The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Translation,” said Shmeltzer, “she was a little liar, conned them into free medication.”

  Avi Cohen nodded and watched the older man flip through the pages of the medical chart.

  “Well, well, take a look at this, boychik. Under Nearest Relative or Admitting Party, there’s a little army stamp.”

  Cohen leaned over, pretending he could make sense of it.

  “Yalom, Zvi,” read Shmeltzer. “Captain Zvi Yalom, Tank Corps—goddamned army captain checked her in. She was leveling about the tank unit.” He shook his head. “The little slut had an official military escort.”

  To listen to Yalom, he’d acted solely out of compassion.

  “Listen, you were there—you know how it was: the Good Border and all that. We fed hundreds of them, gave them free medical care.”

  “Those were political refugees,” said Avi Cohen. “Christians. And all of them went back.”

  “She was Christian too.”

  “Got to know her pretty well, didn’t you?”

  Yalom shrugged and took a drink of orange soda. He was a handsome, somewhat coarse-looking man in his late twenties, blond, ruddy, and broad-shouldered, with immaculately manicured hands. In civilian life, a diamond cutter at the Tel Aviv Exchange. His home address in Netanya had been traced quickly through army records, and Avi had invited him for lunch at a sidewalk café near the beach.

  A beautiful Monday morning. The sky was as blue as the sapphire in Yalom’s ring; the sand, granulated sugar. But Netanya had changed, Avi decided. A lot different from the days when his family used to summer there—a suite at the Four Seasons, calls to room service for hamburgers and Cokes with maraschino cherries, all of them staying too long in the sun, getting burned pepper-red. After-dinner strolls, his father pointing out the gangsters sitting at café tables. Exchanging greetings with some of them.

  Now, the buildings seemed shabbier, the streets more crowded, thick with traffic and exhaust fumes, like a miniature Tel Aviv. Just a block away he could see black people sitting on the front stoop of a decrepit-looking apartment building. Ethiopians—the government had settled hundreds of them here. The men wore kipot; the women covered their hair too. Religious types, but in blackface. Strange.

  “You going to get me into trouble?” asked Yalom.

  Avi smiled noncommittally. He liked this, enjoyed the feeling of authority. Sharavi had made good on his word, kept him away from reading, given him a real assignment.

  He’s a Lebanon vet. You should be able to relate to him.

  Thank you, Pakad.

  Doing your job well will be sufficient thanks.

  “It could really fuck me up, Avi,” said Yalom.

  Overly familiar, thought Avi, using my first name like that. But some military officers had an attitude problem, thought of the police as second-class soldiers.

  “Speaking of fucking,” he said, “is that how you met her?”

  Yalom squinted with anger. He kept a smile on his lips and drummed his perfect fingertips on the table. “You a virgin, kid?”

  “How about,” said Avi, starting to stand, “we continue this conversation at National Headquarters.”

  “Wait,” said Yalom. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m nervous. The tape recorder bothers me.”

  Avi sat down again. Moved the recorder closer to Yalom.

  “You’ve got good reason to be nervous.”

  Yalom nodded, reached into his shirt pocket, and offered a pack of Rothmans to Avi.

  “No, thanks, but suit yourself.”

  The diamond cutter lit up, turning his head so that the smoke blew in the direction of the beach, the sea breeze catching it, thinning it to wispy ribbons. Avi looked over his shoulder, saw girls in bikinis carrying towels and beach baskets. Watched the little dimples in their backs, just above the ass-slit, and longed, for a moment, to be with them.

  “She was scared,” said Yalom. “The place she worked was on the Christian side of Beirut, private club, members only. She was afraid the Shiites would come and get her after we left.”

  “What kinds of members?” asked Avi, remembering what Sharavi had told him about the skull fractures, the cigarette burns.

  “Foreigners. Diplomats, businessmen, professors from the American University. The place was too expensive for the locals, which was one of the reasons she wanted to get out—some fundamentalists had threatened to bomb the building, slapped up a poster calling it a receptacle for the semen of infidels, or something like that.”

