Asylum City: A Novel

by Liad Shoham

  Knowing that Liddie was safe filled Gabriel with joy. What he was doing had a reason and a purpose. He wanted to hear more and more about his sister, how she was, where she’d been all this time, what they did to her. From the window in his cell he could see it was raining. Was she warm enough? Did she have the right clothes? Why did he hear coughing on the phone? Itai didn’t say much. He kept pressuring him to talk. If Gabriel told him what happened, he’d tell him about Liddie, he said. He couldn’t do it. Itai already knew too much.

  The lawyer treated him as if he were backward. He spoke slowly in a loud voice, emphasizing each word. He kept asking him if he understood. That had always been a sign for Gabriel. He was wary of Israelis who talked to him like the lawyer did. That’s why he trusted Michal and Itai. They spoke to him like he was an adult, a real person. The little policewoman spoke to him like that, too.

  Gabriel wanted Itai to represent him, but he said he couldn’t, that he didn’t have experience in criminal cases. Gabriel didn’t care. Anybody was better than the lawyer he had now.

  Prison wasn’t easy for him. Having a bed to himself and regular meals wasn’t enough. He felt stifled. He had no room to move around.

  Eritrea was all open spaces. Sometimes he went days without seeing another human being. He had all the fresh air and sunshine he could ever want. Gabriel missed the wide expanses of his home, the sense of freedom, the feeling of being surrounded by the majesty of nature and being able to breathe it all in. In Tel Aviv there were buildings everywhere, high towers that reached the sky and made him dizzy. There was no quiet, no privacy, only smoke, people, and cars everywhere he went. Too many people, too many cars.

  Everything was smaller in prison. Closed off. He sat in a corner of his cell, not moving, drawing pictures in his head because they wouldn’t give him paper and pencils. His feet longed to run like they used to; his lungs yearned for fresh air. But his feet had nowhere to go and all he breathed in was the stench and congestion.

  They were eight in the cell. The others were all Israelis. Most of the time they ignored him, except when they cursed him or ordered him around like a slave. The tall smelly one with the tattoo on his head beat him up once. He kicked him, punched him in the face. The others didn’t interfere. He’d learned from Rafik in Sinai that it was best not to react, not to show him that it hurt. In the end, he’d stop. It wasn’t much fun to kick an inanimate object. The tall smelly one stopped, too.

  The lawyer said he wanted to help him; he could get him out if he talked. Gabriel didn’t believe him, and he wouldn’t say anything even if he did. The Israeli man gave Arami the money on condition that Gabriel took the blame for what happened to Michal. Before they told Arami to leave, his friend made him swear to uphold his side of the bargain. “If you tell the truth he’ll kill Liddie and have us both deported, like Hagos. He’s a very powerful man, I can tell,” Arami said.

  Gabriel had to stay strong. He couldn’t give in. His fate had been decided and he had to accept it.

  FOR a change, the lawyer looked happy today. He even smiled at Gabriel. The detective who interrogated him was off the case, he said. He’d met with her second in command, who was in charge now, and he said the State Attorney was open to cutting a deal.

  The lawyer thought it was good news. They could use it to their advantage. “Something we can work with. Do you understand? Trust me, Gabriel,” he said with obvious self-satisfaction, “this is what I do. They’ll offer twenty-five years and I’ll counter with fifteen. In the end we’ll agree on twenty. If you’re a good boy, you’ll be out in thirteen. Do you understand?”

  Too many numbers. It was confusing.

  “So what do you say?” the lawyer asked, leaning in, raising his voice, and emphasizing each word. “Should I say yes? I need your consent. I don’t want to pressure you. Do you understand? It’s a good deal. Thirteen years, fifteen at most, and you’re out. Do you understand? You’ll be able to start over.”

