“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 rib
bons 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 fiancée.”
“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.
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 Brookly
n. 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.”
The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery Page 4