The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Kagan took another apple out of the bowl, tossed it in the air and caught it. “No matter. We found him out, sent him home to his masters a little the worse for wear.” He shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. Jews spying on Jews—that’s what thousands died for, eh? If the spineless old ladies of the ruling party spent as much time tracking down terrorists as they did harassing good Jews, we’d have an Eretz Yisrael as the Almighty planned it for us—the one place in the world where a Jew could walk down the street like a prince. Without fear of pogroms or being stabbed in the back.”

  Kagan paused for breath. Daniel heard him wheezing—the man was an asthmatic of some kind. “Anyway, Inspector Sharavi, the minyan in your building is Ashkenazi, not for you. You should be maintaining your noble Yemenite heritage, not trying to blend in with the Europeans.”

  Daniel pulled out his note pad. “I’ll need a list of all your members—”

  “I’m sure you’ve already got that. In quadruplicate, maybe more.”

  “An updated list, along with each member’s outside job and responsibilities here at the settlement. For the ones who travel, their travel logs.”

  “Travel logs.” Kagan laughed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “This is a very serious matter, Rabbi. I’ll begin interviewing them today. Other officers will be arriving this afternoon. We’ll stay until we’ve talked with everyone.”

  “The children too?” said Kagan sarcastically.

  “Adults.”

  “Why exclude the little ones, Inspector? We train them to butcher Arabs as soon as they’re off the breast.” Kagan spread his arms, closed them, and touched a hand to each cheek. “Wonderful. Secular Zionism at its moment of glory.” He put the apple down, stared into Daniel’s eyes. “What wars have you fought in? You look too young for ’67. Was it Yom Kippur or Lebanon?”

  “Your contacts didn’t tell you that?”

  “It wasn’t relevant. It won’t be hard to find out.”

  “The ’67 war. The Jerusalem theater.”

  “You were one of the privileged ones.”

  “Where were you in ’67, Rabbi?”

  “Patrolling the streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Taking on shvartzes in order to prevent them from mugging old Jewish ladies and stealing their social security checks. Not as glorious as liberating Jerusalem, but philosophically consistent with it. Or at least it was until the Jews of Israel got as soft and stupid as the Jews of America.”

  Daniel shifted his gaze down to his note pad. “Some of your members have police records. Have any new people with criminal backgrounds joined the settlement?”

  Kagan smiled. “I have a police record.”

  “For disturbing the peace and illegal assembly. I’m more interested in those with a violent background.”

  That seemed to insult Kagan. He frowned, retrieved the second apple, and bit into it hard, so that the juice trickled over his beard. Wiping himself with a paper napkin, he held out the bowl again.

  “Sure you wouldn’t like some fruit, Inspector?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “A polite Israeli? Now I’m really suspicious.”

  “Please answer my question, Rabbi. Have any new people joined who have violent histories?”

  “Tell me, Inspector, did you risk your life in ’67 so that the Jew could reach a new level of self-denigration?”

  “Rabbi,” said Daniel, “the investigation is going to proceed one way or the other. If you cooperate, everything will go faster.”

  “Cooperate,” enunciated Kagan, as if learning a new word. “How long have you been involved in this investigation?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “From the beginning,” echoed Kagan. “So, no doubt you’ve visited an Arab home or two in the course of your investigation. And no doubt you were offered food in those homes—the vaunted culture of Arab hospitality, correct?”

  “Rabbi Kagan—”

  “One moment. Bear with me, Inspector.” Kagan spoke softly but with intensity. “You were offered food by the Arabs—quaint little dishes of nuts and fruits and seeds. Maybe they rubbed it in donkey meat before bringing it out. Maybe they spit in it. But you smiled and said thank you, sahib, and ate it all up, didn’t you? Your training taught you to respect their culture—God forbid one of them should be offended, right? But here you are, in my home, I offer you fruit, and you turn me down. Me you’re not worried about offending. Who gives a damn if the Jew is insulted?”

