A man reeled out of an all-night Korean bodega on Fifth Avenue, sliding on a patch of ice with a Miller in his hand. He took a few comically fast paces on the spot, brought himself upright, and rolled his shoulders back under his red mackinaw to restore his dignity. He sucked a long belt of beer and hurled the can back into the store.
“Fuck you, you fucking gook bastard,” he yelled.
Omar Yussef halted on the frozen sidewalk a few yards from the man, on the edge of the light cast by the storefront. The loud obscenity in the quiet street shocked him. He checked his watch and saw that it was two in the morning. In his hometown, nobody would be out at this time for fear of Israeli undercover squads. Certainly no one would wander drunk in the night. Those who overindulged in alcohol, as Omar Yussef had once done, closed themselves away with their shame and did their cursing in low voices aimed at themselves.
The Korean storekeeper emerged between the plastic sheets that protected his fruit and vegetables from the freezing weather. He held the open beer can between tense fingers. “You pay for beer,” he shouted, “or you fuck off.”
The drunk belched and wiped his heavy beard. “No money for you, gook bastard. No tickee, no laundry.”
“Fuck you, go away.” The Korean went back into his shop. The drunk bent double, breathless, chuckling quietly and repeating his joke.
As Omar Yussef approached the Cafe al-Quds, he heard the drunk vomit. The Korean came out with a bucket of water to sluice down the plastic sheets on the storefront.
Omar Yussef rang the bell outside the cafe and waited. He tried to turn his mind from the scene he had just witnessed and the memories it revived of his own ugly, hateful drinking. Murder seemed less distasteful. Did Nizar leave the severed head in the trash can? he wondered. Couldn’t it have been the gunman who dropped the head at Playland? Maybe he slaughtered Rashid and now wants to kill Nizar too. Was he the same man I saw at the apartment? The one who’s been tailing me?
A light came on in the staircase behind the kitchen and then another low bulb behind the bar. Rania weaved between the tables and slid back the bolts. When she opened the door, she stared at Omar Yussef with a brittle glimmer in her eyes, but confrontation in her jaw.
“Greetings, my daughter,” he said.
She stepped aside. “You’re in your own home and with your own family,” she murmured.
He limped through the door and unzipped his thick coat.
“It’s very late, ustaz,” she said.
“But you’re awake.”
“When I sleep, Nizar comes to me and I feel his loss too greatly.”
“Do you feel the loss of your father too?”
Rania clasped her fingers in a fist and led Omar Yussef through the kitchen. Her father’s blood had been scrubbed from the floor tiles, but Omar Yussef smelled something dark in the air, as though the dead man’s final breath lingered. He winced with regret for his critical tone at the door.
He followed her up the narrow stairs into a living room lit only by a single fluorescent strip in the galley kitchen behind the sofa.
She poured ground coffee and water into a small tin pot and set it to boil on a gas burner.
“No sugar,” he said, and waited in silence. He savored the cardamom scent of the coffee as she stirred it with a spoon.
Rania brought a tray with his coffee and a glass of water to the low Syrian table in the living room. He ran his fingers over the mother-of-pearl in the tabletop as he waited for the grounds to settle in his cup.
She sat with a straight back on a cheap folding chair and put her hands in her lap. Her eyes were preoccupied and desolate.
Omar Yussef tasted the bitter coffee. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said. “It’s very good.”
“Blessings upon you.”
He put the cup on its saucer and returned it to the tray. “Nizar is alive,” he said.
Her long lips parted, and her head dropped forward. She adjusted her mendil along her hairline and returned her hands to her lap. Omar Yussef saw a little vein pulsing on her neck as though it were trying to creep around the edge of her headscarf.
“He’s alive,” she said, with a bitter note of triumph. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He disappeared again.”
“If you expected to find him here, he won’t come.”
“Why not? Surely he’d want to be with you?”
“The police would be waiting.”
“Why should he be worried about the police? Is it a crime in New York not to have your head chopped off?”
She nibbled at the quick of her thumbnail and watched Omar Yussef so intensely that he felt as though it were him she was biting.
He finished his coffee and wiped his mustache with his handkerchief. “Rania, why did Nizar reveal himself to me? Now that the police know he’s alive, they’ll suspect him not only of killing Rashid, but also of the murder of your father.”
She twitched her head toward Omar Yussef. “That couldn’t be.”
“Murders around here are usually drug-related, so surely the police will assume that the closest man to your father in the drug trade was also the one who killed him.”
Omar Yussef saw a flash of desperation on Rania’s face. “That’s crazy, ustaz,” she said. “Where did you see him?”
“At Coney Island.”
Rania’s eyes were wet. “He took me to Coney Island in the summer. We rode the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.”
“It’s all closed now.”
“Only for the winter.”
“In Brooklyn, that appears to be a long, hard season.” Omar Yussef gazed around the room. On a cheap wicker bookshelf, he noticed a photo of a woman with a deeply lined face and a wide mouth smiling tiredly between Marwan and Rania. The departed mother, he thought. “Nizar faked his death, but he decided to reveal himself after your father died. What was it about the murder of your father that changed Nizar’s mind?”
The girl looked as near to death as the woman in the photograph. She shook her head.
“I think that whatever Nizar’s doing now, it’s somehow because he wants to be with you,” Omar Yussef said.
“What makes you say that?” Her voice was a whisper.
