The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 5

An awning ran above the slick, gray sidewalk outside the Suleiman snack bar in red, white, and green stripes. “I expect they bought it from the same company that makes all the signs for pizza joints in the colors of the Italian flag,” Hamza said. “Fortunately for them, those also happen to be the colors of the Palestinian flag.”

Omar Yussef squinted at the awning. “They’ve missed a color. There should also be black.”

“The little cartoon is black.” Sketched beside the name of the snackbar, a slim waiter wearing a fez and a waxed Turkish mustache lifted a tall coffee pot. “So they have the correct colors, after all. Since you mention black, why did you ask your son if Rashid wore a black coat?”

“After I found the body, someone else entered the apartment. Whoever it was, he fled as soon as he heard me. I only saw his back as he went out of the door. He was wearing a black coat.”

Hamza scratched his eyebrow. “Yeah,” he said.

Omar Yussef didn’t like the skepticism in the detective’s tone. “You think I made that up to divert suspicion from my son?”

“As soon as we sit down, I’ll take out my notebook and write ‘black coat.’ Let’s go inside.”

Hamza edged past three young men in the doorway. The youths were exchanging elaborate handshakes with each other, snapping their fingers and touching knuckles, then wishing each other courtly Arabic farewells. Hamza guided Omar Yussef to one of the five small tables beside the food counter and went to order.

Omar Yussef peered into the display case, examining the wide dishes of oily vine leaves stuffed with rice and the pyramids of baklava, chopped pistachios green in their nests of phyllo pastry. He was suspicious of changes that might have been made to traditional Arab cuisine in America. But he found nothing wrong with the appearance of the food and, though he remained dubious, he was surprised at how much he wanted to taste it.

Hamza set down a cheap plastic tray laid out with a mezzeh of small spreads and salads. After the stress of the morning, Omar Yussef was calmed by the sight of the hummus, pooled with olive oil, and the sfiha flatbread with its coating of pale ground beef and pine nuts. He picked up the sfiha with both hands and took a bite.

“To your doubled health,” Hamza said.

Omar Yussef mumbled his gratitude as he chewed. He dipped a corner of the bread into a plate of labaneh and scooped the white paste into his mouth. He had been expecting the inferior, mild flavor of strained cow’s milk, but this had the sharpness of goat’s yoghurt particular to the best labaneh. He savored the taste of his home as though he had been absent a year rather than a single day. Am I a child, that I should be so homesick? he thought.

Hamza called to the heavy, mustachioed man behind the food bar. “Abu Hisham, we’ll have some kousa mahshi, please. My friend here has had nothing but airline food for a day. He needs to recover.” He rubbed the back of Omar Yussef’s hand affectionately with the pad of his thumb.

A plate of zucchini stuffed with ground beef, rice, and diced tomato came over the counter. Omar Yussef cut into one and chewed. It was hot on his tongue. “Your double health, ustaz,” Abu Hisham said.

Omar Yussef felt himself warming and he shared a smile with Hamza. “You’re not eating?”

“Abu Hisham will bring me some chicken in a minute.” The detective checked his watch. “I’m careful about my diet. It’s time I ate some protein.” He took a dull green squash ball from his pocket and squeezed it between his thick fingers.

“Do you have a health problem?”

“I’m competing next month to be Mister Arab New York.”

Omar Yussef wiggled his hand, palm upward-a question.

“I’m a bodybuilder,” Hamza said. “I’m training for the bench press and the clean and jerk. But my specialty is the dead lift.”

“A good exercise for a homicide detective.”

Hamza ran his thumb over the keypad of his mobile phone and turned the screen toward Omar Yussef to show a photo of himself smiling in tight trunks, his massive body oiled and hairless, his biceps riddled with thick veins, like a map of the Nile Delta. “That’s me winning another competition a couple of months ago,” he said.

Omar Yussef squinted at the heavy muscles and recalled the strong grip on his elbow. “Excuse me if I don’t wait for you to eat. I’m training for nothing more strenuous than lifting a pile of exercise books filled with essays on the history of the Fatimids in Egypt.”

“That sounds heavier than my dead lift. Enjoy the food. To your doubled health.”

The kousa mahshi stuck in Omar Yussef’s throat, and he coughed. He knew why. “What’s the food like in the cells at the police station?” he asked.

Hamza rolled the squash ball from hand to hand across the tabletop. “How was your flight? You departed from Amman?”

“I see the food in the jail is too disgusting to talk about.”

“The food is fine. It’s the cells that I prefer not to discuss.”

Omar Yussef’s mouth was dry. “The plane was almost empty,” he said, “except for a troop of New York National Guardsmen returning from a tour in Iraq. They were thin and stiff, like ghosts draped in desert fatigues.”