  Chapter 53

  ANAT was sitting in her office poring over the documents on her desk. The first time she’d read Michal’s complaint against Yariv Ninio a few days ago, she hadn’t given it much weight. The phrasing was overwrought and histrionic, and the allegations sounded over-the-top, like the claim that by concealing the Foreign Ministry’s legal opinion from the court, Ninio “was signing the refugees’ death warrant.” But the real problem wasn’t the style, it was the content. Michal didn’t have a shred of evidence to back up her claims. It was obvious to Anat that she’d never seen the alleged document she contended could have saved Hagos from deportation and subsequent death.

  Still, what she’d learned from Dvora Gonen was causing Anat to reconsider her theory of the crime. Yariv Ninio wasn’t the ideal candidate for the role of murderer. The motive was weak, no more than what seemed like a hysterical complaint to the Bar Association. But there was no denying that he was a white man with whom Michal was closely acquainted and he had a grudge against her. Anat had learned from experience not to judge a motive from her own perspective. She had to see it through the suspect’s eyes. Something that seemed trivial to her could mean the world to somebody else. It could even be a motive for murder. She’d worked a case where a man killed his wife because of an argument over who was going to take out the garbage.

  Anat aligned the papers neatly, put them through the hole punch, and filed them in a fresh binder.

  She hadn’t been planning to question Ninio. She’d gone to the State Attorney’s Office to have a word with Galit Lavie, to let her know that it wasn’t a slam dunk yet, that she shouldn’t be in a rush to file charges against Gabriel. She didn’t say much, just that there were still some questions that needed answers, but she was sure Lavie got the message.

  If any of Anat’s colleagues found out that she’d spoken to Lavie, they’d brand her a traitor. In theory, the police worked hand in hand with the prosecution, but reality was very different. There was a lot of tension between them. Lavie had a reputation for being nobody’s fool. Anat hoped she could trust her.

  During their conversation, Anat happened to mention Michal’s complaint. She could see that it was the first the prosecutor had heard of it. When she pressed Lavie to tell her why she seemed so troubled by the information, she learned of Ninio’s attempt to find out about the progress of the case from her intern. That set off another alarm in Anat’s head. She decided to risk questioning him even though she hadn’t prepared for the interview.

  Now she was glad she’d followed her gut instinct. Ninio had confirmed her suspicions. She could tell he was putting on an act, making a supreme effort to appear unconcerned. Some of his answers even sounded rehearsed, as if he’d been expecting to be questioned by the cops. And the way he panicked when she noticed his bruises strengthened her conviction that he was worth a closer look.

  Anat’s first call when she got back to the station was to the Bar Association. Within half an hour, Ninio’s official response to Michal’s complaint was on her computer. The words “police investigation” could work wonders. People were willing to divulge a great deal to a police officer, even more than they had to, or ought to. In contrast to Michal Poleg, Anat wasn’t met with silence or indifference.

  She’d expected a long statement in convoluted legalese, but the document was short and simply phrased. Ninio denied Michal’s allegations one by one and claimed to know nothing of any legal opinion composed by the Foreign Ministry.

  Anat was disappointed. It looked as if Ninio was telling the truth: the complaint was little more than a nuisance, nothing to get upset about. Nevertheless, she decided to look deeper. If she wanted to develop a solid theory of the case, she had to tie off all the loose ends. The result of her call to the Bar Association wasn’t enough for her to cross Yariv Ninio off the list of possible suspects.

  Her next call was to the Foreign Ministry. She had to go through ten different people before finally reaching Dr. Yigal Shemesh on the African desk. It turned out Michal had been to see him
. She went to his office to bawl him out for the Foreign Ministry’s official stance on refugees, which held that deportation did not put them in harm’s way. Dr. Shemesh admitted to Anat that he did indeed write the legal opinion Michal referred to in her complaint. So it wasn’t a figment of her imagination. Still, he swore he never showed it to Michal or even acknowledged its existence in so many words, although he confessed he might have alluded to it indirectly.

  “I’ve gotten into enough trouble over it already,” he said. The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable.