  Kagan stared at Daniel, waiting for an answer. When he’d had his fill of silence, he said, “A lovely little secular Zionist democracy we’ve got here, isn’t it, Daniel Sharavi, descendant of Mori Shalom Sharavi? We bend over backward to pay homage to those who despise us, but kvell in the abuse of our brethren. Is that why you fought in ’67, Inspector? Were you shooting and stabbing Arabs in order to liberate them—so that you’d have the privilege of providing them with free health care, welfare checks, turn them into your little burnoosed buddies? So that they could propagate like rats, push us into the Mediterranean by outbreeding us? Or was it materialism that kept your gunsights in place? Maybe you wanted video-recorders for your kids. Playboy magazine, hashish, abortion, all the wonderful gifts the goyim are more than happy to give us?”

  “Rabbi,” said Daniel. “This is about murder, not politics.”

  “Ah,” said Kagan, disgustedly, “you don’t see the point. They’ve indoctrinated you, ripped your fine Yemenite spine right out of your body.”

  He stood up, put his hands behind his back, and paced the room.

  “I’m a member of Knesset. I don’t have to put up with this nonsense.”

  “No one’s immune from justice,” said Daniel. “If my investigation led me to the Prime Minister, I’d be sitting in his house, asking him questions. Demanding his travel log.”

  Kagan stopped pacing, turned to Daniel and looked down at him.

  “Normally I’d dismiss that little speech as garbage, but you’re the one who dug up the Lippmann mess, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did your investigation bring you to me?”

  “I won’t tell you that. But I’m sure you can see the logic.”

  “The only thing I see is political scapegoating. A couple of Arabs get killed—blame it on Jews with guts.”

  Daniel opened his attaché case, knowing there was truth to what Kagan was saying and feeling like a hypocrite. He pulled out crime-scene photos of Fatma and Juliet, got up and gave them to Kagan. The Gvura leader took them and, after looking at them unflinchingly, handed them back.

  “So?” he said casually, but his voice was dry.

  “That’s what I’m up against, Rabbi.”

  “That’s the work of an Arab—Hebron, 1929. No member of Gvura would do anything like that.”

  “Let me establish that and I’ll be out of your way.”

  Kagan rocked on his heels and tugged at his beard. Going over to the walnut case, he pulled out a volume of Talmud.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “Why not? This whole thing is going to backfire on the government. The people aren’t stupid—you’ll turn me into a persecuted hero.” He opened the book, moistened his finger, and began turning pages. “Now be off, Inspector. I have to learn Torah, have no more time to waste on your naarishkeit.” Another look of amusement. “And who knows, maybe after you’ve spent some time with us, something will rub off on you. You’ll see the error of your ways, start davening with the proper minyan.”

  The Gvura members were a motley bunch. He interviewed them in their dining hall, a makeshift concrete-floored space roofed with tent canvas and set up with aluminum tables and folding chairs. Clatter and the smell of hot oil came from the kitchen.

  About half were Israelis—mostly younger Moroccans and Iraqis, a few Yemenites. Former street kids, all of them hard-eyed and stingy with words. The Americans were either religious types with untrimmed beards and oversized kipot or tough-talking secular ones who were hard to categorize
.

  Bob Arnon was one of the latter, a middle-aged man with curly gray hair, long, bushy sideburns, and a heavy-jawed face assembled around a large broken nose. He’d been living in Israel for two years, had acquired three disorderly-conduct arrests and a conviction for assault.

  He wore faded jeans and crossed gun belts over a NEW YORK YANKEES T-shirt. The shirt was tight and showed off thick, hairy arms and a substantial belly. Poking up into the belly was the polished wooden grip of a nickel-plated .45-caliber revolver—an American-made Colt. The gun rested in a hand-tooled leather holster and made Daniel think of a little boy playing American cowboy.

  In addition to the Colt, Kagan’s deputy wore a hunting knife ensconced in a camouflage-cloth case, and carried a black baseball bat, the handle wrapped in adhesive tape that had long ago turned filthy gray. He was a combat veteran, he informed Daniel, and more than happy to talk about himself, starting in American-accented Hebrew but shifting to English after Daniel responded to him in that language.

