Matt Rees - The Fourth Assassin

“You’re here, Rania, my darling,” Nizar said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. This place was my last hope of finding you.”

“Ala came to me,” Rania said, poking her hair behind her ear and straightening the embroidered edge of her black headscarf.

Nizar glared at Ala. “What did you want with her?”

“To say good-bye and to be sure she wasn’t alone,” Ala mumbled. “I’ve been worried about her since her father-”

“She’ll never be alone. She’ll be with me.” Nizar’s teeth were set, and his lips rolled back.

Omar Yussef glanced toward the bedroom, nervously. “Take Rania and go, Nizar,” he said. “Make a break for it now.”

Khamis Zeydan emerged from the bedroom. “Nizar, what did you run off for?” he said.

Surprise registered on Nizar’s face, but it was replaced instantly by a dark satisfaction. He reached for his coat pocket.

“Wait,” Omar Yussef called.

Nizar drew out a pistol. Khamis Zeydan’s eyes widened, and he pulled his own gun from his shoulder holster. They held their weapons on each other, arms tensed and breathing shallow. Nizar’s tongue flicked against the gap between his front teeth. “This is what the Americans call a Mexican standoff,” he said.

“It’ll be a Palestinian standoff when you both kill each other,” Omar Yussef said. He fingered the Omani dagger in his pocket. Take your hands off it, he thought . You’ll never use it. “Nizar, you can’t win. Let us help you. Abu Adel can still get you immunity.”

“Help from the man who killed my father? No, thanks, ustaz .” Nizar sneered. “I would’ve killed the bastard at the hotel if I could’ve done it and got away.”

Khamis Zeydan stepped toward Nizar. “Drop the gun.”

“That’s close enough.” Nizar’s handsome face flushed with panic, and his finger tightened on the trigger. The sweat lay in beads on his face.

Stop sitting in your car checking your watch, Hamza, Omar Yussef thought. Get in here.

Rania reached for the young man’s arm. “My darling, forget all this. Take me away from here, please.”

Inside his pocket, Omar Yussef wiped the perspiration from his palm. He grasped the dagger. If he distracted the boy, Khamis Zeydan could overpower him, and the danger would be over.

He tossed the dagger. The stones in its scabbard flashed garnet and green, as it twisted through the air. He shouted, “Nizar.”

The dagger struck Nizar on his gun hand. His arm jolted to the left. The pistol discharged, and Rania spun back against the wall.

The reverberations of the shot died away. The room was silent but for Nizar’s horrified moan and Rania’s desperate breaths. He went down on his knees, lifting her torso with his free arm and stroking her head with the hand that held his gun. He pushed her headscarf back and kissed her black hair.

The door of the apartment slammed back against the wall. Hamza burst through and took up a firing position. “Put down your weapon,” he shouted. “Let her go.”

Waving his hands at the detective, Omar Yussef stepped toward the two young people on the floor. “Hamza, it was my fault,” he called. His voice trembled and faltered.

Nizar stroked the girl’s long hair with the wrist of his gun hand.

Hamza fired and Nizar recoiled. He clutched at Rania, but her body slipped lifeless from his arms. Nizar let his gun hand rest on the floor and sobbed.

“Hamza, no.” Omar Yussef reached Nizar. “The shooting you heard was a mistake.”

“I thought she was a hostage.” The detective dropped his hands.

“Get an ambulance.”

Hamza went to the phone and dialed.

Omar Yussef pushed Nizar’s pistol away and held the young man’s head against his shoulder.

“Rania’s gone, my boy,” Omar Yussef said. “I’m so terribly sorry. When I threw the knife, I didn’t mean-”

Ala stared at the dead girl. “So soon after her father,” he murmured.

Omar Yussef remembered that Ismail had watched the cafe the night of Marwan’s murder and been sure Nizar couldn’t have killed him. “Rania murdered her father, didn’t she?” he said to Nizar. “It wasn’t you. She killed him because he had beaten her so often.”

Nizar gave a weak shake of his head. “Not for the beatings. The body in the bedroom-she thought her father had killed me to prevent us marrying. She murdered him to avenge my death.”

Omar Yussef had thought Rania’s anger incongruous in a bereaved daughter, when she sat in her office with him the day of her father’s murder. But now he saw that it had been her rage toward the man she’d killed, simmering even after his death.

“That’s why you claimed his killing?” Omar Yussef said. Nizar was already a murderer, after all-he had killed Rashid , he thought. As long as Rania was free, he could still dream of his reward here on earth.

“My Paradise, my dark-eyed houri .” Nizar’s breath stuttered, and his deep eyes bulged.

Khamis Zeydan slumped onto the sofa. “I didn’t kill your father, Nizar.”

The young man struggled to turn his eyes on the police chief. They were defeated and ready to believe anything.

“One of his articles portrayed the Syrian president as a coward and a traitor. So a Syrian agent assassinated him.” Khamis Zeydan pushed his pistol into his shoulder holster. “The Old Man sent me to America to avenge your father’s death. I killed the Syrian assassin. That was my operation in New York.”

Nizar’s eyes slid toward the ceiling. Omar Yussef felt the boy shivering. He held him tighter. “What was my father like?” Nizar whispered.

Omar Yussef caught Khamis Zeydan’s eye and glared. “He was a brave man,” the police chief said. He turned away.

Nizar shuddered.

“You can go now to your reward, my boy.” Soft as a lullaby, Omar Yussef sang the refrain of the Lebanese song that Rania had listened to in the cafe: Take me, take me, take me home . He thought of the two lovers whose joy had been suffocated and crushed by the sinister presence of the Middle East in their family histories. It was the subject he taught at school-he ought to have known that it would surely kill them. In this, he saw, they were tragic.

Ala knelt in front of his friend and the woman he had loved. He tucked a strand of Rania’s hair behind her ear and took Nizar’s hand. He kissed it and wept as it grew cold.

A heavy truck ran over a speed bump, rustling the two flags at the center of Dehaisha Street in its draft. The Iraqi tricolor, with its stars and its imprecation of the greatness of Allah, flapped across the lamppost toward the red, white, black, and green of the Palestinian banner. Omar Yussef grimaced at the din of the stones rattling in the back of the truck as it turned up the hill toward the limestone quarries. He waved to the last of the girls leaving through the blue gate at the front of the schoolyard and wondered when his budget would permit him to plaster over the bullet holes in the perimeter wall. It was his first day back at work since his return from New York. He felt at home behind his scratched old desk.

He wore a short-sleeved light-blue shirt in the warmth of late February. He loved the final weeks of winter, when the clear desert days were mild because the nights were still cold, but the sun was hot enough for him to detect the laundry scent of his shirt on the air, as though it were fresh from the spin-dryer.

By the time he reached the other end of the camp and came onto the porch of his gray-stone Turkish house, his armpits were damp, and he was glad to put down his mauve leather briefcase. His favorite granddaughter Nadia rounded the dining table in the foyer, setting a deep dish of broth at its center. The cool air filled with the scent of lentils and fried onions.