The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “I’m not so important,” Omar Yussef said. “It’s a conference on the ‘situation in Palestine.’ I’m supposed to give a talk on the UN school system in the refugee camps. I dropped off my bags at my hotel and came here to see my son.”

  “And before you got to the hotel?”

  “I took a taxi to Manhattan from the airport,” Omar Yussef said.

  “What time did your flight land?”

  “About half past nine.”

  “Do you have anything from the flight? To verify your statement.” The detective shrugged an apology.

  Omar Yussef produced the stub of his boarding pass from his jacket. Hamza took it and said, “I’ll have to check this.”

  Is that flight my alibi? Do I really need an alibi? It was as though by being drawn this far into the case, Omar Yussef had assumed some of the murderer’s guilt. “What time was Nizar killed?” he asked.

  Hamza glanced at the stub. “About the time you say your plane touched down, as far as we can tell at this stage,” he said. “What about you, sir?”

  Ala raised his eyes, keeping his jaw tight.

  “Where were you at nine-thirty?” the policeman said.

  “I was somewhere else.”

  Hamza worked his tongue around his mouth and lifted his chin.

  “That’s all I can tell you,” Ala said.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “My son, you have to give the policeman an alibi,” Omar Yussef said. “Weren’t you with someone who could verify where you were?”

  “Yes, but I can’t say who.” Ala’s stern face became momentarily desperate and childlike. “I just can’t, Dad.”

  “It isn’t your Dad who’s asking you,” Hamza said. “If you can’t give me an alibi, we’re going to have to take you in.”

  “You can’t arrest him,” Omar Yussef stammered.

  “Calm down, ustaz Abu Ramiz. This isn’t Palestine. If your son has to come to the station with me, he’ll have all the rights that are due to him.”

  “But he’s innocent.”

  “He’s guilty of hiding something, and I want to know what that is.”

  “Ala, tell him where you were. This is serious.”

  Ala clasped his hands, but Omar Yussef saw that they were shaking.

  “You won’t tell Mama about this, will you?” the young man said.

  Chapter 4

  An officer put his palm on the crown of Ala’s head, guiding him down into the patrol car. When he took it away, the boy’s curls fell across his eye. Omar Yussef stepped forward to smooth the hair back, but the policeman slammed the door. As the car turned the corner onto Bay Ridge Avenue, Omar Yussef shivered.

  “You’ll need a better coat if you’re going to walk the streets of New York, uncle.” Hamza came to Omar Yussef’s side, pushing his big hands into the pockets of his blue parka. “It’s colder than a water-carrier’s donkey, as they say back home.”

  Omar Yussef was about to tell the detective that his shivers were for his son, but a sharp gust of icy wind stopped him. His hands trembled as he tried to zip the front of his windbreaker. “I’m going to the police station,” he said. “I don’t need a coat.”

  “Not a good idea. You won’t be able to see your boy for a long time, unless he changes his mind and decides to talk.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Even if he isn’t the perpetrator—”

  “That’s ridiculous. Of course he’s not.”

  “—he’s hiding something. The killer may know that and want him out of the way, in case your boy decides to spill. Could be he’s safer in custody than out here. Maybe that’s why he clammed up.”

  Omar Yussef spun around, as though the killer might lurk behind one of the stark winter trees. He shuddered.

  Hamza stared south along the avenue, away from the direction in which the patrol car had disappeared. “This isn’t the magical, exciting New York you see in the cinema,” he said. “This is just a quiet neighborhood of Brooklyn. But there are many astonishing things even here, uncle—things we could never imagine back home in Palestine.”

  Omar Yussef closed his eyes and breathed deeply, willing his frozen hands to stop shaking. He’s giving me a chance to fumble with the zipper on this jacket without embarrassment. He’s also switched to calling me uncle from the more formal ustaz. He wants to charm some kind of information out of me. Perhaps I can lead him away from the idea that Ala could’ve had anything to do with this. Maybe that’d be more use to my son than waiting in a corridor at the station. “The neighborhood looks very ordinary to me, but I’m ready to be impressed,” he said with a smile.

  “Look all the way beyond the end of the avenue, uncle. What do you see?” Hamza stretched out his arm. Perhaps two miles away, past the signs for the Korean bodegas and Arab cafés, the Italian pizzerias and American ice-cream chains, stood the enormous piers of a suspension bridge. Its gray towers loomed with the arrogant symmetry of a Manhattan skyscraper. “That’s the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”

  “It’s so big, it’s terrifying.” Omar Yussef finally succeeded in pulling the zipper of his windbreaker up to his chin.

