He went unsteadily along the sidewalk, crunching through a thin, unshoveled layer of snow as the wind turned its surface to ice. The buildings here seemed permanently abandoned rather than merely shuttered for the season. Before a wide facade with red doors that looked like a disused fire station, he stamped his feet against the cold and decided to enter the restaurant after all, but only to ask where he might find Playland. As he turned, he looked up and noticed the sign above the red doors in freestanding art deco-style lettering: Playland.
In the time it took him to read the sign, Omar Yussef sensed the fear that must have lurked within him since he had received the note from the boy with the dagger. It came upon him in a gust of adrenaline that chilled his heart like the wind off the breakers. A man awaited him in this building who had been a nervous, intelligent boy when Omar Yussef had known him in Bethlehem. Now, perhaps, he was a killer. All Omar Yussef’s doubts about Rashid’s ability to have slaughtered Nizar were erased by the flood of tension he felt. He glanced along the avenue, hoping the patrol car would come to save him.
As he hesitated, one of the red doors swung open and slammed against the wall in the wind. It creaked on its rusty hinges and Omar Yussef’s jaw trembled. Inside his coat pocket, he gripped the Omani dagger in a sweating fist and slid slowly toward the door.
From within, a chilly damp escaped fast on the air, like a breath that had been trapped in a corpse long dead. It surrounded Omar Yussef and drew him inside, shivering. The windows at the back of the building were shattered. Their empty mullions split the moonlight into square shafts glimmering in the pools of still, stinking water on the floor and illuminating the cracked plaster on the pillars across the big hall.
Omar Yussef rubbed his mustache. His breath trailed wispily into the cold.
In the darkness, someone whistled the refrain of the old Lebanese song Omar Yussef had heard on the stereo when he first went to the Cafe al-Quds.
Take me, take me, take me home.
The tune echoed through the silent building. Omar Yussef scanned the strips of moonlight for Rashid.
The whistler trilled the first verse of the song.
The breeze blew at us from where the river split.
The sound seemed to come from the far end of the building. Omar Yussef made for the row of smashed windows there.
“Rashid,” he whispered. “Is that you?”
His feet sloshed through a puddle. He cursed low as the freezing water filled his loafers.
The refrain came again, closer this time: Take me, take me, take me home. Omar Yussef turned. A foot scraped against the concrete floor. A man in a black cashmere overcoat stepped from behind a pillar. He lifted his head, pushed up the brim of his gray cap, and shook his long hair from his collar.
“Greetings, ustaz,” he said.
Omar Yussef reached out with the terror and compulsion of somebody who has seen the ghost of a loved one. “Nizar? Is it you, Nizar? You’re alive.”
He saw a flash of white teeth as Nizar smiled, and the moonlight caught the young man’s high cheekbones. Omar Yussef stepped forward, but a sudden gunshot roared from across the empty hall. Nizar’s eyes shifted toward the shadows where the shot echoed. He ducked behind the pillar.
Omar Yussef flattened himself against the wall as another shot came. He heard Nizar’s feet on the concrete, running, splashing through a puddle. A door opened along the back wall and Nizar went through it. The moonlight flickered as the door swung in the wind.
A great weight seeped into Omar Yussef’s limbs. His old body surely couldn’t keep up with Nizar or elude whoever had fired the shots. He felt stupid for putting himself in this danger. Did you think that simply because you were invited to Playland, this would be a game? he thought. He clenched his fists and pounded them against his thighs.
He bent low as he made for the exit. His soaking socks squelched and his loafers slipped. Another shot splintered wood from the doorframe. Running footsteps sounded in the building. He went through the door and pulled it shut.
The empty lot in the rear of Playland was a thicket of brown winter scrub. Omar Yussef plunged into the stiff, fawn bushes. Plastic Fanta bottles and bucket-sized Coke cups littered the ground like the seed pods of a virulent weed, hidden by the new snow, tripping him. He cut toward the fence and tumbled into a ditch.
Scrambling to his feet, he went along the depression, slipping on the snow that drifted deeper there. He halted to listen for Nizar’s footsteps ahead of him or the gunman’s chasing him. He heard only his own wheezing. A shot sounded. The snow kicked up a few yards behind him. He scampered along the ditch and dragged himself up a slope toward a six-foot fence.
It truly was Nizar, he thought. He’s alive. But someone wants him dead.
He shook the fence until he found a loose section and edged through. His coat caught on the ragged chain-link. He twisted to free himself. Another shot, and he dropped on his hip beyond the fence. Pain burned red-hot in the small of his back, so intense that he was sure he had taken a bullet.
He bellowed as he shambled toward the beach. Rubbing his back, he discovered there was no bullet wound, only a wringing sensation that gripped his spine deep beneath the meager muscles.
If Nizar is alive, whose body did I find in the apartment? he wondered. Rashid is still missing. Could it have been his?
Between his irregular, limping footfalls on the concrete, he heard the gunman crashing through the undergrowth parallel to him. Cheap signs covered the fence, painted with fat letters advertising clam bars and knishes, candy apples and shish kebab, screening Omar Yussef from the shooter. He touched an ad for a seafood restaurant with his fingertips and whispered his thanks.
Omar Yussef turned on to the Boardwalk and hobbled past the shutters of a fried-chicken stand. He came to a waist-high wall at a gap between the food booths, and collapsed against it. The wall was painted in blue characters on an orange background: Shoot the Freak-Paint Ball. Live human targets. Behind the low wall, there was a drop of ten feet to a derelict lot spread with empty oil drums, dried-out branches, and sections sheared off a car’s body. Omar Yussef frowned. This was a game? He imagined a summer’s day, the Boardwalk crowded, people eating ice cream and cotton candy, coughing up a dollar to shoot pellets filled with paint at men paid to dodge behind the concrete blocks and packing crates. It seemed to him like something from ancient times of human sacrifice and mortal entertainments.
Footsteps mounted the ramp to the Boardwalk. A man came to the corner of the fried-chicken stand, the moon behind him. He lifted his gun.
It’s not a game and I’m not going to be the freak, Omar Yussef thought. He jumped the low wall and fell into the dark lot.
His ankle twisted when he landed. It hurt badly, but he had to move. He hobbled toward a car hood propped against two oil drums and dropped behind it.
The shooter halted by the wall and was still.
Is he going to come down here? Omar Yussef rubbed his ankle and fought to calm his breathing. He peered through the air ports on the car hood and saw the gunman silhouetted against the moon over the Boardwalk. The man lifted his arm and Omar Yussef ducked.
A shot smacked into a tree trunk a few yards from him. He recoiled, pressed his back against the car hood, and hoped that the oil drums would hide him if the gunman descended to search at close quarters. In his pocket, he ran his fingertips over the scabbard of the Omani dagger. Should the gunman come near enough, would he be able to use it?