The Fourth Assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “A terrible thing. The whole neighborhood is sad.” Marwan shook his head. “Why won’t he give an alibi?”

  Omar Yussef stared at Rania. She polished the bar, her eyes following the cloth over the surface of the wood with great concentration.

  “Rania?” he said.

  She turned her deep, black eyes to the mirror behind the bar.

  “Ala knew about you and Nizar.” Omar Yussef stood and went to the bar. “That’s why he met you yesterday. To release you from your arrangement, to set you free to be with Nizar.”

  Marwan scraped his chair as he came to his feet and spoke with a rough edge of assaulted authority. “Rania, is this true?”

  “What does it matter? Nizar is gone.” Her voice quavered, but it didn’t quite break. She ran her hand along the shelf behind the bar and rubbed away the dust from her finger pads.

  Marwan laid his heavy hand on Omar Yussef’s wrist and led him to the door. “Let me persuade my daughter, ustaz. She’ll help Ala, I’m sure of it.” He patted Omar Yussef’s shoulder as he saw his visitors out.

  Omar Yussef sheltered in the doorway of the boutique next door while Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette and cursed the weather. As they walked along the sidewalk, his scalp chilled and the sleet dribbled into his eyebrows.

  “I forgot my cap,” he said.

  They doubled back and entered the café again. The barroom was empty, and Omar Yussef headed for the table where he had left his woolen cap. As he picked it up, he heard Rania’s voice from the kitchen.

  “Yes, I was with Ala yesterday morning. From about eight until half-past nine. He was—”

  “Isn’t that when Nizar was killed?” Marwan’s words rumbled beneath his daughter’s faltering voice.

  “You ought to know.” There was sudden hate in her tone. It seemed to free her, and she wailed a deep, hoarse moan.

  “Rania, what’re you saying?” Marwan brought a hand down hard on a metal surface.

  “Nizar and I were in love,” she cried. “I never had that with Ala, no matter what you wanted, Daddy.”

  “Silence,” the man bellowed. “Ala is too good for you. He’s a good Arab, not like that flashy bastard Nizar who had you under some kind of spell.”

  “And may Allah have mercy upon him, the dear boy,” Khamis Zeydan whispered, with a sarcastic grin.

  Omar Yussef gestured for quiet and crept to the kitchen door. He peered into the room.

  Marwan leaned heavily over the steel kitchen counter, his wide back to the door. “He made you love him, and then he took advantage of you, my darling. You followed him to places where it wasn’t right for you to go, because he had made you love him.”

  Rania’s black eyes were angry and beautiful behind their tears. “I loved him because he went with me to Manhattan. He helped me to experience a new life there. We were going to go away, anywhere away from here.”

  “Now you’ll go nowhere.” Marwan’s fist came down on the counter. “You’ll stay here and learn to behave yourself, or you’ll pay a heavy price.”

  “I paid the highest price when my Nizar died.”

  Marwan snorted through his nose. “This is my reward for taking you away from Lebanon. For bringing you to this city.”

  The girl clicked her tongue dismissively and, in the same moment, dodged backwards as her father’s hand swung through the air where her face had been. Her movement knocked a nargileh from the shelf behind her, and its water bulb smashed on the tiles.

  Omar Yussef went through the door and grabbed Marwan’s hairy wrist as he raised it once more to strike his daughter. “Enough,” he grunted. The wrist jerked and Omar Yussef needed to lay his other hand across it, too, before he could still it.

  Marwan pointed to the broken nargileh and growled at his daughter, “Clean that up.” He staggered into the café and leaned over the bar with his palm on his shaven head. When Omar Yussef touched his thick shoulder, he realized the man was sobbing.

  Rania came to the doorway with her arms folded and her jaw quivering and no more secrets to protect. “Can we suggest to the police that they come and talk to you?” Omar Yussef said to her. “To confirm Ala’s alibi?”

  As the girl bowed her head in assent, Omar Yussef couldn’t help but think what a fine couple she and Nizar would have made. The girl’s beauty was of the flaring, sensuous sort that would force most men into unhappy appeasement. She needed a lover who could laugh off her passions because he was daring enough to risk inflaming them still further. A man like Nizar.

