by Paul Usiskin
‘Reminds me of a joke.’ Yossi grinned. ‘An elderly couple driving through DC are stopped by a patrolman? He tells the husband they’re driving too slow.
The wife, hard of hearing, asks, ‘What did he say?’
The husband shouts, ‘He says we were driving too slow!’
The patrolman asks for his license and registration. The wife asks, ‘What did he say?’
The husband shouts, ‘He wants to see my license and registration!’
The patrolman looks it over, ‘You’re from Staten Island? I had the worst sex of my life in Staten Island!’
The wife yells, ‘What did he say?’
The husband shouts, ‘He says he thinks he knows you!’
Dov was still laughing as they reached the terminal.
Waiting for their flight call, Dov scanned the other passengers. It was a reflex: Crowd, suspects, scan. He was looking for Daniel Freund’s attackers. They weren’t there. His pan stopped at a child and his father. The child was pleading. The father was about 6ft 6ins, muscly, close cropped hair, probably ex-military, a face as stony as a Rushmore sculpture. He ignored his son. The child was obese, over half his father’s height, and given a decent exercise regime and diet, he could end up looking very like his father. He kept repeating, ‘Why aren’t you happy Daddy?’ and looking like he’d burst out crying the longer he was ignored. No one else took any notice. Except Dov, who wondered what kind of father this was, and whether Yakub would ever be this desperate, and Dov as silently dismissive.
Dov spotted the attackers entering the transit lounge at JFK. The flesh colored band-aid over Slim’s nose didn’t blend in, and Heavy didn’t do surreptitious too well, wincing from his aching kidneys. They reminded him of Warsaw ghetto photos of the Judenrat police with armbands, truncheons and irredeemable eyes, healthy looking Jews, who always took care of themselves first. In the business lounge Dov spoke to an El Al supervisor. Five minutes later he had the names of the two men. He called his senior aide Amos Yerushalmi in Jerusalem who came back with a résumé of their police records.
He read it to Aviel.‘Reuben Levin and Jerry Stein, both ex-Jewish Defense League, convictions for aggravated assault in the US. At home they’re under suspicion for participating in assaults on Palestinians, Price Tagging, but no charges.’ Price tagging was settler ‘revenge’ for any Palestinian activity deemed deserving of reciprocal action, even if it wasn’t, like tearing up olive groves and damaging vehicles. ‘They work for some computer design outfit in the occupied territories. Can’t we stop them leaving the US?’
‘We’d have to show cause and it’d probably only delay not stop them flying out,’ Aviel said, ‘cos it’s primarily your word against theirs. From what you told me it’s unlikely Freund got a clear view of them.’
Dov asked, ‘Who do you know?’
Twenty minutes later the El Al supervisor told Aviel a police officer was waiting to escort them to the airport security center. Through the one-way glass Dov identified the men. They looked at ease.
‘Is that you Chizzik?’ Heavy bellowed. ‘See You Next Tuesday! Gettit?’ It was the anonymous caller’s voice.
Aviel translated, ‘C U N T!’
‘Nice,’ Dov said. The officer told him the men would be held pending further inquiries into the Freund assault. A Metro Center officer was flying up.
On the Tel Aviv flight Dov read about the Six Days of the Bidermans. Aviel wasn’t talkative, looked out of the window, ignored the in-flight film, pecked at his food, his tension rising noticeably. He glanced at the article Dov pointed out.
‘Fuck sake, Dov, they’re kidnapping Israeli families now?’
‘There’s more to it than that, but whatever, you’ll be tomorrow’s front page news.’
Aviel didn’t comment and looking at his frown Dov said, ‘My grandfather told me a Russian saying, ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.’’
‘Oh right, let’s keep going til the fuel runs out?’ Aviel doleful.
Dov’s thoughts turned to Hareven. He didn’t believe in fate. There was a logical reason for most acts. The honey trap was his next thought. The object of his lust had been Sara Moledet the call girl, who seduced him in a supermarket. It happened at a time when his life was on a cusp. He loved being a police investigator; Liora had other ambitions for him, Police Commissioner as a stepping stone into politics and national leadership.
