by Paul Usiskin
She hadn’t.
11
‘We’re challenging the forensic analysis. We need the devices used for the analysis independently analyzed.’
Liora’s opening salvo, minutes after Dov, Aviel, Yoel, a Justice Ministry lawyer advising Aviel, Yardena and Liora had all taken seats around a Ministry conference table. It came after a chance meeting between Liora and Dov at the elevator bank in the Ministry.
She’d growled, ‘How’s your Arab whore? Still playing that cracked old Nakba 1948 tragedy record? No one gives a shit.’
Dov replied, emptying his voice of emotion, ‘If no one gives a shit, why bring it up? I thought you were happily settled into your relationship with that guy at your office. Why so aggressive? Things not working out between you?’
‘As if you cared. I knew you’d been pussy whipped by that call-girl, but at least she was Jewish.’
‘Nice try. I’m not going there.’
In the conference room Yoel said coolly, ‘You seem to be cutting off your nose here, legally speaking Mrs Chizzik.’
‘It’s Ms Livnat. Explain about my legal nose.’
‘As you introduced the matter of devices, we need the original device on which the alleged crime was recorded. That device is your client’s. It’s a camcorder, with cell phone Bluetooth remote access. I imagine it’s still in her possession. We analyzed the recording on the memory stick your client provided. It was a copy. We ask for the original. That too must be analyzed. You’ve read the acoustic forensic results. Querying the authenticity of the forensic examination is a fatuous attempt to gain time for reasons a court would find ridiculous.’
Yardena couldn’t hide her shock at the details about the camcorder.
‘We’re ready to test that,’ Liora said firmly. ‘The sooner a court hearing can be arranged the better.’
‘The forensic facility would need to approve the access you request, and that’s inter-Ministerial. It can be quite a lengthy process.’ Yoel said.
‘Now who’s playing for time?’ Liora asked as she and Yardena stood to leave. ‘Hear from you Sunday then.’
‘I can’t promise. And your client’s recording device?’ asked Yoel.
‘I asked first.’
After they’d gone Yoel sat back, irritation in his voice. ‘They’re raising the heat on this in order to negotiate a different outcome to a Foreign Ministry disciplinary procedure. Right now the last thing you want is a court appearance and that’s their only tactic.’
‘What should we do?’ Aviel asked.
‘What do you think Dov?’ said Yoel.
‘Yoel, you talk to the facility, OK? You all right for the rest of the day Aviel? I’ve got a lot to get through, then I’m going to Yafo. I’ll see you at the apartment sometime tomorrow afternoon.’
Aviel ran a hand over his face, ‘I’m in a limbo. I don’t really want to see any of my friends; they’ll only want to know why I’m still here and I’m not up for that.’
Dov shrugged.
Amos Yerushalmi briefed him on his personal file hacking. ‘It’s a no-trace hacker, but that won’t deter us.’
‘Yardena wouldn’t know how to do that. Initially I thought she’d accessed her boss’s computer at the Embassy. This is something else. It means another individual hacked my file and gave her the details. And whoever that is, you can bet they guided Yardena about the video recording, and probably did the voice dub. If our people can’t trace the hackers, we can always ask Shimon Ben Shimon.’
Amos glowered. ‘He always overcharges. We should use 8200.’ He meant the IDF’s equivalent to the NSA.
‘OK call them... you have already…’ Dov nodded, unsurprised. Amos moved on to current cases. When he’d finished, he added, ‘Walla! The opposition parties are supporting the war?’
‘Did you say Walla? Listen very carefully Amos. I’m not anti-Arab or Arabic. But I will not have my senior aide drifting into street slang working for me. Do not use Walla, Yalla, Sababa or any other examples of that here.’
Amos nodded once and his boss resumed. ‘So? The country’s under attack. They might as well concede the election now, the Man’s going to win it for sure.’
