The Hit

by Michal Hartstein

  "Yes, Yoni."

  "Yoni was an officer at the military base where she served. He gave her a ride home one day and the rest was history."

  "You said he was studying medicine?"

  "Right."

  "Does he work as well?"

  "Only on his vacations," said Ilana. "It's very hard to combine work with medical studies."

  "Can you please write down his phone number for me?" I asked gently and extended a piece of paper and a pen to her.

  "Excuse me," Moshe interfered and turned to me. "Why does this interest you? Why do you have to know where Yoni’s studying and what he’s doing? Why do you want to speak with him?"

  "Moshe," Ilana tried to mollify him, "she’s only doing her job."

  "Right. You have to understand that your daughter was a victim of a serious criminal incident. I have only one goal here: to learn about the victim."

  "But to my unprofessional ear, it seems as if the police are looking for the murderer in our family, when any idiot can understand that it was a mafia hit! Why do you care at all what Shirley and Yoni studied, or where they worked? How will that advance the investigation? At this moment, the murderer who took my daughter's life is walking around free in the State of Israel. I can guarantee it’s not Yoni, and it has no connection to him whatsoever! Yoni’s no less than the salt of the earth. An outstanding officer and medical student. A man who just lost the woman he loved, the one who was supposed to be the mother of his children."

  Ilana burst into tears and Moshe bent over to hug her.

  I was silent. What could I say?

  I knew already that I would not be able to fill in the form with the victim's details, at least not at that stage.

  Moshe and Ilana broke away from their embrace.

  "I can't stop thinking about it," Ilana said in a choked voice. "I won’t have grandchildren from my beautiful girl…"

  "Did Shirley want to have children?" I asked.

  "Obviously," said Moshe tightly. "Is there anyone who doesn’t want to have kids?"

  I did not answer.

  "We wanted to have many children," Ilana continued, "but fate brought us only two. Once, someone who could not have kids simply did not have them, unlike today, when there’s treatment available. I was longing to have grandchildren, to hold a little soft body again, to hear the sound of rolling laughter and chase after a sweet toddler all over the house. My brother has three grandchildren already, my sister has two, and Moshe's sister has four grandchildren! I thought my turn had finally come…" She rolled her eyes and covered her mouth with her hand, as if trying to prevent sobs from bursting out again.

  "You’ll have grandchildren from your son," I tried to console them.

  "Ah," she moaned, "my son doesn’t intend to settle down anytime soon."

  I sat with them a little longer. They showed me Shirley's certificates of merit and pictures from different periods in her life. I left their house with the feeling that I had contributed nothing to the investigation, but at least I had consoled two bereaved parents.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nobody at the police station bothered to bring me up to date about Alon's particularly combative mood. I gave him an overly cheery, “Hello!” only to receive a downpour of yelling and swearing in return. He screamed that he had no idea where I had been wandering off to, and asked why he was not receiving enough reports, and how it could be that there had been no progress in my cases. He went on screaming that he had passed by my office and had been shocked by the amount of paperwork on my desk. I wanted to tell him that I had been working an average of twelve hours a day and doing the work of at least two cops. However, I knew that when Alon was in such a state - probably as a direct result of a conversation with his ex-wife - the last thing to do was to answer him. I dragged myself, "full of motivation," to my room, to discover that no paperwork fairy had arrived and cleared the piles of documents waiting for me. I had immersed myself in reading the scores of interrogation reports that had been piling up on my desk over the last few days, when my cell buzzed. I answered.

  "You dare not shirk it again," my sister's voice declared jubilantly.

  "Shirk what?"

  "You're not serious?" Shira almost yelled. "No, you're simply unreal."

  "What?" I asked impatiently. "Shira, I really have no patience for a quiz… I’ve no idea what you want from me."

  "You promised you’d join us this time and not find a last-minute excuse!"

