by Allan Topol
“Please state your name.”
“David Ben Aaron.”
“And how long have you lived in Israel, sir?”
David suppressed a smile. Surely, Goldberg had obtained the information from the central police records. “Approximately four and a half years.”
“And before that?”
“I lived in Moscow, where I was born.”
“Occupation in Russia?”
“Computer engineer.”
“And your last position of employment?”
“With Novosti Chemical Company in Moscow.”
“Where did you live when you first came to Israel?”
“On an Ulpan in the Negev.”
“Which one?”
“Ha’emek.”
“Then you moved to this kibbutz?”
“Correct. About four years ago I met a woman who was a member of this kibbutz. We were married, and a short while after that I moved here.”
“And your wife? Does she still live on the kibbutz?”
The idiot was either grossly insensitive, or he hadn’t done homework. David forced himself to reply calmly. “A year ago she was killed on Bus eighteen in Jerusalem. You remember, the suicide bomb.”
Goldberg was human after all. He looked down at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said weakly. “I had a friend on that bus as well. He didn’t die, but I’m not sure that was a blessing.”
The detective suddenly remembered the tape recorder and looked abashed for his outburst. “What kind of work do you do here on the kibbutz?”
“I’m the director of the kibbutz’s High-Tech Center. We’ve developed a new computer software package that provides twenty basic safety checks on an automobile each time the ignition is turned on, and alerts the driver if there’s a problem. Ford successfully tested the program in Detroit, and we’ve already received a large contract from them.”
“Are you dealing with any other foreign companies?”
Instinctively, David decided to omit Renault. Even a moderate degree of checking with Paris might turn up Maria’s death on the same day she had met with him. But what if the detective already knew about Maria?
Watching him closely, David responded, “I’ve had an initial meeting with Toyota in Japan, but so far no contract.”
Goldberg didn’t react but moved on. “Have you used Dr. Elon in Haifa as a dentist?”
“Yeah. Everybody at the kibbutz does. We have a contract with him.”
“Have you ever used any other dentists in Israel?”
“No.” David decided a lack of humor at this point might make the detective suspicious. “Finding dentists to drill my teeth isn’t one of my great joys in life. One is quite enough, thank you.”
Goldberg didn’t crack a smile.
“Can I ask you what this is all about, Detective?”
“There was a break-in at Dr. Elon’s office last evening about nine p.m. Some dental records were stolen. Where were you?”
“Here. In the kibbutz dining room. My stepdaughter flew home for her mother’s unveiling. The kibbutz had a small ceremony remembering Yael—that was her name. It was taking place at nine o’clock. Anyone from the kibbutz can verify that story.”
David waited for Goldberg to finish writing. Then he asked, “I assume that my records were among those stolen?”
Goldberg stared coldly at him. “They were the only ones taken.”
Having been afraid to ask, David was glad Goldberg had volunteered the information. He felt his heart thumping, but he looked at Goldberg with a bewildered expression.
“Why would anyone be interested in my dental records?”
“That’s what we’d like to know. And why yours alone? Any ideas?”
Looking mystified, David shook his head. Running through his mind, though was the thought: whoever did this was a rank amateur. He didn’t even have the sense to steal a score of records, including mine.
“You have any suspects?” he asked gingerly.
“I can’t tell you that,” the detective replied.
David felt his life unraveling in front of his eyes.
* * *
When the detective left, Gideon didn’t say anything to David about the visitor. As David expected, he waited until they were playing chess that evening.
“So what happened with the Haifa detective?” Gideon asked fifteen minutes into the game, right after he surprised David by taking a rook.
“Trying to break my concentration?”
“You’re so far behind, it doesn’t matter whether you concentrate or not.”
David recounted for Gideon everything that had happened in the interview.
When he was finished, Gideon said, “The police don’t have any suspects yet. Goldberg told me that. But why would somebody want your dental records?”
David shrugged.
“And why only your records?”
“Goldberg asked the same question. It’s been going through my mind all afternoon.”
“And?”
“I have no idea. Maybe the thief mixed my name up with someone else. He could have pulled out the wrong records. After all, David Ben Aaron is not an uncommon name.”
Gideon stroked his chin thoughtfully and gazed at David, then down at the chess board.
“Perhaps,” he finally said.
David knew that Gideon wasn’t convinced.
* * *
“We close in ten minutes,” the owner of a small café near Jaffa Gate in the old city of Jerusalem said to his only patron, a young olive-skinned Israeli who had been nursing a cup of coffee for the last hour.
Kourosh nodded to the owner and checked his watch. It was ten minutes to one, almost time for him to be leaving. He reached into his pants pocket to examine one more time the small handwritten map he had been given in Rome, but he changed his mind. There was no need for that. He had the route fully memorized.
He picked up his navy blue windbreaker and put it on. He flattened down the dental records in a side pocket to make them less obtrusive, to avoid any questions from police he might encounter. Then he gave the owner a ten-shekel note and quietly left.