  “Saw hard action in Korea. Those were tough little suckers we were fighting—no Arabs, that’s for certain. When I got back to the States I knocked around.”

  “What do you mean by ‘knocked around’?”

  Arnon winked. “Little of this, little of that—doing my thing, doing favors for people. Good deeds, you understand? My last hitch was a bar in New York—up in Harlem, gorgeous place, you ever heard of it? Five years I worked the place, never had a single problem with the shvoogies.” This last comment was punctuated by a toothy grin and a slap of the bat.

  “May I see your knife, please?”

  “This? Sure. Genuine buck, great all-purpose weapon, had it for fifteen years.” Arnon took it out of its case and gave it to Daniel, who turned it over in his palm, inspecting the wide, heavy blade, the serrated edge honed to razor-sharpness. A nasty piece of work, but from what Levi had told him, not the one he was looking for. Gray Man, on the other hand, had used a serrated blade. But duller, smaller . . .

  He gave the knife back to Arnon.

  “Do you own any other knives, Mr. Arnon?”

  “Others? Oh, yeah. Got a tackle box that I brought over from the States—haven’t had a chance to use it yet. They say there’s great fishing in the Sea of Galilee. That true?”

  “Yes. Your other knives, Mr. Arnon.”

  “A gutter and a scaler in the box, along with a Swiss Army—least, I think it’s still there. Maybe a spare scaler too. Then there’s another buck for under the pillow and an antique Japanese samurai sword that I picked up in Manila. Want to know about the guns, too?”

  “Not right now. Some other detectives will be here soon. They’ll want to see your weapons.”

  “Sure.” Arnon smiled. “But if I was the one cut up those Arab whores I wouldn’t be advertising it, now would I? Leaving the knife around to show you.”

  “What would you be doing, Mr. Arnon?”

  “Wiping it clean, oiling it, and hiding it somewhere. That’s if, mind you. Hypothetical.”

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me—hypothetical?”

  “Just that you’re barking up the wrong tree. Gvura doesn’t concern itself with an Arab here, an Arab there. It’s a sociological problem—they’ve all gotta go.”

  The women were an odd mix of toughness and subservience, filing in after the men had been questioned. Stoic and unsmiling, they brought their children with them, resisted Daniel’s suggestion that the youngsters leave.

  “The questions I’ll be asking aren’t fitting for a child’s ears,” he told one of the first. She came in with three small ones, the oldest a girl of no more than four, the youngest an infant who squirmed in her grasp.

  “No. I want them to see,” she said. “I insist upon it.” She was young, pallid, and thin-lipped, and wore a long-sleeved striped shift that reached below her knees. Her hair was covered completely with a white kerchief, and an Uzi was strapped over her shoulder. The baby’s tiny fingers reached out and touched the barrel of the submachine gun.

  “Why?” asked Daniel.

  “To show them what it’s like.”

  She sounded like a kid herself. A teenager asserting herself with her parents. So young, he thought, to have three of them. Her eyes were bright, vigilant, her breasts still heavy with milk.

  “What what’s like, Gveret Edelstein?”

  “The world. Go on, ask your questions.” A glance downward, the ruffling of hair. “Listen carefully, children. This is called harassment. It’s part of being Jewish.”

  By noon he’d talked to a third of them, found no one who interested him, other than Arnon, with his knives and assault conviction. And even he seemed more bluster than substance, an aging tough guy living out his mid-life fantasies. His assault conviction itself wasn’t much—the result of a confrontation at a rally. Arnon’s left hook had landed on the nose of a PEACE NOW placard-bearer; when the police came to break it up, Arnon resisted. First offense, no jail time. Not exactly your psychopathic killer, but you could never tell. He’d have the others follow up on Cowboy Bob.

  At twelve-thirty the lunch bell rang and settlement members swarmed into the dining room for salad and fried fish. They took their places automatically and Daniel realized seats were preassigned. He vacated his chair and left the hall, meeting Kagan and his wife as they came in.

  “Any luck, Inspector?” asked the leader loudly. “Find any crazed killers among us?”

