Asylum City: A Novel

by Liad Shoham

  It didn’t take him long to find the restaurant with the sign on the corner of the building. It was suppertime, and the place was full. There was little chance he’d be able to speak to any of the customers in private.

  Yesterday he’d debated whether to ask the asylum seekers in the office if they knew someone called the “Banker” but decided against it. OMA was a place of refuge. The people who came to them needed help, comfort, and a sense of security. He didn’t want to make them nervous by asking questions. Michal’s murder was traumatic enough. OMA had to remain off-limits.

  The busy restaurant lifted his spirits. Aid workers only saw the distress of the asylum seekers. The life they described was a long tale of woe, tragedy after tragedy. Itai was glad to see there were places where they could chill out, enjoy themselves, forget their troubles for a while.

  He inhaled the odor of berbere, the reddish-orange spice the Eritreans used in their cooking. The sharp smell issued from all their restaurants, even managing to overpower the pervasive stench of garbage outside.

  This establishment was no different from the others in the area: a small, poorly lit space that was formerly a storefront. Black plastic tables and chairs were scattered haphazardly around the room. At the far end was a bar with a cheap string of Christmas lights above it. The walls were adorned with an Eritrean flag and colorful tapestries showing scenes of African village life.

  The clientele was exclusively male. The men sat side by side, sometimes two to a chair, touching shoulders and eating with their fingers from a large tin tray in the center of the table. The tray was covered with injera, a spongy flat bread with a mousy gray color and a slightly sour taste, over which was a beef stew called zigni, a dark red chicken stew called dorho, or shiro, an orange vegetarian dish made of chickpea flour cooked with tomatoes and seasoned with onions and garlic.

  Itai scanned the restaurant, looking for a free table. The waiter, who was most likely also the owner, pointed to a small table in the corner with a single chair beside it. Itai walked toward it, aware that every eye in the restaurant was on him. Such places are rarely visited by Israelis, but when they do come, they are welcomed graciously.

  Itai searched for a familiar face, someone he knew from OMA, but he didn’t recognize anyone. When he was seated, the waiter presented him with a menu written only in Tigrinya. “Just tea,” he ordered apologetically in English. He’d tried Eritrean food a few times, but he wasn’t fond of the cuisine. While the purple, red, and orange colors were a feast for the eyes, the flavors were either too hot or too bland for his taste. He remembered that Michal had once admitted, reluctantly, that she didn’t like it, either. It was unusual for her to make such a confession. She was an all-or-nothing type of person: if she liked something, she gave it her unconditional love. It was the same with the things she hated. It was hard for her to say a bad word about the asylum seekers, whom she insisted on calling “refugees.” He recalled how he couldn’t keep from laughing at the sheepish expression on her face when she admitted she didn’t like their food. Naturally, she didn’t understand what he found so funny.

  The men at a nearby table were in the midst of a lively discussion punctuated by laughter. Itai tried to make out what they were talking about, but he couldn’t follow the conversation. He knew even fewer words in Tigrinya than Michal. From time to time, someone glanced over at him and he smiled back politely.

  When the waiter arrived with his tea, Itai showed him the picture on his phone. “Excuse me, but do you happen to know this man?” he asked. The waiter took the phone, looked at the photograph, and then back at him. “Do you know this man?” Itai repeated. The waiter shook his head and quickly returned the phone. “He lost something and I want to give it back to him,” Itai lied. “Sorry, not know him,” the waiter said, walking away.

  Even though the restaurant was already full, more and more men kept streaming in, cramming themselves around the crowded tables and rubbing shoulders, the customary Eritrean expression of friendship and affection. Itai noticed that some didn’t take a seat but instead continued on to what appeared to be a back room. He couldn’t see inside from where he was sitting.

  A young man at an adjacent table smiled at Itai, who seized the opportunity to show him the photograph. The man took the phone accommodatingly, but as soon as he saw the picture he shrugged his shoulders. “Not know him, sorry,” he said. “Can you ask your friends? I really want to talk to him,” Itai said.

