Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  “Look,” whispered Yigal, “it’s not the way it seems. For ten years now Peter and I have been together and not together. Jalal knows. I don’t have any secrets from him, or from Peter, either. You saw that he knows Jalal, but he doesn’t know exactly what . . . how . . . that Jalal and I . . . Peter is a wonderful, generous person, but—how can I say this?—I don’t feel good about it. It’s not my apartment but Peter’s, and he lets me use it, like, to live there when he’s not here, and if I have Jalal there, how does that look? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “So every time Peter comes, Jalal moves to the Labor Party’s abandoned house?”

  “No. That’s not how it is,” said Jalal. “Sometimes I go to my mother’s, but now there wasn’t . . .” He looked around helplessly.

  “Does ‘now’ mean since the murder, since Nessia disappeared?” asked Michael.

  “No. That has nothing to do with it,” pleaded Jalal. “With the whole mess of the intifada, it’s hard to get out of Ramallah. There are roadblocks, and they check.”

  “Let me explain,” said Yigal. “Up until a while ago, there were Romanian workers living in the house on Mordechai Hayehudi Street. We got to know them when we did some electrical work at a building they were also working on. They’d been there in that house for about ten years, in four large rooms. It isn’t a house . . . it’s a ruin, if you know what I mean. It only looks like a house from the outside but inside everything is rotten and there isn’t even any electricity. But sometimes they would make room for Jalal. We were friendly with them, really great guys. They were also here without papers,” he said enthusiastically, as if that would somehow make things easier for Jalal. “Illegals, so to speak. And nice, really good people. In the summer they would sit on the porch and listen to music and drink beer. We would go drink with them sometimes and when we needed to, they would let Jalal live with them. Do you see what I mean?” he asked Michael, who gave no sign of understanding.

  “They kicked the Romanians out. They kicked them out . . . oh, maybe two months ago,” explained Yigal Hayoun. “This contractor came along. They’d sold him the house. He hasn’t done anything there yet. He just shut the front door with an iron bar, and he also blocked the back entrance. You can’t get in from in front because the entrance is boarded up, and you can’t break in, either. And the windows have old-fashioned grilles on them. But in the yard there’s a little structure that belongs to the neighbor who bought up the land around the house, and now the contractor is fighting with him to get rid of it. He dumped piles of sand there with a bulldozer—you know how contractors can be. He—”

  “Who’s the contractor?” asked Balilty.

  “A guy called Asheri. I worked with him once. I nearly killed myself running after him for my money.”

  “Asheri? A guy of about thirty-five, the glamour-boy type, with an Alfa Romeo sports car? The one who built the penthouse on Queen Esther Street?”

  “Do you know him?” asked Yigal Hayoun in astonishment.

  “Of course I know him!” Balilty cried, and turned to Michael. “He’s a Mafioso, that guy. You get it? There’s this house for preservation—you’re not allowed to touch it, you can’t change a thing and you’re not even allowed to renovate it on the outside—and then he comes along and builds a new structure on the roof, on top of a building that’s designated for preservation, without a permit and without anything and no one says a word. Why?”

  “Tell me, are you in the real estate business?” asked Yigal Hayoun respectfully.

  Balilty ignored the question. “It’s all corruption. He pays the municipality not to interfere with him building wherever he wants, and do you think anyone tells him no? Wherever—”

  “Now,” interrupted Yigal Hayoun, “there’s an intifada going on, and he doesn’t have a residence permit. That is, he does have one but he’s afraid that they’ll find out about . . . Never mind. In any case, he can’t move around freely in East Jerusalem or in Ramallah. And if he goes off to Ramallah, he can’t come back. We said—let him be there, in the little house, for a day or to, until everything blows over.”

  “And Peter?” asked Michael.

  “Peter doesn’t know anything. He didn’t even know that Jalal was there. Peter knows Jalal, and if I would ask him he would agree to let Jalal live with us . . . but I didn’t want to break his heart,” said Yigal Hayoun, “even if Peter and I are no longer . . . no longer . . .”

  “No longer a couple, so to speak?” said Balilty with gleeful smugness that was evident beneath his matter-of-fact tone.

