Her husband stood up quickly and turned on her, screaming. “Stupid woman! Is this a lie? Is it a lie that he’s a pig, descended from pigs? Had I known what lineage and dowry you brought I would have run from our wedding, all the way to Mecca.”
The woman backed away and bowed her head again. Wiped a dish that had dried long ago. Maksoud swore and settled back down on the cushion.
“What kind of knife did he use on the animals?” asked the Chinaman.
“All kinds. Whatever he could find or steal—in addition to his other fine qualities, he’s a thief.” Maksoud’s eyes scanned the putrid house. “You can see our wealth, how much money we have to spare. I tried to get hold of his U.N. allotment, to force him to pay his share, but he always managed to hide it—and steal mine as well. All for his stinking games.”
“What kinds of games?” asked Shmeltzer.
“Sheshbesh, cards, dice.”
“Where did he gamble?”
“Anywhere there was a game.”
“Did he go into Jerusalem to play?”
“Jerusalem, Hebron. The lowest of the coffeehouses.”
“Did he ever make any money?”
The question enraged Maksoud. He made a fist and shook one scrawny arm in the air.
“Always a loser! A parasite! When you find him, throw him in one of your prisons—everyone knows how Palestinians are treated there.”
“Where can we find him?” asked Shmeltzer.
Maksoud shrugged expansively. “What do you want him for anyway?”
“What do you think?”
“Could be anything—he was born to steal.”
“Did you ever see him with a girl?”
“Not girls, whores. Three times he brought home the body lice. All of us had to wash ourselves with something the doctor gave us.”
Shmeltzer showed him the picture of Fatma Rashmawi.
“Ever seen her?”
No reaction. “Nah.”
“Did he use drugs?”
“What would I know of such things?”
Ask a stupid question . . .
“Where do you think he’s gone?”
Maksoud shrugged again. “Maybe to Lebanon, maybe to Amman, maybe to Damascus.”
“Does he have family connections in any of those places?”
“No.”
“Anywhere else?”
“No.” Maksoud looked hatefully at his wife. “He’s the last of a stinking line. The parents died in Amman, there was another brother left, lived up in Beirut, but you Jews finished him off last year.”
The sister buried her face and tried to hide herself in a corner of the cooking area.
“Has Issa ever been up to Lebanon?” asked Shmeltzer—another stupid question, but they’d walked through shit to get here, why not ask? His Sheraton companion had turned up nothing political, but it had been short notice and she had other sources yet to check.
“What for? He’s a thief, not a fighter.”
Shmeltzer smiled, stepped closer, and looked down at Maksoud’s left forearm.
“He steal that scar for you?”
The brother-in-law covered the forearm, hastily.
“A work injury,” he said. But the belligerence in his voice failed to mask the fear in his eyes.
“A knife man,” said the Chinaman, as they drove back to Jerusalem.
The unmarked’s air conditioning had malfunctioned and all the windows were open. They passed an army halftrack and an Arab on a donkey. Black-robed women picked fruit from the huge, gnarled fig trees that lined the road. The earth was the color of freshly baked bread.
“Very convenient, eh?” said Shmeltzer.
“You don’t like it?”
“If it’s real, I’m in love with it. First let’s find the bastard.”
“Why,” asked Cohen, “did the brother-in-law speak so freely to us?” He was behind the wheel, driving fast, the feel of the auto giving him confidence.
“Why not?” said Shmeltzer.
“We’re the enemy.”
“Think about it, boychik,” said the older man. “What did he really tell us?”
Cohen sped up around a curve, felt the sweat trickle down his back as he strained to remember the exact wording of the interview.
“Not much,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Shmeltzer. “He brayed like a goat until it came down to substance—like where to find the pisser. Then he clammed up.” The radio was belching static. He reached over and turned it off. “The end result being that the bastard got a bunch of shit off his chest and told us nothing. When we get back to Headquarters, I’m sending him a bill for psychotherapy.”
