“You mean, not like Nizar?”
“Leave him where he is.”
“I can’t do that.”
Marwan’s sobs had become steady tears. “I’m trying to survive; that’s all,” he said. “I’m not a bad man.”
“Marwan, what is it that Ala knows? Why would anyone want to harm him?”
“He doesn’t know anything. But they don’t know that. It’s possible they believe he knows everything. He could be next.”
“Tell me who they are.”
When Marwan lifted his brown eyes, Omar Yussef knew that the man was in the kind of danger from which there was no escape and that the more he struggled against it, the tighter it bound him. In Bethlehem, he had seen men drawn into collaboration for whom the first transactions with the Israelis had seemed harmless, a way to obtain a travel permit or a hospital bed, only to find that gradually they were sunk into an absolute immorality with no choice but to participate in the deaths of others. Who had that power over Marwan?
“I was the one who discovered Nizar’s body,” Omar Yussef said. “A boy I loved was slaughtered. I have to get the police to free my son so they can concentrate on finding the real killer.”
“You were there, in the apartment?” Marwan said. “Then they’ll be after you, as well.”
Omar Yussef remembered the Jeep rushing at him, mounting the curb, and he shivered inside his new coat. “We’re going to the police station. They’ll protect you. Come with us.”
“Leave the boy in jail, ustaz,” Marwan said. He smiled, hopeless and resigned, like a man facing a math problem he knew to be beyond him. “Please come and talk to me. We will discuss the engagement. May Allah lengthen your life and the life of your son.”
Omar Yussef watched Marwan hunch along the street toward his cafe. Khamis Zeydan flicked his cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and smiled through one side of his mouth. “It’s tough to be a legitimate businessman in this city,” he said.
Omar Yussef kicked the butt into the gutter and once again turned in the direction of the police station.
Chapter 13
Omar Yussef mounted the bare staircase to the detectives’ bureau at the 68th Precinct, trudging slowly in his soggy shoes as patrolmen and plainclothes officers hurried past. Breathless from the climb, he waved across the gray metal furniture to Sergeant Hamza Abayat, whose desk was crammed into a corner near a high window, and crossed the room.
Holding a phone to his ear, the Arab detective came halfway to his feet, shook Omar Yussef’s hand, and touched his palm to his heart in the traditional gesture of sincerity. From a chair in front of his battered desk, he picked up a large tub of whey protein with a ludicrously muscled man straining to lift a pair of massive dumbbells on the label and motioned for Omar Yussef to sit.
Next to the desk, Khamis Zeydan rested his foot on a pile of bodybuilding magazines. Omar Yussef glanced at the thick sinews in the tanned, oiled chest of the cover model by his friend’s shoe. Beside the magazines was a pile of community newspapers. He read the main headline on the first tabloid: “NY Youth 2nd in Int’l Koran Contest.” The murder of the Veiled Man will push that off the front page of the Muslim press, he thought.
“I’ll send a uniformed officer along to talk to them, Missus Pierre,” Hamza said. He looked impatiently at the telephone in his hand. “Don’t worry. Thank you for your call.”
He put down the receiver and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “By Allah, these people are crazy,” he said. “May Allah preserve you, ustaz Abu Ramiz. How’re you?”
“Thanks be to Allah, Hamza. This is my friend Abu Adel.”
The sergeant rolled a chair from the next desk toward Khamis Zeydan. “Are you the Abu Adel who’s the police chief in Bethlehem?”
With a nod, Khamis Zeydan folded his hands in his lap. “And you’re the Hamza Abayat whose relatives run riot all over my town like a bunch of gangsters.”
“Your town? I heard you arrived in Bethlehem only a decade ago when the Old Man brought you from exile in Tunis.”
“It’s my town so long as I’m police chief.”
“Abu Adel, this is not the place.” Omar Yussef touched his friend’s knee.
Hamza gazed at the gray sky beyond the window. “Police work is never easy. We all have different challenges-and failures.”
That’s how a real policeman reacts, measured and considerate, Omar Yussef thought. My friend is the Bethlehem police chief, but at heart he’s still a guerrilla, surviving on his passion and bursting with indignation.
Khamis Zeydan pulled out his cigarettes. Hamza wagged his finger toward a sticker on the wall that read No smoking-it’s the law. Khamis Zeydan put the pack away. “You donkey’s ass,” he whispered.
Hamza cleared his throat. “I just got off the phone with a Haitian lady who says her neighbors are practicing voodoo against her. She claims they placed white powder on her doorstep as a threat. I’ll have to send a patrolman around to tell the neighbors not to put powder on the lady’s doorstep.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Khamis Zeydan snorted.
“Sometimes a true threat can seem ridiculous, Abu Adel. Slander rolls off Americans like the rain off Abu Ramiz’s fine new coat, but for us Arabs it’s as hurtful as the blow of a Yemeni knife.”
“If the gunmen in Bethlehem limited themselves to white powders and voodoo spells, I’d consider myself lucky,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“You think it’s easier to be a cop in Brooklyn than Bethlehem? We found a human fetus in a gutter last week.”
“Did you find the owner? I mean, the mother?” Omar Yussef said.
“We followed a trail of blood to an apartment along the street. A Puerto Rican girl had miscarried on the sidewalk and left the baby there.”
“Poor woman.”
“She was only a girl. Newspapers didn’t write stories about her the way they cover the mayhem in Bethlehem.” Hamza leaned an elbow on the papers spread over his desk. “But I saw the girl’s shame when she opened the door to us. Her case is no less important to me than a war in my hometown.”
Khamis Zeydan rubbed his chin. “May Allah’s curse fall on these times,” he murmured.
“Let us rely on Allah,” Hamza said.
They fell silent. Omar Yussef sat forward and, as he moved, the susurration of his quilted coat brought the two men out of their reverie.
“Hamza, we have an alibi for my son,” Omar Yussef said.
“May it be pleasing to Allah.”
“When Nizar was killed, Ala was with Rania Hammiya.”
The detective lifted his eyebrow. “Marwan’s daughter?”
Omar Yussef nodded. “Rania had an agreement with Ala that they would become engaged. But then she fell for Nizar. Ala realized this. He went to her to cancel their agreement.”
“And just at the very moment he was doing this, someone happened to kill his rival?”
Omar Yussef extended a shaky finger toward the detective. “Skepticism is all very well, but your investigations have uncovered nothing. I’m giving you a lead which eliminates one of your suspects. I seem to have obtained more from my son with a few kind words than you were able to get out of him with an entire night of bullying.”
Hamza rolled his tongue inside his cheek. His face was blank. “Provided the alibi is true.”
“You’ll find Rania at the Cafe al-Quds. Take her statement and release my boy.”
Hamza took the squash ball from his pocket and worked his forearms. “So if Ala didn’t kill Nizar-”
“You never seriously thought he did it, surely?”
“-who could be our killer?”
Khamis Zeydan spoke quietly. “You still have one other roommate to consider.”
“Rashid?”
“Has he turned up?” Khamis Zeydan asked.
Hamza closed his eyes and clicked his tongue. No.
“Someone’s been following us,” Omar Yussef said. “I’m sure it’s the same man I saw fleeing Ala’s apartment after I found the body. He tried to run us down.”