  “More or less,” said Yigal Hayoun.

  “But you and Jalal are a couple?” continued Balilty.

  “Danny,” warned Michael, “this really isn’t the issue now. The issue is murder and the disappearance of a young girl. Did you know Zahara Bashari?” he asked Jalal.

  “He did some work with me on the electricity at their house,” volunteered Yigal Hayoun before Jalal could get a word in. “I told them, he’s working with me, and I do all the electrical work in the neighborhood—repairs, everything. You can ask anyone. Everyone knows me.”

  “So you knew her,” said Michael to Jalal. “You did know Zahara?”

  “No, I didn’t really know her. I just saw her once and she never even spoke to me,” Jalal said, and wiped his brow.

  “And Nessia? When did you last see Nessia?”

  “Yesterday morning, at the grocery store,” said Jalal. “I even said hello to her.”

  “What are you thinking?” burst out Yigal Hayoun. “Do you think that Jalal would do anything to my little sister? Do you think he would break my heart and my mother’s heart?”

  “Are you close to your little sister?” asked Michael, as if casually.

  “What do you mean?” said Yigal Hayoun. “She’s my sister, isn’t she? She’s family, and blood is thicker than water, isn’t it?”

  Michael said nothing, and Balilty continued to gaze at the two men sitting on the bed side by side.

  “Are you trying to insinuate something?” Yigal Hayoun demanded, and rose from the bed to a semistanding position. “Do you think that Jalal would do anything to her and I’d cover for him?”

  “Sit down, sit down. Don’t get excited,” scolded Balilty. “Nobody’s insinuating anything. We’re just checking. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “And Peter?” asked Michael.

  “What about Peter?” asked Yigal. “Are you trying to say that Peter would do anything to her?”

  “I saw him talking to her,” explained Michael. “He had a special relationship with her, didn’t he?”

  Yigal Hayoun blushed. “Do you think that Peter messes around with young girls?” he asked in disgust. “What do you think, that he’s some kind of pervert who messes around with little girls as if . . . like . . . You people don’t understand Peter,” he said bitterly. “He’s just a good soul. He felt sorry for Nessia and he would always talk about how lonely she is and all that, and because of that he paid attention to her. Do you think that everyone who gives a little girl a bit of attention is automatically a pervert?”

  “Maybe you’ll explain to us what happened with her yesterday?” asked Michael.

  “Who? Nessia? I already told him, when we were at the police station”—he indicated Balilty. “I told him, we had our holiday dinner, Peter and I and my mother and Nessia, and that’s it. My two brothers weren’t there. They . . . Never mind. It’s not important.”

  “Your brother Moshe has a criminal record,” noted Balilty. “We have quite a file on him.”

  “Because they got him in trouble. Moshiko has a heart of gold, and if he got in trouble, it wasn’t his fault. Okay, it has nothing to do with it,” blurted Yigal Hayoun. “I’m answering him about something else now, right?” Michael nodded in confirmation. “We had our holiday dinner with couscous and all the things that Peter likes, and Nessia decorated the sukkah before that, and afterward Peter and I left and there wasn’t anything until my mo
ther called at five in the morning and told me about Nessia being missing.”

  “Did anything happen during the evening? Anything unusual? Was she in any kind of special mood, your sister?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened. Everything was as usual. Nessia never talks a lot. Sometimes you might think that she’s deaf or something. Okay, so she’s a girl who’s kind of . . . well, lonely. She hasn’t got any friends or anything. But she was like she always is.”

  “Maybe she’d quarreled with your mother?” Balilty suggested distractedly, and glanced at Jalal, who had crossed his legs tightly and was sitting with his face buried in his hands as if he wanted to disappear.

  “She hadn’t quarreled or anything,” replied Yigal Hayoun angrily. “It was the eve of a holiday. Why should she quarrel?”

  “You really aren’t that close to your sister,” stated Michael. “You don’t know very much about her.”

  “Okay, so I haven’t been living at home since she was born and we aren’t very close,” said Yigal Hayoun in embarrassment. “She’s a little girl. What is there to know? Peter, now he speaks to her a bit. She had something going with him.”