Amos gave a yeah-well shrug, took Dov’s follow-up instructions and left to work on them. Dov read his iPad notes after his call to Zvi Yaakov. He checked his cell contacts and called Dennis Allerdyce. It was a brief, formal but friendly call - ‘cop to cop’, Dov joked - in which he penetrated the Ulster-ish and established that Allerdyce had spoken with an Avi Mazal at the Judea and Samaria Police HQ. He called Mazal.
After introducing himself he said, ‘Avi, just wanted a brief chat on the background to the TNT2 Al-Bireh abductions.’
There was a long silence.
‘You still there?’
‘What’s PID’s interest?’
‘Oh just an update. Anything you can tell me?’
‘It looks very different from here.’
‘You mean the view?’
‘We’re in an island, down here. It’s like a police oasis on a hill.’
‘It won’t be an oasis for very long. Maalei Adumim’s expanding. Soon you’ll be lost in an urban landscape. Your HQ’s just down the road from Jerusalem? Not exactly miles from civilization.’
‘Whatever. In this temporary oasis I do as I’m told.’
‘Of course.’
‘Even if I want to throw up afterwards.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Nothing. I’m just doing as I’m told. And then TNT2 did what they did.’ Mazal went quiet and Dov waited, but the quiet lengthened.
‘I can come to you. What’s your address?’
Mazal told him. ‘I have Sunday morning off.’
‘OK. Say nine?’
‘OK. This is very confidential.’
‘Obviously, let’s swap cell numbers just in case?’
By mid afternoon on Friday, Dov had made more inroads into the backlog since his Washington visit. His Inbox had gone down from 2376 to 1751, and the stack of files on his desk had come down enough that he didn’t have to stand to see who came in. He wrote recommendations on an investigation into the fatal shooting the previous October by police cadets of a man threatening suicide. He discussed with Ministry lawyers possible charges against a Border Police officer for shooting a Palestinian youth in Hebron waving a gun that proved to have been a toy, and was updated on another case of four Border Policemen who’d assaulted and abused a mentally disabled Palestinian.
He sat back in his chair, stretching his legs and rubbing his temples.
‘Shabbat Shalom Dov.’ He hadn’t noticed Amos enter, still hadn’t got used to how he magically materialized.
‘How’s the war?’ asked Dov.
‘Which part of it?’
‘Whichever you think I’d want to know about?’
‘There’s an information war, but not as we know it.’
Dov sat up. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s in cyberspace. The Gaza drone strike on Wednesday? It was on YouTube minutes after it happened. Then there’s the Twitter war.’
‘The what?’
‘The IDF Spokesman’s English language Twitter account traded threats with Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades and it’s gone viral, international; the Spokesman Tweeted video and stills before issuing them to the press and media.’
Dov’s face said this is beyond me.
‘Yes, and things have got a little more over the top, not in a good way.’
Dov awaited further revelations.
‘Some gung-ho kids in IDF New Media posted a still of the Gaza strike victim with the word ‘Eliminated’ in red caps across his face.’
‘God’s sake! IDF New Media?’
‘Yes, that’s what it’s called. They’re Twitter happy.’
Dov closed his
eyes and waved Amos away and when he thought he’d dematerialized he stood up, shut down his laptop, packed his iPad and left his office.
Friday in Israel most offices shut early and by lunchtime the Ministry was an empty edifice. People were off shopping for Shabbat, or schmoozing in their favorite coffee places, eating large late lunches. Dov rarely left until around four.
Jerusalem had that closing-down-for-Shabbat air, traffic quieter, streets emptying, families preparing for synagogue to welcome the Bride of Shabbat as the mood of rest and prayer spread out across the city.
Shabbat brought memories of Grandpa Dudik and with them the climax of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven. Traffic was light up to the French Hill interchange for Route 1 and eventually Tel Aviv, enough for Dov to glance up at the entrance to the Hill. There, in a ground floor apartment with its own garden in one of the early apartment blocks, Dudik Chizzik had lived his last years.
Dov wondered why Dudik didn’t appear in the history books he’d read in the school library; he’d found two other Chizziks who’d contributed to the State’s history.
