Pattern crimes

by William Bayer

  "A few. Shai. Yig'al. I saw Zvi Shapira at the airport about a month ago. Making a fortune in computerized imaging. He was on his way to Japan."

  They spoke briefly of old comrades, and then of how they'd cheered that first morning when they'd seen the planes return. David remembered: the terrible heat, the blisters on his face, the dust and the wind, then the roar of the fighters just above their heads and how they'd jumped up and down upon the burning sand: all the Arab air forces destroyed on the ground. The great conquest had begun. Heroic days.

  "It's not the same now, is it? Remember how we all adored Arik? Then Lebanon. I was there. It stunk. Bastard! We didn't know it then. '67! That's when everything started going wrong."

  "Tell me about Peretz."

  "In connection with the murders, right?"

  David nodded. "His name came up."

  "I'm not surprised." Yehuda looked uneasy. David didn't say anything, just waited for him to talk.

  "…a perfect commander for reprisal assaults, which I suppose is why he got the job. It was a covert unit. Strictly volunteer. But there was a level of brutality even the toughest types couldn't take. So then Peretz came up with this idea, a way to staff it out. Fill it out with criminals, guys in trouble, violent guys. They had these guys in stockades, and they didn't know what to do with them. 'Let me have them,' he said. 'It's a filthy job so give me filthy guys.' "

  "So what exactly was this filthy job?"

  "Counter-terror. They do bad things to us, we go do even worse to them."

  "Crossing frontiers?"

  "Nothing new about that. We've been doing it for years." Yehuda looked away. "Of course this was different. Real nasty stuff. The justification was that it was aimed at the hard-core terrorists, the ones who sneak in, kill kids, and shoot up schools."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm not saying anything, David. The unit was small, covert, and when it was disbanded all the records were destroyed. You won't find anyone now who'll admit it ever existed. No one wants to own up to having signed off on the damn thing because of the way it got out of hand."

  "I heard something about Peretz, that he 'liked to cut.'"

  Yehuda nodded.

  "They cut people?"

  "That wasn't the purpose. The purpose was to strike back hard."

  "So what's all this about cutting?"

  "Stories. Tales. You couldn't prove any of them. It was all hearsay kind of stuff."

  "What kind of hearsay?"

  Yehuda looked away again. "The way it started out, the unit was supposed to leave some kind of mark. That way people would know we had a reprisal squad and that the squad always got its man. So let's say they did a termination, they'd leave these cuts on the guy, their signature. But then, later, with this violent criminal element involved, it got out of control." He tightened his lips, squirmed in his seat, then looked David directly in the eye. "There were, at least we heard, some mutilations, things like that. You know, ears, eviscerations-though I find that hard to believe. Women and children too, somebody said. Tell you the truth, David, I don't really want to talk about this. It makes me want to puke."

  "So what happened?"

  "The unit got disbanded."

  "What about Peretz?"

  "The army quietly let him go."

  "Just like that?"

  "Actually, they found a desk job for him. But he didn't like it, so when he complained they suggested he resign."

  "No investigation? No inquiry?"

  "The stories couldn't be verified. The witnesses were criminals. As for Peretz, he was an outstanding officer who took on a dirty job and did it well. Relentless, maybe merciless, but at first no one was too concerned. They wanted results and he gave them results. Later, when they got to know him better, there developed this feeling that he might be getting off on it, which is when they began to have second thoughts. I think that's what really bothered them. Not that Peretz did these things. We're at war. Counter-terror's not supposed to be a Boy Scout jamboree. But if the commander was actually enjoying his work, as opposed, you understand, to treating it as a dirty job… I mean, if it'd been you or me, David, we'd have tried to get out of it, or have griped until they pulled us out, or, failing that, done it half-ass. But Peretz didn't do it that way. He liked it and after a while everyone could see he did. So in the end that was the real reason they closed him down."

  Yehuda sat back. Then he gave David a bitter little smile. "I could get into a lot of trouble if it ever came out I told you this."

