Three

by D. A. Mishani

  There will be no fear on her face when she looks at him, only surprise. “Then what? What if you do? I don’t understand.”

  “That doesn’t mean I was planning to hurt you the same way, you see?”

  She will tense up, and he will see it. When she stands up and says she wants to leave, he will tell her she can’t leave because the door is locked and he has the key. He will grab her hand and she will say, “Gil, stop it, let me go. I have to get home and you’re scaring me again.” But her voice will not sound panicked.

  Without answering her, he will try to block her mouth with his hand, still without the gloves that will be in the plastic bag by the table, but he won’t be able to. Only then will she suddenly say, in a changed voice, “Don’t touch me. I’m wearing a wire and there are police officers outside and they will come in to arrest you now, and you will not resist. It’s over.”

  When Gil says, “Nice try,” she will say, “It’s over, Gil. I’m telling you, I’m a police officer and you’re under arrest. I suggest you not make a single move now.”

  He still will not believe her.

  Not even when the blue lights from outside filter through the slats of the blinds, and the silence up and down the street gives way to police sirens, and the first thuds of heavy iron mallets are heard pounding on the door.

  12

  The first stage of the covert investigation conducted by Chief Inspector Orna Ben-Hamo lasted about six weeks, from the beginning of January to mid-February, during which time she gathered all the information she was able to obtain on Gil without questioning his family and friends.

  She knew he was born in May 1962, in Tel Aviv, and that he had served as an adjustment in the army. He’d studied law at Tel Aviv University, clerked at the magistrates’ court in Ramleh and passed the Bar in 1988. In 1991 he married Ruth Levanon, whose family owned a lot of land in the Tel Aviv area, and her parents gave them the flat she’d grown up in, in Givatayim. They had two daughters, one of whom was now in the army. Gil’s father, whom Emilia had cared for, had died more than two years ago, and his mother, who had time to testify to Inspector A., the first detective on the case, had died a few months ago. Gil had worked for a large employment agency until, in 2002, he started his own law firm, using some money from his father-in-law. She knew part of his work involved frequent trips to Eastern Europe, mostly because he was now managing real-estate investments there. He might also be involved in other businesses. She knew he’d been in Bucharest during the time of Orna Azran’s visit, but she also knew he would be able to claim he was there at least once a month and that it was a coincidence that they’d been there at the same time, even if he did not deny that they had previously been in touch. She found out from the income-tax authorities and the Ministry of the Interior that Gil had never been suspected of tax evasion or failure to report income, and that his work with the Population and Immigration Authority had also never been under scrutiny. However, one of his clients was an Israeli contact who had been suspected of importing illegal workers from Eastern Europe, and Orna briefly considered using that to get Gil into the interrogation room so she could question him. But she had to abandon the idea. Gil’s wife, Ruth Levanon-Hamtzani, was a partner in one of the largest law firms in Israel, which was another reason to be very cautious in the investigation.

  At the beginning of February she had a series of disappointments. She tried to obtain evidence that Gil had booked Orna Azran’s flight to Bucharest and her hotel room, but it was too long ago and the transactions were no longer available. Records of phone calls also revealed nothing, because he’d used a second phone with a prepaid SIM card. She thought if she could get concrete evidence of his being romantically involved with Orna around the time of her trip, and perhaps with Emilia, too, it would be enough to move to an open investigation, try to break him in the interrogation room and gather evidence from relatives and friends. But she didn’t want to take that risk, and had no real evidence that Gil’s relationships with Orna and Emilia had continued up until the time of their deaths. There was only the testimony of Eran, who had seen Gil in their home, and of the neighbour who’d seen Emilia enter Gil’s flat on a Friday or Saturday. And both of them could be disputed.

  There were days when she thought of throwing in the towel. Other cases came in and at some point she was asked to join an intra-precinct investigation team working on a scheme targeting elderly people around the country, and she wondered if she shouldn’t put Orna and Emilia’s deaths aside, if only temporarily. Emilia had no relatives pressuring her to keep investigating, and when Ronen called every few days to ask if there was any progress, she could tell him the investigation was stuck. None of her supervisors thought there was any point in continuing, but still she felt she couldn’t give up: something was driving her. It wasn’t the action, as Avner had said when they’d first talked about the case, not her drive to be the best or anything else about her soul or her life, or at least that was how she felt. It was the fact, which she had not confessed to anyone, that she thought she could see Emilia, and that every so often she found herself driving down Balfour Street in Bat Yam or past the nursing home where Emilia had worked, or smoking a cigarette on the square outside the church in Old Jaffa where Emilia had sat on her last day. This had never happened to her before.

  That was where she first had the idea of following him. She was too impatient to wait and she called Ilana Liss from the church square.

  Ilana was sceptical. “What exactly is that going to achieve? You suspect he’s involved in crimes committed years ago. He’s not going to do anything connected to that now, certainly not unless we make him.”