  “You see that poster yourself?”

  “No,” said Yalom quickly. “I was never there. This was all from her.”

  “Where’d you meet her, then?”

  “We were pulling out of the city. She was standing in the middle of the road, near the barriers between East and West. Waving her hands and crying. She refused to move and I couldn’t just squash her, so I got out, checked for snipers, talked to her, felt sorry for her, and gave her a lift. She was supposed to go as far as Bin Jbeil, but then she started having seizures and I decided to take her all the way.”

  “Considerate of you.”

  Yalom grimaced. “All right, looking back it was stupid. But I felt sorry for her—it was no felony.”

  Avi sipped his beer.

  “How many of you banged her?” he asked.

  Yalom was silent. The hand holding his cigarette began to shake. Bad trait for someone in his line of work, thought Avi. He sipped and waited.

  Yalom looked around at the adjoining tables, moved closer and lowered his voice.

  “How the hell was I supposed to know she was going to get carved up?” he said. Avi saw that there were tears in his eyes, the tough-guy posture all gone. “I just got married a couple of months ago, Samal Cohen. It’s my wife I’m more worried about than the army.”

  “Then why don’t you just tell me the truth and I’ll do my best to keep your name out of the papers.”

  “All right, all right. What I told you about picking her up out of sympathy is right—I was trying to be human. Look where it got me—when we let the Arabs massacre each other we’re fucked and when we try to be human, the same damned thing. No way to win.”

  “You picked her up out of sympathy,” said Avi, prompting. “But . . .”

  “But a bunch of us had her, okay? She offered it for free, she was cute-looking, and we’d just been through two months of hell—the snipers, two of my best drivers were blown up by mines . . . For God’s sake, you know what it was like.”

  Avi thought of his own tour in Lebanon. Hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Beirut, routing the PLO, putting his own ass on the line in order not to shoot the women and children—the human shields those bastards used habitually. Then, a month of guard duty at Ansar Prison, feeling out of control as he stood watch over sulking hordes of PLO captives wearing the blue jogging suits the army issued them. Unable to stop the tough guys from bullying the weaker ones, unable to prevent them from building homemade spears and daggers. Hugging his Uzi like a lover as he watched the tough ones circle the flock, picking off the effeminate ones. Choosing the softest boys to be brides at mock weddings. Dressing them up like girls, painting their faces and plucking their eyebrows and beating them when they cried.

  Gang-fucks when the lights went out. Avi and the other soldiers trying to shut out the screams that rose, like bloody clouds, above the grunts and heavy breathing. The “brides” who survived were treated the next morning for shock and torn anuses.

  “I know,” said Avi, meaning it. “I know.”

  “Three fucking years,” said Yalom, “and for what? We’ve replaced the PLO with Shiites and now they’re shooting Katyushas at us. You going to blame us for having a free taste? We didn’t know if we were going to get out of there alive, so we had her, had a few giggles—it was temporary relief. I’d do it all over again—” He stopped himself. “Maybe I wouldn’t. I don’t know.”

  “What else did she say about her clients?” asked Avi, following the outline t
he Yemenite had suggested to him.

  “They went in for rough stuff,” said Yalom. “The brothel was designed to accommodate that type. Professors, educated types, you’d be surprised at the things that turned them on. I asked her how she could stand it. She said it was okay, pain was okay.”

  “As if she liked it?”

  Yalom shook his head. “As if she didn’t care. I know it sounds strange, but she was strange—kind of dull, half asleep.”

  “Like a defective?”

  “Just dull, as if she’d been knocked around so much nothing mattered to her anymore.”

  “When she begged you to take her with you it mattered.”

  Yalom’s face registered self-disgust. “She conned me. I’m a fool, okay?”

  “You saw the needle marks on her arms, right?”

  Yalom sighed. “Yes.”

  “She mention any friends or suppliers?”

