Pillars of Solomon - [Kamal & Barnea 02]

by By Jon Land

  The preliminary medical examiner’s report arrived when Danielle was well into the pile. There were no surprises. Hyram Levy had died of a single blow to the head that had caved in his skull and crushed his brain. The preliminary examination, rather extensive in itself, had found no signs of any other wound or injury on his body indicative of either repeated beating or a struggle. Levy had been standing behind the counter when his killer lashed out. All indications pointed to the fact that the Engineer had been struck from behind—more evidence he was well acquainted with his killer.

  The most intriguing missing piece now, besides the murder weapon, was motive. Danielle still believed the killer had met with Levy to obtain something from him. When Levy failed to produce it, the killer had struck and then ransacked the shop postmortem in search of what he had come for. Based on the shop’s condition, the odds were he hadn’t found it, which meant there was a piece of evidence still out there, somewhere, that would very likely incriminate the Engineer’s killer.

  Instead of collating the receipts and orders, Danielle decided a scrutiny of Levy’s home and business phone records made for much easier work at this hour of the night. She took a deep breath and opened the manila folder, careful to keep her cooling cup of coffee a safe distance away.

  Although Israel is small geographically, calls between major cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem fall under the toll variety and are listed on the bills. As a service to the police, the phone company also provides the name of the person called, or at least to whom the number is registered, on the printout. Danielle’s intention, after initially perusing the phone records, was to compare them to the database she had been in the process of assembling. Names that appeared most often would give her an initial list of potential suspects who, if not guilty themselves, might have information ultimately crucial to solving the case.

  Most police work is more drudgery in the office than chasing down suspects on the street, and Danielle embraced it now as an alternative to going home to her empty apartment. Once the last of the coffee wore off, she could curl up on the small couch against the wall to her right. It was made out of some leatherlike material that matched her desk chair and most of the other furniture on this floor of offices at headquarters.

  She had been the youngest woman ever to achieve the rank of chief inspector at National Police, and she looked forward to rediscovering the same drive and determination that had accompanied her original tenure. But it hadn’t returned yet. Those who knew her, or of her brief stretch with Shin Bet, regarded her differently. Those who didn’t know asked, were told, and were too awestruck to approach her at all. To all of them, the events of two years ago that had branded her a hero might as well have been yesterday. To Danielle, though, it felt like, and in many ways was, another lifetime. At first she passed her discomfort off to sensing it in others, then realized her own was much deeper. She couldn’t simply go back and pick up where she had left off. Too much had changed, not here but inside her.

  Bearing the legacy of a hero was more curse than blessing because it set expectations in the minds of others that could not possibly be met. She was just a person, and a much different one at that. She had returned to the National Police hoping to melt into the framework and disappear into the routine. That, clearly, was not going to happen. The events of two years before had left their mark, and she could not simply pick up her life again as if they had never taken place. She could see that in her own eyes, just as she could see it in the eyes of her fellow detectives, who expected more of her than she might be capable of providing.

  Danielle went to the bathroom down the hall to freshen up and was relieved to find it empty. She splashed water on her face and tousled her hair. Even in the bathroom’s dim light, most would say she hadn’t changed outwardly at all in two years. Her auburn hair still fell evenly past her shoulders and her skin maintained its bronze, healthy tone. Danielle studied her eyes and wondered if that’s where the difference was. Their sultry radiance had always been her strongest feature, but their gaze seemed empty to her now, somehow lengthened.

  She returned to her office and continued scanning the phone records of Hyram Levy. A recurring number on the second-to-last phone bill in the folder snapped her alert again. Several calls had been made from Levy’s shop in Jerusalem to a Tel Aviv exchange that was not identified. She flipped fast to that same month’s bill from Levy’s home on Navron Street, and, sure enough, the same number had been called numerous times from there as well, also not identified.

  That could only mean a protected, secure line the phone company’s computers could not access. The number was very likely a dummy exchange, just a routing source that had transferred Levy’s calls elsewhere. Only the highest government and military officials were afforded such treatment. The calls were various lengths in duration, long enough to indicate an interested party on the other end of the line.

  Danielle checked the dates on both phone bills. The calls had begun just over two months ago and had increased in frequency in the weeks since. The last call had been placed yesterday afternoon, just hours before the Engineer’s murder.

  Danielle forgot about the rest of her coffee. Commissioner Giott had left the building hours ago, and this was a piece of information she must share with him. Only his authority could help reveal the identity of the person Hyram Levy had been so intent on conversing with for the past eight weeks.