The other detectives laughed, Cohen finally starting to feel like one of them. In the back the Chinaman stretched out his long legs and lit up a Marlboro. Taking a deep drag, he put his hand out the window and let the breeze blow off the ashes.
“What about the Rashmawi brothers?” asked Shmeltzer.
“The defective one never came out of the house all night,” said the Chinaman. “The two older ones were hardasses. Daoud and I questioned them before they got home and they didn’t even blink. Tough guys, like the father. Knew nothing about anything—not an eye-blink when we told them Fatma was dead.”
“Cold,” said Avi Cohen.
“What’s it like,” asked Shmeltzer, “working with the Arab?”
The Chinaman smoked and thought.
“Daoud? Like working with anyone else, I guess. Why?”
“Just asking.”
“You’ve got to be tolerant, Nahum,” the Chinaman said, smiling. “Open yourself up to new experiences.”
“New experiences, bullshit,” said Shmeltzer. “The old ones are bad enough.”
CHAPTER
19
On Sunday at six P.M., Daniel came home to an empty apartment.
Twenty-four hours ago he’d left Saint Saviour’s and gone walking through the Old City, down the Via Dolorosa and through the Christian Quarter with its mass of churches and rest spots commemorating the death walk of Jesus, then over through El Wad Road to the covered bazaar that filled David Street and the Street of the Chain. Talking to Arab souvenir vendors hawking made-in-Taiwan T-shirts aimed at American tourists (I LOVE ISRAEL with a small red heart substituted for the word love; KISS ME,I’M A JEWISH PRINCE above a caricature of a frog wearing a crown). He entered the stalls of spice traders presiding over bins of cumin, cardamom, nutmeg, and mint; talked to barbers deftly wielding straight razors; butchers slicing their way through the carcasses of sheep and goats, viscera hanging flaccidly from barbed metal hooks affixed to blood-pinkened tile walls. Showed Fatma’s picture to metalsmiths, grocers, porters, and beggars; touched base with the Arab uniforms who patrolled the Muslim Quarter, and the Border Patrolmen keeping an eye on the Western Wall. Trying, without success, to find someone who’d seen the girl or her boyfriend.
After that, there had been a quick break for prayer at the Kotel, then the conference with the other detectives in a corner of the parking lot near the Jewish Quarter. What was supposed to have been a brief get-together had stretched out after Daoud had reported pulling Abdelatif’s ID out of Mrs. Nasif, and Shmeltzer had arrived with the arrest information on both the boyfriend and Anwar Rashmawi. The five of them had traded guesses, discussed possibilities. The case seemed to be coming together, taking form, though he was far from sure what the final picture would look like.
By the time he’d gotten home last night, it had been close to midnight and everyone was asleep. His own slumber was fitful and he rose at five-thirty, full of nervous energy. Abdelatif’s family had been located in the Dheisheh camp, and he wanted to reconfirm the trip with the army, to make sure that everything went smoothly.
He’d traded sleepy good-byes with Laura and kissed the kids on their foreheads while buttoning his shirt. The boys had rolled away from him, but Shoshi had reached out in her sleep, wrapped her arms around him so tightly that he’d had to peel her fingers from
his neck.
Leaving that way had made him feel wistful and guilty—since the case had begun he’d barely had time for any of them, and so soon after Gray Man. Foolish guilt, really. It had been only two days, but the nonstop pace made it seem longer, and the loss of Shabbat had disrupted his routine.
As he walked out the door, the image of his own father filled his childhood memories—always there for him, ready with a smile or words of comfort, knowing exactly the right thing to say. Would Shoshi and Benny and Mikey feel the same way about him in twenty years?
Those feelings resurfaced as he arrived home on Sunday evening, weary from empty hours of surveillance and hoping to catch Laura before she left to pick up Luanne and Gene. But all was quiet except for Dayan’s welcoming yips.
He petted the dog and read the note on the dining room table: (“Off to Ben Gurion, love. Food’s in the refrig., the kids are at friends.”) If he’d known which friends, he could have dropped by, but they had so many, there was no way to guess.