  Omar Yussef’s glasses fogged when he left the café. He pulled his NYPD cap over his ears. “What’s so special about 1998?” he asked.

  Khamis Zeydan lifted the collar of his trench coat and cupped his hand around his cigarette. “That was the year the Lebanese government amnestied a thousand convicted drug traffickers. Marwan’s from the Bekaa, the center of Lebanese narcotics production.”

  “You’re saying Marwan was a drug trafficker?”

  “He knew what I was suggesting, and he didn’t like it. It was a shot in the dark, but I think I nailed him.” Khamis Zeydan exhaled, and the smoke came to Omar Yussef damp on the cold air.

  “Why would he leave Lebanon if he had been amnestied?”

  “He might’ve had no choice. He could’ve been on the wrong side of the local bad guys.”

  “Gangsters?”

  “Worse, maybe. Hizballah, Islamic Jihad. Perhaps he came here to get away from them.”

  “He’d have had to lie about his drug conviction on his immigration forms. Otherwise the Americans would’ve denied him a visa—amnesty or no amnesty.” Omar Yussef crossed the road and walked close to the buildings, sheltering from the light sleet under the storefront awnings. “If Nizar found out about that deception, Marwan could’ve killed him to protect himself from blackmail.”

  “If Marwan murdered Nizar, it might just as easily have been to protect the reputation of his daughter,” Khamis Zeydan said. “It was all the fellow could do not to call her a whore to her face.”

  “Just because she followed her heart.” Omar Yussef shook his head. He wondered who was most pitiable: the girl who had lost the man she loved, or the boy who tried to protect her though she had rejected him. “Poor Ala.”

  A police patrol car glided slowly down the empty street, squelching through the rivulets of sleet. Khamis Zeydan pointed at the police department logo on Omar Yussef’s stocking cap and gave a thumbs-up. The officer in the passenger seat touched the peak of his cap, and the car rolled on.

  Chapter 12

  In his Iraqi dialect, the young man who gave them directions to the police precinct house cautioned that it was ten blocks away. Omar Yussef stared through the rain and clenched his fists. He was filled with apprehension about the likely treatment of an Arab in the Brooklyn Detention Complex, and every delay in passing on the information about Ala’s alibi extended his son’s incarceration there. The immensity of the city frustrated him, even as its rain mocked his inadequate clothing and its justice system imprisoned his innocent son.

  “It’s a long walk, ustaz,” the young man said, looking Omar Yussef up and down.

  “You don’t think I’m healthy enough to walk so far?” Omar Yussef shoved his chin forward and edged his voice with aggression. The Iraqi flinched. All these things I’m having to deal with have made me angry, Omar Yussef thought, and this boy might just be the one to catch it. He turned to Khamis Zeydan. “I must look particularly frail today. Nobody thinks I can make it to my destination.”

  “Cool it,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  “What do I have to be calm about?” Omar Yussef shoved Khamis Zeydan’s shoulder with the flat of his hand. “Am I the only one who wants my son to get out of jail?”

  “You’re being ridiculous. This weather has frozen your brain. You need a decent coat so you can warm up and start thinking straight.”

  “May Allah curse this rain.” Omar Yussef stamped in a puddle. The cold water flooded his loafer and chilled his toe
s.

  The young Iraqi stroked his thin mustache and flicked away the rainwater gathering there. “I wasn’t referring to your health, uncle. It’s just that the weather is so bad. Maybe you should take a bus.”

  “I’ll freeze standing at a bus stop.”

  “The buses are frequent. You won’t have to wait long. But if you insist, walk straight up the avenue. You’ll find yourself underneath a raised highway on big concrete supports. Follow the street beside it and you’ll reach the precinct house. May Allah give you his aid.”

  “May Allah turn you into a monkey.”

  Khamis Zeydan sniggered at his friend’s ill humor and gave the young man a consoling pat on the shoulder. “Beg the pardon of Allah,” he said to Omar Yussef.

  As he stumbled along the roadside, Omar Yussef felt ashamed to have yelled at the youth. The longer he spent in this alien city, the further he veered from reactions he would normally expect of himself. Every circumstance seemed set against him, and he had nothing secure to fall back on, so cut off was he from the things he knew.