“His life in Brooklyn seems to have been full of indecision. He was sure of his religion; then he went wild. He was close to Rashid; then they argued. He drove a taxi and worked honestly; then he dealt drugs to make money. The only thing he didn’t doubt was his relationship with you.”
Rania seemed to search Omar Yussef’s face for sympathy. “You’re just like Ala, ustaz. Honest and good.” She glanced at the quilted coat, splayed open across the sofa behind him, and the NYPD stocking cap on his head. “Although he dresses rather better than you do.”
Omar Yussef pulled off the cap.
“I see that you have his sensitivity too,” she said.
The seductiveness had returned to her dark eyes. The eyes of the houri, Omar Yussef thought, as he pushed his hair, rumpled by the cap, into place.
“Ala was too Palestinian for me,” she said. “He was unwilling to venture out of our culture. He wouldn’t enter into American life as Nizar did. No matter how often I said I wanted to break out, Ala thought he knew what was good for me. He’s a typical Arab man.”
“You think I’m like that too?” Omar Yussef lifted his chin.
“Of course you are. No matter how liberal your ideas may be, ustaz, I can smell the Middle East all over you.”
“You’re mistaken. You assume I’m a Middle Eastern man like your father.”
“My father wasn’t like that at all. He hated the Middle East. He wanted to leave it behind, but it followed him here and dragged him down. You, ustaz, can’t wait to leave this city and get back home, can you? Admit it. You want to return to your little town where everyone knows you and respects you.”
Omar Yussef covered his mouth with his hand. He liked to think of himself as a cosmopolitan, educated man, but each day in New York made him long for his family, for the traditions and routines of Bethlehem. The girl had judged him correctly.
“But you cover your head like a Muslim believer,” Omar Yussef said.
“You see, you can’t imagine that a woman might retain some of our traditions and reject others. You assume that if I bend the rules a little bit, I’ll soon be a whore. You think it’s easy to wear this headscarf in Brooklyn? Once I leave these couple of blocks in Little Palestine, people laugh and curse at me. ‘Look at the ninja,’ they shout. But I decide who I am. I follow our traditions of dress and modesty, but I don’t want to live as though this was the Bekaa instead of Brooklyn.”
“I understand.”
“You didn’t understand my father, and you don’t understand me.” Her voice quivered with the force of so much emotion finally uncovered. She spoke with the pace of one who mustn’t cease talking for fear that her words would be stopped by sobbing. “You’re a refugee. Everyone in the Arab world at least pays lip service to your human rights and says they respect your cause. My father and I had to flee Lebanon, but no one calls us refugees and no one respects us. We had to slink away from Lebanon like criminals.” Rania reached out a finger toward the photo on the wicker shelf. “My mother died while my father was in prison. He was convinced no decent man would marry me, because he had been jailed for the shameful act of dealing narcotics, which is against the laws of Islam. We left my mother’s grave behind and came to America. My father thought we could start again. He opened a new business and tried to find me a suitable husband.”
“May Allah have mercy upon your mother,” Omar Yussef murmured.
“May you have a long life.” Rania picked at the hem of her black smock. “Maybe hatred and violence are just part of being an Arab. Maybe you can’t escape them. Maybe the mistake is to try. Anyway, they’ve got me.”
“You’re still young, my daughter. Don’t give up hope for a better life.”
“I deluded myself, visiting the Broadway theaters with Nizar, going to movies, to expensive Italian restaurants. All the time, the Middle East was in me like the cancer that killed my mother.” Rania rubbed a tear from her eye and stared at the moisture on the back of her hand. “I dreamed that Nizar had returned. But he came to you, not to me.” She spoke petulantly, like a thwarted child. Her shoulders dropped, as though the anger had seeped out of her and left only an inanimate sadness. “For me, it will be as though that body in his apartment really was Nizar’s corpse.”
“I can’t believe that you’d rather think of him as a corpse than a living man,” Omar Yussef said. “You told me you wanted to experience happiness now, not in the hereafter.”
“His memory will always be with me.”
“Do you believe he killed his friend?”
“That wouldn’t make him the worst man I ever met. I’m from Lebanon.”
Omar Yussef left her in the glow of the kitchen light. He went through the cafe and pulled the door shut behind him. He took a few painful steps on his swollen ankle, pushed through the entrance next to the boutique, and mounted the stairs to Ala’s apartment. The handwritten sign with the words The Castle of the Assassins written across it had been removed, but the tape that had affixed it to the door remained, like the frame of a painting cut away by thieves.
His son’s face was gray and tired when he opened the door. He barely spoke as he showed Omar Yussef to the single bed. The door to the next room, where the corpse had lain, was closed. Omar Yussef wondered if the police had finished their work in there.
“My son,” he said, “I saw Nizar tonight. He’s alive.”
Ala sat on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his palm against the cheap blanket and tried to speak, but he managed only a stuttering gasp.
“I saw him at Coney Island.”
“Saw him?” Ala croaked.
Omar Yussef turned away from his boy. “I also saw Rashid’s head. It was his body we found in this apartment, not Nizar’s. I’m sorry to be so blunt, my son.”
Omar Yussef heard his son whisper the name of his dead roommate. The sound seemed like a cold wave in the air, chilling Omar Yussef’s throat and lungs, and he wondered if that was the way a final breath might feel.
Ala stared at his father, as though it were he, not Nizar, who had come back from the dead. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Go and rest. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
The boy shuffled out of the bedroom and flopped onto the couch.
After Omar Yussef had turned out the light, he heard the sibilant whimpers of his son in the other room, shivering through a nightmare.