Pillars of Solomon - [Kamal & Barnea 02]

by By Jon Land

  Danielle shrugged. “Why not?”

  “It’s good to be working with you again, Pakad,” Ben smiled.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 14

  H

  ershel Giott’s brow wrinkled as he listened to Danielle’s request. He waited until she was finished before responding.

  “You understand that our intelligence services are no longer permitted to conduct operations in Jericho and the other cities ceded to Palestinian control.”

  “Yes, Raz Nitzav.”

  “So you are asking me to produce something which by all accounts cannot exist.”

  “That’s right, sir. Only because in return it could yield us something of substantial aid to our investigation into the murder of Hyram Levy.”

  “This list of smugglers from your Palestinian police contact ...”

  “Who assures me he wishes to view the tape only to see if it captured the abduction of a young girl. Should the tape not include that, he will have no use for it.”

  Giott sighed deeply. “I see.”

  The sadness that lengthened his expression and deepened the baggy circles beneath his small eyes was something Danielle had never seen before. “You knew Levy, didn’t you, sir?”

  “In Israel those of us in certain positions know most others in comparable ones. Ours is a small country, Pakad.”

  “Did my father know Levy?”

  “I’m sure he did. Why?”

  “Because I think Levy knew me. My name was found on a note tucked in his desk.” She let that sink in before continuing. “Along with my room number when I was in the hospital.”

  Giott remained utterly expressionless. “I don’t think this is something you should be concerned about.”

  “It’s only that—”

  “Listen to me, Pakad,” Giott said, more sternly than he had meant to. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, laced with a false calm. “Let it go. For your own good.”

  His eyes had gotten that fatherly look of concern Danielle remembered so well from her first tour of duty with the National Police. This man could have been her father as he stared across his desk at her. A small man, an old man. It was a paradox of Israel that so many people of age held positions of great power. Here experience was valued above all else, and people like Giott formed an impenetrable bottleneck for the younger generations to advance. As if they weren’t ready to be trusted yet. As if only those who had lived through all of Israel’s wars had the ability to lead her properly.

  “Let it go,” Giott repeated.

  Danielle looked into his tired eyes and knew she would be better off if she did that, just as she knew that she couldn’t.

  Giott’s phone rang. He picked it up, listened briefly, and then looked again toward Danielle.

  “That was for you, Pakad,” he said, replacing the receiver on the cradle. “You’re wanted in the Mahane Yehuda marketplace as soon as possible. Apparently, they have found a witness.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  B

  en returned to the West Bank via the main road that ran between Hebron and Jerusalem so he could stop outside Bethlehem at the Deheisha refugee camp, from which one of the three girls on Nazir Jalabad’s list had disappeared,

  Deheisha was one of more than a dozen camps still active in the West Bank. Surrounded by a crumbling twenty-foot fence, it remained the most populous. Ben had had few occasions to visit Deheisha since his return. The camp’s militant reputation made it a prudent place for him to avoid, given his established association with a peace process the residents felt had betrayed them.

  Nonetheless, today Ben parked his car in a packed-dirt lot and walked past the first of the seemingly endless rows of ramshackle homes squeezed close to one another en route to the office belonging to the United Nations camp administrator. He told the administrator he was looking for the Shabaz family and was surprised when the man produced a card with their address within seconds.

  “Can you tell me anything about them?” Ben asked hopefully.

  The administrator consulted the card as a ceiling fan spun lazily above them. “A mother and six children, according to this. The house belongs to the grandmother who still lives with them. The children’s father has been in an Israeli prison for the past five years.”

  “How long have they been here?”

  “It doesn’t say. But the daughter and her children were born here; I can tell you that much. Would you like me to have someone show you to their house?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  The previous night’s rain had dragged up from the earth a musty stench that clung to the air like an invisible shroud. Ben tried to shut his nose to it as his feet sloshed through the soggy ground en route to the address the camp administrator had provided. The cement houses of Deheisha were squeezed closely together, often separated by no more than a small yard fenced in with corrugated aluminum. Virtually all the yards contained gardens, some no more than a few potted plants placed atop the fence, but a garden all the same. Many of the houses showed the effects of growing families in the form of neatly erected concrete extensions, their color unmatched from that of the main structure and their bulk shrinking the space between adjacent homes even further.