He stayed just long enough to eat a quick dinner—pita and hummus, leftover Shabbat chicken that he’d never had a chance to eat hot, a handful of black wine grapes, two cups of instant coffee to wash it all down. Dayan kept him company, begging for scraps, the black patch surrounding the little spaniel’s left eye quivering each time he cried.
“Okay, okay,” said Daniel. “But just this little piece.”
Finishing quickly, he wiped his face, said grace after meals, changed his shirt, and was out the door at six twenty-five, behind the wheel of the Escort and speeding back toward Silwan.
Sunday night. The end of Christian Sabbath and all the church bells were ringing. He parked on the outskirts of the village and covered the rest of the journey on foot. By seven he was back in the olive grove, with Daoud and the Chinaman. Watching.
“Why don’t we just go in there and lay it on the line with them?” said the Chinaman. “Tell them we know about Abdelatif and ask them if they took care of him?” He picked up a fallen olive, rolled it between his fingers, and tossed it aside. Ten forty-three, nothing had happened, and he couldn’t even smoke in case someone saw the glow. The kind of night that made him think about another line of work.
“They’re hardly likely to tell us,” said Daniel.
“So? We’re not finding out anything this way. If we confront them, at least we’ve got the element of surprise working for us.”
“We can always do that,” said Daniel. “Let’s wait a while longer.”
“For what?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“For all we know,” persisted the Chinaman, “the guy’s still alive, flown off to Amman or Damascus.”
“Looking into that is someone else’s job. This is ours.”
At eleven-ten, a man came out of the Rashmawi house, looked both ways, and walked silently down the pathway. A small dark shadow, barely discernible against a coal-black sky. The detectives had to strain to keep him in their sights as he made his way east, to where the bluff dipped its lowest.
Climbing gingerly down the embankment, he began walking down the hill, in the center of their visual field. Merging in the darkness for stretches of time that seemed interminable, then surfacing briefly as a moonlit hint of movement. Like a swimmer bobbing up and down in a midnight lagoon, thought Daniel as he focused his binoculars.
The man came closer. The binoculars turned him into something larger, but still unidentifiable. A dark, fuzzy shape, sidling out of view.
It reminded Daniel of ’67. Lying on his belly on Ammunition Hill, holding his breath, feeling weightless with terror, burning with pain, his body reduced to something hollow and flimsy.
The Butcher’s Theater, they called the hills of Jerusalem. Terrain full of nasty surprises. It carved up soldiers and turned them into vulture fodder.
He lowered the binoculars to follow the shape, which had grown suddenly enormous, heard the Chinaman’s harsh whisper and abandoned his reminiscence:
“Shit! He’s headed straight here!”
It was true: The shape was making a beeline for the grove.
All three detectives shot to their feet and retreated quickly to the rear of the thicket, hiding behind the knotted trunks of thousand-year-old trees.
Moments later the shape entered the grove and became a man again. Pushing his way through branches, he stepped into a clearing created by a tree that had fallen and begun to rot. Cold, pale light filtered through the treetops and turned the clearing into a stage.
Breathing hard, his face a mask of pain and confusion, the man sat down on the felled trunk, put his face in his hands, and began to sob.
Between the sobs came gulping breaths; at the tail end of the breaths, words. Uttered in a strangulated voice that was half whisper, half scream.
“Oh, sister sister sister . . . I’ve done my duty . . . but it can’t bring you back . . . oh sister sister . . . we of the less favored wife . . . sister sister.”
The man sat for a long time, crying and talking that way. Then he stood, let out a curse, and drew something from his pocket. A knife, long-bladed and heavy-looking, with a crude wooden handle.
Kneeling on the ground, he raised the weapon over his head and held it that way, frozen in ceremony. Then, crying out wordlessly, he plunged the blade into the earth, over and over again. Unleashing the tears again, snuffling wetly, sobbing sister sister sister.
Finally he finished. Pulling out the knife, he held it in his palms and stared at it, tearfully, before wiping it on his trouser leg and placing it on the ground. Then he lay down beside it, curled fetally, whimpering.