  “You really ought to buy a better coat,” Khamis Zeydan said, “and that woolen cap isn’t much good in this wet weather.”

  “We don’t have time. We have to get Ala out of jail.”

  “Did you bring your magic carpet to break him out?”

  “We’ll tell the detective about Rania. She’ll give him the alibi.”

  “Don’t be so sure the girl will play along.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Nizar was fucking the daughter—”

  “Don’t be so crude.”

  “—of a man who may have been in jail in Lebanon for a drug offense and who now runs a café with no apparent customers. The third roommate is still unaccounted for, too: remember that. It may not be as simple as it seems.”

  Sleet crackled against the shoulders of Omar Yussef’s windbreaker with a sound like a fusillade. He felt his spine stiffening. After another block, he stopped and gave Khamis Zeydan a mournful look.

  The police chief smiled. “Ready to make a new fashion statement?”

  They went into a store that announced itself as “The Chic Bazaar.” Khamis Zeydan approached a short Arab man with a belly like a watermelon, a receding forehead, and a thin gray mustache. “My friend isn’t equipped for the New York winter,” Khamis Zeydan said. “What can you do for him?”

  “Quickly,” Omar Yussef said. “We’re in a rush.”

  The man simpered and rubbed his hands. He pulled a long black quilted coat from a rack and held it open for Omar Yussef. The schoolteacher removed his windbreaker and handed it dripping to Khamis Zeydan. His tweed jacket was damp and musty, like a sheep in need of shearing, so he removed it too. The walk had made him sweat, and a trace of steam rose from within the jacket.

  When the storekeeper dropped the big coat onto Omar Yussef’s shoulders and flipped the hood onto his head, he was surprised by its light weight. The zipper buzzed up to the end of his nose.

  “It’s perfect, ustaz,” the storekeeper said, turning Omar Yussef toward a full-length mirror.

  All his life, he had worn the finest clothes, European styles that made him feel as though he were a Parisian or a Milanese, not an inhabitant of a Bethlehem refugee camp. Now he was forced to dress himself in the outlandish garments of another kind of ghetto. “I feel ridiculous,” he said.

  Khamis Zeydan pulled the zipper down a few inches. “We didn’t hear what you said. It was too muffled.”

  Omar Yussef looked in the mirror. The coat came to his knees, and his hands were lost in the enormous sleeves. He had to admit that he already felt warm. If I do up the zipper and wear the hood, no one will even know it’s me in this coat, he thought. I’ll look like any New Yorker wrapped up against the elements.

  When they left the shop, they saw a bulky man in a wide-brimmed hat hurrying along the other side of the road, his arms flailing as he tried to propel himself faster. He noticed Omar Yussef and crossed the street.

  “Is it you, ustaz?” Marwan Hammiya came close to Omar Yussef. “May Allah grant you grace, my dear sir.”

  Omar Yussef pushed the hood of his new coat off his head and ran a palm across his thin hair. “Greetings, Marwan.”

  The Lebanese gripped Omar Yussef’s elbow and drew him toward the curb. He leered with an awkwardness that exposed his crooked lower teeth and gave a brief wave to Khamis Zeydan, indicating that he needed to speak to Omar Yussef alone.

  “I’m so happy to have caught up with you, ustaz. You’re going to the police station?”

  “With the news of Rania’s alibi for my son.”

  Marwan’s pressure on Omar Yussef’s arm grew stronger, as though he intended to drag him in the opposite direction, away from the precinct house. “I followed you because I wished to apologize for the scene in my café. Don’t be offended by my Rania. You know how girls can be?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “After you left, she calmed down and agreed to my proposition. She consents to Ala.”

  “Consents?”

  “To resume the engagement.”

  Omar Yussef blinked. “I’ll see what he thinks once he’s out of jail. Thanks to her evidence.”

  “In good time, ustaz.”

  Omar Yussef tried to pull his elbow away, but Marwan held onto it and his leer widened.

  “You understand that I have fatherly feelings toward your boy, as we may hope that I will soon be his father-in-law. Fatherly, protective feelings. For that reason, I must say that now may not be the right time to free him, my dear Abu Ramiz.”

  “Rania can hardly marry him in jail.”

