“If you expected to find him here, he won’t come.”
“Why not? Surely he’d want to be with you?”
“The police would be waiting.”
“Why should he be worried about the police? Is it a crime in New York not to have your head chopped off?”
She nibbled at the quick of her thumbnail and watched Omar Yussef so intensely that he felt as though it were him she was biting.
He finished his coffee and wiped his mustache with his handkerchief. “Rania, why did Nizar reveal himself to me? Now that the police know he’s alive, they’ll suspect him not only of killing Rashid, but also of the murder of your father.”
She twitched her head toward Omar Yussef. “That couldn’t be.”
“Murders around here are usually drug-related, so surely the police will assume that the closest man to your father in the drug trade was also the one who killed him.”
Omar Yussef saw a flash of desperation on Rania’s face. “That’s crazy, ustaz,” she said. “Where did you see him?”
“At Coney Island.”
Rania’s eyes were wet. “He took me to Coney Island in the summer. We rode the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone.”
“It’s all closed now.”
“Only for the winter.”
“In Brooklyn, that appears to be a long, hard season.” Omar Yussef gazed around the room. On a cheap wicker bookshelf, he noticed a photo of a woman with a deeply lined face and a wide mouth smiling tiredly between Marwan and Rania. The departed mother, he thought. “Nizar faked his death, but he decided to reveal himself after your father died. What was it about the murder of your father that changed Nizar’s mind?”
The girl looked as near to death as the woman in the photograph. She shook her head.
“I think that whatever Nizar’s doing now, it’s somehow because he wants to be with you,” Omar Yussef said.
“What makes you say that?” Her voice was a whisper.
“His life in Brooklyn seems to have been full of indecision. He was sure of his religion; then he went wild. He was close to Rashid; then they argued. He drove a taxi and worked honestly; then he dealt drugs to make money. The only thing he didn’t doubt was his relationship with you.”
Rania seemed to search Omar Yussef’s face for sympathy. “You’re just like Ala, ustaz. Honest and good.” She glanced at the quilted coat, splayed open across the sofa behind him, and the NYPD stocking cap on his head. “Although he dresses rather better than you do.”
Omar Yussef pulled off the cap.
“I see that you have his sensitivity too,” she said.
The seductiveness had returned to her dark eyes. The eyes of the houri, Omar Yussef thought, as he pushed his hair, rumpled by the cap, into place.
“Ala was too Palestinian for me,” she said. “He was unwilling to venture out of our culture. He wouldn’t enter into American life as Nizar did. No matter how often I said I wanted to break out, Ala thought he knew what was good for me. He’s a typical Arab man.”
“You think I’m like that too?” Omar Yussef lifted his chin.
“Of course you are. No matter how liberal your ideas may be, ustaz, I can smell the Middle East all over you.”
“You’re mistaken. You assume I’m a Middle Eastern man like your father.”
“My father wasn’t like that at all. He hated the Middle East. He wanted to leave it behind, but it followed him here and dragged him down. You, ustaz, can’t wait to leave this city and get back home, can you? Admit it. You want to return to your little town where everyone knows you and respects you.”
Omar Yussef covered his mouth with his hand. He liked to think of himself as a cosmopolitan, educated man, but each day in New York made him long for his family, for the traditions and routines of Bethlehem. The girl had judged him correctly.
“But you cover your head like a Muslim believer,” Omar Yussef said.
“You see, you can’t imagine that a woman might retain some of our traditions and reject others. You assume that if I bend the rules a little bit, I’ll soon be a whore. You think it’s easy to wear this headscarf in Brooklyn? Once I leave these couple of blocks in Little Palestine, people laugh and curse at me. ‘Look at the ninja,’ they shout. But I decide who I am. I follow our traditions of dress and modesty, but I don’t want to live as though this was the Bekaa instead of Brooklyn.”
“I understand.”
“You didn’t understand my father, and you don’t understand me.” Her voice quivered with the force of so much emotion finally uncovered. She spoke with the pace of one who mustn’t cease talking for fear that her words would be stopped by sobbing. “You’re a refugee. Everyone in the Arab world at least pays lip service to your human rights and says they respect your cause. My father and I had to flee Lebanon, but no one calls us refugees and no one respects us. We had to slink away from Lebanon like criminals.” Rania reached out a finger toward the photo on the wicker shelf. “My mother died while my father was in prison. He was convinced no decent man would marry me, because he had been jailed for the shameful act of dealing narcotics, which is against the laws of Islam. We left my mother’s grave behind and came to America. My father thought we could start again. He opened a new business and tried to find me a suitable husband.”
“May Allah have mercy upon your mother,” Omar Yussef murmured.
“May you have a long life.” Rania picked at the hem of her black smock. “Maybe hatred and violence are just part of being an Arab. Maybe you can’t escape them. Maybe the mistake is to try. Anyway, they’ve got me.”
“You’re still young, my daughter. Don’t give up hope for a better life.”
“I deluded myself, visiting the Broadway theaters with Nizar, going to movies, to expensive Italian restaurants. All the time, the Middle East was in me like the cancer that killed my mother.” Rania rubbed a tear from her eye and stared at the moisture on the back of her hand. “I dreamed that Nizar had returned. But he came to you, not to me.” She spoke petulantly, like a thwarted child. Her shoulders dropped, as though the anger had seeped out of her and left only an inanimate sadness. “For me, it will be as though that body in his apartment really was Nizar’s corpse.”
“I can’t believe that you’d rather think of him as a corpse than a living man,” Omar Yussef said. “You told me you wanted to experience happiness now, not in the hereafter.”
“His memory will always be with me.”
“Do you believe he killed his friend?”
“That wouldn’t make him the worst man I ever met. I’m from Lebanon.”
Omar Yussef left her in the glow of the kitchen light. He went through the cafe and pulled the door shut behind him. He took a few painful steps on his swollen ankle, pushed through the entrance next to the boutique, and mounted the stairs to Ala’s apartment. The handwritten sign with the words The Castle of the Assassins written across it had been removed, but the tape that had affixed it to the door remained, like the frame of a painting cut away by thieves.
His son’s face was gray and tired when he opened the door. He barely spoke as he showed Omar Yussef to the single bed. The door to the next room, where the corpse had lain, was closed. Omar Yussef wondered if the police had finished their work in there.
“My son,” he said, “I saw Nizar tonight. He’s alive.”
Ala sat on the edge of the bed. He rubbed his palm against the cheap blanket and tried to speak, but he managed only a stuttering gasp.
“I saw him at Coney Island.”
“Saw him?” Ala croaked.
Omar Yussef turned away from his boy. “I also saw Rashid’s head. It was his body we found in this apartment, not Nizar’s. I’m sorry to be so blunt, my son.”
Omar Yussef heard his son whisper the name of his dead roommate. The sound seemed like a cold wave in the air, chilling Omar Yussef’s throat and lungs, and he wondered if that was the way a final breath might feel.