by Paul Sussman
He lit another cigarette and, with a despondent groan, left his office and went downstairs, walking out of the station onto El-Matouf Street to get some fresh air. There was a small drinks stall on the corner with Sharia Karnak Temple. Wandering over to it, he bought himself a glass of karkaday and squatted down against the station wall, sipping at the cool ruby liquid. A baker's boy cycled past balancing a giant tray of aish baladi on his head.
The truth was he was fast running out of options. Farouk al-Hakim was dead so he couldn't talk to him, and although there remained a few minor leads to chase up, as he saw it the investigation had now come to hinge on two key factors: speaking to Jansen's friends up in Cairo, and getting some useful feedback from that dreadful Israeli detective. The Gratzes were still refusing to get in touch. They were definitely at home, both of their neighbours having independently reported hearing their voices inside their apartment. For reasons best known to themselves, however, the two of them were playing hard to get, and short of going all the way up to Cairo and hammering on their door personally, Khalifa didn't see much immediate hope of pinning them down.
Which left Ben-Roi. Rude, incompetent, lazy Ben-Roi. Khalifa had already called his office four times that morning, on each occasion getting an answerphone, and on each occasion leaving an increasingly curt message asking what, if anything, the Israeli had managed to dig up about Hannah Schlegel. He still hadn't replied, however, fuelling Khalifa's suspicions that he was simply giving him the runaround, not taking him seriously.
He let out a frustrated sigh and drained off his karkaday, closing his eyes and allowing the afternoon sun to play across his face. It was warm and relaxing, not yet possessed of the furious scorching heat that would come with summer.
'Bloody damn you, Ben-Roi,' he muttered, dragging on his cigarette. 'Bloody sodding damn you.'
'All going well, then!'
His eyes flicked open again. His deputy, Mohammed Sariya, was standing over him.
'You know, I think that's the first time I've ever heard you swear,' said Sariya, impressed.
'It's the first time I've ever had to deal with the sodding Israelis,' grunted Khalifa, flicking his cigarette into the gutter and coming to his feet. He handed his glass back to the street vendor and, slipping his arm through Sariya's, the two of them wandered back into the police station together.
'I hear you're working with Ibrahim Fathi now,' said Khalifa.
Fathi was another of the station's detectives, popularly known as el-homaar – the donkey – on account of his plodding, unimaginative approach to police work. Not surprisingly he was one of Chief Hassani's favourites.
'Anything interesting?'
'A pair of banana merchants who've been fiddling their weights up in el-Bayadiya,' replied Sariya, 'and an intriguing case of serial chicken theft over in Bayarram. Things were never this exciting when I was working with you.'
Khalifa smiled. He wouldn't have admitted as much, but a part of him had been worried Sariya might actually enjoy working with el-homaar, doing things by the book for a change. The fact that he clearly didn't was somehow a relief, made him feel a little less isolated. He had missed his deputy these last few days.
They passed between the twin guard emplacements set on either side of the station entrance and started up the main stairway.
'But seriously, how is it going?' asked Sariya as they climbed. 'Not so good, I take it.'
Khalifa shrugged, but said nothing.
'Anything I can do? Calls I can make, you know.'
Khalifa smiled and patted his deputy on the arm. 'Thanks, Mohammed, but it's probably best if I just get on with it on my own. I'm not overworked. Just confused. As usual.'
They reached the top of the stairs. El-homaar's office, where Sariya was working, was down a corridor to the right; Khalifa's was to the left.
'Make sure you let me know what happens with those banana merchants,' he said, releasing Sariya's arm, winking at him and turning away. He went a couple of paces, then turned back again.
'Hey, Mohammed! There is one thing.'
Sariya joined him and together they went down the hall to Khalifa's office. The phone was ringing as they came through the door.
'You want to get that?' asked Sariya.
Khalifa waved a hand dismissively. 'It'll just be Hassani phoning to check up on me. Let him wait.'
He crossed to his desk and, ignoring the phone, started rooting through the piles of paper heaped all over its surface, eventually pulling out the photographic slide he had taken from Jansen's house.
'It's probably nothing, but I was wondering if you could find out where this tomb is. To be honest, it's more personal interest than business, so don't bother wasting too much time on it – just whenever you get a moment.'
Sariya took the slide from him and held it up to the light. The ringing continued, shrill, insistent, filling the room.
'And probably best not mention anything to Fathi,' added Khalifa, throwing an annoyed look at the phone. 'I don't think he'd be too happy about you moonlighting.'
JERUSALEM
'Come on, you stupid Arab schmuck, where the fuck are you?'
Ben-Roi sat at his desk, scowling and drumming his fingers impatiently on its surface, the telephone receiver jammed to his ear. He was already in a foul mood after what had happened in the camp, and was in an even worse one now having listened to the four messages the Egyptian had left on his office answerphone. 'Inspector Ben-Roi, could you kindly give me a call.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, I was hoping to have heard back from you by now.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, can you please let me know how your investigations are going.' 'Inspector Ben-Roi, have you even started looking into the matter we discussed?'