Shabbat with Dudik was riotous, he always had some equally eccentric woman with him, usually much younger. Dan, Dov’s father, had said of Dudik, ‘He had several wives, some of them his own,’ and mumbled about Dudik being an old goat, leaving that to Dov’s teenage imagination. Later he got why his father was reticent about Dudik; there was a hint that Dan had brothers and sisters, not by his mother.
Dudik was wonderfully opaque about when he’d been born ‘Late eighteen something, eighty-eight or nine, can’t remember.’ He described his family as religious, his grandfather had been a shtetl rabbi who became a successful furrier, and his father eventually owned the family business in Moscow.
‘My grandfather had some very influential Goyischer - non-Jewish - clients, and that allowed him to run and keep a Jewish business in that city after Jews were banned.’ It was a Friday afternoon, on their usual route to the Jerusalem Forest, the top of his red convertible down, the stereo blaring Led Zeppelin; Grandpa Dudik was a fan long before Stairway to Heaven. ‘You’ve seen Fiddler on the Roof?’ he’d shouted.
‘Sure.’
‘My family’s life before Moscow was something like that...’
The forty-something dazzling red head, Irina, a new immigrant from Ekaterinberg, reached across and turned down the radio, which got a pithy Russian curse from Dudik, but he left the sound level alone.
‘Anatevka looked pristine as compared. Our shtetl was grubby, dirty, no proper sewage, shit and piss in the streets, which weren’t properly paved, leaking roofs, winters freezing enough to ice up your balls ...’
Dudik invariably picked the hour when Shabbat had just begun, to drive along Bar Ilan Street. There was no motorway and tunnel network in those days.
Bar Ilan Street had ultra-orthodox enclaves either side.
‘They look like our neighbors from that crappy shtetl!’ Dudik snarled. ‘My father used to make and sell fur streimels just like those, but for Goyim, not for Jews.’
Dov saw men wearing the tall circular black fur hats his great grandfather had once manufactured. They were dressed in black silk coats, and knee breaches, white socks and black shoes.
Hand on horn, Dudik would slow and taunt them in Yiddish ‘Shabbess! Shabbess,’ before they could shout and raise their fists at his breach of the Sabbath. His women were either blondes or redheads in flashy clothes, their revealing tops adding more incitement to the men in black on Bar Ilan.
He’d once asked Dudik whether he was held by his past. Dudik’s face transitioned through querulous, surprised, perplexed. ‘That’s a brilliant question. It shows maturity beyond your years. It’s like this: My past has many colors. As much as any sentient being, I’m a product of my past, my family’s, our ancient people’s extraordinary perambulations. To be held by all that suggests a degree of inability to progress and in that sense no, my past does not own me because I believe in change, the core of progress, everything changes, nothing stays the same. So I am not who I was, I am who I am now. How’s that?’
After he died the news papers and TV we’re full of obituaries for him. Dan gave him an edited version of how Dudik came to Israel and what he had done. He’d been a refugee to America and, ‘Came up to Eretz Israel, The Land of Israel.’ He’d been a fervent Zionist nationalist and he’d accumulated enough protektsia, influence, to help Dan in his banking career. He said nothing more about his father’s womanizing.
On Dudik’s politics, Dan paused then said, ‘My father believed that the occupation was no good for us. He was a total paradox if you ask me, what with his nationalistic politics, but that was my father.’
Dan wouldn’t elucidate. Of his relationship with Dudik, all Dan said was, ‘We didn’t see eye to eye, your grandfather and me. He was a bit of a pirate.’ Nevertheless, memories of Dudik always made Dov smile.
Dov once reminded Dudik that he lived in occupied territory. French Hill was on the wrong side of the Green Line. ‘Yes,’ Dudik had beamed, ‘we’re a people of marvelous paradoxes.’
The radio intruded, reporting the cabinet’s approval to call up 75,000 reserves in readiness for a ground operation in Gaza. The Egyptian Foreign Minister chose this moment to make the first official Egyptian visit to Gaza since 1967, in solidarity, amidst rumors of an Egyptian cease-fire initiative. Israel halted its aerial operations during the visit. There were no missile alerts on Dov’s drive down to Tel Aviv and the beaches looked almost as full as in the summer months.
