“It’s for you, ustaz,” the boy said.
“What is?”
“The knife.” The boy dropped the dagger. Omar Yussef gasped as it landed flat on its side in his lap. The hilt was carved into an hourglass shape from a mottled olive-green length of rhino horn.
“This is also for you.” From his pocket, the boy took the dagger’s scabbard, embroidered with silver and gold thread. “Isn’t it nice?”
The boy’s appreciation for a traditional art soothed Omar Yussef. “Very.” He took the scabbard and went to sheath the dagger, but he found a paper rolled inside. He pulled it out. Before he could read it, the boy giggled and ran off. Omar Yussef slithered to his feet. The boy was already around the corner and gone.
Omar Yussef unrolled the paper and read: “‘If I had wished you dead, this dagger would’ve been in your soft breast.’ Come and see me. Playland, near the Boardwalk, Coney Island, 10 P.M.”
He brushed the slush from the back of his coat. The swift pulsing of his heartbeat filled his head. He rustled the paper in his hand and ran through the message once more-he knew what it meant.
Rashid was inviting him to meet.
He crossed the avenue and headed for the police barricade outside the Cafe al-Quds. He held the knife in his right hand, the scabbard and note in the other.
Your soft breast.
You remembered your lessons, Rashid, he thought. In the twelfth century, the leader of the Assassins had bribed an enemy’s servant to deliver a note while his master slept. The man awoke to find the very words Omar Yussef had read nailed to the floor beside his bed with a dagger. Fleetingly, Omar Yussef considered that Ismail might have sent him the message after he had glimpsed him on the street and at the UN. But this was the block of Fifth Avenue where Rashid had lived, and Rashid had always been more interested in the historical Assassins than Ismail had been. It had to be Rashid.
If Rashid was indeed the killer, then meeting him was a terrible risk. But this message is a signal to me that he wants to talk, Omar Yussef thought. If he had wanted me dead. . He fingered the dagger.
“What happened here?” A man in a brown bomber jacket, a Mets cap, and thin, gaudy pants with a burst of flame drawn around the ankles passed Omar Yussef and approached the policeman guarding the barrier around the cafe.
“Guy got killed,” the policeman said.
“Murdered?”
“That’s right.”
“You catch the terrorist?”
“Say again.”
“Catch the terrorist?”
“It’s not terrorism, sir.”
“It’s an Arab cafe, buddy. You think there’s no terrorist link?”
The policeman wandered slowly to the other side of the area enclosed by the blue barrier.
“This is how it starts,” the man continued. “They carry out an attack here, and no one cares because, hey, it’s only Brooklyn. Next thing you know they’ll blow up the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, and then you assholes will have to pay attention.”
Omar Yussef reached the barrier. “My dear sir, it’s not a terrorist attack. The dead man is an Arab,” he said.
“They’re killing each other, eh, buddy? Less of them for us to deal with.” The man turned a fat face on Omar Yussef. The unshaven flesh around his neck rolled over the upturned collar of his bomber jacket. He glanced down and noticed the dagger in Omar Yussef’s grip.
“Shit, man,” he said. He held his hands above his head and backed away. “Oh shit, man.”
Omar Yussef thrust the dagger into the scabbard and buried it in his pocket.
“Officer, hey officer,” the man called.
The policeman turned at the shrill note in his voice. “Will you quit it?” he said. “It’s not a terrorist case.”
“This guy over here-Jesus, oh Jesus.”
Omar Yussef ducked onto the side street. He walked, fast. He could’ve explained, but he would surely have sounded ridiculous trying to make the policeman understand that a seven-year-old boy had given him the dagger. He was an Arab and, despite himself, he was overcome by images of blindfolded men shuffling with their hands and ankles cuffed under the guard of American soldiers. He searched within himself for some calm, but he found only a hunted, terrified foreigner. He feared that if he tried to take the knife to Hamza, he would be arrested before he could speak to the detective. He looked at his watch. It was almost five in the evening.
In a few hours, he would go to Rashid. Alone.
Chapter 20
When the D train came to the end of the line at the Coney Island station, Omar Yussef dropped down the steel steps, crossed the cold concourse beneath the elevated rails, and followed the lights to Surf Avenue. He watched a police cruiser roll slowly by, like a heavy eater drifting back to a buffet, sated and gloomy. The wind volleyed piercing pins of ice off the Atlantic. He gazed up at the bright night sky. A jagged cloud streaked across the full moon, and he thought of the passage Nahid Hantash had quoted from the Koran.
“The hour of Doom is drawing near, and the moon is cleft in two,” he murmured.
He looked around at the shuttered amusement arcades and the sad facades of empty hotels. The spindly superstructure of a Ferris wheel was silhouetted above the storefronts like a gigantic machine of torture. The moon doesn’t have to split apart, he thought, for it to seem like the world is ending in this place.
Omar Yussef went along the avenue to a side street beside a rollercoaster. A long sign descending from the tallest part of the ride told him it was the Cyclone. His eyes strained at the rickety mess of wooden struts and whitewashed girders under the tracks, and he rattled the chain on the high corrugated-iron gate. He stared through a chain-link fence across the street at the rides within. Even a coating of snow couldn’t dress the dodgems, pirate ships, and shrimp stands in an aura that might defy their wintry cheapness. Every ride came with a laughable name promising an experience beyond its mere mechanics. He saw that the big Ferris wheel was The Wonder Wheel, as though it turned by some miracle and rose higher than anyone had ever before soared.
He skirted the fence until it brought him up a wooden ramp to the Boardwalk. The wind cut across his face, and a few seagulls hovered black against the moon. The birds were silent, and Omar Yussef wondered if they slept on the wing. The slate sea rolled beyond the strand with a sound like the strangled respirations of a disturbed sleeper. The shuttered pizza stands on the Boardwalk, painted gaudily with signs for Italian sausage and cold beer, seemed to Omar Yussef to be unsanitary places from which to serve food. As he looked along the wide, solitary promenade, he had an impression less of a place to spend leisure time than of a lonely depressive’s recurrent nightmare.
Omar Yussef saw no sign of Playland on the Boardwalk, so he cut back toward the avenue. He gravitated to the green neon lights of a corner restaurant advertising its “famous” hot dogs. Checking his watch, he saw that he was fifteen minutes early for his ten o’clock assignation. Since he had fled the policeman outside the Cafe al-Quds he had eaten nothing, and he was suddenly aware of his hunger. He wondered how a hot dog tasted.
The restaurant was brightly lit, staffed by people in identical striped shirts and green hats. At the tables, clutches of people buried pale rolls lengthwise in their mouths. The bread dripped a livid red sauce onto their hands. Through the window, the scattered shows of bonhomie made Omar Yussef feel isolated. Were he to enter the restaurant, he feared the diners would fall silent, recognizing the loneliness he broadcast like a leper with his bell. He experienced a flash of hate, and he understood how it might happen to him-the resentment that made Arab immigrants like Nahid Hantash, seething in his mosque, despise American society. He recalled the token-booth clerk who had cheated him and felt the man’s insults lingering, a little clot of stress that could suddenly lodge in his brain and destroy him. The diners disturbed him because they were in a place where they belonged with people they liked, and he was outside the window in the cold, alone, far from home.