  Anat found out that several months ago Dr. Shemesh had written a position paper arguing that the lives of migrants deported to Ethiopia were in danger. “All I did was repeat what the British Foreign Office has said, what you can find in UN reports. It was nothing new, certainly nothing revolutionary. Everybody knows it,” he said apologetically.

  He told her he sent copies to the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice. At Anat’s request, he e-mailed her a copy as well.

  Despite Dr. Shemesh’s efforts to minimize its importance, Anat immediately recognized the significance of his position paper. For the past few nights she’d been reading up on what people liked to call the “refugee problem.” From the court transcripts she read, she could see that the main battles were fought over the issue of a migrant’s citizenship. Eritreans and Sudanese couldn’t be deported. They were protected because of the situation in their countries and the risks they would be facing if they returned. In contrast, Ethiopians were subject to deportation.

  Anat learned that Ethiopia and Eritrea weren’t strangers to each other. They didn’t merely share a border, either. It was only in 1993 that Eritrea declared its independence from Ethiopia after a thirty-year war. Consequently, some of the Eritreans in Israel used to be Ethiopian citizens, and they speak the language. The Ministry of the Interior took advantage of this fact, labeling them Ethiopian in order to deport them.

  Dr. Shemesh’s position paper could potentially seal up this crack in the legal wall by spelling out the threat to Eritrean migrants who were deported to Ethiopia. The paper could actually save a lot of lives. As Dr. Shemesh told Anat, everything in it had been published before by various bodies around the world. But this was the first legal opinion written in Hebrew on the official stationery of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and that’s what made it so important. The good doctor understood that himself.

  The document had a further significance. If it was presented in court, it would put an end to the string of victories credited to Yariv Ninio, the golden boy of the Interior Ministry and people like Ehud Regev, who built their careers on stoking the flames of hate against Africans.

  Anat’s next task was to trace the document itself. She had to prove that Ninio had received it, despite his insistence to the contrary.

  It took her less time than she anticipated to locate the right person in the Justice Ministry. Chen Shabtai in the International Affairs Department confirmed that she had, in fact, received it from the Foreign Ministry. “It’s just a position paper,” she said, trying to downplay its importance.

  “What did you do with it?” Anat asked.

  “I passed it on to the relevant party.” Anat could almost hear Shabtai shrug her shoulders.

  “Would that happen to be Yariv Ninio in the State Attorney’s Office?”

  After a pause, the government official stammered that she wasn’t sure she should answer that question.

  “This is a murder investigation,” Anat said sharply in a threatening tone. “You can tell me now or you can come to the station for a formal interview.”

  “Yes, he’s the one I sent it to,” Shabtai said. Any qualms she might have had about passing on this information were suddenly gone. It was the oldest trick in the book. It worked with everyone, even legal advisers.

  “Are you certain he received it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’ve got his reply right here. He e-mailed back ‘thank you.’”

  ANAT leaned back in her chair. David’s flight was getting in this afternoon and he’d be taking over the case. She had worked with him long enough to know he’d put it to bed in a day or two. He’d send it to the prosecution with the firm recommendation that charges be filed against Gabriel for the murder of Michal Poleg.

  He’d be wrong. But as things stood at the moment, no one would listen to her. Ever since she stopped the reenactment in the middle, she’d been a pariah around the station. Nobody spoke to her, nobody made eye contact. Before he got on the plane, David sent her a text message: “Don’t worry. I’ve got your back. Keep your head down.”

  Again she read Dr. Shemesh’s legal opinion and the e-mail she’d received from the Justice Ministry. Michal was shooting in the dark. She filed a complaint with the Bar Association not knowing if there was any evidence to back it up. But Yariv Ninio knew. Despite his adamant denial, he received the document and he concealed it. And he lied to the Bar Association about it. There was no doubt in Anat’s mind that he understood its significance and the implications it could have for his career.

  This was a major development. But it wasn’t enough. She needed more. At least now she knew where to look.