  “The engineers had to factor the curvature of the earth’s surface into the design, because it’s so massive. It expands and contracts with the heat of the season so that in the summer the road hangs three meters lower than in winter.” Hamza shook his head in wonderment. “Think of that. Can you imagine our people building something like that in the Arab world? This is an amazing place, uncle.”

  “Is it just big bridges and tall buildings that you like about New York?”

  “The Arabs in this neighborhood, Bay Ridge, are mainly Palestinian. In the direction of Manhattan, you’ll find Atlantic Avenue, where there’re a lot of Yemenis. Then in Queens you have the Moroccans. Whenever any of them makes enough money, they cross that bridge to Staten Island, and they buy a nice big house.” Hamza turned and swept his arm along the avenue. “Bay Ridge used to be Norwegian and Irish, until about a decade ago. Then our people came, and soon it turned into Little Palestine. Eventually all the Palestinians will have become prosperous and crossed that bridge. This place will be taken over by some other poor immigrant group. Little Palestine is destined to die young.” He looked closely at Omar Yussef and raised an index finger. “But in big Palestine, you’ll still be living in the same dirty refugee camps. There’s no alternative back home, no way up. That’s why I like it better here.”

  Omar Yussef jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Unfortunately, your colleagues weren’t taking my son across the bridge to prosperity. They went in the opposite direction.”

  “Don’t worry about him, uncle. He’ll be safe at the station. My colleague Lieutenant Raghavan isn’t one of these Americans who believe the Arabs are capable of all evil.”

  “What about you? Are you ‘one of those Americans’?”

  “If you think I’m being tough on your son because he’s an Arab, you’re wrong.”

  “You’re tough on everyone?”

  “I’m just tough.”

  “You don’t really believe Ala killed that boy upstairs, do you?”

  “There’s a snack bar a few blocks down run by a fellow from Beit Hanina,” Hamza said. “Come and let me buy you the best sfiha in Brooklyn.”

  He took Omar Yussef’s elbow in his fist. The schoolteacher gave a last look in the direction in which the police car had vanished, whispered the name of his son, and let himself be dragged away.

  They went along the avenue, passing a basketball court enclosed by a chain-link fence. In the corner, six Muslim girls played handball against a tall gray wall. They wore their black mendils tight around their heads and with the ends tucked inside their collars.

  “Even if a girl wasn’t religious, she might cover her head against the cold here,” Omar Yussef said.

  “When the summer comes and they start to sweat, they can’t wait to go home and take them off.” Hamza waved to one of the girls, who blew him a kiss i
n return. “My daughter,” he said.

  “You live here? You didn’t make the trip across the bridge to a bigger house?”

  “For the same reason, I would guess, that you didn’t move out of the refugee camp, though you don’t dress like a poor man. I like to live where people know me.”

  Omar Yussef observed the detective’s steady gait. The man looked heavy, with shoulders that sloped powerfully to a bulky back, but he balanced easily on the balls of his feet. His body, like his facial features, mirrored that of the dangerous relative Omar Yussef had tangled with back in Bethlehem.

  “Your uncle Hussein wasn’t as bad as I at first believed, Hamza,” he said, cautiously, keeping his eyes on the detective’s face. “But under his command the Martyrs Brigades did terrible things in Bethlehem.”

  “You think he’d still have been that kind of man if he hadn’t been born into the violence of Bethlehem?” The detective turned back to watch his daughter celebrate victory in the handball game and run for her coat.

  Omar Yussef remembered the way Hussein had swaggered around Bethlehem with his massive machine gun on his hip. I’m quite sure he’d have been a gangster wherever he had lived, he thought. Bethlehem only offered him easier opportunities. He recalled the lawlessness of the intifada, the beatings and extortion and murder, and he wondered how much of the viciousness with which Hussein had administered his gang had been passed on to Hamza in his genes. Those had been violent times, but he had never before seen a man’s body with its head cut away.

  His shoe slipped on a smear of snow, and Hamza caught his elbow, supporting him in a grip so tight it seemed as strong as the jaws of an animal.

  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 Frères 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 Frères 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.