  There were six other men at the table. Itai watched their faces as they passed the phone from hand to hand, whispering among themselves. Two of the men looked in his direction, but they lowered their eyes when he looked back. “Sorry, sir, nobody know him,” the young man said, returning the phone and twisting his chair around slightly so that his back was to Itai. He’d spent enough time with asylum seekers to know that the small gesture was a sign of dismissal.

  Itai glanced at the television hanging over the entrance. An African entertainer he’d never seen before was singing into a microphone, but his voice was drowned out by the noise in the restaurant. The door opened and three more men walked in. Instantly, all eyes turned to them and the noise level dropped dramatically. The three men, one carrying a black leather bag, crossed the room quickly and disappeared behind the bar. The diners immediately resumed their conversations.

  Itai sat there a few minutes longer. Something was going on in the back. Could it be the illegal banking activity Michal was on to? If he wanted to convince the cops to look into it, he had to bring them something concrete. He might be able to persuade them if he could snap a picture of what they were doing back there.

  Another man walked in and hurried toward the back. This was his chance. Itai stood up and followed the man as he made his way between the crowded tables. Passing behind the bar, he found himself in a dark stuffy hallway. Itai’s heart was pounding. He turned his head, but no one seemed to notice what he was doing. The man turned right into another hallway. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air, making Itai gag. At the end of the corridor, he pulled out his phone and pressed the camera button. The man knocked on a white door. A few seconds later, the door opened and he disappeared inside.

  Itai pressed his ear to the door. He could hear raised voices. He stood there debating with himself whether to knock on the door, but before he could come to a decision, it opened again and the body of a tall African filled the doorway. Itai was six foot one, but the man was a head taller and twice as broad.

  “Toilet?” Itai spluttered, uttering the first thing that came to him.

  The big man shook his head and gestured for him to leave.

  “What’s in there?” Itai asked, standing his ground.

  “Go away,” the man ordered, giving him a shove. He very nearly lost his balance.

  “Let me in.”

  The man shoved him again, harder this time. Itai fell backward. He saw the waiter behind them, watching.

  “What are you trying to hide?” He picked himself up and pointed his phone at the man in the doorway.

  Itai’s heart stopped even before he felt the pain of the sucker punch to his stomach. He could hardly breathe. He dropped to his knees. The phone went flying.

  Chapter 37

  ANAT watched Shmuel Gonen as he made his way to her office. His eagerness aroused her suspicions. No more than half an hour had elapsed since she’d called and asked him to come in for a lineup, and he was already here, unmistakably ready and willing to do his part. Anat didn’t like overly eager witnesses. They were always a headache in the end.

  According to regular police procedure, a suspect is taken to the scene and asked to give a detailed account of what happened there. The reenactment is recorded and placed into evidence. Only after that is a lineup conducted. But this time Anat’s bosses had told her to switch the order. The police force suffered from a lack of public confidence, and they didn’t want to miss a chance to improve their image. Gabriel admitting that “Michal died because of me” and “I k
illed Michal” would be leaked to the media and repeated time and again. They had to get the lineup out of the way as quickly as possible to pave the way for their moment of triumph.

  When they finished questioning Gabriel, Yochai descended from his lofty chamber to congratulate Anat. “I always knew I could count on you,” he said, shaking her hand. She played her part impeccably, thanking him dutifully. She would have been more pleased by his compliments if she hadn’t gotten a call from David five minutes before the DC walked into her office. David told her Yochai had called him yesterday and leaned on him to get his ass back to Israel.

  Anat herself hadn’t yet decided how she felt about the interview with Gabriel. In her opinion, he looked more frightened than guilty. But no one else had any qualms. “He confessed, we didn’t drag it out of him, we didn’t threaten him, we didn’t keep at him for hours. What else do you want, Nachmias?” Yaron said, adding, “That’s why you’re still single. Nothing satisfies you.