  The Shabaz home was a simple rectangular structure, one story built upon a cement-block base with a rather large yard since it lacked the additions enjoyed by many of its neighbors. Ben could hear chickens squawking, and a few goats meandered near the rear of the property, munching verdant weeds that seemed to grow out of the fence. He spotted a woman clipping clothes to a rope line that extended between her house and the next. Her feet slogged through a thick layer of mud as she fastened the clothes tight. When the earth grew sodden like this, the rancid smells of sewage permeated the air, seeming to hang over everything and casting a pall over the whole of the camp.

  “Umm Shabaz?” Ben called.

  She turned, regarded him fearfully. “Who are you?”

  He showed her his badge. “Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police.”

  She looked him over again. “Where is your uniform?”

  “I’m a detective.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “I’ve come about your daughter.”

  The woman dragged her basket of clothes free of the mud and stood facing Ben, the basket lying between them. “Which one? What have they done?”

  “Nothing, I’m sure.” He consulted the card Nazir Jalabad had given him. “It’s Assira I’ve come about.”

  Mrs. Shabaz started to kick her basket back toward the line. “Then you’ve come for nothing. She’s not here.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re late. She’s been gone for almost six months now. Eib.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Thirteen,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “My oldest.”

  “Did you report her disappearance to the police?”

  Umm Shabaz simply chuckled and went back to hanging her clothes. A pair of boys—twins, Ben thought—rushed out through a patched screen door chasing a dog. The door stayed open and an older woman, their grandmother, he guessed, emerged lugging a tray of dough toward an outdoor oven called a taboun. Soon the fragrant smell of bread baking would fill the air, battling the odors of refuse in one of the paradoxes of Deheisha and all the camps.

  Ben followed Umm Shabaz into the mud. “Your daughter isn’t the only young girl who’s disappeared recently.”

  She still didn’t look at him, continuing to sound like anything but the grieving mother. “She didn’t disappear, Mr. Policeman. She left, she ran away. She’s gone because she wants to be gone.”

  “Do you know where she can be found?”

  “No.”

  “Why did she leave?”

  Umm Shabaz smirked. “Just look around you. Who wants to stay? My children sleep in a single room. Our toilet doesn’t work. Wherever she is, she probably has more space, can go to the bathroo
m when she wants, I hope.”

  “Have you seen her again since she left?”

  “No.”

  “If I could find her . . .”

  “Don’t bother,” the missing girl’s mother said, and turned her back on him. The line was sagging now, the clothes in the center flirting with the mud’s reach. Ben could see the next few items she hung trembling in her hands.

  “Have others left the camp, too, like your daughter?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “People talk.”

  “I don’t listen. I keep to myself, so when the police come I don’t have to lie.”

  She still wouldn’t look at Ben. She dropped a tattered shirt into the mud, fished it out, and hung it on the line even though it was soiled now.

  “I can help you.”

  “You want to help? Look around you. Where would you like to start? My daughter wanted to leave. She left. She hasn’t come back and maybe she never will. Fi Idein Allah. It’s in God’s hands. I have nothing else to say.”

  With that, Umm Shabaz picked up her basket and retreated back through the mud into her house, leaving the door open behind her.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  T

  he witness’s name, Danielle learned, was Abdul Samshi, and he operated a food stand in the Mahane Yehuda marketplace, just around the corner from Hyram Levy’s shop. Wrapped around the intersection of Chaim Street and Apple Alley, the stand lay on the street parallel to the covered lane. It was situated next to an open-air market featuring all varieties of meats hanging in display from a small overhead rack and smelling strongly of the salts and spices with which they had been smoked. Samshi, an Israeli Arab, was in fact part owner of the stand, rewarded by its elderly Jewish proprietor for fifteen years of loyal service.

  To reach the stand, Danielle had to dodge the tables of card players clustered on the sidewalk. Older men watching the world go by between hands completed amid the fragrant smells of the marketplace.

  “What is it that you saw?” she asked Samshi as some of the card players looked on, attracted by the slight commotion.

  “Not what I saw, Pakad,” Samshi said impatiently, repeating what he had told Yori Resnick, “what I didn’t see.”

  “Very well.”

  Samshi checked on some grilling meat that smelled strongly of salt, then returned to the counter. He was a dark man with a furrowed brow and a pitted but gentle face. His mustache was thick, well groomed, and mottled with strands of white. “Every day the Engineer comes here to my stand for his lunch. Every day I can remember. If he’s in town he comes here. Nowhere else. Picks up his food, always the same thing: magluba, a chicken, rice, and eggplant dish I make special for him in a pita sandwich. Picks it up and takes it back to eat in his shop. Stops and talks to people on his way.”

  “Except on the day he was murdered,” Danielle said, recalling Yori Resnick’s preliminary report.