  "Ah, the vaibers…" Once every few weeks, the vaibers (Yiddish for “wives”) - my mother, her sister Nira and their daughters, that is my sisters, Shira and Ayala and my cousin, Orly - would meet for a light dinner in a pleasant café in Givat Shmuel, to gossip and catch up. Since I had no kids and since most of the discussion revolved around stories about grandchildren, those get-togethers were a pain in the neck for me. During the last one I attended (I had failed to find a timely excuse) we were sitting on such a comfortable sofa that I simply fell asleep.

  "The café in Givat Shmuel. Half an hour."

  "I completely forgot about it."

  "So here I am, reminding you."

  "I’ll never get there in half an hour. I’m still at the station."

  "Then leave right now. At the most, you’ll be ten minutes late. Ayala will be late for sure."

  "Fine…" I answered in a low voice. The truth was that my level of concentration was close to zero, and I thought that after three such loaded days, a little familial support would not hurt me.

  Three quarters of an hour later, the women of the family embraced me affectionately. Since, over the last few months, I had usually missed family get-togethers, I was the guest of honor.

  "Either we don't see you at all, or I see you twice in the same week," said my aunt and laughed aloud.

  "When did we see each other this week?" I asked, surprised, and sat down next to Shira.

  Ayala joined in the laughter. "Wow, what a space cadet! At the bris, of course… Evyatar and Efrat's son."

  "Perhaps she didn’t get to see you." Mother rushed to my rescue. "Right in the middle of the bris she was summoned to an incident in Tel-Aviv."

  "You’re both right," I smiled, embarrassed. "I did actually see you. We even chatted a little! But as mom said, I was called in by my work and the last few days have been crazy, so I got a little confused."

  "You're talking about the hit that took place in the center of Tel-Aviv?" asked Orly with curiosity.

  "Hmm…" I nodded, looking at the menu. How disappointing – the menu had changed completely since the last time I was there.

  "What a tragedy," said my aunt in a not-to-be disputed tone of voice. "A young woman goes out to eat lunch, and a gang of criminals shoot her only because she was standing in the wrong place."

  "They have no boundaries," said Ayala. "As if all the terror attacks weren’t enough for us, these criminals conduct their gang wars in the middle of the street!"

  "Let them kill each other in their own homes, not in our streets," added Orly.

  I pretended to immerse myself in the menu. I had already heard similar comments more than once during the last week, and they were not pleasant to hear. Shirley was, indeed, an unintended and unnecessary victim of the crime war, but, for me, Koby was a close friend. I did not wish for his death, not in the heart of Tel-Aviv, nor in his private home.

  The voices around the table became silent and I realized that they were waiting to hear my statement.

  "It's getting on my nerves," I said and put down the menu melodramatically, "that they’re always changing the menus in restaurants!"

  They all laughed. I also smiled, even though I absolutely meant what I said. "I always ordered their pasta salad here. Now I’ve no idea what to have."

  "Order the tomato and pine cone pasta," suggested Shira. "It's exactly the same."

  "Then why change the name?" I raged. They laughed again. This time I did not smile. I did not understand what was funny.

  "It appears to me tha
t the one who tried to change the subject of this discussion was you," Aunt Nira teased me.

  "Perhaps you’d leave her alone?" My mother defended me again. "She’s not allowed to discuss her work."

  She turned to me and smiled at me with understanding. I smiled back. I knew that, later on, she would try to squeeze all the juicy details of the case out of me. I tried to understand why she had been so protective of me lately. Was it that motherly instinct that everybody talked about, which seemed to have been stirred up in her lately, or was it her wish to be the first and exclusive source of all the information at my disposal?

  "The truth is, I don't have too much to tell," I said and sipped my Coke.

  "Fine… we won’t bother you," said my aunt in a placating tone of voice. "Did you hear our news?"

  "What news?"

  "Orly’s pregnant again!" answered my aunt jubilantly and bestowed a warm, suffocating embrace on her daughter. Orly was two years older than me. For years, we had shared the same pitying looks reserved for childless women. I, at least, had been married for a not-too-short period, but Orly had only got married three years ago, at the advanced age of thirty-four. A year after her wedding, she gave birth to a son, and now she was about to bring another offspring into the world. Indeed, my dear aunt could leave this world without any cloud hovering above her only daughter’s head.

