“A trap?”
Omar Yussef thrust his forefinger at his son and shouted, “My boy is the bait.”
Chapter 18
Ala stepped out of the cafe and hurried between the low snowbanks on the sidewalk. Omar Yussef would have gone after him, but he was breathless even before he reached the door, and he knew he couldn’t keep up. He returned to the kitchen and grabbed Hamza’s thick arm. “You have to protect my son,” he shouted.
“You think I should follow him?” Hamza settled back against the steel counter.
“I told you someone’s been following me. They tried to run me down on Atlantic Avenue. Whoever they are, they think I know something I shouldn’t about these murders. Now they’ll try to kill my boy too.” Rania had solved Ala’s problem with the police; but without the protection of the jail, he would now be in greater danger. Unless I can find the killer before he gets to us, Omar Yussef thought.
“Your son won’t go far.” Hamza jerked his thumb at the back stairs. Slow feet descended. Rania came to the door. “You get what I mean, ustaz?” the detective said.
Rania was so pale that her veins showed blue through her skin, seeming to write across her face the fears she held within. She wore a long black coat cut tight around her upper body and a black mendil with a trim of gold sequins around her face. Her lips pouted and her big sullen eyes were edged with the slack purple skin of unhappiness and fatigue.
The detective reached into a large tin of olives, fished in the vinegar, and pulled out a handful. He fed one into his mouth. “Where’re you going?” he asked.
“I’m going to work,” she replied.
Omar Yussef sensed the girl’s horror as she crossed the floor, skirting the smears of her father’s blood. “Long life to you, my daughter,” he said. “May Allah be merciful upon him, the deceased one.”
Rania opened her mouth to speak the traditional response to these condolences, but her breath caught. “The Community Association will help me to arrange the funeral,” she whispered. “It’s best for me to go there as usual. I need to be with good people, Arab people.” She turned away from Hamza with a sneer.
It seemed unnatural to Omar Yussef that her father’s murder appeared to anger Rania, rather than sadden her. Perhaps it’s only her grief that makes her rage, he thought, or the detective’s suspicion.
She let Hamza see her curled lip again. “People with a heart,” she said. Her voice stammered on a strangled sob.
Hamza chewed another olive.
Rania left the kitchen, her chin up and her glassy eyes straight ahead. If Omar Yussef couldn’t keep pace with his son, he could at least follow this girl across the street. Perhaps she could tell him something that would help track the killer who now seemed a menace to Ala. Omar Yussef took a final look at the blood on the floor and went after her.
“I’ll walk you to the Community Association,” he said, rushing to reach the door before it closed behind her.
On the snowy sidewalk, Rania’s back was very straight and she balanced easily beside Omar Yussef, who was tense and unsteady. “Your father will find forgiveness in Paradise, my daughter,” he said.
“For what must he be forgiven?” Her voice was dismissive, clipped.
“Only you can know that.”
Her neck twitched backward, and her eyes rolled like a thoroughbred in the moment of restraint before its rider lets it gallop.
“And only Allah knows your father’s reward,” Omar Yussef added, “whether Paradise or Hell.”
“If it’s Hell, then my father was paid in advance long ago.” The girl crossed Fifth Avenue toward the Community Association, pulling her shoulders back. She stopped at the sidewalk to wait for Omar Yussef, something regretful in her face. “I’m certain he won’t go to Hell,” she said. “He’ll receive the reward of the martyrs.”
“If Allah wills it. But it’ll be hard to convince people that your father is honored in the Gardens of Delight, once it’s revealed that there were drugs in his kitchen,” Omar Yussef said. “It’ll damage your reputation too.”
The girl folded her arms against the cold. “Do you mean even Ala wouldn’t have me as a wife now?” she said, with a scornful smile. “Perhaps that will be his martyrdom.”
“What about Nizar? What was his reward?”
Rania turned in the doorway of the Community Association and slapped her pale hand against her breastbone. “I was his reward,” she sobbed.
She sucked in a breath to steady herself and entered the building. Omar Yussef kicked the snow off his loafers and followed.
Cheap couches fringed the reception room. Each seat was filled by an Arab waiting quietly for one of the counselors. They huddled in their heavy coats, the old men with their Astrakhan hats pulled low, silent and sleepy in the heat. A middle-aged woman turned a hostile glare on Omar Yussef. Her fat chins rubbed against her headscarf with each flexing of her jaw, chewing her gum. She’s already angry and defensive because she expects me to jump the queue, he thought. Even in America, where everyone’s polite, we Arabs can bring the unfairness of the Middle East with us.
“Peace be upon you,” he said.
The two dozen people around the edge of the room murmured their response: “Upon you, peace.”
He hurried across the gaudy floral carpet into the offices behind the reception counter. He found Rania in a small room papered with informational posters about the New York school system, basketball camp, and local businesses that offered satellite dishes with Middle Eastern stations. The desk was spread with pamphlets on health services and kindergartens. Her coat was draped over a filing cabinet, and she sat behind the desk in the same black smock and tight jeans he’d seen her wearing the day before. When she shuffled her mouse on its pad, the screen of her computer prickled into life.
Bitterness seemed to course through her movements and tremble beneath the tight set of her face. Omar Yussef wondered if it was more than the deaths of her father and her lover that ate at her, more than the loneliness of a girl with no family to console her. An unspoken anger underlay her grief, so that Omar Yussef found himself a little scared of her.
She clicked the mouse, and a photo expanded over the screen of the computer. Rania and Nizar were at a table in a restaurant which appeared to be part of a bigger public space. They were laughing for the camera with three smiling waitresses who wore white shirts and black ties. On the table, a short tube shot sparks from the center of a pink cake.
“Nizar made everyone love him, ustaz,” Rania said. “This picture was taken on my birthday. He asked the waitresses to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ He taught them the words in Arabic. They thought it was very funny.” She murmured the refrain, “Sana hilweh, ya jamil. Sana hilweh, ya jamil.”
Now I know why she wanted to come to her office, Omar Yussef thought, as Rania clicked through more photos of Nizar on the computer. But I’ve never heard the birthday song sound so broken-hearted.
He tried to think of words to comfort her. He recalled the argument he had overheard between Rania and her father when he had returned to the cafe for his forgotten hat. The usual appeal to trust in Allah might not console a girl who had dreamed of Manhattan, he decided. “I’ve always had faith, my daughter,” he said softly. “Not in Islam, I must admit, but in human qualities. Of course, my faith in love and humanity and intelligence is tested by life in the Middle East. There I see events in which these qualities are entirely lacking. But the times when they go missing only make me believe more strongly that they must exist.”