Matt Rees - The Fourth Assassin

“Your daughter runs the cafe with you?”

“She’s a counselor at the Community Association across the street. But she helps me, too.”

From the bar, Rania called: “With sugar, ustaz ?”

“No sugar,” Omar Yussef said.

“And you, ya pasha ?” she asked Khamis Zeydan.

“Sugar, please,” he replied. “How do you know I’m a pasha , a military man?”

Marwan intervened quickly: “Rania grew up in Lebanon. There one learns early to recognize a fighter, even when he wears his civilian clothes. It can be dangerous not to do so.”

Khamis Zeydan watched the girl closely as she poured the coffee. He took a sachet of sugar from the pot on the table and read the label. “The Maison du Cafe, Khaldeh Highway, Lebanon.” He snorted a laugh. “I was shot in the shoulder once on the Khaldeh Highway.”

“Israelis?” Marwan said.

“Shiites. Near the airport.”

“The bad old days of Beirut.”

“Where are you from, Marwan?” Omar Yussef asked. He tried to make his question sound friendly, but something sharp in his voice took the smile off Marwan’s sensuous lips.

“Baalbek, in the Bekaa Valley, ustaz .”

“So you’re Shiite?”

Marwan directed a thin, apologetic smile at Khamis Zeydan and stroked his shoulder, as if to salve the police chief’s old wound. “I’m not religious. I’m modern. Here we sit, with my unmarried daughter standing right next to us. I don’t worry about keeping her out of the sight of men. We’re no longer in the old country, are we?”

Rania set the coffee cups on the table.

Omar Yussef detected the scent of lavender water when she bent close to him. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said, touching the saucer of his cup.

“Blessings,” she murmured.

“Marwan, how long have you been in New York?” Omar Yussef asked.

“Since the end of 1998. Sadly I brought only my Rania, who was then barely a teenager. Her dear mother rests in Baalbek, may Allah have mercy on her, and I have no other children.”

“You’ve had the cafe since then?”

“Only a year or two.”

“It’s not very busy.”

“It’s early. Later in the day,” Marwan hesitated, “we have many clients. They come to hear Arabic spoken and to enjoy the tastes of their homeland.”

Rania watched her father from behind the bar, her broad mouth turned down at the ends, her shining eyes impatient.

“What did you do in Lebanon?” Khamis Zeydan said over the rim of his small coffee cup.

“A merchant. Trade, business, different things.”

“Business got bad in 1998, did it?”

Marwan looked hard at Khamis Zeydan. Omar Yussef was surprised by his friend’s sarcastic tone. Khamis Zeydan winked at him. That year means something to him, Omar Yussef thought. He needed to break the tension between the two men, to turn the conversation to Ala’s alibi. “I’ve been to see my son at the jail,” he said.

Marwan’s eyes were stern when they moved to Omar Yussef. “The jail?”

“He refuses to give the police an alibi. He won’t tell them where he was when Nizar was killed.”

“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 cafe 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 cafe 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.