He'd just risked his fucking life for the man and all he got by way of thanks were messages like that! He shouldn't even have bothered to ring him back; should have just let him stew for a few days. Teach him some manners. In fact, now he thought about it, that's exactly what he was going to do. Hang up and let the little tosser wait.
The line clicked into life.
'Sabah el-khir.'
'Khediva?'
A fractional pause.
'Khalifa. Kal-ee-far. I take it that's you, Inspector Ben-Roi.'
'Yes, it's me,' said the Israeli, resisting the urge to add 'you pushy little Muslim cunt' and instead taking a swift nip from his hip-flask.
At the other end of the line Khalifa lit a cigarette and bit hard onto the filter, disliking the man even more than he had the first time they'd spoken, not least because, by catching him unawares like this, he had made him feel disorganized and incompetent.
'I was hoping to have heard from you sooner,' he said, trying to reassert himself.
'Well, you're hearing from me now,' growled Ben-Roi. 'Which is as soon as I could manage.'
They lapsed into silence, each somehow sensing that to make the next move would be a sign of weakness. I mustn't sound like I need him, thought Khalifa, puffing on his cigarette. I mustn't seem too interested, thought Ben-Roi, taking another swig of vodka.
It was the Egyptian who cracked first.
'So?' he asked, his attempt at nonchalance not quite coming off. 'Have you found anything?'
Ben-Roi gave a satisfied nod, sensing that he had somehow gained the upper hand. Yes, he replied, he had found something. Several things. He let the statement hang a moment, lifting his legs and crossing them on the corner of the desk, enjoying the thought of Khalifa clenching his fists impatiently at the other end of the line, then launched in.
He started with all the personal stuff about Hannah Schlegel: France, Auschwitz, the filing job at Yad Vashem, the twin brother, everything the Weinberg woman had told him the previous day. The receiver echoed to the soft rasp of pen on paper as Khalifa scribbled notes at the other end of the line. He butted in with constant questions – Where in France? Filing what? Have you spoken to this brother? – which brought increasingly curt, monosyllabic responses from Ben-Roi, partly because he didn't like be
ing interrupted, mainly because, deep down, he knew he hadn't covered the ground as well as he should have, and by failing to provide adequate answers was being made to look sloppy.
'Look, I don't fucking know!' he snapped at one point after yet again being forced to admit he hadn't followed something up. 'I've only had two fucking days.'
At the other end of the line Khalifa smirked, perversely glad at having something to criticize, each unanswered question seeming to shift the balance of power a little further his way.
'I quite understand,' he said in the most sympathetic-yet-patronizing tone he could muster. 'Two days is really not very long at all. Especially if you have other things to do.'
'Bollocks,' thought Ben-Roi, holding the receiver away from his ear and giving it the finger.
He stumbled to the end of the background stuff, then moved on to the house fire, and here he was on firmer ground because, although he said it himself, he'd actually done a pretty good job. He took it slowly, starting with what Mrs Weinberg had told him and then going through it step by step – Hani Hani-Jamal, the trip to Al-Amari, Majdi's admission that he'd been paid to burn the apartment, the description of the flat's interior – building the story up piece by piece. Again Khalifa interrupted with numerous questions, but this time Ben-Roi had the answers and, despite himself, the Egyptian was forced to acknowledge it was a pretty good piece of detective work, one with which he himself would have been happy.
'Maybe he's not as stupid as I thought,' he conceded to himself. 'Rude, crass, objectionable. But not stupid.'
The Israeli ordered his narrative in such a way that the crowning piece of information, the revelation of who had actually commissioned the arson attack, came right at the end of the story. By this point Khalifa had become so absorbed in what was being said that he wasn't even bothering to ask questions any more; he was just listening and taking notes. When the Israeli finally mentioned the name the young Palestinian man had given him – Gad, Getz – he let out a low whistle.
'You know him?' asked Ben-Roi, trying, and failing, to mask his own interest.
'Maybe, maybe not,' replied Khalifa. 'Piet Jansen had a close friend named Anton Gratz, who also lives in Cairo. It's certainly a strange coincidence.'
He pondered a moment, wondering why on earth Gratz should have wanted to destroy Hannah Schlegel's flat, then, with a shake of the head, he sat back and stared down at the pad in front of him, scanning the notes he had just taken.
'I am interested in this incident on the boat,' he said after a long pause. 'When Mrs Schlegel first came to Israel. When she said . . .' He ran his pen down his notes, searching for the relevant quote.
' "I'm going to find them," ' put in Ben-Roi, helping him out. ' "If it takes me the rest of my life I'm going to find the people who did this to us. And when I find them I'm going to kill them." '
'Exactly. Who is she talking about?'
'The ones who did whatever they did to her in Auschwitz, I guess,' grunted the Israeli. 'The doctors, the scientists. From what the Weinberg woman said, she had a pretty fucking bad time there.'
