The Fourth Assassin

Chapter 9

A pockmarked Latino with a hoarse voice and a thick accent brayed over the chatter and rumble of the D train. “When the kingdom comes, you’re going to be there,” he bellowed, his head back like a market tradesman to project through the crowded car. “He’ll tell the world, and you’re going to teach what He says. Only Jesus Christ can save all of you.”

Khamis Zeydan fingered his pack of Rothmans. “I ought to remind him that only the believers in Allah will be saved,” he mumbled.

“Allah is most great, Honored Sheikh.” Omar Yussef poked his friend’s chest. “Jesus is a prophet named in the Koran. Maybe this guy is a Muslim after all. Anyway, of those believers who will be saved, how many will be former PLO hit men with a fondness for Scotch whisky and cursing? I expect the answer is none.”

“You may be right. Ah, then, fuck the believers.”

“If it is the will of Allah.” Omar Yussef smiled.

“I entrust myself to the protection of Allah.” Khamis Zeydan rubbed his palms together as though he were washing his hands. “But if Paradise is a no-smoking zone like America, I want to go to Hell.”

“For a Palestinian, that’s the easiest of wishes to grant. One doesn’t even have to leave home to get there.”

They approached the Grand Street station as the Latino finished his message: “All the people who will be saved will be saved by Jesus Christ. All of you are chosen to be saved. Thank you for listening, and have a beautiful day.”

“May Allah grant you grace,” Omar Yussef whispered as the preacher left the car.

The train rumbled at low speed onto the strangely terrifying superstructure of the Manhattan Bridge. Downriver, beyond the massive girders and the mesh of electric lines, the Brooklyn Bridge arched over the water. Its famous towers sprayed thick cables along its span. Omar Yussef felt as though he were flying out of control through the air, high above the river and the tangle of highway along the shoreline. An old Vietnamese man screamed into his cell phone over the noise of the train. The wheels rang like the slow beating of a giant steel kettledrum until the train slipped back under the earth, jumped to a different track, and picked up speed. “This is an unnatural way of traveling,” Omar Yussef whispered.

“There’s a daily caravan between Manhattan and Brooklyn, if you prefer.” Khamis Zeydan leered. “Next time we’ll rent a camel and join them.”

Omar Yussef shook his head and wondered if he ought to buy some nicotine gum for his irritable friend. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left your work today. I’d prefer the president had to deal with your rotten temper, rather than me.”

“My brother, I have a bad feeling about his visit. Some danger that I can’t predict.”

“Surely there’s plenty of security at the UN?”

“America used to be the last place you’d expect any kind of attack.” Khamis Zeydan rubbed the knuckle of his prosthetic hand against the sharp edge of his front teeth. “Not anymore.”

“May it be displeasing to Allah.”

“It makes me nervous to be stuck on a subway train when someone might be planning a strike against my boss right now.”

Omar Yussef, too, wished to be elsewhere. He wondered what lies Abdel Hadi would be telling the other delegates at the UN conference about him in his absence. He needed to sort out Ala’s problems and return to the UN before any plots could play out against him. He had given little thought to the speech he was to make, but now it seemed he had almost no time to prepare. His nervousness made him bitter. “May Allah curse this train,” he said. “I feel trapped like a bound man in a pit of scorpions.”

They left the subway at Atlantic Avenue and emerged at a big intersection that received traffic from five directions. Omar Yussef covered his ears with his hands as the lights changed and a troop of shiny SUVs bellowed past.

Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette and lifted his head to the deepening gray in the sky. “Rain’s coming,” he said. He pulled a tweed cap from the pocket of his trench coat and covered his short white hair. “You’re not exactly dressed for this weather, are you?”

Omar Yussef approached an elderly Arab who was resting on his cane by the traffic light, his red-and-white-checkered keffiya wrapped under his chin. “Peace be upon you,” he said.

“And upon you, peace,” the man responded.

“The Detention Complex, which way is it?”

The old Arab looked Omar Yussef up and down. He wonders who I’m visiting at the jail, Omar Yussef thought. He’s suspicious of my criminal connections.

“It’s a long walk,” the Arab said, pointing with his cane. “That direction. Six blocks.”