  "Forget about that. It won't. But I've got a couple of questions. You say the unit records were destroyed. Does this mean I can't get a list of the men?"

  "No list. The unit didn't exist. It didn't even have an official name. Whenever anyone mentioned it he'd just say 'Peretz and the boys.' Peretz recruited for himself, so he might remember. Didn't occur to me till now, but he might have some kind of informal list of his own."

  "Second question: What exactly was the 'signature'?"

  "I don't know exactly but I have a vague recollection of hearing it discussed one time. I think the original idea was to convey the notion of double trouble, two-for-one. You know, like in Hosea: 'They have sewn the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.' I remember something about sets of cuts-double cuts, something like that."

  They found Peretz very quickly on the videotapes, and when they did they all wondered why they hadn't spotted him before.

  "He's so still, David." Shoshana shuddered.

  "Guy doesn't move, doesn't react."

  They rewound the master audience tape and ran it again. The striking thing about Peretz was his total lack of affect. In a sea of highly disturbed people he was a noticeable island of calm.

  "As if nothing anyone said touched him at all. How did we miss him?" Micha asked.

  "We were looking for the wrong thing," David said.

  "But still we got him! We got him!" They were excited: David's long-shot scheme of the false symposium had worked.

  "Not so fast," he warned them. "He's a suspect. Now we watch him. No pressure. He mustn't know we're there. Full-press covert surveillance around-the-clock, which means constantly changing shifts. Not three guys wearing Ray-bans parked in a white car across the street."

  He put Dov in charge of organizing the surveillance, gave Micha the job of digging into Peretz's past. But Micha was put out when David assigned him Moshe Liederman.

  "He's a burn-out. He isn't any good. All he talks about is his retirement."

  "Try and use him anyway," David said. "He told me in thirty years he's never worked a case that wasn't shit. I'd like it if, when he retires, he could tell people he worked one hell of a case one time."

  That night, the Seder night of Passover, he called Avraham. "Do you know a Jacob Gutman?" No reply. "I know you do, Father. Please tell me who he is."

  A long pause, then finally a response: "Jacob Gutman is a man who has been wronged."

  Driving home the second evening of the holiday, passing Herod's Gate, David glanced up at the Rockefeller Museum and smiled. He remembered the day he had spotted Anna here, the day that had changed his life.

  It was the previous November, just three weeks after he'd broken off his affair with the journalist Stephanie Porter. He'd bought himself a ticket to a recital at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. An exciting new Soviet-emigre cellist was being featured along with her Israeli accompanist. There'd been an article about them in the Jerusalem Post, an interview with Anna Benitskaya and also her photograph. Perhaps it was the inviting look in her eyes or the expression on her face. Something intrigued him. When he discovered he had a free evening he decided to go and hear her play.

  The recital moved him. He loved chamber music, and when she played the third Beethoven sonata he found himself entranced. He couldn't take his eyes off her. She was a beautiful young woman but it was more than beauty that he saw. Vulnerability, something open and yet mysterious, a haunting quality too, an impression of depth that
belied her youth. She had worn a gray silk dress, a pearl necklace, and tiny pearl earrings which glowed like soft little lights beside her head. She played with passion and her forehead gleamed. When the concert was over he left the church wondering wistfully where she was staying and whether it would be possible to meet her and if he did what she would be like.

  Then, the next day, there was one of those coincidences that seemed to occur so often in Jerusalem. He had been driving mid-morning past the Rockefeller Museum on an errand concerning some now-forgotten case when he saw her walking alone up the entrance drive.

  My chance, he'd thought. I mustn't let it pass. He quickly circled the museum, found a parking place, hurried back to the gate, bought himself a ticket, and entered too.

  It didn't take him long to find her. There were few tourists that time of year, and the Rockefeller, an archaeological museum, was not one of the more popular sights. There were perhaps a dozen visitors moving quietly through the galleries, but when he found Anna she wasn't studying the collections. She was walking slowly beneath the vaulted arcades that lined the central sun-filled court.

