television man raised his voice to be heard above the insults Rania brought down on Israel. He clearly enjoyed being in the midst of the mayhem, like a grandfather joining in when the children bawl and scream.

Within minutes, the television crew was packing up. The reporter shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat with a shiver. The photographer clicked through his images to check that he had one good enough to transmit on the wire. Rania handed her placard to the man beside her and edged back through the crowd of demonstrators. Omar Yussef strained to see where she had gone. With the journalists no longer attentive to them, the demonstrators turned their slogans on the commuters, who avoided the protest with the same harsh disapproval Omar Yussef had noticed on the faces of subway passengers when a beggar entered their car. It was as though a mere whiff of something bad might let in the full stink of the city. He felt sorry for the demonstrators, so animated and passionate, and so ignored. The commuters were the only people he had ever seen who looked as unhappy as the refugees sweating in the Palestinian camps back home.

A woman wearing the same black coat as Rania came around from the back of the crowd, shaking her long hair free of her collar. She turned her face from the demonstration like any other commuter. Her skin was pale against the shining blackness of her hair, and her eyes were big and full of anticipation. Rania had taken off her headscarf. Omar Yussef was surprised to discover that this breach of Muslim propriety shocked him, even though his own wife wore her hair uncovered. As he wove through the crowd behind her, she checked her reflection in the window of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, squeezing and lifting her hair with both hands to give it body, and he smiled because he knew that his suspicion about Valentine’s Day had been correct.

He followed her through the swinging wooden doors into the main station concourse and almost lost her when he gazed up at the famous ceiling. He traced the looping gold lines linking the stars across the concave emerald roof and saw that, indeed, they were misplaced, as he had once read, because the Frenchman who painted them had made a mistake and set them out backward. Hurrying to catch up, he reached the foot of the steps to the mezzanine restaurant just as Rania skipped to the top.

When he had climbed to the hostess’s lecturn, he was breathing heavily. The restaurant was open to the elaborate ceiling of the concourse and to the drifting shafts of orange light through the tall windows. Omar Yussef recalled the photo on Rania’s computer and her sad rendition of the birthday tune, as he watched the girl arrive at her table. A man stood, jumped into a few laughing steps of dabka, and hugged her, stroking her hair with his hand.

It was a long embrace, as the hostess waited with a frozen smile to leave their menus, and it was still unfinished when Omar Yussef pulled an extra chair up to their table and dropped into it.

“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef extended a finger toward the hostess and said, “Nizar, don’t you want to hear the specials?”

They broke their clinch. Nizar came to Omar Yussef and gave him five kisses on his cheeks. He was as cheerful as an emir watching his hawk bring down its prey in the desert. “Ustaz, I’ll have the crab cakes. In fact, we’ll all have them. I know the menu very well. Rania and I eat here whenever we’re in Manhattan. We like to look down on the entrances to the platforms and imagine we’re going on a journey.”

“To where?”

“Who cares? Poughkeepsie, New Canaan, Wassaic.” Nizar read off the names from the Departures board in the concourse. “They all sound a little exotic to my foreign ear, even if they’re really just boring commuter towns. One place you don’t see up on that list is Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’m never going back there.” He poured a glass of ice water for Omar Yussef. “Drink it, ustaz. You look like you got a little overheated keeping up with my darling Rania.”

“Welcome, ustaz,” the girl said. She seemed not to share Nizar’s pleasure at Omar Yussef’s intrusion upon their romantic dinner.

“She set a good pace.” Omar Yussef swigged from the glass. “She was obviously eager to reach you, and my ankle hurts from our last meeting at Coney Island.”

Nizar showed the gap between his front teeth.

“Who fired at us in Playland?” Omar Yussef asked.

Nizar stroked Rania’s hand against his prominent cheekbones and giggled. “Coney Island is a dangerous place at night, ustaz. But I supplied you with an Omani dagger for self-defense. If someone gave you trouble, you could’ve carved them up.” He made two swift motions of the wrist like a swordsman pressing home a coup. “You had no reason to be scared.”

“Neither did you. You’re immortal. You’re the Mahdi, after all.”

“You liked that stuff? The Veiled Man? The dagger that could’ve been planted ‘in your soft breast’? I knew you’d appreciate it. But don’t worry-I’m not insane enough to think I’m actually the Mahdi, even if I do have the looks for it.”

Rania reached out and touched her fingertip to the boy’s front teeth with a playful smile. “Your appearance is just as it was written in the prophecies.”