He didn’t know that Sara was really Sophia Gulkowitsch a new immigrant from Estonia; her real identity came in the headlines after her body was found in dunes outside Tel Aviv, dumped like trash on a waste heap. Neither she nor Dov had any idea who was behind the trap, or so she professed. She’d been approached anonymously with a detailed plan to bring him down with an offer of money she couldn’t refuse. Dov’s work in TPI was the reason; he’d successfully smashed a porn video duplication center. He’d become sex-dependant on her, like an addict. He knew her in a way he’d never known another woman. That she harbored feelings for him, came from a cryptic poem she’d hand written which reached him after her murder. He knew it off by heart:
What’s in a name?
My first is a land that is mother’s or home.
The second is a mountain all made of stone.
Who am I? And who is he?...
‘Sorry’ the last word should really be.
Sorry too about Mint Tea.
But it isn’t. It’s goodbye.
He’d puzzled over it ever since. Mint Tea was a reference to a trafficked sex slave he’d been nurturing into giving evidence against her traffickers. He’d been negligent, Aviel had protested that he was risking her life, then she’d disappeared. That was before Sara in the supermarket, with those endless legs and I-want-you look, and his whole life had crumbled. The Mint Tea reference told him Sara had known much more than being a consummate courtesan.
At one point during the Defense Ministry scandal investigation, he’d decided that Sara had tried to tell him that the ‘he’ was Hareven. What was a ‘mountain all made of stone’? Har was mountain in Hebrew and Even was stone. A more prosaic version was Stonemount, the name of Hareven’s multinational. At the time Dov had been looking into a hi-tech defense manufacturer called Lodestone. It was a Stonemount company, developing the next generation of drones, the size of insects. He and Aviel had been given a demonstration of swarming beetle drones and mosquitoes with miniaturized weapons.
Moledet was the Hebrew for motherland or homeland, but Dov couldn’t figure what that was about. He was sure Sara and Hareven were linked, but he had no hard facts.
And now here was Aviel Weiss pointing a finger at Hareven and surprise, surprise, in a context where sex was the focal point, and a red line on his mental white board went straight back to Sara. Coincidence was never ignored by any true investigator, and Dov retrieved one great detective’s query, ‘What do we say about coincidence? We say that the world is rarely so lazy.’ His inflight stasis lulled Dov to sleep but the little voice in his head whispered ‘it’s not vengeance, it’s justice’ and Dov murmured, ‘Oh really?’ Aviel heard him and asked, ‘Are you OK?’ and Dov said, ‘I guess so.’
At Ben Gurion Airport the press and media pack was almost as big as the crowd waiting to greet other arrivals. Aviel looked suitably grim. Dov recited, ‘Brigadier General Weiss has agreed to willingly assist the Police Investigations Department in an inquiry,’ then a phalanx of police officers cleared a way through the crush.
As they reached Amos Yerushalmi and the Ministry staff car, Aviel muttered, ‘Hope I’m not going to be a star attraction for too long’
Over that Dov asked, ‘Amos, can you do a trace on access to my personal file? Somebody got into it and it’s to do with this Rotem thing.’ He described his meeting with the Minister for Senate Affairs and asked him to contact Foreign Ministry security to check the Minister had changed his password and not shared it with Yardena.<
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8
Four Palestinians disappeared.
They were there at home one night and gone the next morning, Farouk Shehadeh the father, thirty seven, Aisha his wife, thirty, Hussein their ten-year-old son and Leyla their eight-year-old daughter.
Her school was the first to query Leyla’s absence. After getting no replies from calls to the Shehadeh’s home in Al-Bireh, a classy suburb north of Ramallah, undeclared Palestinian capital, and to Aisha’s cell-phone, the head teacher called her counterpart at Hussein’s school. The head inquired, apologized for keeping her waiting, but Hussein was not in school either and his attempts to reach Farouk Shehadeh at his insurance business office had only worried his secretary who had no answer from calls to her boss. As the boys’ school was close to the Shehadeh house, the head teacher sent his deputy to the Shehadeh home. He came back twenty minutes later saying he’d found the back door unlocked, no one in the house.
