Matt Rees - The Fourth Assassin

“He was in jail in Lebanon, wasn’t he?” he said.

She ran her tongue over her lips, pale pink like a fingernail.

“Could his killer have been someone from his past?”

“He was forced into the drug business during the civil war,” she said.

“Forced?”

“By Islamic Jihad people. They came to the Bekaa to train with the Iranians, the Revolutionary Guards, and they recruited local people like Dad to do their dirty work. He had no choice. They didn’t ask him nicely, if you see what I mean. When the government wanted to jail some drug producers, Islamic Jihad sacrificed my father, because they knew he wasn’t one of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t believe in Islamic revolution. He didn’t love the Iranian mullahs or want Hizballah to take over Lebanon, and he didn’t care at all about the Palestinian cause. He just loved me and my mother.”

“Then he was freed in the government amnesty.”

“Amnesty.” Rania laughed scornfully. “We left Lebanon right away, so that he could forget how he’d been forced to live. We came to the U.S.”

“But someone back home would’ve known he lied on his U.S. immigration forms about his drug conviction,” Omar Yussef said. “If he’d told the truth, the Americans would’ve never allowed him to become a citizen. They wouldn’t even have given him a visa as a tourist. Isn’t that right?”

Rania fingered a plastic paperweight in the shape of the Dome of the Rock. The dome was painted in a garish egg-yolk yellow. “Someone from Islamic Jihad found him here. I don’t know who it was. My father called him ‘the little bastard.’ Excuse my language, ustaz .”

“That’s all right. I’m not a fan of the Jihad. This man forced your father to sell drugs here in Brooklyn?”

Rania’s chin dropped to her chest.

“Can you forgive him?” Omar Yussef asked.

She was briefly confused. “For selling drugs?” she said.

“This is the day that you’ll bury your father. Make your peace with what he did.”

“I can forgive him for the drugs, ustaz . That was the fault of the son of a whore from Islamic Jihad. But I can’t forgive him for letting Nizar work with him.”

“Is that why Nizar died? Because of his connection to the drugs?”

Rania shook her head, and tears brought a higher sheen to her black lashes. She waved Omar Yussef out of the room. He shut the door behind him.

As Omar Yussef went out through the waiting room, the woman chewing her gum looked him up and down with disdain. Calm yourself, dear lady, he thought. This was one queue I’d rather not have jumped. He stepped outside, fumbling with the zipper of his parka. A boy of about seven years nipped through the glass door as it closed behind him and pulled at the coat.

Omar Yussef came slowly down onto his haunches to face the boy. He smiled. “What is it, clever boy?”

The boy gave a cry and lifted a knife. Reflexively Omar Yussef threw himself against the wall, sliding onto his backside. The boy giggled and waved the knife. It was an elaborate Omani dagger with a curved eight-inch blade.

In his shock, it took Omar Yussef a few seconds even to be angry with the crowing child. “Where’s your mother?” he said.

“It’s for you, ustaz ,” the boy said.

“What is?”

“The knife.” The boy dropped the dagger. Omar Yussef gasped as it landed flat on its side in his lap. The hilt was carved into an hourglass shape from a mottled olive-green length of rhino horn.

“This is also for you.” From his pocket, the boy took the dagger’s scabbard, embroidered with silver and gold thread. “Isn’t it nice?”

The boy’s appreciation for a traditional art soothed Omar Yussef. “Very.” He took the scabbard and went to sheath the dagger, but he found a paper rolled inside. He pulled it out. Before he could read it, the boy giggled and ran off. Omar Yussef slithered to his feet. The boy was already around the corner and gone.

Omar Yussef unrolled the paper and read: “‘If I had wished you dead, this dagger would’ve been in your soft breast.’ Come and see me. Playland, near the Boardwalk, Coney Island, 10 P.M.”

He brushed the slush from the back of his coat. The swift pulsing of his heartbeat filled his head. He rustled the paper in his hand and ran through the message once more-he knew what it meant.

Rashid was inviting him to meet.

He crossed the avenue and headed for the police barricade outside the Cafe al-Quds. He held the knife in his right hand, the scabbard and note in the other.

Your soft breast .

You remembered your lessons, Rashid , he thought. In the twelfth century, the leader of the Assassins had bribed an enemy’s servant to deliver a note while his master slept. The man awoke to find the very words Omar Yussef had read nailed to the floor beside his bed with a dagger. Fleetingly, Omar Yussef considered that Ismail might have sent him the message after he had glimpsed him on the street and at the UN. But this was the block of Fifth Avenue where Rashid had lived, and Rashid had always been more interested in the historical Assassins than Ismail had been. It had to be Rashid.

If Rashid was indeed the killer, then meeting him was a terrible risk. But this message is a signal to me that he wants to talk, Omar Yussef thought. If he had wanted me dead. . He fingered the dagger.

“What happened here?” A man in a brown bomber jacket, a Mets cap, and thin, gaudy pants with a burst of flame drawn around the ankles passed Omar Yussef and approached the policeman guarding the barrier around the cafe.

“Guy got killed,” the policeman said.

“Murdered?”

“That’s right.”

“You catch the terrorist?”

“Say again.”

“Catch the terrorist?”

“It’s not terrorism, sir.”

“It’s an Arab cafe, buddy. You think there’s no terrorist link?”

The policeman wandered slowly to the other side of the area enclosed by the blue barrier.

“This is how it starts,” the man continued. “They carry out an attack here, and no one cares because, hey, it’s only Brooklyn. Next thing you know they’ll blow up the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, and then you assholes will have to pay attention.”

Omar Yussef reached the barrier. “My dear sir, it’s not a terrorist attack. The dead man is an Arab,” he said.

“They’re killing each other, eh, buddy? Less of them for us to deal with.” The man turned a fat face on Omar Yussef. The unshaven flesh around his neck rolled over the upturned collar of his bomber jacket. He glanced down and noticed the dagger in Omar Yussef’s grip.

“Shit, man,” he said. He held his hands above his head and backed away. “Oh shit, man.”

Omar Yussef thrust the dagger into the scabbard and buried it in his pocket.

“Officer, hey officer,” the man called.

The policeman turned at the shrill note in his voice. “Will you quit it?” he said. “It’s not a terrorist case.”

“This guy over here-Jesus, oh Jesus.”

Omar Yussef ducked onto the side street. He walked, fast. He could’ve explained, but he would surely have sounded ridiculous trying to make the policeman understand that a seven-year-old boy had given him the dagger. He was an Arab and, despite himself, he was overcome by images of blindfolded men shuffling with their hands and ankles cuffed under the guard of American soldiers. He searched within himself for some calm, but he found only a hunted, terrified foreigner. He feared that if he tried to take the knife to Hamza, he would be arrested before he could speak to the detective. He looked at his watch. It was almost five in the evening.