  “No.”

  “Anything about her past that could connect her to anyone? Maybe one of the educated ones?”

  “No. We were in back of the halftrack, riding south in the dark. There wasn’t much conversation.”

  “Nothing about the seizures?”

  “No, that took me by surprise. All of a sudden she’s all rigid, moving back and forth, teeth chattering, frothing at the mouth—I thought she was dying. You ever see that kind of thing?”

  Avi remembered the epileptic kids in the Special Class. Retards and spastics, shaking and drooling. He’d felt like a freak being with them, cried hysterically until his mother had pulled him out.

  “Never,” he said. “What was she doing when it started to happen?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Lucky, huh?”

  Yalom looked at the detective, puzzled.

  “Lucky,” said Avi, smiling, “that she wasn’t going down on you when she started to shake. Hell of a way to pick up a war wound.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  There was no record of Juliet’s whereabouts during the four months following her release by Northern District. No pimp or whore or drug dealer admitted to knowing her; no substation had booked her. She hadn’t applied for welfare or any other kind of public assistance, nor had she worked in a legitimate job and gotten on the tax rolls.

  It was as if she’d gone underground, thought Daniel, like some kind of burrowing animal, surfacing only to be torn apart by a waiting predator.

  She could have plied her profession independently, he knew, pulling tricks on side streets in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Or taken an unregistered side job—as a char-woman or fruit picker. In neither case were they likely to find out about it. An employer would be less than enthusiastic about admitting he’d hired her illegally, and those who’d purchased her favors were sure to keep silent.

  The strongest thing they had going for them was the epilepsy angle and the best way to work that was footwork: a canvass of doctors, hospitals, Kupat Holim clinics, and pharmacists. The medication she’d received at Rambam had run out some time ago, which meant she’d have gotten a refill somewhere.

  They started, all of them, checking out neurologists and neurological clinics; when none of that bore fruit, moved on to general practitioners and emergency rooms. Showing Juliet’s picture to busy people in white uniforms, searching for her name in patient rosters and charts. Eye-straining work, reeking of tedium. Avi Cohen was less than useless for most of it, so Daniel had him handle the telephones, cataloging crank calls and following the false leads and compulsive confessions that the newspaper articles had started to bring in.

  By the end of the week they’d learned nothing and Daniel knew that the whole endeavor was questionable. If Juliet had been streetwise enough to get her hands on fake ID within days of coming across the border, she probably had multiples, with false names and birth dates. Her baby face would have allowed her to claim anything from seventeen to thirty. How could you trace someone like that?

  Even if they managed to connect her to some doctor or druggist, what good would it do? This was no crime of passion, the victim’s destiny interlaced with that of the killer. She’d been slain because of a chance meeting with a monster. Persuasive words, the exchange of money, perhaps. Then a rendezvous in some secret, dark place, the expectation of hurried sex, a recreational shot of dope. Blackness. Surgery.

  He hoped neither she nor Fatma had ever known what was happening to them.

  Surgery. He’d started thinking of it in medical terms, because of the anesthesia, the washing, the removal of the uterus, though Levi assured him that no special medical knowledge had been necessary to perform the extraction.

  Simple stuff, Dani. A butcher or shohet or nurse or medical corpsman could have done it without special training. If I gave you an anatomy book you could do it yourself. Anyone could. Whenever something like this happens people always start looking for a doctor. It’s nonsense.

  The pathologist had sounded defensive, protective of his profession, but Daniel had no reason to doubt what he was saying.

  Anyone.

  But here they were, talking to doctors.

  Hospitals.

  Right after Fatma’s murder, he’d thought about the Amelia Catherine, the proximity of the hospital to the dumping ground, how easy it would have been to hide the body in a big, empty building like that, sneak out at the right time during Schlesinger’s shift in order to dump it. But apart from a rumor that Dr. Walid Darousha was homosexual, the Amelia Catherine people had turned up clean on every record check. And the trail he’d followed up through Silwan had made him forget about the U.N. hospital.