  He watched her. It would have been too obvious to follow her directly, and in any case he was a detective and knew how to follow without being seen. So as she moved slowly under the arcades he moved more quickly through the adjoining interlocking galleries, catching glimpses of her every so often through interior windows open to the cloister.

  After a while she crossed to the center and sat down on an old stone bench. It was nearly noon. The sun was shining directly on her, showering her with brilliant November light. She shut her eyes, turned her head for warmth, and as she did, revealed her face. Her forehead gleamed as it had during her concert and then he caught a glimpse of skin glistening at her throat. Something so intimate about that gloss of perspiration: He was filled by an image of her writhing and moaning in sexual abandon that filled him with desire.

  Perhaps he spent a quarter hour watching her. He remembered being fascinated and also feeling like a spy. When she left the museum, he followed her down the drive, across Suleiman, along the Old City walls, and then, turning the corner, along a little footpath that ran between an ancient Moslem cemetery and the massive Turkish wall.

  Some Arab boys were playing soccer in the dust. There was a scent of pine resin in the crystal air, the leaves on the olive trees flashed silver, and the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock glowed brilliant beneath the sun. She stopped several times. At first he thought she was looking at Gethsemane. But then, as he drew closer, he saw that she was gazing upon the chalk-white graves that coated the slopes of the Mount of Olives.

  Suddenly she glanced at her watch, then broke into a run. His heart stopped when, plunging forward, she almost tripped upon a step. He watched as she ran into the Jericho road, flagged down a taxi, then was gone, speeding back toward the center of Jerusalem. And then he knew he had to meet her, that if he did not he could not live.

  Sarah Dorfman arranged it. Poor wonderful Sarah, Rafi's loyal middle-aged secretary, abandoned by her husband for one of those aggressive young German girls, the kind who come to Israel "to confront my parents' guilt" but in fact, or so it always seemed to David, came for a quick tan and to make love to a lot of swarthy Jews. Still, Sarah never complained, and now her life was devoted to the CID. Her only outside interest was music. She knew everyone in the Jerusalem music world and delivered on her promise that David would meet his cellist within the week.

  All that had happened less than six months before and now Anna lived with him in Abu Tor. What if he had not driven by the Rockefeller that day? Would they have met? Or would he have forgotten her face and the extraordinary way she'd played? David did not know but he believed in the magic of Jerusalem, that it was a city of intersecting lives.

  A rumble of thunder as he pulled into En Rogel Street, a flash of lightning as he parked. Just as he stepped out of his car the rainstorm began. He dashed to the doorway of number sixteen where he frantically stabbed out the code on the touch-tone combination lock.

  He was soaked before he got inside. In the lobby he took off his jacket, held it away from him, and wrung it out. A spring rainstorm at last; the country needed rain. Water was a problem even more serious than the confrontation states.

  Anna was wearing a faded yellow shirt. There was a crease between her eyes.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Rafi just called. You're to call him back right away. He sounded tense." She shook her head, disturbed.

  He kissed her between her eyes, then strode to the phone. Dialing the Russian Compound, waiting for them to patch Rafi in, he threw her several more kisses as she stood by the kitchen door.

  "David?"

  "It's me."

  "There's a terrific rain coming down."

  "I know. I just got in."

  "You're going to have to come out again."

  "Another one?" He knew the answer and even before Rafi responded he could feel the dull ache again, the ache he had felt in his stomach ever since he'd been assigned the case.

  "It's near you, anyway. A dumpster on the south corner of Bloom field Park."

  He gulped. "Two minutes ago I passed within fifty feet."

  "If I'd seen you I'd have flagged you down."

  Anna had his poncho out, was smoothing it by snapping it in the air. He glanced out the window and at that moment a bolt of lightning cracked the sky. Anna held the poncho, he ducked under it, then straightened up so that his head was in the center hole. She pulled the hood up for him.

  "When you come back we'll make love," she whispered. "And then I'll make us eggs."

  Rafi wore a bright orange slicker, like a fisherman, David thought. Micha wore a trench coat, Moshe Liederman sucked on a cigarette beneath a poncho, while Dov Meltzer stood in soaked sneakers holding a pin-up magazine above his head.