Abu Hisham brought over a plate of grilled chicken that appeared to be plain except for a little lemon juice. Hamza tore a strip from a breast and stuffed it into his cheek. “They must have seen some terrible things over there.”

Omar Yussef thought of Nizar’s headless body and wondered if the image would let him sleep when he closed his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said.

He went into the bathroom at the back of the snack bar, removed his glasses, and splashed water over his face. He felt the water dribbling from his brows and nose, but when he looked in the mirror his myopia blurred the image and it appeared as though his face were melting. He gripped the sink and yanked at it, as though he might pull it from the wall, and he let his forehead drop against the mirror. “Ala, my little Ala,” he whispered.

When he returned to the table, he pulled a wad of napkins from their metal dispenser. He tore them absently into strips, laying them next to his plate.

Hamza watched the arrangement of the shredded napkins, then drew a long breath. “How does your son come to know these roommates of his?”

Omar Yussef balled up the napkins in his fist. “He was in their class in school.”

“High school?”

“All the way through. He’s known them since he was three years old.”

“The Freres School?”

“How did you guess?”

Hamza lifted one side of his mouth into a grin. “I can’t imagine you letting your son go to a crappy UN school in the camp.”

“Be careful. You know I’m the principal of one of those UN schools. I have some professional pride.”

“What’s the quality of the education where you work?” The detective smiled with one side of his mouth again and lifted his chin knowingly.

Omar Yussef tapped his plate with a stiff crust of sfiha. “Funds are very limited.” He looked at Hamza. “Ala studied at the Freres School because, at the time, I was a history teacher there.”

“Why did you leave?”

I was fired because the government schools inspector believed I was too much of a free-thinker, too critical of the fight against the Israelis, Omar Yussef thought. How would that sound to this man? He’s an American now, but he’s also the nephew of a dead resistance leader. “It’s not important,” he said. “The boys were all in my class. They were very close. They even had a little gang.”

“A gang?”

Omar Yussef flicked his fingernail against his plate. Its ring sounded like the distant echo of an alarm bell. “Gang” had been the wrong word.

He took another bite of the sfiha and chewed it without enthusiasm. When he looked up from his plate, he caught Hamza glaring at him with hard, narrow eyes. The detective’s expression quickly reverted to affability. Omar Yussef watched the thick fingers pulsing on the squash ball.

Hamza waited while Abu Hisham placed two coffees and a plate of baklava on the table. A young Arab woman in a black headscarf and a pink fur coat entered, greeting the staff and smiling at Hamza and Omar Yussef. Hamza tested the heat of the small coffee cup with his fingertips. “What kind of gang was it that these boys formed?”

“It was more of a secret society. They called themselves The Assassins.”

The detective raised an eyebrow.

“When the boys were fourteen, I taught them about the medieval order of the Assassins in my history class. They named their club after that sect. It was an intellectual society, an innocent little secret.”

“These three roommates were the members?”

“There was another boy. But he doesn’t live in New York.”

“What about that sign on the door of the apartment: The Castle of the Assassins?”

Omar Yussef remembered what Ala had said about the Veiled Man, the betrayer with the disguised features who would battle the Mahdi. He was an essential part of the historical Assassins’ beliefs. Is Hamza right to wonder about this connection?

“Why are you frowning, ustaz?” the detective asked.

“If you want to cheer me up, release my son.” Omar Yussef pushed his chin toward Hamza and saw instantly that aggression had no effect on the detective. Hamza ran his tongue along his bottom lip and stared at Omar Yussef with eyes as blank as a funeral shroud. He’s tough, Omar Yussef thought. Even if I were the type to bully people, I’d have no success with this man. “The sign about the ‘Castle of the Assassins’ is just some sort of nostalgic joke. The apartment is hardly a castle.”

“If this little gang was secret, how do you know about it?”

Omar Yussef lifted his coffee cup by its delicate handle and sipped. He grimaced at its sweetness. Son of a whore, I forgot to ask for mine bitter, he thought. He rattled the cup into its saucer petulantly. “I was a part of the club. Well, in a sense.”

“You were one of The Assassins?” Hamza gave a deep, slow giggle. “Forgive me, ustaz. But I would more likely send that girl over there in the pink coat to be an assassin than you.”

“I told you, it was an academic joke. No one was actually going to be assassinated.” The boys had given him the name of the medieval chief of the Assassins, the Old Man of the Mountain. He had still been young enough that it hadn’t offended him to be called an old man. He polished his glasses with a napkin. “We used to go on picnics to ruined Crusader castles.”

“Castles?”