He bit down on her finger and snarled, but when he let go he swallowed hard, as though he had tasted a bitterness on her hand. There’s something between them that they’re pretending isn’t there, for the sake of their celebratory dinner, Omar Yussef thought. Is it murder?

Omar Yussef put his palms flat on the glass table and glared at the liver spots, the wrinkled knuckles, the long black hairs on his fingers. He had loved these four boys, his Assassins. His innocence had been tarnished long ago, but he felt its final traces obliterated by the words he had to speak: “You killed Rashid.”

“I had to do it.” Nizar stopped while the waitress uncorked a half-bottle of champagne and poured two flutes. Omar Yussef put his hand over the top of his own glass and shook his head.

“To you, my life, my heart, my love,” Nizar said to Rania, and they drank. “I had to get rid of Rashid, ustaz. He was an assassin. Not the kind of Assassin we pretended to be in your classroom, but a real one.” He cut his hand through the air once more as though handling an epee.

“This is very romantic talk for Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef sneered at the champagne in its ice bucket. “How do you know he was an assassin?”

Nizar mugged like a guilty schoolboy.

The Israeli jail, Omar Yussef thought. As Ala suspected, they joined Islamic Jihad. “You were recruited in prison,” he said. “You came here to kill someone?”

“Rashid was supposed to do the killing. Despite his nervous nature, he showed himself to be a determined little fellow in training. That’s why they picked him. I was ordered to provide him with backup.”

“Why did you murder him?”

Nizar drained his champagne and watched Rania fill his glass. “I lost interest in sacrificing myself. I found my dark-eyed houri right here.” He touched her hand.

“Allah is most great,” she murmured, with a sardonic smile.

He slapped her hand playfully and clicked his tongue. “The streets of Brooklyn at first disgusted me with their commercialism and immorality. But then I walked the same avenues with Rania. She sprinkled the streets with magic. I couldn’t hate the place any longer, because some part of it was hers, and she was all beauty.”

Omar Yussef said, “Rashid didn’t like that, I suppose?”

“It displeased him quite spectacularly.”

“You could simply have taken one of these trains. Gone away with Rania and disappeared in America.”

“And sent my letter of resignation to the men who recruited me? Ustaz, they would kill my brothers and make my mother’s life hell back in Bethlehem if I sabotaged their operation. I had to make them believe I was dead.”

“So you murdered Rashid, dressed him in your clothes, and left your identity cards on him.”

“Rashid threatened me, my family, and Rania.” Nizar watched the bubbles streaming to the surface of his glass. “I realized it wasn’t the Americans or the Israelis I hated; it was us, the Arabs. I despised the mess we’ve made of our struggle, the way we fight each other. My father died at the hands of another Palestinian. After a lifetime of struggle for our freedom, it wasn’t the enemy, the Israelis, who killed him. He was murdered by one of his comrades.”

“Killing your friend doesn’t exactly stop that cycle.”

“Hear me out, ustaz,” Nizar said. “I can’t blame the Israelis for wanting Palestine. It’s a beautiful land. Neither can I fault the Americans for living like pigs-what else would you expect from infidels? But we Palestinians are destroying ourselves, and it makes me sick. So I abandoned our cause.”

“Very fine reasons. But you decapitated your friend and carried off his head. Now you’re sitting here for a Valentine’s Day celebration?” Omar Yussef said. “Are you mad?”

“I was prepared to do anything to be free of Islamic Jihad. I wanted them to think Rashid was psychotic-too crazy to carry out his mission. That way, they’d call everything off, and I’d be in the clear.”

Omar Yussef thought bitterly of the civil war among the Palestinians at the end of the intifada. In Bethlehem, people had tortured each other, because they belonged to one faction or another-people who had grown up together in the same village or refugee camp. Our politics is so extreme, he thought, it drives us to do disgusting things that are against our true nature. Nizar was following our political traditions.

“After you slaughtered Rashid, why didn’t you stay undercover?” he asked.

Nizar touched the end of his finger to the condensation on his champagne flute. “Slaughtered him? It gave me no pleasure. It made me-” He closed his eyes.

Omar Yussef continued: “Why did you reveal yourself to me at Coney Island?”

A waiter swung his hips between the tables to bring the crab cakes. Omar Yussef watched Nizar gather himself, take a bite, and wipe his mouth with his napkin. He was chewing as he replied: “I killed Rania’s father.”

The girl bowed her head, pushing a crab cake across her plate with her fork.

Omar Yussef let out a small wheeze of shock. “Because of the drug business?” he said.