“Thank you.”

“But they’re long blocks. Atlantic Avenue is a long street.”

It’s not my criminal ties that make him look at me so dubiously. It’s my frailty. “We’ll be fine, sir.”

The old man laughed, coughed, and spat. “You don’t live in New York, do you? You thought that just because you were going to an address on Atlantic Avenue, you ought to go to the station with the same name. You don’t look like peasants to me, but sometimes you can’t tell the real hicks by sight. You should’ve taken a different subway line altogether and you’d have come up much closer to the jail. Anyway, you ought to take a bus now.”

Omar Yussef resented the old man for pointing out his mistake. “I think we’ll walk.”

The man gave Omar Yussef a doubtful look. “If you don’t get tired from the long walk, you’re certainly going to freeze. You ought to have a hat. This isn’t the Naqab desert, you know.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Khamis Zeydan said, patting the warm cap on his own head.

“I’ll buy a hat then,” Omar Yussef said, impatiently. “Over there.”

Across Fourth Avenue, they came to a stall hung with keffiyas, baseball caps, and woolen hats. The vendor stood beside it, leaning against the wall of a red-brick Gothic building that housed a mosque, his hands so deep in the pockets of his thick quilted coat that his elbows were locked.

“Take this one,” Khamis Zeydan said, pointing at a woolen cap emblazoned with a white skull and crossbones. “That’s your style. It ought to appeal to your interest in history.”

Omar Yussef felt his cheeks reddening with irritation, but his scalp was numb with cold. Some of the hats bore only a few colored letters, so he reached out for the first one that came to hand and gave the vendor three dollars. When he pulled the hat over his head, the lancing pain of the freezing wind on his baldness left him, and he sighed with relief.

Khamis Zeydan read the letters on the hat. “NYPD? The design’s not quite up to your usual standard of elegance, but it might get us into the Detention Complex a little quicker.”

Beyond the mosque, they passed a row of Arab mini-markets stocked with buckets of sumac and cardamom, the price of halal meat advertised in the windows. Outside a store selling greeting cards and bumper stickers, Khamis Zeydan stopped to read aloud: “Hatred is not a family value-Koran 49:13. The Koran says that?”

“In that verse, Allah says he ‘made you into nations and tribes, so that you might get to know each other,’” Omar Yussef said.

“So this is the dumb American version?”

“What do you want from them? It’s only a bumper sticker.” Omar Yussef tried to pick up their pace. “Did you ever meet Nizar, may Allah have mercy upon him?”

Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “Only briefly. He was out walking with Ala near the Nativity Church. They were with those other two boys who were always close to them.”

“The other members of The Assassins.”

The police chief grimaced. “I don’t know why you encouraged them with that name.”

“It was just a historical interest, a little bit of fun.”

“I don’t see that there’s so much fun to be found in a bunch of medieval drug addicts.”

“History was never your strong subject when we were together at university, Abu Adel.”

“Screw your sister, schoolteacher. I majored in women and whisky.”

“With a minor in cursing. The Assassins weren’t drug addicts. Their leaders used the promise of Paradise to train fanatical killers.”

“So not drug addicts, but insane murderers.”

“Their leaders weren’t insane. They were ruthless and manipulative. They used the men they sent on suicidal missions to eliminate political enemies and to protect their particular strain of Islam.”

Khamis Zeydan picked at his back teeth. “Even so, a bunch of kids named ‘The Assassins’ is the kind of thing people take seriously in the Middle East. If the Israelis had found out there was a group with that name in Bethlehem, they’d probably have assassinated them.”

Omar Yussef took a sharp breath. Could that be what happened to Nizar? he wondered. People believed it was the Mossad that killed Nizar’s father, after all.

“They were very important to me, all those boys,” he muttered.

“I don’t know why you get so close to your pupils. Emotional involvement only causes trouble.”

“There you see the difference between a teacher and a professional killer.”

Khamis Zeydan clicked his tongue.

Omar Yussef hurried across Third Avenue, stepping aside for a pair of stout Arab women, their mendils tight beneath their plump chins. “Maybe you knew Nizar’s father. He was a PLO guy back when you were running around on missions for the Old Man.”