  Danielle looked at her own phone, flirting with the notion of dialing the number Levy had contacted so many times in the past few months. It was not the soundest or most prudent of strategies, but in the end it came down to not being able to resist.

  She picked up the receiver and pressed out the number. It rang twice, then stopped. Nothing.

  Dead air.

  The line had been disconnected.

  Danielle hung up the phone just as a shadow crossed her open door. She gasped, snapped to her feet so fast that her desk chair was sent sliding backward against the wall.

  “I’m sorry I startled you, Pakad,” said Yori Resnick.

  Danielle gripped the edge of the desk with both hands. “I thought you had gone home.”

  “I promised myself, just another half hour.”

  “It’s been more than that. You shouldn’t lie to yourself, Yori.”

  Resnick didn’t return Danielle’s forced smile. “I found something, Pakad, something I thought you should see immediately.”

  “What is it?”

  Resnick approached her desk stiffly, holding a crinkled piece of note-paper in his hand. “This was found in the top drawer of Levy’s desk in the study of his house. I’m . . . not sure what to make of it.”

  He said no more, just handed the notepaper across the desk. Danielle took it and read Levy’s scratchy writing:

  Her name was scrawled across the top of the page, followed by the numbers 5-1-3.

  The room she had been in at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem last month.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  B

  en had come to his office early the next morning after a fitful night’s rest. He had fallen asleep staring at the phone in his apartment, had dreamed mostly of picking it up and making the call he had avoided while awake. He had promised himself he would make that call this morning. Better not to disturb her at home anyway, so as not to confuse the professional with the personal.

  Nabril al-Asi had made it clear Ben was on his own when it came to obtaining a surveillance tape that, if it existed, had been made around the time Leila Fatuk had disappeared. For al-Asi to exert his influence would be to admit he knew the Israelis were in Jericho, and that was something the shrewd head of the Palestinian Protective Security Service could not afford to do. Pursuing such an inquiry through conventional channels, though, would lead Ben nowhere. That left the unconventional, and the only person in Israel he could call upon for help.

  Seated in his office now, Ben picked up where he had left off at home: staring at
the phone. Coming up short every time of picking it up and dialing the number.

  He hadn’t spoken with Danielle in months, no correspondence at all other than the sympathy card Ben had sent after al-Asi told him what had happened to her in the hospital. She had not written back, and that had been almost six weeks ago.

  Staring at the phone again, practicing the words, what to say when she answered. The right thing, it had to be the right thing. Yet Ben knew whatever he said, it would be wrong.

  The phone rang as he stared at it, jolting him. He snatched the receiver to his ear.

  “Hello,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Can you meet me in an hour?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Don’t say my name. Just answer the question.”

  Ben recognized the voice. It was Nazir Jalabad, godfather of Leila Fatuk.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Baladiya Square. The butcher’s shop in the market. I’ll be in the back.”

  “Yes. One hour.”

  Click.

  Did Nazir suspect Ben had brought him to al-Asi’s attention? Had al-Asi acted last night after their conversation? No, that wasn’t the colonel’s style at all. Nazir’s request for a meeting must have been spurred by something else.

  Ben went back to staring at the phone, willing himself to pick it up. If only he had visited Danielle in the hospital. He had tried, he would tell her that, but it had been a tension-filled time right after the Israeli special election. By the time Colonel al-Asi secured him the VIP pass he needed to enter Jerusalem, Danielle had already left the hospital.

  Not that Ben was sure he would have used it anyway. In truth he was angry, bitter, jealous. The emotions scraped him raw and took turns exacting misery. It should have been his child she was pregnant with, and when she lost it Ben was racked by guilt over seeing what he had childishly wished for come true. He would never get over her, could not move on as she insisted he must. And now, eighteen months after their parting, far more than a phone stood between them.

  Ben promised himself he would call her as soon as he returned from his meeting with Nazir Jalabad. In the meantime, he had just enough time to keep his weekly coffee session with newspaper editor Zaid Jabral before heading off to Baladiya Square.

  Ben walked from his office to an outdoor coffee shop set on a nearby corner shaded by olive trees, eliminating the need for canopies over the tables laid out on the sidewalk. He got there a few minutes early and ordered two coffees and a plate of kenafeh, a sweet cheese pastry, before Jabral arrived precisely on time.