  “Maybe not.” Marwan rubbed his face. “She certainly can’t marry him if he’s dead.”

  Omar Yussef ceased to resist the café owner’s grip.

  “If he leaves the jail, ustaz,” Marwan said, “he may be an easier target.”

  “A target for whom?”

  Marwan watched Khamis Zeydan smoking a Rothmans under the awning of the clothing store. “I can’t—” He sobbed. “They have their teeth into me. I can’t help Ala any more than this.”

  “Who’re they?” Omar Yussef pulled the big man’s collar. “Who?”

  “Leave him where he is, ustaz. He’ll make a good husband for my Rania. He’ll look after her when I’m gone, and he’s honest—”

  “Gone?”

  “—and he isn’t involved in bad things.”

  “You mean, not like Nizar?”

  “Leave him where he is.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Marwan’s sobs had become steady tears. “I’m trying to survive; that’s all,” he said. “I’m not a bad man.”

  “Marwan, what is it that Ala knows? Why would anyone want to harm him?”

  “He doesn’t know anything. But they don’t know that. It’s possible they believe he knows everything. He could be next.”

  “Tell me who they are.”

  When Marwan lifted his brown eyes, Omar Yussef knew that the man was in the kind of danger from which there was no escape and that the more he struggled against it, the tighter it bound him. In Bethlehem, he had seen men drawn into collaboration for whom the first transactions with the Israelis had seemed harmless, a way to obtain a travel permit or a hospital bed, only to find that gradually they were sunk into an absolute immorality with no choice but to participate in the deaths of others. Who had that power over Marwan?

  “I was the one who discovered Nizar’s body,” Omar Yussef said. “A boy I loved was slaughtered. I have to get the police to free my son so they can concentrate on finding the real killer.”

  “You were there, in the apartment?” Marwan said. “Then they’ll be after you, as well.”

  Omar Yussef remembered the Jeep rushing at him, mounting the curb, and he shivered inside his new coat. “We’re going to the police station. They’ll protect you. Come with us.”

  “Leave the boy in jail, ustaz,” Marwan said. He smiled, hopeless
and resigned, like a man facing a math problem he knew to be beyond him. “Please come and talk to me. We will discuss the engagement. May Allah lengthen your life and the life of your son.”

  Omar Yussef watched Marwan hunch along the street toward his café. Khamis Zeydan flicked his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and smiled through one side of his mouth. “It’s tough to be a legitimate businessman in this city,” he said.

  Omar Yussef kicked the butt into the gutter and once again turned in the direction of the police station.

  Chapter 13

  Omar Yussef mounted the bare staircase to the detectives’ bureau at the 68th Precinct, trudging slowly in his soggy shoes as patrolmen and plainclothes officers hurried past. Breathless from the climb, he waved across the gray metal furniture to Sergeant Hamza Abayat, whose desk was crammed into a corner near a high window, and crossed the room.

  Holding a phone to his ear, the Arab detective came halfway to his feet, shook Omar Yussef’s hand, and touched his palm to his heart in the traditional gesture of sincerity. From a chair in front of his battered desk, he picked up a large tub of whey protein with a ludicrously muscled man straining to lift a pair of massive dumbbells on the label and motioned for Omar Yussef to sit.

  Next to the desk, Khamis Zeydan rested his foot on a pile of bodybuilding magazines. Omar Yussef glanced at the thick sinews in the tanned, oiled chest of the cover model by his friend’s shoe. Beside the magazines was a pile of community newspapers. He read the main headline on the first tabloid: “NY Youth 2nd in Int’l Koran Contest.” The murder of the Veiled Man will push that off the front page of the Muslim press, he thought.

  “I’ll send a uniformed officer along to talk to them, Missus Pierre,” Hamza said. He looked impatiently at the telephone in his hand. “Don’t worry. Thank you for your call.”

  He put down the receiver and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “By Allah, these people are crazy,” he said. “May Allah preserve you, ustaz Abu Ramiz. How’re you?”

  “Thanks be to Allah, Hamza. This is my friend Abu Adel.”

  The sergeant rolled a chair from the next desk toward Khamis Zeydan. “Are you the Abu Adel who’s the police chief in Bethlehem?”