  Orna wasn’t sure what it would achieve. She wanted to observe him from up close. She also thought he might be in touch with other women, and that perhaps they were in danger. That was what finally persuaded Ilana. A detective unit followed Gil for three rainy days in late February and didn’t come up with much. He left for his office every morning and came home in the afternoon or early evening. Once he went on a bike ride with a group in Yarkon Park and once to the gym. He didn’t visit his rental flat in Givatayim and didn’t meet any woman who wasn’t his wife. On two of the three mornings, he stopped on the way to work at a café near his home in Givatayim.

  Ilana Liss would not authorize Orna to try to make contact with him or monitor him herself, so one morning she simply went to the café, without telling anyone. She had never done anything like that before, but this time she had to. She brought her laptop and pretended to work. She did not yet have a clear plan.

  He didn’t come to the café on the first morning, or the second. But on the third he did. And he looked at her that first time. Until that moment he had been a person whose name she had read in the investigation files and had heard other people talking about, and now their eyes met. She knew it was him. But she still had no idea how she was going to catch him, and only after they made initial contact, on his initiative, did she tell Ilana Liss about him.

  She knew Ilana would be furious, and she was, but she still tried to persuade her. “He initiated the first contact, Ilana, not me,” she explained, “so let me continue. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll send the case on.”

  Ilana didn’t understand. “But continue what, exactly?”

  That was not clear yet. Get closer to him and try to make him tell her something. Or try to develop a relationship with him and see if he followed a similar pattern.

  Ilana gave her a week—with a list of conditions. The first was that they were not to meet anywhere except the café, and that there must always be a plain-clothes detective there. When she asked how their contact had been established, Orna told her the truth: “I somehow realized what would make him talk to me. Without planning anything. Based on the few details I knew about him, I guess. I had to explain what I was doing in the café every morning and why I had my laptop, and somehow I ended up with this story about Eastern Europe. I
really did study history at college and I worked in the Museum of the Diaspora for a few months.”

  She’d picked the name Ella without much thought. After their first cigarette together, she’d almost told him her name was Orna. Later it occurred to her that she might have come up with the name “Ella” because of the famous Tel Aviv restaurant Orna & Ella.

  Every day in March, after they met at the café, she went back to the station and wrote up a thorough report, which was Ilana’s second condition. Several times, she conducted loud phone calls in the café and mentioned the phone number she was hoping Gil would call, and he did make a note of it. The fact that it was winter helped her—she could hide the recording device under her coat.

  She did not tell Avner anything, not even when she met Gil for lunch in Jaffa and let him touch her and kiss her. She also left those details out of the report she wrote the next day. Thanks to the pictures of the women, which never left her, she imagined in those moments that she was Emilia or Orna and that was what helped her get through it. She said things to him that seconds before she hadn’t known she was going to say, and if someone had asked her to explain how she’d come up with them or whether they were true, she would have preferred not to answer or think about it.

  At first Gil disclosed nothing that could have moved the investigation forward, even though once in a while she tried to cautiously prod him in the right direction. When he mentioned the idea of going away together, she finally felt she was getting closer. At this point she was so focused on the case and on Gil that if she’d had to, she would have gone to Bucharest with him. But she knew Ilana Liss would never authorize that, and in their last conversation, before Ilana took the sick leave from which she never returned, they hatched the idea of taking advantage of his suggestion to go to Romania. They would make him organize the trip, to see if he would repeat his presumed behaviour patterns, find out which hotels he would book and how he would purchase the tickets, and then pressure him by publishing a semi-fictitious story in the papers and hope he would do something he hadn’t planned to. The police sketch was drawn by Freddy Amsaleg in under an hour, based on a picture from the driver’s licensing authority and Orna’s input. When it worked and he asked her to come to his flat, she believed he might actually confess to the murders of Orna and Emilia before he tried to hurt her, but he didn’t. In his interrogation, after the arrest, he claimed he hadn’t tried to hurt her at all and denied any connection to the two deaths. His lawyer informed them that he would ask to rule out all investigation findings obtained through Orna, but the Tel Aviv District’s deputy DA, who met her at court and complimented her on her work, said, “This is just the beginning of the process, but even if he continues to deny everything, we have enough evidence to put him away.”

  According to her prior agreement with Ilana, she never met Gil again. All subsequent questioning was conducted by other investigators, including the handsome young detective who now regretted not keeping the case, although he tried to hide that from Orna.

  When she heard that the investigators were getting arrest warrants for Gil’s wife and daughters, to pressure him, she assumed it would be over soon.

  Two days after the arrest, on Monday, Orna didn’t have to go to work because she had asked for the day off. She woke up before sunrise, as she did almost every morning that winter, for no reason and even if she’d gone to bed late.

  It was still dark outside.

  She didn’t want to wake Avner, so she got out of bed and put on a sweatshirt. She made a cup of coffee, and when she opened the kitchen window the cold air blew in, along with the smell of rain and wet roads. Later, she dropped the girls off at school and nursery school, then went back home and tidied up, and at eleven her mother came to watch Danielle. She called Ronen and arranged to visit him at home that afternoon. Ruth opened the door, wearing a white knee-length jellabiya, and invited Orna to come in and sit down at the kitchen table. The kitchen was dirty, full of dishes with leftover pasta in tomato sauce and unwashed pots and pans. Ruth left her alone with Ronen, and she told him they’d caught the man who had apparently hurt Orna.