  “Seriously, Nachmias,” he went on, wiping the smile off his face when he saw the expression she shot at him, “we don’t have any evidence that contradicts what he said. There’s nothing that suggests he didn’t do it. Not a single thing.”

  Anat envied his self-assurance, the confidence not to second-guess himself. With Yaron there was no “do this, do that,” “he did it, he didn’t do it.” For him, there were no two ways about it: Gabriel was guilty. Things always seemed more complicated to Anat.

  She kicked herself for not picking up immediately on the fact that Gabriel spoke English. She should have asked Itai Fisher or, at the very least, not simply assumed he didn’t. She got the sense he understood what she was saying at the very beginning of the interview, but she chalked it up to her lack of experience with Africans. Then when she asked him if he wanted an attorney, he shook his head without waiting for the translation. She noticed it but decided to ignore it. Still not certain she was reading him correctly, she didn’t want to bear down on him too hard at that early stage in the interrogation.

  Anat was also pissed off at Yaron for not making sure the two Africans didn’t know each other. She’d told him to check, and he came back saying there was no reason they couldn’t use Arami. That kind of mistake could easily affect the admissibility of the confession. She had to keep a closer eye on Yaron. In an effort to remedy the situation, she’d asked Gabriel the same questions a second time and was relieved to get the same answers without Arami in the room.

  Gabriel claimed that he didn’t mean to kill Michal. It was an accident. Anat managed to get him to admit halfheartedly that they’d fought over money, but he couldn’t say how much he owed her. And he continued to insist that it happened in the morning, when Anat knew for certain that Michal was killed during the night. Bottom line: on two critical points, the how and the why, Gabriel’s explanations were less than persuasive.

  Anat couldn’t forget what Itai Fisher said, that Gabriel might not be telling the truth, that someone might be threatening him or squeezing him for money. And maybe he was covering for somebody else. But who? Unlike Itai, Anat was convinced that Michal knew her killer. Was it someone Gabriel knew, too? Was the man coercing him somehow? What was he holding over him?

  THEY usually had a hard time finding the right number of decoys for a lineup, people whose appearance was close enough to that of the suspect and who were willing to take the job. For Gabriel’s lineup, all it took was one call to a foreign labor contractor and they had fifteen candidates. Six even had a scar on their face. Israelis turned their nose up at the pittance they were paid for the service, but it sounded very appealing to Africans. Now they just had to wait for the public defender to show up.

  Shmuel Gonen was standing next to Anat, looking very tense. “I hope I don’t get a heart attack when I see him. He nearly killed me, that black punk, like he killed Michal.”

  Anat tried to calm his nerves, assuring him he had nothing to worry about, that the police would protect him. She watched him closely when the men were revealed. He passed his eyes rapidly from one to the other. Too rapidly, in her opinion. It was always hard to ID a person of a different race. She’d explained that to Gonen before the lineup.

  “Number four,” he declared after only a few seconds.

  “Are you certain?” Anat asked.

  “It’s number four. I’m positive. I’ll never forget him,” Gonen answered confidently.

  “Take another look.”

  “No need. Number four.” Gonen made no effort to hide his irritation.

  Anat remained silent. Gabriel was number seven.

  Chapter 38

  LIDDIE lay on her thin mattress. Although her eyes were closed, she was wide awake. The room was dark, with no more than a narrow ribbon of light filtering in through the small crack between the door and the floor. The heavy smell of sweat and semen in the air seeped into her skin, the mattress, and the flimsy sheet that was her only blanket.

  Her body ached. She had been sick for two weeks, coughing constantly. The hacking cough came from deep down, sending waves of pain through her whole body. She pulled the stinking sheet tighter around her in an effort to keep warm. Her teeth were chattering and she was trembling from the cold.

  The room she was in was tiny. She’d been imprisoned here, the sole occupant of this cell, for two months. In all that time she hadn’t seen the world outside, hadn’t heard the sound of cars or the noise of the city. They hadn’t let her out even once.

