“Morning of joy, Dad.” His voice was cracked and dry. He smiled weakly at Khamis Zeydan. The police chief folded his arms and inclined his head.
“Morning of light, my son.” Omar Yussef noticed that Ala wore the same dress shirt in which he had been arrested. He had half-expected to see the boy in an orange jumpsuit and thought perhaps it was a good sign that he hadn’t been forced into the anonymity of a prison uniform. “How’ve you been?”
“I was at the precinct house for a long time with the Indian lieutenant and that meathead bastard, the Palestinian sergeant.” Ala’s eyes darted about urgently, as though he were being hunted. “Then they brought me here.”
Omar Yussef was surprised at the force of his son’s anger toward Hamza. “What’s it like?” He lifted his chin. “In there?”
“I’m in a small cell with a lot of other men. Everyone tries to stay close to the bars, staring down the corridor, waiting for someone to come and release them. They look like the people on the street watching anxiously for a bus. Everybody is nervous and irritable and talkative. They all want to describe how they were arrested and keep telling the others they’re sure someone will bail them out. Everything stinks and something in the air is making my asthma act up.” Ala wheezed and scratched the stubble on his face almost vindictively. “And I’m itching all over. It’s driving me crazy.”
“My boy, you can end this now,” Omar Yussef said. “Tell the police where you were when Nizar was killed.”
“I can’t do that, Dad.”
The bruise on the back of Omar Yussef’s head throbbed.
“Don’t you think the police have been asking me that all night?” Ala continued. “That bastard Sergeant Abayat thinks I killed Nizar.”
“Surely not.”
“He’s badgering me to confess. ‘Tell us the real story; tell us how you did it; you went out to get rid of the murder weapon, and when you came back your father was there, so where did you hide it?’ America’s full of Arabs like him. They want to show their American patriotism, so they make out that other Arabs are all bad guys. Why not hang the murder on me? I’m just a stinking Arab, after all.”
“You’re letting your animosity toward that man obscure what you ought to be focusing on. You need to reveal your alibi.”
“I’m sorry to try your patience, Dad, but there’s somebody I must protect.”
“By Allah, you mean that you really know who committed this murder?”
Khamis Zeydan leaned forward and took the second handset. He lifted an eyebrow to indicate that Ala should continue.
“That isn’t what I mean by protecting someone.” Ala rocked his head from side to side. “I was with a woman when the killing happened. I’m worried about her reputation.”
“Her good name is worth more than your freedom?”
“I’ve already told the meathead detective that I waive my right to a lawyer. I don’t want to have to admit where I was, and there’s no other way out of this for me.” Ala sucked his upper lip.
“Without a lawyer, they’ll pin this murder on you. They could put you away forever.” Omar Yussef slammed his palms onto the counter before him. The guard stuck his head around the door with a warning look.
Ala’s voice softened. “I love her. I’m ready to sacrifice for her.” His face was beatific, but his lower lip twitched.
“She’ll surely be prepared to let you tell your story. She’ll corroborate your alibi.”
“She’s an Arab woman, Dad. She can’t just say, ‘Sure, I was with him.’” Ala scratched at his curly black hair and groaned.
He’s worried someone will kill her. To punish her for besmirching the honor of her family by meeting alone with an unmarried man, Omar Yussef thought.
“Tell me who she is, my son. I’ll persuade her to let you speak. Then you can go free. I’ll appeal to her love for you.”
“She doesn’t love me, Dad.”
“Why not?”
Ala snorted a tired laugh. “Am I talking to my father or my excessively proud mother? I’m not irresistible to women, you know.” The boy fretted at his lips with his front teeth. The whites of his eyes were shaded blue and green and shot through with red.
She doesn’t love me. Omar Yussef remembered the pink sheet of writing paper in the bony hand of the police lieutenant, the love letter from the corpse’s pocket with the graphic language. He recalled the pain in Ala’s face when the Arab detective read the name “Rania” from that letter. It must have been the same girl, the one Ala was with when Nizar was murdered. But it had been Nizar she had wanted. Omar Yussef felt his son’s desolate loneliness through the Plexiglas. “You and Nizar were rivals for a woman’s love?”
Ala looked up sharply, his haunted, unhealthy eyes wide and defiant. Omar Yussef recognized something of the strength and desperation that must have seen the boy through the long police interrogation. “You think I killed Nizar because he beat me in love, Dad?”
“Of course not. But I want to know the truth. Tell me.”
The boy leaned back in his cheap plastic chair, gazing around at the whitewashed walls and the posters advising prisoners’ relatives of their visiting rights. “You remember Nizar and Rashid as bright young students, Dad, but they changed.”
“Why?”
Ala gave a vague wave of his hand. “You know, the intifada.”
“I know about your intifada.”
“It wasn’t much, was it? Going out with the guys to throw stones at the Israelis. The Assassins, as we used to call ourselves, all four of us.” Ala turned to Khamis Zeydan. “We stoned an army jeep at the edge of the camp.”
“I don’t know why you did it,” Omar Yussef muttered. “It just wasn’t like you, or the other boys.”
“Everyone did it.”
“Other kids at least would’ve run away before the second army jeep came up behind them and arrested them.”
Ala bit the nail of his thumb. “Somehow I think we wanted to be arrested. So we could feel part of the struggle like everyone else. Throwing stones? Well, as you say, it wasn’t like us.”
Arrested and held in a tent on a cold hillside near Ramallah, Omar Yussef thought. The cells here in the Detention Complex must seem like a hotel room with a mint on the pillow compared to the Israeli camp. “It was a terrible time, my son. But you said that it changed Nizar and Rashid. How?”
“In the Israeli jail, they became close to a sheikh from Hebron. The Israelis had picked him up for running an Islamic Jihad mosque.”
“The boys joined Islamic Jihad?”
“I don’t know that.”
But it’s what you think. “It made them radical?”
Ala shook his head. “It made them religious. It was something else that made them radical.”
“What?”
“Ismail.”
Ala’s classmate, my old pupil, Omar Yussef thought. The fourth Assassin. “I don’t understand.”
“The Israelis offered Ismail a deal.”
“I see where this is going.” Khamis Zeydan clicked his tongue.
“They told Ismail that if he informed on the sheikh, they’d let the four of us go free,” Ala said. “You remember what Ismail was like, Dad. It was easy to sway him. He loved The Assassins. He’d have done anything for us.”
Omar Yussef remembered Ismail as a shy boy who’d always been on the periphery of the class and of the games in the schoolyard, until he had come into the circle of The Assassins. He recalled the habitual trace of fear and nervous supplication in Ismail’s eyes, even when he was smiling; the way he trained his attention on Nizar and Rashid, the gregarious leaders of the gang, laughing at their jokes a beat too late and just a little too loudly.