The cobblestone pedestrian pathways of the Old City were well lit as he started in the direction of the Jewish Quarter. The recently renovated and restored buildings had a bizarre old-new look as the bright helium lights reflected from the Jerusalem stone. Acting as if he were going home, Kourosh nodded to a security policeman who examined him casually holding an Uzi at his side. The policeman looked bored, cursing his luck for drawing the graveyard shift.
Three blocks later, Kourosh glanced over his shoulder. The policeman was looking the other way. Kourosh quickly darted to the left and walked swiftly along the narrow road which led to another world—the dark and winding alleyways of the Muslim Quarter. He slowed his pace, not wanting to make a wrong turn, fearful that someone would jump out of one of those closed buildings and attack him.
Shops were boarded up for the night, but the pungent smell of spices, cooked lamb and overripe melons lingered in the air. Homes were shuttered. The streets were deserted except for a scrawny old dog who sniffed at Kourosh briefly, lost interest and headed away. From one second-floor window he heard Arab music. From another, the cries of a baby. He was terrified of being alone here at night: his heart began to thump and his knees wobbled. He was looking around so much that he stumbled on the uneven cobblestones, tripped and skinned his knee. Still, he pushed on, following in his mind the route he had committed to memory, convinced that he could save his parents, that he could get them out, that he could do for them what they had done for him.
He wasn’t an observant Jew, but with fear came mumbled prayers. He walked up an inclined cobblestone alley. The map said it was a right turn at the first alley. That put him into a tiny dead-end path that was almost pitch dark. He looked at the numbers on the buildings. Number seven was the third building on the right, as the map had said.
It had an old battered wooden door, with blue peelin
g paint. He knocked three times, as they had told him. His whole body was shaking as he waited for someone to answer. What if no one was here? What if...
Suddenly, the door opened, and strong, grimy arms pulled Kourosh inside an entrance hall lit only by a single candle. The door was quickly closed behind him. Two men dressed in the style of Arabs of East Jerusalem, with their standard head covering and graying beards, were watching him carefully. One said in Persian, “Did you bring the dental records?”
Kourosh reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, removed a brown envelope and handed it over. The man took the envelope, moved over close to the candle and studied the contents. Then he nodded with approval.
“When will they be released?” asked Kourosh nervously.
Those words were the last he ever uttered. The other man grabbed Kourosh around the mouth to keep him from screaming and then drove a sharp knife into the young man’s chest again and again.
When Kourosh’s body stopped convulsing, they kicked him outside into the alley and raced away.
Chapter 3
Israelis compulsively read newspapers. Journalists, encouraged by their large and engaged audience, respond with diligent and aggressive reporting. Psychiatrists frequently speculate about why the tiny country leads the world in published newspapers per capita. It’s free press carried to an extreme.
So from the time of his interview with Detective Goldberg, David had searched the three largest national dailies—Ha’aretz, Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonat for any information about the theft of his dental records. He hoped to find bits of evidence that the Haifa police had leaked purposefully or accidentally. The day of the interview with the Haifa detective, he hadn’t seen anything all in the newspapers. But the next morning, another grisly story dominated the front page of Ha’aretz. As he sat reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee in the kibbutz dining room, David’s level of anxiety was rising fast.
There in the center of the front page was a picture of a good-looking young man with dark hair from Haifa. Underneath was an article that identified him as Kourosh Hareri. His dead body, stabbed a dozen times, had been found late the night before in a narrow alley in Arab East Jerusalem. Despite Arab protests, the area had been sealed off, and a door-to-door search was under way. So far the police had no suspects.
Inside the newspaper was a profile of Kourosh. He had been twenty-eight years old and employed as a clerk at Bank Hapolim in Haifa. When he was twelve years old, immediately after the fall of the Shah, he had come to Israel from Iran by himself. His father had owned and operated a bank in Tehran. They were among the affluent upper class, including some Jews, who had waited too long to escape from the country. Once the Ayatollah’s people slammed shut the doors to the outside world, Kourosh’s parents knew that they had no chance of getting out. So they concentrated all of their efforts, and what jewelry and other possessions they had been able to conceal, toward smuggling Kourosh, their only child, across the border into Turkey. According to the newspaper, the police had no idea what Kourosh was doing in East Jerusalem late last night.
David studied Kourosh’s picture and shook his head sadly. Suddenly, he became aware of Gideon sitting down across the table with a cup of coffee in his hand.
“A gruesome story, isn’t it?” Gideon said.
“What would he be doing there late at night?”
“Did you know the boy?”
Startled, David said, “Why do you ask that?”
Gideon hesitated. “Well, I thought with him living in Haifa and so forth...”
“C’mon, Gideon, don’t play games with me. What does ‘and so forth’ mean?”
Gideon coughed, clearing his throat. “I got a call from a friend of mine with the Haifa police department. After Kourosh’s body was found with his wallet in his pocket, they searched his apartment. They found notes he had made for himself and other materials indicating that he was the one who stole your dental records from Dr. Elon’s office. But they couldn’t find the records anywhere. Isn’t that peculiar?”