  The only items in the room were the mattress, a small sink, and a bucket that functioned as a toilet and a receptacle for the condoms the men left behind. Ahmed insisted they use condoms and that she wash herself in the sink every night. He didn’t want to damage the merchandise.

  Lately, he’d stopped bringing the men to her. They were put off by her coughing, he told her angrily. He worked her hard before she got sick, usually sending in two or three men at once. The record was six. They were all Africans. Some lay down on top of her and rammed themselves into her; others wanted her to put her mouth on them down there. It was like an assembly line; the men came one after the other, rubbing against her, invading her body, spilling their seed on her.

  The first time was in Sinai when Rafik forced himself on her. Liddie wept, screamed, begged him to take pity on her. She was only seventeen, and still a virgin. Rafik slammed the barrel of his rifle into her stomach and punched her in the face. He held a finger up to his lips, signaling her to remain silent, and then moved it across his throat to warn her what would happen if she didn’t obey. That was the last time she let anyone see her cry. She still wept when no one was around, but that soon stopped as well. Even when Rafik brought the other Bedouins to her, she didn’t let out a sound.

  Liddie wasn’t the only girl here. There were others like her elsewhere in the apartment. She could hear them screaming, hear Ahmed shouting at them, hear the footsteps of the men entering their rooms. Sometimes, late at night, she could hear them sobbing.

  Three times a day the door opened and Ahmed flung food inside: a pita bread, a tomato, a cucumber. Every now and then she got rice or chickpeas. Sometimes, when Ahmed was in a particularly good mood, he was more generous. Once or twice he even brought her meat.

  Other than that, the door only opened to let in clients. She never looked at their faces, just stared off into space, biting down on her lip when they hurt her. Periodically, Ahmed gave her the signal that meant the client was paying extra and she was expected to groan.

  At first Liddie tried to hide her face from the clients. She didn’t want to be recognized by a man from her village or somebody she had met on the way here in the refugee camp in Sudan, in Egypt, or in Sinai. There had been many stages on the long journey to Israel. She didn’t want anyone to know what she was doing now, what had become of her. People talk. Gossip travels fast and slips easily across borders. The rumor could reach her mother or Gabriel. She couldn’t bear the shame.

  Ahmed beat her when he realized what she was doing. He charged m
ore for her because of her pretty face. How dare she hide it!

  A while ago, maybe a month, maybe more, one of the clients recognized her. There was no point in denying who she was. His name was Fotsom and he was also from Eritrea. He had been in the truck that took them from Sudan to Egypt. For several days they had been packed together on the floor of the truck covered in sacks, praying not to be discovered by the police at one of the checkpoints they crossed. To pass the time, they told each other about the villages they had left behind and tried to imagine what they would find in their new home, what their life would be like there.

  Liddie whispered in his ear, begging him to go to the women’s shelter on Neveh Sha’anan Street and tell Dahlia, the social worker, where she was, or at least tell her she hadn’t simply left without saying good-bye. But he could only tell Dahlia. He mustn’t speak to Gabriel. Her brother mustn’t know that she was in Israel or find out anything about the fate that had befallen her.

  Ahmed had caught them talking and pulled Fotsom off her, shouting that if he didn’t want a bullet in the head, he’d better not tell anyone anything. He had connections, Ahmed yelled. Wherever Fotsom went, he’d find him. Then Liddie heard a thud followed by a groan of pain.

  A few days ago, the door opened and Ahmed came in and started beating her. He punched her in the stomach, slapped her face, pounded her all over. Liddie had no idea why. What had she done?

  “I’m fed up with you,” he thundered. “This isn’t a hotel. You lie here like a fat cow, eating and coughing all the time. The clients don’t want you. They’re scared of catching something.”

  Ahmed grabbed her by the throat and sat down on top of her, pinning her to the floor.