  Mrs. Kagan winced, as if her husband had told an off-color joke.

  Daniel smiled noncommittally and walked down the path toward the guard post. As he left he could hear Kagan talking to his wife. Something about melting pots, a fine old culture, what a shame.

  At twelve forty-six, Shmeltzer and Avi Cohen drove up to the guard post in Cohen’s BMW. Laufer had wanted four detectives questioning the Gvura people. Daniel had given in partially by pulling Avi out of the Old City for the afternoon, but this was no job for Daoud and he had no intention of removing the Chinaman from his current assignment.

  He was interested in the big man’s story about the flat-eyed American with the strange grin, despite Little Hook’s credibility problem, because it was something—a solitary buoy bobbing in a great sea of nothingness. He double-teamed the Chinaman and Daoud again—the Arab helping out until sundown, before he began the Roselli surveillance. Those two and Cohen were to put all their energies into finding some backup for Little Hook’s story, someone else who might have encountered Flat Eyes. And in locating Red Amira Nasser. The dark hair and the fact that she was dull-witted put her in league with Fatma and Juliet. So far the only thing they’d come up with was a rumor that she had family in Jordan, had escaped there. And a medical chart at Hadassah Hospital—treatment six months ago for syphilis. No welfare payments, no other government records; a true professional, she lived off her earnings.

  Avi parked the BMW next to Daniel’s Escort. He and Shmeltzer got out and trudged up the sloping pathway, kicking up dust. Daniel greeted them, summed up his procedures, gave them the list of Gvura members, and told them to do a weapons check on all of them, paying special attention to Bob Arnon. Any blade that remotely fit Levi’s descriptions was to be taken and tagged.

  “Anything about this Arnon that makes him interesting?” asked Shmeltzer.

  “He’s an American, he likes to play with guns and knives, he beat up on a leftist last June, and he hates Arabs.”

  “Are his eyes flat?” Shmeltzer smiled sourly. He knew Little Hook from his days on the pickpocket detail, was far from being convinced of the hunchback’s story.

  “Bloodshot,” said Daniel. “Otherwise unremarkable.”

  “Fucking political games, coming down here. A total waste of our time.”

  Avi nodded along like a dutiful son.

  “Okay, let’s get it over with,” said Daniel. “Send a report to Laufer and move on.”

  “Laufer knew my father,” said Cohen. “He thinks I’m his boy. I think he’s a shithead.”

>   “What’s with Malkovsky?” Daniel asked him.

  “Nothing. Still edgy. I wish I were there instead of playing the shithead’s game.”

  “The shithead cornered me in the hall this morning,” said Shmeltzer. “Wanted to know what we’ve gotten out of these sweet souls—just itching for another press release. I told him we just started, it was too early to tell, but from the way it looked, they were all blameless as newborn lambs—did the esteemed Tat Nitzav wish us to continue in the same vein? ‘What do you mean?’ he says. I say, ‘Should we start checkin’ out the other MK’s and their people too?’ ”

  Daniel laughed. “What did he say to that?”

  “Made like an old car—sputters and snorts, metal against metal—then headed straight for the bathroom. Primed, no doubt, for a little vertical communication.”

  Daniel got back to Jerusalem at two-thirteen, bought a felafel from a street vendor near the train station, and finished it while driving to Headquarters. Back in his office he began transcribing the interview with Kagan onto official forms, wanting to be rid of it as quickly as possible, then called the operator and asked for radio contact with the Chinaman. Before she completed the transmission, she interrupted, saying: “There’s one for you coming in right now. Do you want it?”

  “Sure.” He endured a minute of static, was connected to Salman Afif, the mustachioed Druze, phoning from his Border Patrol jeep.

  “I’m out here with some Bedouins—the ones we spoke about that first morning. They’ve migrated south, found something I think you’ll want to see.”

  He told Daniel what it was and reported his location, using military coordinates. Daniel pulled out a map and pinpointed the spot, three and a half kilometers due north from the Scopus ridge. Fifteen hundred meters past the perimeter of the grid search he’d ordered after viewing Fatma’s body.