David’s face remained cold and unemotional, but his mind was churning. So whoever had put Kourosh up to the theft had killed him after he handed off the records. David wasn’t surprised that they had decided to eliminate Kourosh as a witness. He was of no more use to them, and it was safer that way. What David found mind-numbing was that someone wanted his dental records badly enough to kill for them.
“What do you think of all that?” asked Gideon.
“I have no idea. East Jerusalem is a rough neighborhood for a Jew at night.”
Gideon’s eyes narrowed. “Wait, it’s more complicated than that. The Mossad has taken over the case.”
David considered the implications of what Gideon had just said. In Israel, the police and Shin Bet handle domestic security issues. The Mossad gets involved only if there’s a foreign component.
“The Mossad?” David asked incredulously.
“It seems that Kourosh flew to Rome last week on a sudden one-day round trip. From the available evidence in the boy’s apartment, he apparently was promised that his parents would be released and flown to Israel if he provided someone with your dental records. Isn’t that something?”
Knowing that Gideon was close with Mossad people whom he had commanded in the army, David was surprised that he was divulging this much information about the evidence. Then the reason came to him: The Mossad had deputized Gideon to tell him these facts and to gauge his reaction, before he had a chance to digest the news or to develop a response. David decided communications were a two-way street. He would use Gideon as well.
“Look, Gideon,” David said slowly, staring squarely at the director of security, “I’ve thought about this a great deal. The explanation I gave you the other night has to be right. David Ben Aaron is a common name in Israel. Whoever organized this effort mixed me up with another David Ben Aaron. If I were with the Mossad, I’d be checking out all of the other David Ben Aarons in the country.”
“That’s a possibility,” Gideon snarled, and he walked away.
* * *
David sat at his computer in the High-Tech Center trying to work, but he couldn’t concentrate. Distraught, he kept thinking about Kourosh.
He remembered the knapsack under his bed. There was no point trying to use it now. Gideon had stationed himself in front of the door of the High-Tech Center. For the time being, escape from the country was impossible. He had no choice but to try and tough it out.
He looked up at the clock on the wall. It was already five minutes after ten. The Mossad bureaucracy must be cumbersome these days. He had expected them an hour ago.
They arrived fifteen minutes later—two strapping young men in their twenties. One clean-shaven, the other with a sandpaper beard. After they had shown him their identification, the bearded one told him harshly, “We’d like you to come to Jerusalem for questioning.” In the car, they didn’t talk. They were the pickup and delivery team. The clean-shaven one drove; the sandpaper beard was in the back with David. He made no effort to conceal the gun in his shoulder holster.
They drove south and east toward Jerusalem, as David expected. After riding about an hour, when they were still about ten miles from the capital, they pulled off the highway onto an unmarked gravel road that led back into the hills. At the end of the road David saw a small three-story structure built with Jerusalem stone during the British occupation. A high barbed-wire-topped chain-link fence surrounded the building. At the checkpoint where the gravel road passed through the fence, their car paused for a second before one of the three armed guards quickly waved them through.
David thought about asserting his legal rights—the right to counsel, the right to appear before a magistrate and so forth but he brushed those aside. As he had learned in the last few years, Israel has no written constitution. Emergency regulations for dealing with security issues imposed by the British before 1948 were still in place, and they gave governmental authorities wide latitude in dealing with
suspects, even citizens.
Before getting out of the car, the man in the backseat asked David to put his hands behind his back, and he clamped on a pair of handcuffs. David smiled faintly. They know I won’t try to escape. They’re trying to intimidate me, to make me feel vulnerable.
The two men led him up the stairs to a third-floor room that had two wooden chairs and nothing else. One was empty. In the other sat a large, powerfully built man with a blond crewcut, bloodshot gray eyes and a pug nose. He was in his forties, David guessed. Probably a high-ranking official if he was still with the Mossad at that age.
In one hand he held a hard rubber black police baton. The windows were open, and olive trees fluttered outside in a gentle breeze. It wouldn’t matter what sounds came from the room. No one would hear them.
Keep calm, David told himself. Don’t show fear. Never show fear.
The driver pushed David into the empty chair and said, “We’ll be outside, Yosef. Call us if you need us.”
More intimidation. David didn’t smile this time. He decided to go on the offensive. “Why am I here?”
Yosef sneered, “Because you killed Kourosh Hareri. But you don’t need me to tell you that.”
David managed to conceal his surprise. That wasn’t the answer he had been expecting. He thought they would focus on why his dental records had been stolen. He wondered if this Yosef really believed the murder charge, or whether it was part of the intimidation routine to get him to talk. But then a terrible thought flashed into his mind: the Mossad had had a couple of serious embarrassments in recent months, which were being widely discussed throughout the country. Would they charge him with Kourosh’s murder and try to make it stick? A quick arrest would repair their public image. David could feel a knot in the pit of his stomach.
“But I didn’t kill Kourosh Hareri,” he declared.