  “And did you speak to her?” Michael asked Jalal.

  Jalal relaxed his lips into a kind of ironic smile, but there was still the same alarm in his eyes. “Me?” he said in astonishment. “Not me. She didn’t come to the house and outside she also . . . If I happened to run into her, we’d say hello and that’s all.”

  “And apart from at the grocery store, you didn’t see her?”

  “I didn’t see her. Really I didn’t,” pleaded Jalal. “I was just waiting there at the house so that there wouldn’t be all that tr . . . so that the police wouldn’t catch me . . . ,” he whispered, and wiped his cheeks with both hands.

  “Okeydokey,” Balilty said, and gave Michael a questioning look.

  “We’re going to transfer you to the Russian Compound now,” Michael said, and Jalal hung his head as if accepting judgment.

  “But he has nothing to do with it!” cried Yigal Hayoun. “He hasn’t done a thing. Nothing. Believe me. He isn’t involved with anyone and just wants to live in peace, to work, to stay alive, to live. Don’t you understand? Why can’t you turn a blind eye?”

  “I understand very well,” said Michael quietly, covering up for the distress he felt, “but even you understand that we cannot ignore . . . that we can’t pretend that we don’t know that he’s a Palestinian from the territories who doesn’t have a residence permit within the Green Line.”

  “And definitely not now, with all these riots,” added Balilty, “because how could we let someone go who’s broken the law like that? Now if you had at least . . . at least some essential information about Nessia or in connection with the murder of Zahara Bashari . . .”

  Balilty dropped his eyelids like an oriental merchant who has begun the process of haggling over the price of a carpet and is waiting for the counteroffer. Jalal shook his head in negation. “I wish I did know something,” he whispered, “I wish I did. I’d give anything not to go to jail now. Anything.”

  “He can’t even make things up,” pleaded Yigal. “Look at him—straight as a ruler. He can’t make something up just so you’ll leave him alone. He’ll get two years for this. They’ll give him two years for falsifying documents and interfering with due process and who knows what. And especially now, with all those disturbances, and then they’ll send him back to Ramallah and nothing will make any difference.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael Ohayon said, and meant it. “There isn’t any way we can avoid this.” Even Balilty didn’t look particularly happy. It was obvious that Jalal had touched his heart too, whether by his frankness and submissiveness or by his beauty, which was impossible to ignore.

  “I can’t go with him, because of Nessia,” said Yigal Hayoun in a broken voice as they stood beside the paddy wagon. He lowered his voice to a whisper when he spoke to Michael: “Could you put a word in so that they don’t rip him to shreds? So that they won’t . . . At least so he won’t suffer so much. He’s pretty delicate.”

  “It’ll be all right,”’ Balilty said, and whispered something to the policeman in the driver’s seat. Before he slammed the door of the paddy wagon he leaned over to Jalal and said to him: “With recommendations to the court, it’s possible to get a lower sentence—sometimes even a year off. Isn’t that so, Ohayon?” Michael nodded weakly and then watched as the paddy wagon moved off down the street.

  “They won’t give him even a month off,” said Balilty as the vehicle dis appeared around the corner. “These guys always get two years. What can I tell you? He looks okay, but who doesn’t look okay? Their biggest murderers look okay, and they also talk okay, until they blow up a busful of children.”

  “And what about us? How are things looking with us?” Michael asked, and brought his attention back from the street to the yard. Esther Hayoun was still sitting there on the straw-seated stool, staring vacantly into space and surrounded by a circle of neighbor women. From beyond the wall floated the voice of the woman from the second floor: “Don’t you remember that Arab from Baka? For three years he was murdering people here. What? Don’t you remember how much blood there was? With a knife he slaughtered them, one after the other, with no mercy. The memorial plaques are still there, over on Yair Street, where they put them on the thirtieth day after the killing. God forbid we should find the girl like that.”

  “Enough, Janina. Don’t talk,” begged another woman. “You don’t want to bring the Evil Eye. With God’s help they’ll find Nessia and everything will be fine. The police will find her.”