  "Congratulations!" I called out, adding in a near-whisper, "Indeed, everybody’s pregnant…" I added in a whisper.

  "What?" Shira heard me muttering and shrieked at once, "Who else is pregnant?"

  "Yinon's wife."

  "Your Yinon?!" Ayala and Shira were shocked.

  "It turns out he’s not really mine anymore," I said and knew that the chance of holding back my tears was nil. My mother rushed to get up and hug me. In the background, I heard my aunt asking Shira when Yinon had remarried. "I didn’t know that he’d remarried at all," she answered in a whisper.

  I do not cry a lot, and when it happens, I try not to do it in front of other people. It does not fit with the image I try to construct for myself. Rather, just as I find it difficult to handle other people’s sorrow, it is hard for me to handle other people's reaction to my sorrow. I cannot bear the thought that I am the object of pity. However, this time around, my mother's hug was the thing I needed most. I felt like a five-year-old girl again, and Mother's protective embrace shielded me from the whole world.

  "How long have you known about it?" she asked me.

  "Just since yesterday."

  "Why didn't you share it with me right away?"

  "I didn't have the time."

  She looked at me, full of compassion. I knew what she was thinking. For each phone call from me, my sisters called her about five hundred times. They called her several times a day in order to update her with trivialities, while I did not even call her to tell her about something so fundamental.

  "It's not good to keep things locked up inside." She cuddled me gently. "You’ll give yourself an ulcer."

  "Right," I said and broke away from her embrace, which had become oppressive.

  I went to the bathroom to blow my nose and wash my face. When I returned to the table, I saw Aunt Nira looking at me with that look, the one my mother had managed to wean herself from. It said, "I told you so."

  "All’s well!" I said in the most joyful voice I could assume.

  "If you say so." My aunt could not stop herself, and my mother gave her a blood -curdling look.

  "Aunt Nira," I told her calmly, "I know that all that reverberates in your head now is 'I told you so,' but I can assure you: I haven’t changed my mind about parenting. I’m sad because my story with Yinon is over in a final way. That's all." I hoped I sounded convincing, because I had to convince myself as well.

  We managed to finish dinner without additional scenes, to my mother's great delight. We avoided talking about anything that could cause one of us to burst into tears, which more or less limited the conversation to talking about the weather and reality shows, most of which I had never heard of.

  I returned home relaxed and full. I took Tsumi out for a walk and went to bed before eleven. I could not remember when I had settled to sleep so early in the last two months. I decided I had had enough drama for one week, and planned to spend the weekend in bed with a good book and some food, which I would get from my mother the following day. I fell asleep with a sweet smile of expectation.

  My smile disappeared at 2:00 A.M., when my cell phone woke me up.

  "Hello?" I half-said, half-asked sleepily.

  "Hadas Levinger?" The authoritative voice at the other end also half-spoke, half-asked.

  "Yes…" My sleepy voice became confused.

  "This is Attorney Idan Margolin from the District Attorney's office. Are you the investigator in the murder case of Koby Ozri and Shirley Navon?" He got to the point right away.

  "Right."

  "Great," he breathed heavily. It was apparent from his voice that he had endured several particularly stormy hours.

  "We have a state's witness for your case, it appears."

  "What?" My confusion became perplexity.

  "We have someone who claims that he knows who murdered Koby Ozri and Shirley Navon."

  I was silent. I was shocked and speechless. He continued: "Can you get to the station now for a preliminary interrogation of the witness?"

  "Fifteen minutes," I answered and parted from my bed with a sorrowful look.

  CHAPTER 8

  Anya Ivanov hated life in Russia. She had only been a little girl when the old Soviet regime had been in power, so she had to believe her parents when they said that life was currently a paradise compared to what it had been in the past. Still, she was a young, educated woman. She even toured Europe for a while when she was invited to do some modeling in Milan, so she knew that life in Russia was very far from what the West had to offer young people. As an only child, she found it hard to leave her loving, aging parents, but she knew that she would not want to put down roots in Moscow or in any other city in Russia. She was a beautiful young woman, tall and shapely, her long blond hair framed her pretty face, and her large, blue eyes glowed like two gemstones.