It was then that the detectives came toward him, guns drawn, stepping out of the shadows.
CHAPTER
20
Daniel kept the interrogation simple. Just him and the suspect, sitting opposite one another in a bare, fluorescent-bright room in the basement of Headquarters. A room wholly lacking in character; its normal function, data storage. The tape recorder whirred; the clock on the wall ticked.
The suspect cried convulsively. Daniel took a tissue out of a box, waited until the man’s chest had stopped heaving, and said, “Here, Anwar.”
The brother wiped his face, put his glasses back on, stared at the floor.
“You were talking about how Fatma met Issa Abdelatif,” said Daniel. “Please go on.”
“I . . .” Anwar made a gagging sound, placed a hand on his throat.
Daniel waited some more.
“Are you all right?”
Anwar swallowed, then nodded.
“Would you like some water?”
A shake of the head.
“Then please go on.”
Anwar wiped his mouth, avoided Daniel’s eyes.
“Go on, Anwar. It’s important that you tell me.”
“It was at a construction site,” said the brother, barely audible. Daniel adjusted the volume control on the recorder. “Nabil and Qasem were working there. She was sent to bring food to them. He was working there also and he snared her.”
“How did he do that?”
Anwar’s face constricted with anger, the pockmarks on his pale cheeks compressing to vertical slits.
“Pretty words, snake smiles! She was a simple girl, trusting—when we were children I could always fool her into thinking anything.”
More tears.
“It’s all right, Anwar. You’re doing the right thing by talking about it. What was the location of this site?”
“Romema.”
“Where in Romema?”
“Behind the zoo . . . I think. I was never there.”
“How, then, do you know about Fatma meeting Abdelatif?”
“Nabil and Qasem saw him talking to her, warned him off, and told father about it.”
“What did your father do?”
Anwar hugged himself and rocked in the chair.
“What did he do, Anwar?”
“He beat her but it didn’t stop her!”
“How do you kn
ow that?”
Anwar bit his lip and chewed on it. So hard that he broke skin.
“Here,” said Daniel, handing him another tissue.
Anwar kept chewing, dabbed at the lip, looked at the crimson spots on the tissue, and smiled strangely.
“How do you know Fatma kept seeing Issa Abdelatif?”
“I saw them.”
“Where did you see them?”
“Fatma stayed away too long on errands. Father grew suspicious and sent me to . . . watch them. I saw them.”
“Where?”
“Different places. Around the walls of Al Quds.” Using the Arabic name for the Old City. “In the wadis, near the trees of Gethsemane, anywhere they could hide.” Anwar’s voice rose in pitch: “He took her to hidden places and defiled her!”
“Did you report this to your father?”
“I had to! It was my duty. But . . .”
“But what?”
Silence.
“Tell me, Anwar.”
Silence.
“But what, Anwar?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you think your father would do to her once he knew?”
The brother moaned, leaned forward, hands outstretched, eyes bulging, fishlike, behind the thick lenses. He smelled feral, looked frantic, trapped. Daniel resisted the impulse to move away from him and, instead, inched closer.
“What would he do, Anwar?”
“He would kill her! I knew he would kill her, so before I told him I warned her!”
“And she ran away.”
“Yes.”
“You were trying to save her, Anwar.”
“Yes!”
“Where did she go?”
“To a Christian place in Al Quds. The brown-robes took her in.”
“Saint Saviour’s Monastery?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know she went there?”
“Two weeks after she ran away, I took a walk. Up to the olive grove where you found me. We used to play there, Fatma and I, throwing olives at each other, hiding and looking for each other. I still like to go there. To think. She knew that and she was waiting for me—she’d come to see me.”
“Why?”
“She was lonely, crying about how much she missed the family. She wanted me to talk with Father, to persuade him to take her back. I asked her where I could reach her and she told me the brown-robes had taken her in. I told her they were infidels and would try to convert her, but she said they were kind and she had nowhere else to go.”
The Butcher's Theater Page 18