Khalifa pulled deeply on his cigarette. Before his search on the internet the previous afternoon he'd known almost nothing about Auschwitz save the name. Even now he found it hard to believe such a place could have existed. Gas chambers, ovens, medical experiments . . . He took another deep drag, thinking about the scar he'd seen on Hannah Schlegel's abdomen, thick, zig-zagging, like some squirming reptile. Was that a legacy of the camp, he wondered? Had they cut her open, poked around inside her, torn bits out? An image flashed momentarily through his mind of a young girl strapped to a hospital gurney, naked, shaved, weeping, terrified, calling for her mother. He grimaced and shook his head, trying to dislodge the vision.
'You think Jansen could maybe have been one of these doctors?' he asked. 'That he could have been involved in these experiments in some way?'
He knew it was a long-shot, explaining as it did some pieces of evidence but leaving most dangling unresolved. Ben-Roi dismissed it immediately.
'All the Auschwitz doctors were either executed or imprisoned at the end of the war. Mengele escaped to South America, but he died thirty years ago. Whatever else your Mr Jansen was involved in, I don't think it was Nazi medical experiments.'
Khalifa nodded, disappointed but not particularly surprised, and sat back in his chair, exhaling a long, undulating ribbon of smoke and flicking through his notes one more time. There was some good stuff here. No blinding revelations, admittedly, but some important new pieces to add to the jigsaw. Schlegel's wartime experiences, the 'archive' in her flat, her twin brother, the arson attack – taken with what he himself had already dug up these were significant new leads. For the first time since the start of the investigation he felt the vaguest flicker of optimism, a rumbling sense that, despite the fog of uncertainty in which everything still seemed to be shrouded, he was at least starting to move forward, to get closer to the heart of the thing.
There was still a long way to go, however, and to cover that extra distance he needed more – more facts, more background, more information, more angles. Some, to be sure, he could ferret out himself; he'd already decided his next move would be to travel north to Cairo to confront the mysterious Mr Anton Gratz. But there were other leads that he couldn't chase up on his own, or at least not easily. Whether he liked it or not he still needed Ben-Roi. Which was frustrating, because if he was grudgingly impressed with some of the work the Israeli had done, that didn't mean he found him any more amenable as a person.
Ben-Roi, for his part, was grappling with much the same problem, albeit from the opposite direction: how to admit that he wanted to stay involved in the case without coming across as overly eager. OK, maybe the Egyptian wasn't quite as incompetent as he'd at first thought; some of the questions he'd asked and the comments he'd made had actually been pretty astute. He was still an irksome, pushy little towel-head, though, and he was fucked if he was going to go crawling to him asking for favours.
There was once more a long, charged silence, neither man wanting to make the move, to say what was on his mind, for fear of giving the other some invisible advantage. This time it was Ben-Roi who caved in first.
'I'll see what else I can turn up,' he said, gruffly, swiftly, as though downing a drink he didn't like.
'Right,' said Khalifa, relieved and slightly surprised. He sat down behind his desk again and screwed his cigarette out into an ashtray. 'I'll fax you a picture of Jansen. And a report of what I've found so far.'
'Do that. And you'd better take my mobile number.'
Khalifa distinctly recalled the Israeli saying he didn't have a mobile. Given that he was being so unexpectedly helpful, he didn't want to risk provoking him, so he just grabbed a pen and made a note of the number. Once he'd got it down there was another silence, neither man quite knowing how to end the conversation.
'I'll be in touch then,' said Ben-Roi eventually.
'Right,' said Khalifa. 'I will wait to hear from you.'
He quarter-lowered the receiver, then lifted it again.
'Ben-Roi?'
'What?'
'One thing . . . it may or may not be significant.'
'Yes?'
Khalifa paused.
'Piet Jansen . . . it seems he was trying to make contact with al-Mulatham. He said he had something that would be useful to him in his fight against Israel. I thought you ought to know.'
After he had put down the phone Ben-Roi sat for several minutes doing nothing, just staring into space, fingers playing with the menorah around his neck. Then he got to his feet and crossed to a metal cabinet in the corner of the office. Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he unlocked it and, squatting, removed a chunky cardboard file crammed with papers. He kicked the cabinet door shut, went back to his desk, sat down and opened the file. Right at the top was a photo of a young woman with short-cropped black hair. Scrawled on a fix-it note stuck to the bottom of the photo was the name Layla al-Madani.
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br /> CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND
It was past five o'clock when Layla eventually arrived in Cambridge, an unseasonably warm, hazy evening with a high, powdery sky and wafts of cherry blossom and mown grass in the air. She had come up from London by train, and under other circumstances would probably have walked the mile and a half from the station into the centre of town – it was years since she had last been in this part of the world and it would have been nice to take in some of the old sights again, from the days she had lived here with her grandparents, after she and her mother had fled from Palestine. As it was, time was pressing, and she was anxious to track down the elusive Professor Topping.