  Chapter 54

  ITAI stared at the computer impatiently, waiting for the news site to refresh and the items on the screen to change. The journalist had sent a text message half an hour ago notifying him that the story would appear in a few minutes. But he still didn’t see it. The sluggishness of the computer was making him even more jittery. He was sick of having to put up with outdated equipment, fed up that nothing worked the way it was supposed to.

  He’d debated with himself a long time before calling Amit Giladi. Itai kept as far away from the media as possible. He’d been burned once, and that was enough to last a lifetime. It was back when he was new at OMA. In an effort to get the Ministry of the Interior to cancel the deportation order issued for Sue, a young woman from Thailand who put out a small news sheet for the local community, he spoke to a reporter, hoping to get public opinion on his side. The reporter asked him to describe Sue. Naturally, he painted a glowing picture of her: she was charming, intelligent, attractive. The subhead over the story in the paper the next day hinted snidely at a direct link between his desire to help the woman and his fondness for Thai masseuses. It didn’t matter that there was no evidence of such a connection in the article itself, the damage was done. And not just to Sue, who was deported soon afterward. Itai’s own reputation was also tarnished, along with the cause he was trying to promote. Not to mention his mother’s reaction. As soon as she saw the paper, she purchased cemetery plots for herself and his dad, claiming they wouldn’t live long with the shame of it all. He joked that she could make it easier for herself if they moved closer to the cemetery. “You’re laughing now, but you’ll cry later,” she said, ending the conversation with one of her pet platitudes.

  But now he had to take action. A woman he was close to had been murdered, and a fine young man was in jail. He couldn’t explain why he was so protective of Gabriel, but the fact was that he felt a special responsibility for him, almost like a father, or at least an older brother. It wasn’t merely his gentleness and modesty or the ease of communicating with him thanks to his knowledge of English. It was more than that. Gabriel’s artistic talent gave Itai hope that he could make a better life for himself. Itai’s job was to help provide asylum seekers with the bare necessities. Beyond that, he had few expectations. He didn’t see a future for them in Israel, where they’d never be a real part of society. Virtually all of them would go on living the way they did now. But Gabriel was different. His talent could be his ticket out. Itai yearned for that, not only for Gabriel’s sake but for his own sake as well. He badly craved a success story. Maybe that’s why Gabriel’s arrest affected him so personally.

  Itai chose Giladi because he knew from his articles that he’d been present at the reenactment. And when he Googled his name,
what he found made him think the reporter wasn’t in anyone’s pocket and wasn’t easily intimidated.

  He was sure Giladi would jump on the story. It had everything going for it: a man wrongly accused; a brother sacrificing himself for his sister; a girl abducted, tortured, and raped in Sinai and then brought to Israel as a sex slave; cops turning a blind eye to the truth in their rush to close the case; a gangland killer and extortionist still walking free.

  To his surprise, the reporter was skeptical. “The guy confessed, so where’s the story?” he asked when Itai called.

  Finally, he got Giladi to agree to meet with him. Once they were face-to-face, Itai could see that he was breaking through the reporter’s initial lack of enthusiasm. Giladi took copious notes and seemed particularly interested in the account of how Arami had found Liddie in the street, the condition she was in, and the traumatic experiences she had undergone.

  “I want to talk to Liddie and Arami,” Giladi said. “The interview with Gabriel will have to wait since he’s in custody for the time being.”

  Itai explained that it was impossible to speak to the asylum seekers themselves. Arami was too vulnerable, to say nothing of Liddie. Neither of them would ever consent to talk to a reporter. They came from a dictatorship where the first law of survival was to keep a low profile. Even if Itai could convince them that things were different in Israel, they’d be afraid that going public would make them a target of the Immigration Police, who would find a way to make them pay. The fact that asylum seekers were invisible to most Israelis was in the best interest of both sides: Israelis didn’t want to know, and asylum seekers didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. That was their worst fear.

  “At least give me some pictures. I need something,” Giladi insisted.

  Itai couldn’t agree to that, either. He didn’t have any pictures, and even if he did he wouldn’t turn them over to the reporter without their consent.