  “It’s such a beautiful day. A perfect day for a picnic,” grumbled Balilty, and out of the corner of his eye Michael noted the authoritativeness with which Yair was instructing the policemen. He divided them into groups and then looked at the map Eli Bachar had drawn for him and watched as they entered the yards in front of the houses. Up the street, the tracking dog pulled at the leash held by the police dog handler, a clumsy man in a checked flannel shirt and running shoes, and down the street Eli Bachar led a group of five uniformed policemen toward Yael Street.

  “I don’t understand why you’re putting that baby boy, who barely knows the city, in charge of the search teams,” grumbled Balilty, “and especially when there’s such a shortage of manpower. I mean, it’s going to take hours until we manage to recruit more volunteers from the Scouts, and while that’s going on the girl could already be buried in Beit Safafa. Why on earth did you put him at—”

  “I need you here,” replied Michael. “It’s you that I need here, and I can dispense with him at the moment.” Predictably, Balilty immediately changed his tone and his complaining was replaced by the story of his conversation with the district commander. “Didn’t I tell you about Drori?” scoffed Balilty. “What Drori said to me? ‘I don’t understand why the head of the investigations division is fussing over a murder case when I’ve got riots like that going on at the Patt junction.’ ‘Sir,’ I say to him, ‘a saint can’t just drop good works in the middle,’ so he says to me: ‘You can tell Ohayon that I am not pleased. Convey to him for me that right now I need the head of the investigations department of the Jerusalem District to deal with the general situation and not with a single murder case,’ and then he asks me whether we are even aware of what’s happening at the Patt junction and how Jews have rampaged in Beit Safafa with bottles and stones and broken windows there and stopped Arabs’ cars and made them get out and all that. ‘Yes, we are aware, sir,’ I say to him. ‘Of course we’re aware, and this whole case that we’re dealing with, of a body that was found in a house that is about to be renovated where Arabs were roaming around, could also be connected to the situation. But of course,’ I say to him, ‘of course they’re attacking Arabs’ houses in Beit Safafa, if they’ve started to shoot at Jewish houses and rape and slaughter our women and kidnap our little girls. Are we going to sit back and do nothing?’ I talk to him and talk to him
and he—what does he give me in the end? Forty-seven policemen and another ten from the Missing Persons Unit and this dog handler, Motti, who hasn’t woken up yet and . . .”

  Michael listened distractedly and looked at the Beinisches’ son, who was standing by the fence between his parents’ home and the Basharis’ wearing a white undershirt and shorts. He took a quick peek at the street and examined the muscles in his arm and displayed indifference to everything that was going on all around him until he suddenly shivered as though he felt Michael’s gaze from across the street. Then he hugged himself with his bare arms and hurried back into the house, where the blinds were drawn.

  “I suggest we split up now,” said Michael without taking his eyes off the house. “You wanted to talk to Rosenstein about the apartment, so go talk to him. As for me, I’m going in to see the Basharis about that matter that Orly Shushan talked about.”

  “Don’t you need me there? At the Basharis’?” asked Balilty suspiciously.

  “I could have used you there,” said Michael, weighing his words carefully and avoiding anything that could lead to insult or stubbornness, “but you’ve already started with the lawyer, and we haven’t got the manpower to work in pairs. Do you feel,” he asked cunningly, “that you won’t manage with Rosenstein on your own? Maybe you’re afraid that such an established and experienced lawyer won’t cooperate with you?”

  “Me?” Balilty laughed. “Who does that Rosenstein think he is? When you get right down to it, he’s just a lawyer, and an anxious one at that, and, believe you me, he has good reason to be.”

  “So you won’t be needing me?” asked Michael.

  “No, of course not,” said Balilty. “I’m off to Talbieh to his house, and I even phoned before we left to tell him that. I’m on the mobile if you need anything. You’ll be keeping your beeper on, won’t you?” Michael ignored the warning tone of the question and tapped the pocket of his jeans in reply. “There’s also the kid, Nessia, and we’re in the middle of a case and you can’t turn it off. And furthermore,” he added with a smile, “maybe the lady will be looking for you.”