  Jabral was the senior editor of the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Quds. He had been a teacher until he was beaten by student leaders for not agreeing to dismiss his students early so they could take part in a protest. It did not seem to matter to the leaders that his class was in the midst of their Tawjini, final high school exams. But it mattered to Jabral. His reporting had long presented an objective, if somewhat cynical, view of the peace process. His latest series of articles had chronicled how individual lives in Palestine had changed through the various stages of peace and how these individuals felt about Ari Bar-Rosen. The incoming Israeli prime minister had won a special election eight weeks earlier on a platform that promised to pursue peace again in bold, sweeping strokes on a landscape marred by scars and mistrust.

  Ben’s own personal history with Jabral was scarred as well. He had returned to his native Palestine from Detroit four years earlier to establish a detective bureau within the fledgling Palestinian police force. One of the first investigations he supervised directly was the murder of a cabdriver who was a suspected Israeli collaborator. The trail led to three members of the Palestinian police force who had tortured and executed the man, later found to be innocent. All three were sentenced to life in prison by a militarylike tribunal.

  Jabral’s scathing articles on the case had branded Ben a kahyin, a traitor to his people and collaborator in his own right. He had been ostracized and nearly exiled until his capture of a serial killer known as al-Diib, the Wolf, redeemed his worth. Thanks in large part to another series of articles by Jabral, Ben was not only returned to good standing among his people, he was lauded as a hero in the same tradition as his late father. He became a celebrity who came to represent the great hope of peace, or at least peaceful coexistence for the benefit of both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.

  By connection, though, when peace failed miserably due to the installation of a more militant right-wing administration under the Likud Party in Israel and a scourge of terrorist attacks, Ben became just another figure the Palestinian people could turn their wrath upon. He had become so identified with peace that functioning amid its breakdown had become nearly impossible. As a result he had been spending all of his time teaching at Jericho’s police academy and handling an ever growing load of administrative duties at the office.

  Going nowhere fast and finding himself increasingly frustrated over a different form of ostracism he had fallen victim to: instead of being hated, he was ignored. Lumped together with the politicos who preached and promised peace, then continued to increase their own standing when it didn’t come. These men had white license plates with red numerals that permitted free passage throughout the West Bank and even Jerusalem. Ben had no such plates, but those who considered him party to the same lie never seemed to notice.

  Of late, he had shared his frustrations with Zaid Jabral, who had brushed off his consideration of a return to America as overreaction. What do I have to keep me here? Ben would challenge. A lot more than you will find when you get back to the U.S., Jabral would snap in his typically caustic tone. But Ben wasn’t so sure the journalist was right anymore.

  Despite the cane clacking on the side of his bad hip, Jabral had a spring to his step today.

  “I have to take a rain check,” he said when he got to the table Ben had taken.

  “Was it something I said?”

  “Haven’t booked your plane tickets yet, have you?”

  “I was waiting for you to talk me out of it again.”

  Jabral gazed down at the plate of pastry that had come ahead of the coffee. “You’ll find the kenafeh back in Detroit sadly lacking.”

  “Is that the best you can do?”

  “I have an interview scheduled.”

  “You always have an interview scheduled. Who is it today?”

  “Fayed Kabir.”

  “Ah, the Authority’s eminent finance minister.”

  “We’re not going to be discussing finances, Ben,” Jabral said, not bothering to hide his excitement. “I’m onto something big.”

  “Bigger than the last story you did on me?”

  “Perhaps.” Jabral leaned on his cane and checked his watch nervously.

  “I’d tell you if I could, but you wouldn’t believe it. Nobody would believe it.”

  Ben lifted a piece of the pastry but stopped short of biting into it. “Sounds like the story of the year.”

  “Try century, Ben. If I’m right, our world is going to wake up a much different place the morning this story runs. That’s why I need proof.”

  “It’s a good thing you don’t need a loan, based on Kabir’s handling of the Palestinian Authority’s budget.”

  Jabral fidgeted, eager to leave. “Same time next week, then?”

  “Wait,” Ben said, “one more thing.”

  The journalist put all his weight on his cane and leaned toward Ben. “If you leave Palestine, who would I have coffee with?”

  “There was an article you did a while back about an old woman from Jerusalem who claimed her baby had been stolen fifty years ago.”

  Jabral’s back stiffened, as if a jolt of electricity had coursed straight up his spine. “What about it?”

  “I think there may be some vague connection between her story and a case I’m working on.”

  ”I thought you weren’t permitted to work on cases. You keep trying to convince me that’s why you want to leave our tranquil h
ome here.”

  ”You think I’m lying?”

  “A lie of omission. Leaving out the part about the Israeli detective, Ms. Barnea.”

  Ben bristled, returned the pastry to the plate and wiped the sticky glaze

  Ben from his hand with a napkin. “That was over a long time ago.”