What was left of the afternoon was spent with Yakub and Lana, having ice cream, listening to Yakub describe his week. He wanted a ride on Dov’s Segway, but Dov told him it was put away until next summer. Despite the crowded beaches winter was approaching.
After an early meal, Yakub went out to play and Dov and Lana sat talking about this latest war against Gaza, she anxious about the loss of innocent life on both sides, knowing the fatalities would be much higher in Gaza, he fuming at the pointlessness of it.
‘Of course any country has the right to defend its citizens when they’re attacked,’ he said, ‘but there’re other things that could have been done and should be done to avoid this war.’
‘We both know they’ll never talk to Hamas.’
‘That’s what they said about the PLO.’
‘Hamas is different, fundamentalist first and that drives its politics. They’re not going to be flexible in their positions. The PLO was a secular liberation movement. Without Arafat it’s just the shell of an egg.’
‘Whose side are you on?’
‘Mine. I’m an Arab and a Muslim, and I believe in civilized engagement. Israel will have to engage with political Islam eventually. The alternative is Jihad - Holy War.’
‘Yes, well, we are in an election and the Man wants to project the tough war leader image; it’s always a vote catcher with his tribal voting right wingers. Will you vote? I hear Arab Palestinian citizens don’t see the point.’
‘No we don’t and who can blame us? It’s not enough that we lost our land. You keep pushing us to the edges, which radicalizes our young people, and then you shout that we’re a fifth column for Islamic fundamentalism. Anyway, I haven’t been radicalized. I’m working with a joint Arab-Jewish list, supporting equality.’
‘I’m surprised you’d want to get involved with them. They don’t have much of a press profile; they work on social media, Facebook.’
‘I didn’t think you’d bother with that.’
‘Funnily enough I’ve been known to surf Facebook, is that how you say it?’
She smiled. ‘You’d say it.’
‘I’ll let you into a secret. I even have a Facebook friend, Liran. He’s in New York. We exchange views, ideas, mostly on politics. A good man.’ Lana gave a sweet smile. He asked what she thought about the Biderman affair.
‘I’m sorry
I never thought of it. It’s so simple. A role-play. In this case, another form of non-violent protest. And they carried it off.’
‘I can’t tell you what I know officially, but personally I’d say this was a well executed psychological warfare operation, and if terrorist groups were ever to roll this out as their modus operandi, the effects would be devastating. It’s taking Gandhi’s non-violent philosophy to a new level, not that Gandhi would have approved; the threat of violence was implicit.’
Lana was quiet for a moment. ‘So this wasn’t a terrorist group?’
‘I didn’t say either way.’
‘It sounded like respect for your enemy.’
He nodded twice. ‘What I’ve learned is that when people are pushed to the wall they act in astonishing ways. We were like that. The fight for survival does that.’ He wanted to kiss her. Maybe a rocket from Gaza would fall on them and he wouldn’t be able to kiss her ever again. But he knew that kissing her would break the agreed rules in their platonic relationship. He tried to expunge the thought of such a rocket strike. They watched the news and Dov’s anxieties were reduced a little when it was reported that an Iron Dome anti-missile system was being deployed for Tel Aviv.
Maybe it was Lana’s hair style, she looked sleek and very sexy; whatever it was, Dov wanted her, the physical more than the intellectual Lana.
Yes he wanted her, but not for his own gratification, or the fun ‘I need a fuck and so do you and we’ll enjoy it and forget it, like a three star film, good but not great, what was your name again?’
He wanted to make love with Lana as that flickering into flame sensation climbed within him, and he with it; her touch, her scent, her desire fulfilled. What about her desires? He was crazy for her and he couldn’t see himself going through another year of abstinence from the one woman he loved most in all the world.
He slept in the spare room on the other side of Yakub’s so his son could come and wake him up and play and let Dov make them breakfast. Dov took them to lunch at Lana’s favorite fish restaurant, then to the park on the hill behind the old city.
