“I should hope so, but don’t forget to buy something for Miral and Dahoud, too, and for Ramiz’s other two. I know she’s your favorite, but you have to be fair.”
“You’re my favorite. Shall I find something to bring back for you, my darling?”
“Just a husband hungry for his wife’s cooking after eating American fast food for a week. Did you give Ala the present I sent with you?”
Omar Yussef coughed. “Not yet. Later today, if Allah wills it. I’m sure I shall see him.”
“If Allah wills it. Give him my love, and tell him I want to speak to him and to see him soon.”
When Omar Yussef hung up, he let his wife’s soothing voice linger in his head. But the comforting words faded, and he heard her speaking the name of their son like a guilty mantra, Ala, Ala, Ala, rebuking him for his deception. The message light on the phone seemed to blink out the boy’s name, an alarming semaphore. He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
The phone trilled. Startled, Omar Yussef stared at it a moment. He picked up. “Maryam?”
“Ustaz Abu Ramiz? May merciful Allah bless you, O ustaz. This is Nahid Hantash. How’re you?”
“Thanks be to Allah, O Nahid.”
The PLO gang leader ran through a series of blessings and good wishes. He’s been a long time in America, where they always get right to the point, Omar Yussef thought, but when he speaks Arabic he’s as formal and courtly as the mukhtar of a village back in Palestine. “May Allah bring you peace,” Omar Yussef said.
“Have you heard from Sergeant Hamza Abayat today?” Nahid asked.
Down to business, Omar Yussef thought. “No.”
“He didn’t call you?” Nahid chuckled. “I thought perhaps he wouldn’t.”
“What has happened? Is it something to do with my son?”
“It’s connected to our discussion yesterday.”
“Nahid, please. Spit it out.”
“You could say the Cafe al-Quds is under new ownership. Marwan Hammiya is dead.”
Chapter 17
Trees reached up from the road to hedge the elevated section of the subway, their bare silvery branches stark against the flat white sky, like a diagram of a bronchitic lung in a medical textbook. Through the trees, Omar Yussef stared out at the apartment buildings on the avenues and their rooftop water towers decorated with bulbous graffiti. The colorful characters seemed to puff out their chests, posturing like the writers who made them declarations of individuality. The houses on the side streets, their yellow planks layered like baklava, were shrunken and shunted close, parodies of spacious American suburbia. In the distance, the towers of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, stern and monstrous, rose over the low Brooklyn skyline.
Back underground, Omar Yussef checked his watch impatiently as he reached his station. He needed to get to Hamza, to tell him what Marwan had said when he stood in the street weeping-about the danger “they” posed. It had proved real enough for Marwan, and the poor man had warned that Ala might be next.
From the train, he rushed toward Fifth Avenue. Around the Cafe al-Quds, blue police barriers blocked the sidewalk. He approached an officer who was slapping his hands against his ribs to keep warm while he stood guard.
“Is Sergeant Abayat here?” Omar Yussef asked. “I need to see him.”
“Who’re you, sir?” the officer said. Beneath his peaked police cap, he wore a close-fitting black felt headband designed to cover his ears. It came low over his brow and gave him the look of a medieval Crusader.
“My name is Sirhan. I’m involved in the case of this man who is now dead.” He flicked his fingers toward the cafe. “May Allah have mercy upon him.”
The officer muttered into the radio clipped to his collar. A voice crackled a response, and the policeman shoved the wooden barrier aside with his foot to let Omar Yussef pass.
Inside the cafe, he recognized the agitated crime-scene technicians he had seen at Ala’s apartment. Hamza Abayat leaned against the bar with his back to the door. The female lieutenant emerged from under the bar and spotted Omar Yussef. The big Arab detective turned and frowned.
Omar Yussef made his way between the tables. The lights, which had been dimmed when he visited Marwan Hammiya the day before, were bright on the busy technicians. He remembered Khamis Zeydan’s suspicion that the Cafe al-Quds was a front with few real clients. Murder has turned it into a bustling cafe, he thought.
“Hamza, why didn’t you call me?” he said.
“Are you a detective on the case?” Hamza rolled his neck, and Omar Yussef heard a vertebra click as the big muscles moved. “I know that you like to play the sleuth back in Bethlehem, but what makes you think I’d need your help here?”
“I was in this cafe yesterday talking to Marwan. He even followed me along the street to plead with me. Maybe he told me something that might be useful to you.”
“Take him into the kitchen,” the lieutenant said, ducking behind the bar once more.
The lights glared off the stainless-steel counters in the kitchen. The floor was smeared with blood, like a butcher’s shop on the day of the Eid al-Adha. Omar Yussef put his open hand flat against the doorpost and imagined he had left the bloody print with which he had seen Egyptians mark their entryways during that feast of sacrifice.
“Where’s the body?” he asked, conscious that he spoke with a little extra force to compensate for the tremble in his stomach.
Hamza rubbed the back of his hand across his nose. “Gone. For autopsy.”
“You’re sure it’s Marwan?”
“The daughter refused to identify the body. Says she’s too traumatized. It’s him. I’d seen him around.”
“When did it happen?”
Hamza lifted his sleeve and glanced at his wristwatch. It was silver with a luminous blue dial, glowing even under the kitchen lights. In the dark, it would be very bright. “The middle of last night. About eight hours ago.”
“You should’ve called me.”
The detective blew out a breath of impatience and resignation.
Omar Yussef remembered Rania’s testimony. “Did the girl confirm Ala’s alibi?”
“She did.”
“So you can release my boy?”
“It’s done.”
Omar Yussef felt relief flooding his chest, as though tension had constricted his breathing for days.
“But your son wasn’t too pleased that Rania decided to speak up,” Hamza said. “I think he preferred to play the wounded romantic hero.”
Omar Yussef blamed himself for his son’s stubbornness. It was an unfortunate trait the boy had inherited from him. “What did you find here?”
“What do you think? A dead man on the kitchen floor.”
Omar Yussef averted his eyes from the bloody tiles. “How did he die?”
“He was stabbed repeatedly. With venom, I’d say. Someone wanted him dead, but they didn’t do it efficiently with a single cut through the jugular.”
“Do you have the knife?”
Hamza looked with curiosity at Omar Yussef. “The murder weapon? Yes. No prints on it. But I didn’t say it was a knife.”
“Is it a knife?”
“Sure, but how did you know?”
Omar Yussef let out a dismissive sigh. “Come on, you said he’d been stabbed. It’s the same murderer, isn’t it? The one who killed Nizar.”
“We haven’t established a definite connection between the two killings.”
“Two murders within a few steps of each other in a couple of days. No connection?”
“Not a clear one. Nizar’s killer didn’t descend into the frenzy of the person who stabbed Marwan over and over again. And Marwan wasn’t decapitated, as Nizar was.”
“It’s too much of a coincidence. What do you think this was-a random robbery that went wrong?”
“A robbery? No.” Hamza let a nasty sarcasm into his voice. “If robbers had done this, they’d probably have taken the case full of hashish and the used twenty-dollar bills we found in that cupboard behind the tubs of hummus.”