“Have you been up all night?”
“This is the city that never sleeps, ustaz.” The detective laughed wearily. “I can’t follow the short and unpredictable office hours of the Middle East here.”
“If you come to a village where they worship a calf, gather grass and feed it.”
“As they say back home.” Hamza spoke quietly in English to someone in the room with him. Omar Yussef heard the yipping voice of the female lieutenant in the background, then Hamza came back on the line. “Lieutenant Raghavan agrees that you can talk to your son, ustaz. She’ll contact the Detention Complex. They’ll be expecting you. And, ustaz, please try to talk some sense into him. He isn’t helping anybody by clamming up.”
“Thank you, Hamza.” Omar Yussef hung up the phone.
Khamis Zeydan had gone through another Rothmans while his friend talked. He looked at Omar Yussef. “Something else on your mind?”
“I think I was followed. On the subway yesterday, coming back from Little Palestine.” He stared into the dark glass of the building across the street. Though it was early, he saw the outlines of office workers at their computers. “I’m nervous about returning to Brooklyn.”
Khamis Zeydan exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “I always knew we’d end up in jail together one day. I don’t fancy the observation deck on the Empire State Building in this cold weather, anyway. Let’s go to Brooklyn.”
As they walked along the corridor, the smoke detector whined out its electronic siren in Omar Yussef’s room.
Chapter 9
A pockmarked Latino with a hoarse voice and a thick accent brayed over the chatter and rumble of the D train. “When the kingdom comes, you’re going to be there,” he bellowed, his head back like a market tradesman to project through the crowded car. “He’ll tell the world, and you’re going to teach what He says. Only Jesus Christ can save all of you.”
Khamis Zeydan fingered his pack of Rothmans. “I ought to remind him that only the believers in Allah will be saved,” he mumbled.
“Allah is most great, Honored Sheikh.” Omar Yussef poked his friend’s chest. “Jesus is a prophet named in the Koran. Maybe this guy is a Muslim after all. Anyway, of those believers who will be saved, how many will be former PLO hit men with a fondness for Scotch whisky and cursing? I expect the answer is none.”
“You may be right. Ah, then, fuck the believers.”
“If it is the will of Allah.” Omar Yussef smiled.
“I entrust myself to the protection of Allah.” Khamis Zeydan rubbed his palms together as though he were washing his hands. “But if Paradise is a no-smoking zone like America, I want to go to Hell.”
“For a Palestinian, that’s the easiest of wishes to grant. One doesn’t even have to leave home to get there.”
They approached the Grand Street station as the Latino finished his message: “All the people who will be saved will be saved by Jesus Christ. All of you are chosen to be saved. Thank you for listening, and have a beautiful day.”
“May Allah grant you grace,” Omar Yussef whispered as the preacher left the car.
The train rumbled at low speed onto the strangely terrifying superstructure of the Manhattan Bridge. Downriver, beyond the massive girders and the mesh of electric lines, the Brooklyn Bridge arched over the water. Its famous towers sprayed thick cables along its span. Omar Yussef felt as though he were flying out of control through the air, high above the river and the tangle of highway along the shoreline. An old Vietnamese man screamed into his cell phone over the noise of the train. The wheels rang like the slow beating of a giant steel kettledrum until the train slipped back under the earth, jumped to a different track, and picked up speed. “This is an unnatural way of traveling,” Omar Yussef whispered.
“There’s a daily caravan between Manhattan and Brooklyn, if you prefer.” Khamis Zeydan leered. “Next time we’ll rent a camel and join them.”
Omar Yussef shook his head and wondered if he ought to buy some nicotine gum for his irritable friend. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left your work today. I’d prefer the president had to deal with your rotten temper, rather than me.”
“My brother, I have a bad feeling about his visit. Some danger that I can’t predict.”
“Surely there’s plenty of security at the UN?”
“America used to be the last place you’d expect any kind of attack.” Khamis Zeydan rubbed the knuckle of his prosthetic hand against the sharp edge of his front teeth. “Not anymore.”
“May it be displeasing to Allah.”
“It makes me nervous to be stuck on a subway train when someone might be planning a strike against my boss right now.”
Omar Yussef, too, wished to be elsewhere. He wondered what lies Abdel Hadi would be telling the other delegates at the UN conference about him in his absence. He needed to sort out Ala’s problems and return to the UN before any plots could play out against him. He had given little thought to the speech he was to make, but now it seemed he had almost no time to prepare. His nervousness made him bitter. “May Allah curse this train,” he said. “I feel trapped like a bound man in a pit of scorpions.”
They left the subway at Atlantic Avenue and emerged at a big intersection that received traffic from five directions. Omar Yussef covered his ears with his hands as the lights changed and a troop of shiny SUVs bellowed past.
Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette and lifted his head to the deepening gray in the sky. “Rain’s coming,” he said. He pulled a tweed cap from the pocket of his trench coat and covered his short white hair. “You’re not exactly dressed for this weather, are you?”
Omar Yussef approached an elderly Arab who was resting on his cane by the traffic light, his red-and-white-checkered keffiya wrapped under his chin. “Peace be upon you,” he said.
“And upon you, peace,” the man responded.
“The Detention Complex, which way is it?”
The old Arab looked Omar Yussef up and down. He wonders who I’m visiting at the jail, Omar Yussef thought. He’s suspicious of my criminal connections.
“It’s a long walk,” the Arab said, pointing with his cane. “That direction. Six blocks.”
“Thank you.”
“But they’re long blocks. Atlantic Avenue is a long street.”
It’s not my criminal ties that make him look at me so dubiously. It’s my frailty. “We’ll be fine, sir.”
The old man laughed, coughed, and spat. “You don’t live in New York, do you? You thought that just because you were going to an address on Atlantic Avenue, you ought to go to the station with the same name. You don’t look like peasants to me, but sometimes you can’t tell the real hicks by sight. You should’ve taken a different subway line altogether and you’d have come up much closer to the jail. Anyway, you ought to take a bus now.”
Omar Yussef resented the old man for pointing out his mistake. “I think we’ll walk.”
The man gave Omar Yussef a doubtful look. “If you don’t get tired from the long walk, you’re certainly going to freeze. You ought to have a hat. This isn’t the Naqab desert, you know.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Khamis Zeydan said, patting the warm cap on his own head.
“I’ll buy a hat then,” Omar Yussef said, impatiently. “Over there.”
Across Fourth Avenue, they came to a stall hung with keffiyas, baseball caps, and woolen hats. The vendor stood beside it, leaning against the wall of a red-brick Gothic building that housed a mosque, his hands so deep in the pockets of his thick quilted coat that his elbows were locked.
“Take this one,” Khamis Zeydan said, pointing at a woolen cap emblazoned with a white skull and crossbones. “That’s your style. It ought to appeal to your interest in history.”
Omar Yussef felt his cheeks reddening with irritation, but his scalp was numb with cold. Some of the hats bore only a few colored letters, so he reached out for the first one that came to hand and gave the vendor three dollars. When he pulled the hat over his head, the lancing pain of the freezing wind on his baldness left him, and he sighed with relief.