  “What do you mean, apparently?” he asked.

  “He hasn’t confessed yet, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that he hurt her and that she did not commit suicide. It’s the man she was going out with for a few months. The man Eran saw. He seems to have been the person she went to Romania with. I didn’t update you sooner because the investigation was covert for a few weeks, but he was arrested yesterday.”

  “But why did he do it? Did he explain why?”

  She couldn’t answer that, because Gil was still denying everything.

  She asked if she could talk to Eran, and Ronen hesitated and said it might be best if he asked the therapist to be present for their conversation. She said that was no problem and she would wait. There was a picture on the fridge of Ronen and Ruth with their kids, including Eran, in the Golan Heights or maybe some other green mountainous area, all with sleeping bags rolled up in backpacks on their backs and heavy walking shoes. Eran was standing next to Julia, who had her hand on his shoulder. Below that picture was another one, which showed Eran on the Tel Baruch beach with Orna; it was a picture Ronen had taken on Eran’s fourth birthday.

  The therapist couldn’t come, but he said it was fine with him if Orna talked to Eran in Ronen’s presence. So the three of them sat in the kitchen, Ronen next to Eran with his hand on the back of his neck, and her opposite them.

  She said to Eran, “I want to tell you that we caught the man who hurt Mum. That means we know that Mum did not kill herself. Someone else hurt her. She was planning and hoping to come back to you, and this man prevented her from doing it. Do you understand?”

  He covered his eyes so she would not see him crying.

  “I also want to tell you that I think we were able to catch this man thanks to you,” she added. Ronen asked why she said that, and she said she would give them more details later. She didn’t want to tell Eran now who the man who hurt his mother was, and how without the things he’d seen and written in his notebook, about Gil’s car and the night he saw them in her bedroom, he would probably never have been caught. But she did say they would probably need to talk to the police again, and testify at the trial.

  Ronen nodded. “We’ll do whatever we have to.”

  She had two hours before she had to pick up the girls.

  She could still smell Gil’s cologne and feel the taste of his lips in her mouth. She called Avner to hear another voice, and when he answered and realized she was upset, he asked if something had happened and if she wanted him to come home early. She picked up voicemails from a few officers in the precinct who’d called to congratulate her, but unlike with previous cases, she did not feel she ought to be congratulated because she hadn’t really done anything. The people who’d caught Gil were Eran and Ronen, who’d insisted that Orna couldn’t have committed suicide, as well as Ilana Liss, who’d allowed her to keep investigating, even when she couldn’t explain why. And Emilia. Someone should be notified that Emilia’s murderer had been caught, too, not just Orna’s. So she called Tadeusz, as it was thanks to his initial testimony that the first doubts had arisen in her mind. But Tadeusz’s phone was off, and when she called the church and asked to speak to him, she was told he had left Israel because his mission here had ended and he’d been sent to Rome. Since there was no one she could tell about Emilia, she talked to her in her heart.

  Her mother stayed for a while after she got home. Orna couldn’t tell her much because the investigation was under a gagging order, but she promised to say more soon. When she was alone with the girls she felt the need to do something different with them, something they’d never done before, something she and they would always remember. But it was beyond her capacity that day, and the afternoon dragged on in her efforts to get organized. The girls didn’t want to go to the beach to play in the sand and se
e the sunset, they only wanted to watch TV. And so at seven o’clock she found herself cooking eggs and peeling cucumbers for dinner, as she did every evening, while they spread ketchup all over the kitchen and themselves and tried to make their own cheese sandwiches.

  With Avner there were actually some nice moments of intimacy in the evening, and she told him more than she’d thought she could.

  Throughout that whole winter, Avner had known almost nothing of what she was going through, even though he did ask and did listen when she wanted to talk. She felt restless, as though she’d forgotten something in Gil’s flat, and even though it was late, she checked her phone every few minutes to see if anyone had emailed or texted her. Inspector A. called to congratulate her, but Ilana Liss did not because she was in the hospital.

  About the meetings in the café, about the lunch in Jaffa, and the last meeting with Gil in his flat—she did not tell Avner. She simply said they’d trapped him by luring him into a romantic correspondence, and that she’d been instrumental in the arrest. While she talked about Gil she could see him before her, in the moments when he’d opened the door and when he’d put his hand on her shoulder. She got up so that Avner would not see her eyes, and when she came back to the living room with a bowl of nuts, she asked him about his work.

  Even though she was exhausted, she couldn’t force herself to fall asleep while Avner was still awake, the way she wanted to. She felt the hours ticking by and the night growing shorter.

  When she was almost asleep, she heard Danielle cry and got up to make a bottle and feed her. Shortly after that, Roni woke up, too, as she did almost every night that winter, saying she was afraid there was someone in the house.

  Orna stroked her soothingly, whispered that no one besides them was in the house, and when she heard her daughter’s quiet, sleeping breaths, she went back to bed and shut her eyes. And this time, she managed to doze off, because you stayed with her all night to guard her sleep.