They left the 4 train at Grand Central. Rania went through the early evening commuters to a side exit onto Lexington Avenue. She rushed to the corner of 42nd Street and ducked under a blue police sawhorse to join a group of two dozen people waving placards similar to hers. Omar Yussef was disappointed-perhaps she simply intended to join the protest.
A few of the demonstrators wore red-and-white keffiyas around their necks or on their heads. About half of them seemed to Omar Yussef to be Arabs. A couple of converts to Islam wore white skullcaps low on their brows. The rest were white men and women with hair shaved short, the raddled sallow skin of extreme vegetarians, and eyes gleaming with outrage. A press photographer knelt to get a low shot of the demonstrators, and a television reporter in a tan trench coat bellowed into his microphone.
Rania went quickly to the center of the demonstration, brandishing her placard and crying her willingness to sacrifice for Palestine. The photographer snapped her repeatedly, because she was the most vociferous of the women wearing a picturesque headscarf. The television man raised his voice to be heard above the insults Rania brought down on Israel. He clearly enjoyed being in the midst of the mayhem, like a grandfather joining in when the children bawl and scream.
Within minutes, the television crew was packing up. The reporter shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat with a shiver. The photographer clicked through his images to check that he had one good enough to transmit on the wire. Rania handed her placard to the man beside her and edged back through the crowd of demonstrators. Omar Yussef strained to see where she had gone. With the journalists no longer attentive to them, the demonstrators turned their slogans on the commuters, who avoided the protest with the same harsh disapproval Omar Yussef had noticed on the faces of subway passengers when a beggar entered their car. It was as though a mere whiff of something bad might let in the full stink of the city. He felt sorry for the demonstrators, so animated and passionate, and so ignored. The commuters were the only people he had ever seen who looked as unhappy as the refugees sweating in the Palestinian camps back home.
A woman wearing the same black coat as Rania came around from the back of the crowd, shaking her long hair free of her collar. She turned her face from the demonstration like any other commuter. Her skin was pale against the shining blackness of her hair, and her eyes were big and full of anticipation. Rania had taken off her headscarf. Omar Yussef was surprised to discover that this breach of Muslim propriety shocked him, even though his own wife wore her hair uncovered. As he wove through the crowd behind her, she checked her reflection in the window of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, squeezing and lifting her hair with both hands to give it body, and he smiled because he knew that his suspicion about Valentine’s Day had been correct.
He followed her through the swinging wooden doors into the main station concourse and almost lost her when he gazed up at the famous ceiling. He traced the looping gold lines linking the stars across the concave emerald roof and saw that, indeed, they were misplaced, as he had once read, because the Frenchman who painted them had made a mistake and set them out backward. Hurrying to catch up, he reached the foot of the steps to the mezzanine restaurant just as Rania skipped to the top.
When he had climbed to the hostess’s lecturn, he was breathing heavily. The restaurant was open to the elaborate ceiling of the concourse and to the drifting shafts of orange light through the tall windows. Omar Yussef recalled the photo on Rania’s computer and her sad rendition of the birthday tune, as he watched the girl arrive at her table. A man stood, jumped into a few laughing steps of dabka, and hugged her, stroking her hair with his hand.
It was a long embrace, as the hostess waited with a frozen smile to leave their menus, and it was still unfinished when Omar Yussef pulled an extra chair up to their table and dropped into it.
“Happy Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef extended a finger toward the hostess and said, “Nizar, don’t you want to hear the specials?”
They broke their clinch. Nizar came to Omar Yussef and gave him five kisses on his cheeks. He was as cheerful as an emir watching his hawk bring down its prey in the desert. “Ustaz, I’ll have the crab cakes. In fact, we’ll all have them. I know the menu very well. Rania and I eat here whenever we’re in Manhattan. We like to look down on the entrances to the platforms and imagine we’re going on a journey.”
“To where?”
“Who cares? Poughkeepsie, New Canaan, Wassaic.” Nizar read off the names from the Departures board in the concourse. “They all sound a little exotic to my foreign ear, even if they’re really just boring commuter towns. One place you don’t see up on that list is Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I’m never going back there.” He poured a glass of ice water for Omar Yussef. “Drink it, ustaz. You look like you got a little overheated keeping up with my darling Rania.”
“Welcome, ustaz,” the girl said. She seemed not to share Nizar’s pleasure at Omar Yussef’s intrusion upon their romantic dinner.
“She set a good pace.” Omar Yussef swigged from the glass. “She was obviously eager to reach you, and my ankle hurts from our last meeting at Coney Island.”
Nizar showed the gap between his front teeth.
“Who fired at us in Playland?” Omar Yussef asked.
Nizar stroked Rania’s hand against his prominent cheekbones and giggled. “Coney Island is a dangerous place at night, ustaz. But I supplied you with an Omani dagger for self-defense. If someone gave you trouble, you could’ve carved them up.” He made two swift motions of the wrist like a swordsman pressing home a coup. “You had no reason to be scared.”
“Neither did you. You’re immortal. You’re the Mahdi, after all.”
“You liked that stuff? The Veiled Man? The dagger that could’ve been planted ‘in your soft breast’? I knew you’d appreciate it. But don’t worry-I’m not insane enough to think I’m actually the Mahdi, even if I do have the looks for it.”
Rania reached out and touched her fingertip to the boy’s front teeth with a playful smile. “Your appearance is just as it was written in the prophecies.”
He bit down on her finger and snarled, but when he let go he swallowed hard, as though he had tasted a bitterness on her hand. There’s something between them that they’re pretending isn’t there, for the sake of their celebratory dinner, Omar Yussef thought. Is it murder?
Omar Yussef put his palms flat on the glass table and glared at the liver spots, the wrinkled knuckles, the long black hairs on his fingers. He had loved these four boys, his Assassins. His innocence had been tarnished long ago, but he felt its final traces obliterated by the words he had to speak: “You killed Rashid.”
“I had to do it.” Nizar stopped while the waitress uncorked a half-bottle of champagne and poured two flutes. Omar Yussef put his hand over the top of his own glass and shook his head.
“To you, my life, my heart, my love,” Nizar said to Rania, and they drank. “I had to get rid of Rashid, ustaz. He was an assassin. Not the kind of Assassin we pretended to be in your classroom, but a real one.” He cut his hand through the air once more as though handling an epee.
“This is very romantic talk for Valentine’s Day.” Omar Yussef sneered at the champagne in its ice bucket. “How do you know he was an assassin?”
Nizar mugged like a guilty schoolboy.
The Israeli jail, Omar Yussef thought. As Ala suspected, they joined Islamic Jihad. “You were recruited in prison,” he said. “You came here to kill someone?”
“Rashid was supposed to do the killing. Despite his nervous nature, he showed himself to be a determined little fellow in training. That’s why they picked him. I was ordered to provide him with backup.”