A woman’s voice answered. “Nine-one-one emergency.”

Omar Yussef cleared his throat and spoke in his precise English. “I wish to report a death.”

“What is the mode of death, sir?”

Omar Yussef strained to comprehend the woman on the other end of the line. The operator’s voice had the impenetrability of poor diction forced to cope with a pre-scripted, elevated grammar. “I mean to say, it’s a murder.”

“How do you know it’s a murder, sir?”

The phone shook in Omar Yussef’s hand. “He has no head.”

“You have a dead person there with no head, sir?”

Omar Yussef nodded at the phone.

“Sir? That is the situation?”

“That’s correct,” he stammered. “No head.”

“What’s your location, sir?”

Omar Yussef looked around for the slip of paper with his son’s address. He checked his pockets, but it was gone. “I don’t remember the address. It’s in Bay Ridge. On Fifth Avenue. Above a boutique.”

“The name of the boutique, sir?”

“Abdelrahim. But that’s in Arabic. In English, it just says Boutique.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Are you sending the police now?”

“Yes, sir. What’s your name?”

“Sirhan. Omar Yussef Sirhan. From Dehaisha Refugee Camp.”

“Where, sir?”

“Ah, Bethlehem, in Palestine. I’m not American.” As he added that final, unnecessary information, Omar Yussef felt he had spoken from some kind of shame. It sounded to him like an admission of complicity in the murder of the man in the next room and those other murders infamously committed by his people in this land, a confession that he was an outsider not bound by the decency and trust that Americans believed they shared.

“Do you know the identity of the victim, sir?”

“Not absolutely.” Omar Yussef sensed the pressure behind his eyes again. He dropped to the sofa and put his hand to his forehead.