“We pretended they were Alamut. That was the name of the biggest Assassin fortress.”

“Alamut?” Hamza said, stroking his beard. “What does that mean?”

Omar Yussef replaced his glasses and squinted at Hamza. You’re not the simple muscleman you’d have me believe you to be, he thought. “The Death Castle. That’s the most likely meaning in Arabic and Persian.”

“The Death Castle, eh? But the note on the door about the ‘Castle of the Assassins’ is just a nostalgic joke, as you put it? The body inside the apartment spoils the fun, don’t you think?”

Omar Yussef spun his coffee cup slowly on its saucer. “There’s a prayer schedule for some place called the Alamut Mosque in the kitchen of the apartment. Maybe it’s connected.”

“So now an entire mosque is in on the joke?” Hamza scratched gently at his goatee. “I remember reading that when these medieval Assassins went off on their suicide missions, they were high on drugs.”

“That’s a myth. They seemed so unafraid of death that others thought they must have taken hashish and so called them the Hashishine. ‘Assassin’ is a corruption of that word. But in reality they were like the people from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda today. They did insane things because they believed they would be rewarded in Paradise.”

“The virgins, the dark-eyed houris, and all that?”

Omar Yussef bit into a piece of baklava and crunched the pistachios between his back teeth. “Everything isn’t always about sex, Sergeant Abayat.”

Hamza waved his hand. “Sure, they receive a seat next to Allah, and they get a free pass into Paradise for their relatives too. But I think most young men are more interested in the virgins, no matter how much they love the Master of the Universe or their mama’s cooking.”

“I see that you’re no sheikh.”

“And I see that you’re no Assassin.”

“Neither is my son.”

“Nizar probably wasn’t killed by someone looking for the rewards of Paradise. Most of the killings around here are simply related to the drug trade.”

Omar Yussef stiffened. “My son isn’t involved in such things. How dare you?”

“Even if it wasn’t true, the reputation of the Assassins was that they were stoned on hashish. Maybe these boys revived the name of their teenage gang as a joke, as you say. But perhaps the joke was a private reference to the fact that they were dealing drugs.”

“You’re trying to provoke me. That’s crazy.”

“Forgive me, but even in Brooklyn we don’t see headless corpses every day. That is crazy.” Hamza leaned over the table, and Omar Yussef pressed himself back against his chair. “It also happens to be a craziness that involves you somehow, ustaz.”

Omar Yussef struggled to hold Hamza’s gaze. He worried that he had been too open with the policeman, and he felt panic chill him. Maybe he’ll use this information about the Assassins to pin the killing on Ala, or even on me as revenge for what happened between me and his uncle back in Bethlehem, he thought.

“They were intelligent boys. That’s why they based their little club around their interest in history. They didn’t go out to throw stones at the Israelis. Study was their reward, not Paradise.” Omar Yussef played with the triangle of baklava on his plate. In Bethlehem, the intifada turned people who had previously seemed peaceful to violence and martyrdom. But not these boys, he thought. I’m sure of it.

A police siren approached. Hamza watched the blue and red lights streak past the window, then looked hard at Omar Yussef. “After Nine-Eleven, the FBI woke up to the fact that Bay Ridge had turned into Little Palestine. They sent agents to investigate all the community leaders. They found a few who were married to people whose cousins back in Ramallah were neighbors of someone who was in jail for being in Hamas. That kind of nonsense. But it made people very suspicious here. It made the cops suspect Arabs, and it made Arabs resent the cops and the FBI and ultimately America itself. One day that’s going to result in something bad, ustaz.”

“Do the people here resent you, too?”

“The police brass is suspicious of all Arabs. The INS, the FBI, everyone in law enforcement is down on the Arab community, and that goes for Arab cops too. And the Arabs on the street see me as a traitor working for their persecutors.” Hamza struck the table with the side of his heavy fist. “I’m not scared of any of them. My only fear is that someone from Palestine will come here and use this place as a base for terrible acts. If that happens, the Feds will come back, and then, may it be displeasing to Allah, they’ll stomp Little Palestine into the ground.”

The syrup in the baklava coated Omar Yussef’s esophagus, and for a moment he felt smothered. He sipped from his water. “Thank you for this meal,” he said. “It was very good.”

“May you enjoy it with double health deep in your heart.” Hamza took a business card from his wallet and handed it to Omar Yussef. “My cell-phone number. In case you think of anything important, ustaz.”

Hamza walked Omar Yussef back along the avenue toward the subway station. The clouds remained featureless and uniform, blanking out the sky, but the fawn bricks on the side-street row houses looked bright. The detective gestured down a street lined with trees. “The homes on these streets are expensive,” he said. “There’re a lot of Greeks on that block. The Arabs mostly live here on the avenue, above the shops, where the apartments are cheap.”