  Did U.N. clinics, he wondered, see epilepsy patients? He was almost certain they had to—the disorder was common. Those files would be off-limits to his men. Unless he wanted to make a stink about it, get embroiled with Sorrel Baldwin and others like him. All that U.N. bureaucracy.

  Baldwin—now there was something interesting. Before coming to Jerusalem, the American had lived in Beirut, Juliet’s former home base. He’d earned a degree from the American University—sociology; Daniel remembered the diploma. According to the tank captain Cohen had interviewed, Juliet’s brothel had catered to foreigners. American University personnel—Yalom had mentioned that specifically. A coincidence? Probably. The university was a breeding ground for Arabists; lots of them ended up working for the U.N. Still, it would have been interesting to talk to Baldwin in depth. Impossible without going through the brass.

  Evidence, Laufer would bark at him. What evidence do you have for me to get my hands dirty, Sharavi? Challenging their diplomatic immunity? Stick with the case and don’t run off on another tangent, Sharavi.

  Since the discovery of Juliet’s body, the deputy commander was in foul spirits. Pickled by his own press release, fermenting in ruined optimism. Firing off memos that inquired shrilly about progress. Or the lack of it.

  Evidence. Daniel knew he had none. There was nothing to tie Juliet in with Baldwin or anyone else at the Amelia Catherine. Her body had been dumped clear across town, in the pine forest near Ein Qerem, on the southwest side of town. About as far from Scopus as you could get.

  A Jewish National Fund forest, financed by the penny-in-a-blue-box donations of schoolchildren. The corpse wrapped in white sheeting, just like Fatma’s. Discovered by a pair of early morning hikers, teenage boys, who’d run from the sight, goggle-eyed with fear. The Russian nuns who lived nearby at the Ein Qerem Convent had seen and heard nothing.

  Then there was the matter of Brother Joseph Roselli. Daniel had dropped by Saint Saviour’s hours after the discovery of the second body, found the monk on his rooftop, and showed him Juliet’s death picture. Roselli had exclaimed: “She could be Fatma’s sister!” Then his face had seemed to collapse, features falling, restructuring suddenly in a tight-lipped mask. His demeanor from that point had been hard and cold, taut with outrage. A completely different side of the man. Daniel supposed he couldn’t be faulted for his indignation: Men of God weren’t accustomed to being c
onsidered murder suspects. But the shift was sudden. Strange.

  He couldn’t shake the feeling that Roselli was harboring some secret, struggling with something . . . but the resumption of Daoud’s nighttime surveillance had turned up nothing so far.

  No evidence and two dead girls.

  He thought about Fatma and Juliet for a while, tried to establish some kind of connection between the runaway from Silwan and the whore from Beirut, then scolded himself for going off on tangents. Obsessing about the victims instead of trying to understand the killer, because the victims had names, identities, and the killer was an enigma.

  Seven days had separated the two murders. Now, a week had passed since Juliet had been found.

  Was something happening right now? Another helpless woman seduced into endless sleep?

  And if so, what was there to do?

  He kept thinking about it—cursing his helplessness—until his belly filled with fire and his head felt ready to burst.

  After a Shabbat supper during which he nodded and smiled at Laura and the children, hearing them but not listening, he went into the laundry room that Laura had converted to a studio, carrying an armful of books and monographs checked out of the library at National Headquarters. The room was bright—he’d left the light on before Sabbath, stacked Laura’s stretched canvases neatly on the floor. Sitting among rolls of fabrics and tins of wax, jars filled with brushes and paint-encrusted palettes, he began to read.

  Case histories of serial killers: Landru; Herman Mudgett; Albert Fish, who murdered and ate little children; Peter Kurten, a nauseating excuse for a human being who had well earned the nickname Dusseldorf Monster. According to one expert, the Germans produced a disproportionate number of sex murders—something to do with an impoverished collective unconscious.