  Samshi nodded. “That afternoon another man came up and asked for magluba.”

  “For the Engineer?”

  “He didn’t say.” Samshi shrugged. “But who else would know to order it?”

  “You had never seen this man before.”

  “No.”

  “Was he Israeli or Arab?”

  “It was hard to tell. The sun was in my eyes and he kept his face tilted down.”

  “Would you recognize this man,” Danielle said, “if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t know.” Samshi shrugged again. “I think so.”

  “Then I would like you to give a description of what you did see to someone else from the National Police.”

  Samshi looked troubled. “When I get off work. I’m alone here right now. Just an hour or so. Is that okay, Pakad?”

  Danielle nodded. “I’ll have a car bring you to his house.”

  “He is not a policeman?”

  “He’s an artist. Based on what you tell him, he will create a likeness of the man you saw.”

  “Anything if it helps you find the killer of the Engineer,” Samshi said sadly. “He was a great man, a truemukhtar.”

  “I don’t know what that—”

  “An elder, Pakad,” Yori Resnick translated. “One held in the highest esteem by his village.”

  “This was the Engineer’s village,” Samshi said passionately. “The street, the marketplace, all of Jerusalem. He was loved by everyone.”

  “Almost,” Danielle corrected.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 17

  C

  ome in,” the woman named Arra Rensi greeted Ben an hour later in Ramallah. “It’s about time.”

  Then she practically grabbed Ben to drag him inside.

  “Umm Rensi—”

  “My neighbor’s dogs. Something must be done about them, I tell you.”

  Ben’s foot smacked into a box, rattling a collection of framed pictures piled inside. He looked down briefly.

  “We have only lived here a month,” Arra Rensi said apologetically. “Please excuse the mess.”

  But the two-story home did not look messy at all. The double-door entrance opened into a traditional salon, the walls of which were lined with low cushions used during the day for sitting and at night for sleeping. To the right was a Western-style living room furnished with a long couch, a love seat, and four matching chairs upholstered in a brick red fabric.

  “I have not come here about your neighbor’s dogs.”

  Arra Rensi, who appeared to be in her early forties, suddenly looked suspicious. “Oh?”

  “I have come about your daughter, Zahira. The one who has been missing for five months now.”

  The woman hesitated just slightly. “But I have no daughter by that name.”

  “There must be some mistake,” Ben said unsurely.

  “Yours, I think.”

  “You have no daughter?”

  “I have two, and two sons as well. But they’re all here. None is missing.” She seemed eager to close the door. “If you don’t mind . . .”

  Ben consulted Nazir Jalabad’s note again. “And neither of your daughters is named Zahira?”

  “No.”

  “Are they home?”

  “Playing.”

  Ben gazed beyond her. “Can I see them?”

  “No.”

  “You would like me to come back with more police, then?”

  The woman glared at Ben fearfully. “What have I done? Why do you pester me?”

  “Why are you scared?”

  “I’m not scared! I want you to leave!”

  Ben retreated slightly. “If you have done nothing, you have nothing to be frightened of. I’m only conducting an investigation.”

  “Into nothing!” Arra Rensi said, and pushed forward against him.

  Ben reached the door. “Into missing children.”

  “You must have the wrong address.”

  “I would like to see your children. I promise I will not be long.”

  “Kus Okhthum,” Arra Rensi said just loud enough for Ben to hear, and pushed him outside.

  The double door slammed in his face and Ben started to head back down the walk. He was almost to his car when something struck him: the family portrait he’d glimpsed inside the box his foot had struck had pictured five children, not four. Three girls, even though Arra Rensi was quite adamant about the fact that she had only two daughters. One could have died recently, he supposed.

  Or Arra Rensi could be lying.

  * * * *

  H

  is interest piqued, Ben decided to call on the final name on Nazir Jalabad’s list. The Khaladi family lived in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Nablus. Night was falling by the time he arrived, yet Ben still could hear the sound of bulldozers blocks before he neared their address, only to find that the Khaladi home was the one being bulldozed to the ground. A woman wearing a traditionalhatta stood in a neighboring yard wailing hysterically and screaming at the Israeli workmen.

  More punitive actions
being dispensed by the Israeli government in the outgoing administration’s final days, Ben thought, feeling anger gnaw at him. He felt so helpless standing there, imagined how the Khaladis must have felt. Obviously they had built their home without obtaining the proper permits. Strange how in the West Bank the most dreaded weapon was not tanks, but bulldozers.