A series of calls were made to the wider family, Farouk’s brothers and sisters, Aisha’s sisters, but they knew of no travel plans and no reason for this absence; they were all due at Farouk’s parents house for the usual family Friday night supper.
Ghazi Shehadeh, Farouk’s elder brother, contacted the police a day after exhaustive friends and extended family calls. He was desperate, but knowing the disarray in the Palestine Civil Police he had little expectation of results.
Ghazi repeatedly phoned the PCP HQ in Ramallah but got polite apologies, then curt reactions over the next twenty-four hours. The PCP was full of enthusiastic recruits, but short on experienced police officers. Corporal Faris who took Ghazi’s calls was a rookie cop, starting at the very bottom as a reception clerk. He knew how lacking in expertise and equipment the PCP was. He’d joined the HQ in early summer where only the previous spring, vehicle and communications levels were boosted to near full complement. Until then handheld radios didn’t have batteries, external and internal phone lines worked intermittently, they still weren’t totally reliable, and colleagues used their own vehicles, if they had them, for work. Builders were still cluttering the HQ’s corridors erecting an operations room and technicians kept interrupting with tests for radio communications integration.
Three days later news of the Shehadeh family’s disappearance reached a sergeant in CID.
Corporal Faris handed Detective Sergeant Hisham Nabulsi a note on the Friday morning. It read: ‘Ghazi Shehadeh keeps phoning. His brother’s family is missing – Farouk, his wife and their two children. ‘What should I tell him?’
‘How often has he called?’ asked Nabulsi, a tall thirty five year old, intense eyes, short dark hair and neat mustache.
‘Since Wednesday.’
Everyone knew the Shehadeh family. They were one of the oldest in Al-Bireh. Amer Shehadeh, Farouk’s father had been mayor for many years and Farouk’s insurance company was one of the most respected. ‘So they’ve been missing three days?’
‘It’s four. Ghazi called a day after he’d tried family and friends.’
‘What has the crime scene officer reported?’
‘Nothing. There isn’t a crime scene officer.’
‘Has anyone talked to Ghazi, or his parents, other family members and friends, Farouk’s work colleagues, or visited the children’s schools?’
‘No.’
‘And I suppose no one’s spoken to neighbors?’
‘Well no. Is that what’s supposed to happen?’
‘Yes, in a normal police force.’
Faris looked downcast.
‘Who have you shown this to in CID?’
‘I don’t know who to talk to.’
‘Tell me Faris, what do you think I do here, what’s my job?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m in CID. How come you decided to show this to me now?’
‘I see you every morning, and you offered me a cigarette once.’
‘I see. OK, in future pass on urgent messages immediately, OK? Anything else connected to this, tell me. Here’s my cell number,’ and he waited as Faris wrote it down.
Hisham managed to get keys for a recently arrived VW Passat police vehicle, and drove to the Shehadeh’s home. The sky above the town was cloudy, dark enough for Hisham to use his sidelights. The street was muddy from late autumn rains washing away earth from numerous building sites. He parked, took a roll of crime scene tape from the trunk and walked up the freshly blacktopped driveway. It glistened after the rain and still smelled of tar. He fixed tape to the front door, the garage door and the back yard door. He gazed up and down, at sidewalks and streetlights, tidy front yards, new-builds from the rapid modernization and expansion of Ramallah, spilling into its environs.
On the few occasions Hisham had traveled to Jerusalem he’d seen Israeli neighborhoods identical to this one, a kind of Palestinians keeping up with the Cohens. Here was an oasis of tidiness in the jungle of Ramallah; if someone had enough money and wanted to build a home or an apartment house, they did it, without planning permission or consideration for the surrounding environment. Money, in varying quantities changed hands. Such edifices popped up out of the ground everywhere, interspersed with empty plots of land that became alternative rubbish tips. The municipality bravely fought back, turning a few vacant spaces into fully equipped children’s play areas.