Khamis Zeydan cupped his hands to light another cigarette. “Yeah, I knew Fayez.”

“What was he like?”

“Arrogance is a weed that mostly grows on a dunghill, as they say. The PLO was a real dunghill, and that’s how all those assholes were-arrogant as cockerels, every one of them.” The police chief hunched his shoulders against the wind. “Fayez ran off to study in Baghdad and joined the PLO there. He prospered on the dunghill. He had his own little commando group within the PLO for a while and used to write heroic essays about their exploits against the Israelis.”

“I’ve read some of his political essays. I seem to remember they were mainly critiques of the Arab nations.”

Khamis Zeydan sneered. “When he merged his fighting unit with the main PLO forces, the Old Man rewarded him by making him a special ambassador.”

“What did that involve?”

They crossed another side street. “We’re being followed,” Khamis Zeydan said.

Omar Yussef spun around in surprise, but his friend grabbed his arm and pulled him along.

“A man in a black coat.”

“Where?” Omar Yussef turned his head.

“Stop it. If he knows we’ve seen him, it might force his hand.”

“Force his-You mean, he might try to-”

“Steal your new hat.” Khamis Zeydan took Omar Yussef’s arm more casually, linking their elbows so that he could watch over his shoulder.

“Can you see him?” Omar Yussef whispered.

“His face is covered by a scarf.” Khamis Zeydan’s eyes glittered with intensity.

“It’s him, isn’t it? The one I saw at the apartment, and I’m sure he followed me back to the hotel, too.”

“Well, he’s gone now. He went down the side street.”

“Should we follow him?”

Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “He might be armed.”

“We have to get away.”

“I don’t expect he’ll follow us into the prison. Keep walking.”

The police chief seemed to enjoy exercising his old skills from his time as an undercover operative. He became expansive. “You asked about the special ambassador? It sounds like a bullshit title, but the Old Man actually sent Fayez on secret diplomatic missions. He stationed him here in New York for a while.”

Omar Yussef remembered the lieutenant holding the plastic evidence bag with the dead boy’s passport. “But Nizar wasn’t born in exile.”

“Fayez sent his wife to his parents in Bethlehem whenever she was pregnant, so that the kids would be real Palestinians, as he saw it, born on the land. That’s why she was able to get permits from the Israelis to live there with them, after the- when Fayez died.”

Khamis Zeydan pulled Omar Yussef to a halt in front of the display window of a lingerie store.

“What’re you doing?”

A skinny mannequin in high heels and thigh-high stockings pushed her lacy ass toward the two men. Khamis Zeydan squinted into the glass. “I’m checking to see if there’s anyone across the street,” he said.

Omar Yussef looked at the figures reflected in the window. A line of people waited at a bus stop with an appearance of innocent boredom.

“How did Fayez die?” he asked.

“Assassinated.”

“He really was murdered?”

“You sound shocked. Come on, you’re a history teacher. Without assassination, history would be a dull subject. Murder is your business.”

A group of teenaged boys stopped to giggle before the store window.

“Was it the Mossad?” Omar Yussef glanced over his shoulder, but Khamis Zeydan grabbed him and led him along the sidewalk. “Did they kill Fayez?”

Khamis Zeydan threw his cigarette into the gutter and retched a wet cough from the bottom of his lungs.

“That’s what people said in Bethlehem. Is it true?”

“Sure, the Mossad,” Khamis Zeydan snorted.

The bitterness in his friend’s voice made Omar Yussef suspicious. “Tell me?”

“While he was in New York, Fayez made contact with a couple of prominent Jews. They introduced him to some left-wing Israeli politicians. Together they came up with a peace plan.”

“I don’t understand. The Mossad killed him to cut off those peace talks?”

Khamis Zeydan made his eyes wide and sarcastic. “Yes, and they also blew up the Twin Towers so that the U.S. would invade Iraq. But they called all the Jews who worked in the buildings first and told them to stay home that day. Oh, and they also exported special chewing gum to Egypt to make all the single men unbearably horny and, thus, destroy Arab morality. Those Israelis have put together quite an amazing organization, you know.”