  In Milan, she received quite a few job offers and several fashion designers practically begged her to stay and continue modelling for them. But she opted to return to Moscow to complete her degree in electronic engineering. Anya was determined to succeed in life. A lot of guys courted her, but she was careful not to fall in love. In reality, she did not have to be too careful; she was disgusted by the typical Russian masculine chauvinist. She longed for a man who would listen to her, and let her express herself without fear – not from him, and not from society's response.

  Her beloved father had been one of the rare men she had known who had not been a chauvinist. He had treated her mother like an equal. He had never beaten her, had never sworn at her, and had always encouraged her to express her opinion fearlessly. She remembered well how her girlfriends had been shocked by her parents' conduct during her birthday party. It turned out that her father had brought the wrong cake from the confectionery.

  "Dimitri!" her mother said angrily when she realized that another child's name was written on the cake in creamy letters. "It’s not the cake I ordered!"

  Her father apologized and rushed off to replace the cake at once.

  Other mothers would have covered the cake with a layer of cream and decorated it with the correct name. None of them would have dared to send her husband to bring a new cake, and would certainly not have yelled at him in the presence of strangers.

  During the difficult winter of 2009, her father was stricken with severe flu and infected her mother. They were old and sick and both of them passed away within three months. After recovering from her deep mourning, Anya knew that nothing was holding her in Russia any more. She started looking for work in various countries in Europe, and tried her luck in the US and Canada as well. But the world had been steeped in its own mourning and had not
recovered yet from severe economic instability. Unemployment was rife everywhere in the world, and good jobs were snapped up fast. Anya's prospects of getting a position – as a foreigner who did not speak the language well – were low.

  She completed her internship in engineering, but, without good connections, she was out of the loop as far as good positions were concerned. And she did not have connections. In the end, she was accepted for a position that even a high school graduate could do with her eyes closed and her hands tied. At a certain point, she considered going back to modeling. She was now twenty-eight, a young woman by any measure, but in the realm of modeling, she was considered to be a dinosaur. Her few girlfriends and male friends were in various stages of romantic relationships and one girlfriend was even pregnant, and Anya began to feel stuck. There were still quite a few guys interested in her, though fewer than before, but she still insisted that she was not interested in Russian men. Once in a while, she relented and dated someone, only to discover that she should have trusted her instincts after all.

  About six months after her parents' passing, Anya decided to try her luck with international dating websites. She had done some research on the subject and knew of several websites where Western men advertised for Russian brides. However, there were also some websites where it was possible to meet men who were interested in an egalitarian relationship. She registered with one of those, along with men and women from all over the world, and felt safe. Her profile was rather attractive; she was young and good-looking and received many responses. The main obstacle was the language. Though Anya's English was quite good, she found it hard to type fast in English, and the more difficult problem was that many guys whose profiles she liked did not know any English.

  Two weeks after she had registered on that website, she already started to lose hope that she would find love there. But then she received a response from a guy named Ilan. The name intrigued her. She never heard of such a name. She examined his profile: thirty-two, and from Israel. Her late father had admired the State of Israel and used any opportunity to tell how his maternal grandfather was of Jewish origins. Her father had told her that Israel was a small state in the Middle East, and, though surrounded by hostile countries, it had a strong army and a modern economy. She also knew that quite a few Russian-speaking Jews had immigrated to Israel after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. She examined Ilan's picture. He looked robust, healthy and tanned. He looked somewhat Middle-Eastern, which intrigued her. After a correspondence of several stuttering sentences in English, Ilan asked if she would prefer to correspond in Russian. Anya was surprised. Ilan did not look like someone with Russian roots. She was, of course, glad to switch to her native language. Soon she discovered that Ilan was fluent in the language, though he wrote with quite a few errors. Ilan told her that his parents had immigrated to Israel from Odessa in 1971, right after getting married. He and his two brothers were born in Israel, and spoke Russian at home and Hebrew at school, but since he had never learned to write in Russian, he made many mistakes.