Hisham lived in three rooms in a late Ottoman era house in Ramallah’s old city. He was from Nablus, hence the name Nabulsi. His mother came from al-Khalil, Hebron, city of the friend of God, and her explanation about why he grew to be so tall and strong was that her family line went all the way back to an ancient clan of giants around al-Khalil. God had other friends than Ibrahim, tall ones, she’d said. Hisham’s elder brother Ramsi was tall too. He’d been caught by the Shin Bet after a bus bombing. He was convicted of manufacturing the bomb, which killed fifteen and injured thirty-seven. He proclaimed his innocence and his attorney insisted that the evidence against his client was circumstantial. The Israeli military judge thought otherwise. The IDF had arrived early one morning a week after Ramsi was sentenced to life, and bulldozed his parents’ house.
It was an act indelibly stamped on Hisham’s memory and was reinforced by Ramsi’s changed appearance each time he went with his mother to visit him in prison. Ramsi had become a devout believer, spouting Jihadist slogans from a mouth framed by a bushy beard. Hisham was secular and in that, he swam against a changing tide.
He wanted to know who he was and what was his people’s past, the better to know where he and they were going. His degree from An-Najah National University in Nablus gave him an all-encompassing vision from Pre-Islam through the Golden Age in Spain, to the Ottoman Empire, the Jews in Modern Ages and the History of Modern Palestine.
In between seducing foreign exchange girl students, Hisham learned that the high point of the 20th century secular pan-Arab movement, to which Yassir Arafat had hitched his Fateh wagon, was past. And Israel was to blame. The 1948 Nakba, catastrophe, the knockout one Palestinian academic called it, when Israel was born and Palestine was lost, was bad enough. The 1967 Six Day War, the Naksa, set back, was another shock.
For Hisham the Palestinian national movement was too diffuse, headed by Arafat, an old Pasha, dominating everything but no match for Israel. The Israelis were all about the means of attaining their objectives, ruthless about achieving them.
He didn’t like Hamas, but they stood up to Israel; he’d applauded their tenacity but wouldn’t vote for them.
Despite his obvious failings, The Rais, President Yassir Arafat, was his hero and he was proud of his membership of Fateh. It had helped him get his job in the police force; he’d leapfrogged other candidates who weren’t members.
But as Fateh imploded after Arafat’s death, policing became an either or. Either citizens did as they were told or the police brutalized them. Palestinian police were viewed as partners in the occupation or ine
ffectual. That hardened many officers. Palestinians were caught between frustration and despair over the lack of a future. They were hemmed in by Israel. Ramallah was surrounded by walls, the so-called security barrier, beyond which on the hills at the city’s edge, Israeli settlements burgeoned, red-roofed and immaculate, water and electricity rarely interrupted, IDF and Israel Police in constant evidence.
The PCP was only eighteen years old, born out of one of the treaties of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. The Intifadas interrupted the force’s integration. Its Chief had been so corrupt, a dissident group kidnapped him and released him on condition the Rais fired him. He did, but then put his even more notorious cousin Musa in charge. He was killed by other dissidents.
Hisham sighed, ‘We forgive the Rais so much, now that he’s dead.’
On the street, he began his own door-to-door, doing what he imagined a CID officer should do. He hoped his bosses, the head of CID and the Chief of Police, would sanction it. It took him away from his crowded desk at the National Directorate building at the Ein Munjid-Jaffa Street crossroad, where he spent his time mostly picking over a salad of reports, drug related crime, street thefts, checkpoint abuse, none of which was he able to fully investigate.
Few bothered answering his knock; he saw eyes looking up the street to see his vehicle, faces turning away from their windows.
At the eighth house, diagonally opposite the Shehadeh’s, a sullen teenage girl bursting out of her puppy fat in tight jeans and pink sweatshirt answered. Her name was Jihan. Hisham asked if she’d noticed anything unusual on the street. ‘Only the black car that drove by five nights ago,’ she said.
‘Did you see what make? Did you see the plate? What time?’
‘It was around eleven at night, I was listening to music before going to sleep and stood up to close the curtains. It looked like those vehicles you see on TV shows, big, with black windows, like they have for the American President. It was coming away from the Shehadeh’s.’
‘How could you see so clearly? There’re trees in your front yard. How do you know it was coming from there?’
