“As you claim Nizar just did?”
“Correct.”
Hamza pointed upward. “Well, that cloud just moved away, and the moon is full once more. So your Mahdi is out of luck.”
“That depends on how deluded he is.” Omar Yussef gave a laugh that came out like a hacking cough. “I caution you, if the world is about to end, it’d be best not to be sur prised by it.”
“I’m a policeman in New York City. Nothing could surprise me.”
“The end of civilization and all humankind?”
“Least of all that.”
Hamza led Omar Yussef into the Shoot the Freak gallery. Floodlights at both ends of the area illuminated the oil drums, the branches, the blocks of concrete. Omar Yussef whispered his thanks for the darkness that had made it possible for him to evade the gunman.
A forensics officer in a blue raincoat slouched toward Hamza. He handed two transparent plastic bags to the detective. Inside each was a bronze-colored lump of metal the size and shape of a piece of well-chewed gum.
“One of them was embedded in that dried tree trunk there by the wall,” the technician said. “The other one was in the base of the oil drum over by the hood of the Mustang.”
The hood of the car, Omar Yussef thought. He shot that close to me.
“They’re still very slightly malleable, suggesting they were discharged recently. I mean, they certainly haven’t been sitting here a month since some bunch of gang-bangers had a shootout. So I’d guess they’re from the gun of our perpetrator. Of course, it could just be that someone had a real rough game of paintball, eh, Sergeant?”
Hamza handed the bags back to the technician and swallowed hard. He spoke quietly to Omar Yussef, but didn’t look at him. “Where did you say you saw Nizar?”
At the entrance to Playland, Hamza took a flashlight from his pocket. As he pulled the door open, its hinges squealed and echoed through the hall.
“I went in this direction,” Omar Yussef said, leading Hamza by the hand across the puddled floor. “This was where I first heard him whistle. When I got to this spot, I saw him.”
“And the shots came from behind you?”
“From over there, I think. Near where I entered.”
Hamza paced slowly toward the door from which Nizar had made his escape. He peered closely at the shattered doorframe where the third bullet had hit, then went outside.
Without the flashlight, Omar Yussef felt suddenly blind and alone. He struck his shoulder on the crumbling plaster of a pillar. Edging around it, he caught his knee on an old metal garbage can. He cursed and paused. He thought he had heard something move inside the garbage can when he jogged it. He lifted his foot and gave the can a gentle kick. The sound was repeated, a solid, dull connection, not the hollow crackle of trash.
“Hamza, over here,” he called.
When the detective directed his flashlight into the garbage can, he recoiled and braced himself against the pillar.
“What is it?” Omar Yussef said.
Hamza puffed out his cheeks and blinked hard.
I thought nothing could surprise a New York City detective, Omar Yussef said to himself. He took the flashlight from Hamza and shone it inside the garbage can. He gasped and turned his eyes away, as though they might somehow erase the few seconds during which they had focused on this awful sight.
In the bottom of the garbage can, staring up with eyes that seemed to register all the hopeless dereliction of the building where it lay, was the head of Omar Yussef’s former pupil, Rashid.
Chapter 22
A man reeled out of an all-night Korean bodega on Fifth Avenue, sliding on a patch of ice with a Miller in his hand. He took a few comically fast paces on the spot, brought himself upright, and rolled his shoulders back under his red mackinaw to restore his dignity. He sucked a long belt of beer and hurled the can back into the store.
“Fuck you, you fucking gook bastard,” he yelled.
Omar Yussef halted on the frozen sidewalk a few yards from the man, on the edge of the light cast by the storefront. The loud obscenity in the quiet street shocked him. He checked his watch and saw that it was two in the morning. In his hometown, nobody would be out at this time for fear of Israeli undercover squads. Certainly no one would wander drunk in the night. Those who overindulged in alcohol, as Omar Yussef had once done, closed themselves away with their shame and did their cursing in low voices aimed at themselves.
The Korean storekeeper emerged between the plastic sheets that protected his fruit and vegetables from the freezing weather. He held the open beer can between tense fingers. “You pay for beer,” he shouted, “or you fuck off.”
The drunk belched and wiped his heavy beard. “No money for you, gook bastard. No tickee, no laundry.”
“Fuck you, go away.” The Korean went back into his shop. The drunk bent double, breathless, chuckling quietly and repeating his joke.
As Omar Yussef approached the Cafe al-Quds, he heard the drunk vomit. The Korean came out with a bucket of water to sluice down the plastic sheets on the storefront.
Omar Yussef rang the bell outside the cafe and waited. He tried to turn his mind from the scene he had just witnessed and the memories it revived of his own ugly, hateful drinking. Murder seemed less distasteful. Did Nizar leave the severed head in the trash can? he wondered. Couldn’t it have been the gunman who dropped the head at Playland? Maybe he slaughtered Rashid and now wants to kill Nizar too. Was he the same man I saw at the apartment? The one who’s been tailing me?
A light came on in the staircase behind the kitchen and then another low bulb behind the bar. Rania weaved between the tables and slid back the bolts. When she opened the door, she stared at Omar Yussef with a brittle glimmer in her eyes, but confrontation in her jaw.
“Greetings, my daughter,” he said.
She stepped aside. “You’re in your own home and with your own family,” she murmured.
He limped through the door and unzipped his thick coat.
“It’s very late, ustaz,” she said.
“But you’re awake.”
“When I sleep, Nizar comes to me and I feel his loss too greatly.”
“Do you feel the loss of your father too?”
Rania clasped her fingers in a fist and led Omar Yussef through the kitchen. Her father’s blood had been scrubbed from the floor tiles, but Omar Yussef smelled something dark in the air, as though the dead man’s final breath lingered. He winced with regret for his critical tone at the door.
He followed her up the narrow stairs into a living room lit only by a single fluorescent strip in the galley kitchen behind the sofa.
She poured ground coffee and water into a small tin pot and set it to boil on a gas burner.
“No sugar,” he said, and waited in silence. He savored the cardamom scent of the coffee as she stirred it with a spoon.
Rania brought a tray with his coffee and a glass of water to the low Syrian table in the living room. He ran his fingers over the mother-of-pearl in the tabletop as he waited for the grounds to settle in his cup.
She sat with a straight back on a cheap folding chair and put her hands in her lap. Her eyes were preoccupied and desolate.
Omar Yussef tasted the bitter coffee. “May Allah bless your hands,” he said. “It’s very good.”
“Blessings upon you.”
He put the cup on its saucer and returned it to the tray. “Nizar is alive,” he said.
Her long lips parted, and her head dropped forward. She adjusted her mendil along her hairline and returned her hands to her lap. Omar Yussef saw a little vein pulsing on her neck as though it were trying to creep around the edge of her headscarf.
“He’s alive,” she said, with a bitter note of triumph. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He disappeared again.”