  "I heard it on the radio," Dov said. His T-shirt was soaked; through the wet fabric David could see dark curls of hair covering his upper chest.

  "Peretz?"

  "He's home. We spotted him around five going into his building. I've got four guys watching him now. Thought I ought to meet you here."

  The dumpster loomed before them like an oversized coffin, huge and black, difficult to see, except when the lightning struck and then it was etched out. Five patrol cars and an ambulance were parked around it at converging angles. The forensic team was waiting for the illumination. A sergeant was setting up portable quartz lights, clipping the lamps to the door frames of a van.

  David went up to Rafi. "Female?" he asked.

  Rafi nodded, pipe clenched between his teeth. "Found by a couple of teenagers looking to scrounge up some discarded wood. Very young this time, like the third one by the wall. But I have a bad feeling she's not a prostitute. Five is too many, David. We never had a case with five."

  "You said it before. Our first serial killer."

  "But the scale's wrong. Know what I mean?" Rafi reached under his slicker, brought out a lighter, tried unsuccessfully to light his pipe. "Everyone's always talking about scale. We go to war, lose a thousand guys, and we say that's like the fifty, sixty thousand the Americans lost in Vietnam. So figure it out. Five is like two hundred fifty. Yeah, I know it doesn't work that way, but that's the way it seems." Another lightning bolt. Rafi winced at the thunderclap. Now the rain was slashing down in sheets. "Shit, don't know what they think they're going to find in there. With rain like this there'll just be soup."

  "Same blanket?"

  Rafi nodded.

  Suddenly David was furious. "Pricks!"

  Rafi squinted at him. "Anyone I know?"

  "Mossad bastards. Their guy spotted Peretz but they had to wait a couple days before they clued me in. Now this. We've only been on Peretz since five o'clock today. He could have done this last night. We'd have seen him approach her. We could have stopped him. You understand, Rafi? If Peretz did this, then the blood's also on their fucking heads."

  A SHAPE IN THE CLAY
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  Big Sur

  Six Months Before…

  "Oh…Targov…"

  She was like that-after she climaxed she always moaned his name: "Targov, Targov…oh…oh…" Then, always, she fell asleep.

  She was a big girl, this one, taller than Anna, California-grown with a quick smile, a dimpled Irish face, and a Milky Way of freckles across her chest. Strong hard breasts and a ribbon of reddish hair between her legs. She jogged. She took dance class. She lifted weights. Her hair was long and auburn. Her hands were powerful. She was a potter.

  He left her on her mattress amid rumpled salmon sheets. There was no bed in the loft, just the huge mattress and her clothing, costumes really, stored in straw baskets scattered on the floor. Smaller baskets, containing underwear and stockings, hung from the ceiling amid her hanging plants. A ladder led down to her studio. He descended it, his cock swinging. A little tired, a little droopy, he thought, but still it swings and rings…

  He went to the refrigerator, poured himself a vodka, sat down naked on her sofa upholstered in musty olive corduroy. Then he inhaled the aroma of her freshly made pots sitting on their wheels, still wet and wrapped in towels.

  They had a date every Tuesday. He drove up to Palo Alto in the morning, taught his Master Class, met Maureen for a quick pizza near the campus, walked with her to her studio, screwed her brains out until five o'clock, then drove back down to Big Sur, arriving home just in time for dinner.

  Irina knew. "Dish him out more soup, Rokovsky. Poor thing's exhausted. Look at the circles beneath his eyes." Then she'd smile her cunning smile and then she'd glower. Later, when she retired for the evening, she'd make sure they heard her throw the latches on her door.

  "Targov? Where are you? Come back up here, naughty man!"

  Maureen wanted him again; he obeyed her summons, ascended, and then paused on the ladder so she could see him only from head to waist. Her fiery green eyes focused on his navel. He took another step. She stared and moaned. Yes, he thought, the lusting lion is back to mount the rutting sow.