“So who killed him, if it wasn’t the Mossad?” Omar Yussef shivered and pulled up the collar of his windbreaker.

“We Arabs managed to knock off quite a few of our own during that time.” Khamis Zeydan watched a massive kebab turning on a spit in the window of a restaurant, dribbling fat. “You didn’t have to step much out of line to be dead meat.”

“You yourself-” Omar Yussef halted when Khamis Zeydan turned his glare upon him.

“I myself?”

“Carried out a few such missions. Why are you looking at me like that? Well, you did, didn’t you?”

The police chief stared along the avenue with a malevolent concentration. “It’s going to rain, and it’s already so fucking cold,” he said.

“Did Fayez have the approval of the Old Man for his peace talks?”

“The Old Man never approved anything until it was done. That way he could take credit for it if it succeeded and be absolved of blame for any failure.”

“Did the Old Man rub out Nizar’s father?”

“Don’t you have enough to worry about, with your son in jail?”

“All this could be important to my son’s case.” Omar Yussef spoke quickly. “If Nizar’s father was killed by the Old Man or by another PLO faction or, I don’t know, by the government of some Arab country, maybe the same people wanted Nizar dead. Maybe it was they who cut off his head.”

“Maybe this time it was the Mossad.”

Omar Yussef cursed and marched ahead. His thighs ached with fatigue. He damned the Arab man at the subway station for having recognized that he was too weak to make this walk in comfort. He paused for breath, leaning against a battered yellow newspaper-vending box, then stepped out to cross the street.

He heard the splashing first, then the heavy, threatening groan of a big engine accelerating. A blue Jeep with tinted windows came through the intersection fast, rushing over the puddles. Instinctively Omar Yussef put one foot back on the curb.

The Jeep veered toward him. Khamis Zeydan grabbed him, throwing him backward. He fell in the snow piled around a lamppost. His head struck the ground with an impact like the kick of a donkey’s hoof.

The Jeep jumped onto the curb, its bumper knocking the newspaper box across the sidewalk. A pile of tabloids spilled into the wind. The Jeep disappeared quickly down the side street. A copy of the Daily News blew into Omar Yussef’s face. He pushed it away. Khamis Zeydan helped him to his feet.

“By Allah, that must’ve been the bastard who was tailing us,” Khamis Zeydan said.

“Did you see him?”

“The windows were too dark.”

A middle-aged black woman in a camel-hair coat came across the side street. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said to Omar Yussef.

“Think again, dear lady,” Khamis Zeydan said. “My friend’s a Palestinian.”

When the police chief laughed, the woman gave him an affronted stare and walked on.

“If you couldn’t see him, how do you know that was the man who was following us?” Omar Yussef felt the back of his head where it had hit the snowy ground. It was wet and tender, but the skin hadn’t broken.

“He was out of sight just long enough to get into his vehicle and line us up.”

“Why does he want to kill me?”

“As far as he knows, you might’ve seen his face at Nizar’s apartment.”

Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Anyone in the crowd on the sidewalk might be tracking him. All the cars thundering through the traffic lights were potential instruments of his death. He covered his face with his hands and felt his pulse jumping behind his eyes.

“My brother,” Khamis Zeydan said quietly, “let’s go to your son.”

The Arab food stores and cafes dwindled as Atlantic Avenue rose into a gentle slope. The Islamic bookstores with pamphlets on Muslim marriage and gold-inlaid copies of the Koran in their windows were replaced by the unsightly offices of bail bondsmen, encased behind bars like their clients. The bondsmen hung gaudy signs above their doors painted with glib slogans, as though temporary release from jail were a purchase no more worthy of deep consideration than that of a slice of pizza.

Across the street, a nine-story tower rose in pink stone. The windows were composites of thick glass bricks molded around a mesh of iron bars that caged the entire building. The branches of the trees along the sidewalk had been cut back to their gray trunks, so that they looked like men with their hands cuffed behind them. The sign above the blacked-out glass in the entrance read: Brooklyn Detention Complex.

Omar Yussef lifted his head, following the bars up through the glass bricks to the top of the jail. His spectacles spotted with water. The rain had started.