The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 6

The windows of the N train were scratched and daubed in an ugly paste graffiti, the translucent letters dripping like a sugar glaze on a cake. The floor was black and speckled to disguise the dirt, but pink smears of vomit and red chewing gum and the explosions of dropped soda cups stained it.

As Omar Yussef rattled toward Manhattan, fewer than half the slippery, unwelcoming seats in the car were taken. Encased in voluminous coats, the passengers hunched their shoulders, crossed their arms, and coughed into their collars, though it was warm in the train. Omar Yussef let his eyes drift across the smiling faces in the advertisements just below the ceiling of the car. The ads pushed training courses for para-legals and court reporters, the services of doctors who would give you better skin or allow you to commute on the train without hemorrhoid pain. He imagined the ads might have been there to torment the riders with the Siberian gloom of their journey, allowing them to glimpse the mediocre extent of the improvements they might pursue. Enclosed in plastic, strip lights flickered over the ads and across the immobile faces of the passengers. Their glow gave the train the somnambulant aura of a midnight bus station.

He felt a rush of loneliness. He missed his wife and wondered if he ought to have insisted on waiting for his son at the police station after all, despite Sergeant Abayat’s dissuasion. On the wall beside him, the N train snaked its yellow trail across a subway map. To distract himself from his worries, he lifted a finger to the map and tried to trace his path to his destination, but he lost track of the route in the mess of different lines converging on lower Manhattan. He realized that he’d forgotten Abayat’s instructions and was unsure if he needed to change trains again to make it back to his hotel. The variegated twirls on the map made no more sense to him than the wires in a diagram of an electrical appliance. He glanced nervously around the train. To ask directions might, he feared, invite a mugging.

A fur-lined hood bracketed the face of the girl on the bench opposite Omar Yussef. She was slight, even in her quilted brown coat, but her cheeks had an Andean broadness. Omar Yussef heard a jangling pop tune, and the girl pulled a mobile phone from her pocket. When she flipped it open, to his surprise she answered the call in Arabic. She squirmed in her seat with enjoyment as she whispered into the phone, smiling to reveal a row of teeth imprisoned behind heavy orthodontic apparatus.

“I’m on the train,” she said, giggling. “I might be cut off in the tunnel, so I’ll call you back.”

Despite the relentless thundering of the train and the quietness of the girl’s hurried voice, Omar Yussef detected the soft consonants of the educated Palestinian. When she returned the phone to her pocket, he smiled at her. “Where in Palestine are you from, my daughter?” he asked.

She opened her eyes in surprise. Is it, perhaps, so odd for a stranger to talk to another on this train? Omar Yussef wondered. Or did she simply not take me for an Arab, just as I mistook her for a South American?

“Jerusalem, O Hajji,” the girl said.

I look so old, youngsters assume I must by now have fulfilled the obligation to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca, he thought. “I’m not a Hajji, my daughter, though may it be the will of Allah to grant you the honor of such a journey to the holy places in Arabia.”

“If Allah wills it, ustaz.”

Allah might will it, Omar Yussef thought, but I’d no more go on the Hajj than I would enter a mosque to pray in Brooklyn. He recalled the page on Ala’s refrigerator with the prayer times for the Alamut Mosque. He wondered which of the boys worshiped there. He didn’t remember any of them being religious. Maybe it was only the name-with its connection to their old Assassins gang-that had led them to display it.

“Which neighborhood of Jerusalem?” he said.

“Sheikh Jarrah.”

It had been many years since Omar Yussef had visited that quarter north of the Old City where the leading Arab families had their mansions, dilapidated now that their owners no longer were the power in the town. “How long have you lived in New York?”

“I was born here, O Hajji.” She corrected herself: “Sorry, I mean ustaz. My parents came when my mother was carrying me. And you, ustaz?”

“I’m-visiting my son in Bay Ridge,” Omar Yussef stammered. “I’m from Bethlehem, from Dehaisha Camp.”

“May you feel as if you were in your own home and with your family in New York.”

“You don’t look typically Palestinian.” Omar Yussef stroked his own cheekbones to demonstrate what was different about her appearance.

“My great-grandfather came to Palestine from Libya, ustaz,” the girl said with a grin. “My mother says I inherited the cheekbones of a North African tribeswoman.”

“May Allah bless you.” Omar Yussef paused as the train rocked across the points and the lights flickered. “How is life here?”