“Where do you live?”

“The end of that block. For my wife to be near the church.”

Clad in dark granite, the square tower of a church cut across the flat gray sky.

“She’s a Christian?”

Hamza grunted and pulled some chicken from between his teeth.

“What did your tribe back in Bethlehem have to say about you marrying a Christian?” Omar Yussef asked.

“It’s better than marrying a refugee from the camp where you live.” Hamza pointed to the red ribbons on the trees. “It’s Valentine’s Day this week. You remember the Christians in Beit Jala used to celebrate it back home?”

Omar Yussef nodded. “You’re supposed to give a card to your wife or your fiancee.”

“In America, the whole thing is commercialized, ustaz. In the schools, the children give Valentine’s Day cards and little bags of chocolate to everyone in their class.”

“And everyone has to put a red ribbon on the tree outside their house?”

“Not everywhere, but the neighborhood association organizes it here. It’s better than graffiti about dead martyrs, isn’t it?” Hamza smiled. “What about the unfortunate Nizar’s Valentine? Who’s Rania?”

Omar Yussef remembered his son’s anxious glance at the love letter, the recognition he seemed to show at the sight of the pink stationery in the evidence bag. “It’s a fairly common name. Rania could be anyone.”

“I don’t think it was a letter from the Queen of Jordan.” Hamza frowned. “Here’s your station, ustaz.”

“I want to go and see my son.”

“If Allah wills it, you’ll be able to talk to him tomorrow. But not now.”

“Don’t hide behind Allah. Why don’t you will it?”

“I may be an American, but we’re speaking Arabic and it’d be rude of me to come right out and tell you that the answer’s no.”

Omar Yussef lifted his jaw in anger. “You said yourself that this isn’t the Middle East. My son has rights, and so do I. I’m asking you as an American to give me the right to see my son.”

The detective grinned mirthlessly. “If Allah wills it.”

“Damn it, Hamza. I want to see him.”

“Take the R train one stop and change to the N,” Hamza said. “It’ll get you back to Manhattan quicker.”

“Do you think I’m so eager to escape Brooklyn?”

As Omar Yussef descended the grimy steps beneath the subway-station sign, he heard Hamza’s voice, slow and deep: “No, ustaz. In any case, you certainly can’t escape me.”

At the bottom of the steps, Omar Yussef considered that he might have to make a number of trips out to Brooklyn to see his son. He decided to buy ten rides. He pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the tray of the token booth and received a yellow-and-blue ticket in return. There was something familiar about the ticket clerk, who dropped his eyes when Omar Yussef wished him a good day.

Omar Yussef swiped the card at the turnstile. As he pushed through to the other side, he noticed the little electronic screen read “$2.00/$16.00 Bal.” The machine had deducted the two-dollar fare, but there were only sixteen dollars remaining on the card. Omar Yussef stopped and looked back at the clerk in his booth. The man held Omar Yussef’s glare. He was in late middle age with a pinched sour face and a thin, mean mouth. He wore thick, black-framed glasses, and his gray hair was slicked back. He looks like the man who used to be the American Defense Secretary, Omar Yussef thought, the one who blew the war in Iraq.

He went back through the turnstile. The clerk made a show of counting bills as he approached the booth.

“I bought a ticket for twenty dollars, sir,” Omar Yussef said, “but you gave me a card worth only eighteen.”

The clerk spoke, but Omar Yussef heard nothing. He repeated his complaint, and the clerk lifted his head to his microphone. “Sold you a twenty-dollar card, sir.” His voice drawled through the speaker as though it were cut roughly from metal.

Omar Yussef decided to be generous. “Then there has been a computer error, because the machine says I only have sixteen dollars remaining.”

“Sold you a twenty-dollar card, like I said.”

“You took my twenty and kept two dollars for your pocket.” Omar Yussef had the familiar feeling of his heartbeat quickening, drowning all sense of moderation and leaving him full of anger. “This is a damned outrage.”

“Watch your mouth, buddy,” the clerk said.

“You cheated me, sir.”

“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you another ticket for nothing.”

Omar Yussef took a long breath. “Very well.”

“One-way, non-stop back to Baghdad, Osama.” The clerk sniggered, as he licked his thumb to count a pile of twenties.

Omar Yussef brought his fist down beside the change tray. The quarters jumped on the clerk’s desk. “You may keep my two dollars,” Omar Yussef said. “I don’t wish to sell my dignity as cheaply as you do.”

The clerk sneered.

Omar Yussef swiped his card in the turnstile again and followed the signs for the Manhattan platform.