“The drug proceeds were intended to finance the assassination. An operation like that costs money, whether it’s for equipment or bribing people to give you access to secure locations. When I got rid of Rashid, I had to tidy up that last loose end.”

“I still don’t see why you came back from the dead.”

“I feared the police would suspect Rania of killing her father. He often beat her. I thought they might accuse her of murdering him to prevent further abuse.”

Rania covered her face with her hands.

“I didn’t want to give myself up to the police, but I thought that if I confessed to you about Marwan’s murder, you’d tell the cops and they might leave Rania alone,” Nizar said.

“Don’t believe him, ustaz,” Rania said. “I don’t know why he’d tell you this, but it isn’t true.”

You just don’t want it to be true, Omar Yussef thought. I’m starting to think I’d believe this boy capable of any horror.

Nizar’s lips stretched in a tight grin. “It’s true, all the same. I intended to tell you at Coney Island.”

“That was the flaw in your plan-that the police might suspect Rania. Why didn’t you think of that before you killed her father?”

“I made a mistake. Like I said, I was only pretending to be the Mahdi. I’m not really divine.”

“Now Islamic Jihad will be on your trail again.”

“It was me or Rania. I had to sacrifice myself for her sake.” Nizar pulled at a shred of crab between his front teeth. “I only wanted to talk to you, ustaz. I didn’t expect the gunfire. I really don’t know who shot at us.”

“Maybe it was the true Mahdi?” Omar Yussef sneered.

Nizar extracted the crab and rubbed it into his napkin.

“The Prophet Muhammad came to bestow mercy,” Omar Yussef said, “but the Mahdi is a bringer of vengeance.”

“You think the shooting at Coney Island was supposed to be vengeance for killing Rashid?” Nizar’s eyes became disturbed and small. “Forget about the Mahdi stuff. It was just my joke.”

“Who was Rashid intending to assassinate?”

“Our president.” Nizar announced the title with jocular pomposity, like the identity of a lottery winner. “Rashid intended to kill him this week when he speaks at your UN conference. Islamic Jihad wants him dead because he’s been arresting our boys back in Palestine. The secret police SWAT teams making the arrests were trained by the CIA. Killing him in the U.S. was supposed to deliver a message to Washington to keep out of Palestinian affairs.”

Omar Yussef sipped his water and grimaced as it chilled his gums.

“I knew that if Rashid went ahead with the hit, it’d bring down the full force of the police and the Feds right on my head,” Nizar said. “I’d either go to jail for life or be on the run forever. I’d never be with Rania.”

“May Allah forbid it,” Rania said.

Nizar’s good humor dissolved into morose despair. He emptied his glass and brought it down fast, chipping the stem against his plate. “Nothing’s more important to me than her. Nothing.”

Rania took Nizar’s hand. His long fingers quivered with adrenaline as she kissed them.

“My boy, you have to give yourself up,” Omar Yussef said.

Nizar squeezed Rania’s fingers and shook his head.

“Whatever one might say about your methods, you prevented the assassination of the Palestinian president,” Omar Yussef said. “Perhaps you can give the police other leads, too, about the drug ring. About Islamic Jihad’s activities in America. If you help them, they might forget what you’ve done. What’s more important to them-two dead Arabs in Brooklyn, or an entire terrorist network?”

Nizar crooked his lip sarcastically. “They’ll give me a new identity with a season ticket to commute from this station to my beautiful wife and delightful American family in Pleasantville?”

“Where? Stop kidding me. This is serious.”

“It’s a real place. Can you believe it?” Nizar jerked his chin toward the Departures board. “It’s on the Harlem Line.”

“At the very least let me talk to Abu Adel. Maybe he can secure you a deal.”

“Who?” Nizar’s face became stony.

“Brigadier Khamis Zeydan. He’s the president’s security adviser in the consultations with the Americans and at the UN.”

Nizar stared distantly into his champagne.

“He’s a friend of mine. If you tell him everything, I’m sure he’d be willing to help do a deal with the Americans so that you wouldn’t be prosecuted for what you’ve done.”

“A deal?” Nizar glanced at Rania.

“We can go to my hotel now and I’ll get in touch with him,” Omar Yussef said.

Nizar tapped his thumbnail against the edge of his plate. It sounded loud until Omar Yussef realized he was hearing the bell of a departing train beyond the main concourse. Nizar held Rania’s eyes in his somber gaze. “Where’s your hotel, ustaz?” he said. “Let’s see about that ticket to Pleasantville.”