“It’s all I’ve known, ustaz,” the girl said. “My dear parents love Jerusalem, but I’ve only visited once. The city seemed full of frustration.”

“This subway car is very far from Jerusalem.”

“It’s also far from the fears people experience there, ustaz.”

Omar Yussef thought of the desperation in his son’s eyes when the police took him away, of the headless body and the strange reference to the Veiled Man. Did Palestinians have to take trouble with them wherever they went? Couldn’t they be more like Americans, engaged in their financial struggles, but unburdened by politics? “Far away, my daughter? It seems to me that fear tracks our people faster than they can flee it.”

“May it be displeasing to Allah, ustaz.” The girl rose as the train came into the Pacific Street station. “This is my stop. May Allah grant you grace, ustaz.”

Omar Yussef remembered why he had spoken to her in the first place and lifted his hand to catch her attention. “For 42nd Street-?”

“Stay on this train, ustaz. Peace be upon you.”

“And upon you, peace. May Allah lengthen your life.”

He watched her slip into the crowd on the platform and lost sight of her as the train picked up speed again. The subway car had felt comforting while they spoke, but she had taken all that warmth with her and left him feeling more bereft and alien than before.

As the train carried him through the tunnel, he had the feeling that he was trapped like an African crammed below the decks of a Yemeni slave ship. Whenever he tried to divert his thoughts from the arrest of his son, he knew that he was like the slave dragging his chains over the inert bodies of those packed beside him, hoping that his efforts took him in the direction of home. But he was being stolen quicker than he could struggle toward freedom. He felt himself transported beneath a world that was outlandish and dangerous and imprisoning. You’ve been here less than a day, and already you’re so gloomy, he thought. Remember how excited you were to arrive here, to see your son.

He left the train at Times Square, squinting along the busy platform as he sought the EXIT sign. He made his way through a series of wide, low-ceilinged tunnels. Passengers passed him swiftly, dodging between those hurrying in the opposite direction until their movement made Omar Yussef dizzy. He came to a stretch of tunnel quiet enough that he could hear his own steps over the rattle of the trains, rounded a corner to a flight of stairs, and found the exit barred by a locked gate. No wonder no one was around, he thought.

As he turned back, he heard someone moving stealthily along the tunnel. His breath quickened. He held himself close to the cream tiles on the wall and peered around the corner. The footsteps halted. He saw no one. A fluorescent light flickered over the dirty concrete floor with a stuttering buzz.

He would have headed back toward the crowds, but his fear filled the empty corridor with the image of the man in the black coat he had glimpsed fleeing Ala’s apartment. He went further along the tunnel, quickening his pace.

Before he had gone twenty yards, he was panting, and tension lanced through his chest. He stopped to catch his breath and heard a single set of footsteps behind him.

“Rashid?” he said. The name of his former pupil, the boy his son believed had become a killer, echoed in the tunnel. Omar Yussef heard the quaver in his own voice. “Rashid, my dear one?”

Water dripped from a short-circuited light fixture. The steps sounded again, as though someone were moving with fast, short paces. But Omar Yussef saw nothing. He recalled his secretary’s warning about New York muggers and wondered if he were about to be robbed. It’d be preferable to a murder, he thought.

At the end of the tunnel, another exit seemed to be barred and he whimpered in self-pity. He advanced on the gate in desperation and discovered that, while the entry was blocked, a one-way turnstile allowed him access to the stairs. As he scrambled up the steps, he heard someone running along the tunnel behind him, but no one came through the turnstile. The cold on the street chilled his scalp, and he realized that he had been sweating with tension.

He hurried along 42nd Street toward his hotel, watching the crowd over his shoulder as darkness overwhelmed the blank light of the winter’s day. He tried to pick out a man in a black coat, but the dour dress of the commuters making for Grand Central melded into an indistinguishable mass. In Bethlehem, where he had lived since infancy, he recognized all the faces in the street, even when the souk was busy with market stalls and hawkers. But in New York he could be on personal terms with a million people, and there would still be seven million strangers around him. His teeth chattered, and his eyes teared in the wind.

Outside his hotel, he reached into his pocket for the conference schedule and read from the first page: 5:30 p.m. Welcome tea and coffee for conference delegates and UN staff, Room 3201, Secretariat Building. He was too nervous to be alone in his room. He folded the pages neatly, put them in his pocket, lifted his shoulders against the cold, and went east, toward the UN tower.