by By Jon Land
“What it took to get them new visas.” Kabir shook his head dramatically. “The Israelis must think they are the only ones who deserve good homes. Well, the most patient hunter always reaps the biggest catch.” He finally gave Ben more than a passing glance. “Now what can I do for you?”
“You’ve heard about Zaid Jabral’s murder?”
Kabir looked regretful for a brief moment, until his eyes turned to a front-loader that had prematurely dumped its load. Then he grimaced. “What a tragedy . . . Of course I have.”
“The other day he told me he was coming to see you.”
Kabir nodded, straightening slightly. “He wanted to do a profile of me. He said he thought I would make a good story for the international press.”
“Because of your . . . wound?”
“No. Jabral was more interested in my youth, the theft by the Israelis of my family’s land. You know in 1948 it was the great peacemaker Rabin who issued the order to expel all Palestinians from our villages. And people still wonder why we don’t trust the Jews. . . .”
Kabir suddenly shook his head and angrily stormed toward the site foreman, yelling his name.
Ben hurried to keep up. “You told this to Jabral?”
“Among other things.”
“Like what?”
Kabir stopped. “That I came from a village that enjoyed excellent relations with our Jewish neighbors, until we were banished from our land. My family was among the first of the Palestinian refugees, Inspector. We settled in a camp outside of Ramallah. Jabral wanted to know what life was like in that camp.”
“That’s all?”
“I was eighteen years old. I left my village with only the possessions I could carry. We had to fight for every scrap of food, every drop of water. There was no organization, no leadership. People came and went. People died, my brother and sister included. Once I sneaked over the border to the land the new Israel had claimed for itself—our land. A town was being built right before my eyes. They were laying irrigation pipes, electrical lines, already planting their crops in our fields. Until that moment I had stupidly clung to the belief that someday the Jews would be vanquished and we would be able to go home. I think realizing that would never be was harder than leaving in the first place.” Kabir took a deep breath to steady himself. “But Jabral was more interested about what I had to say about life in the camp.”
“Specifically?”
“What we had to do to survive. It wasn’t pretty. Little accurate has ever been written of those days before.”
“So what did you do to survive?”
Kabir started toward the foreman again. “Whatever it took, Inspector.”
“That’s what you told Jabral?”
“I had to return to Authority headquarters before our interview was completed. I promised to call him next week to make another appointment. A shame he won’t be able to finish the story now.” Kabir cupped his hands in front of his mouth. “Come over here!” he shouted at the foreman, then turned back to Ben while the man trudged over. “You know what I told Jabral before he left, Inspector? I told him I had never gotten over seeing the Israeli machines laying a new town over ours. But now I have my own machines. I feel I have gotten the last laugh on the Israelis, and this home, I will tell you, they will never take from me.”
* * * *
C
ontinuing to retrace Zaid Jabral’s final days, Ben drove to Jericho’s small library, where back issues of his newspaper, Al-Quds, were stacked neatly on steel shelves against a far wall on the first floor. He couldn’t remember exactly what day Jabral had run the story on the old woman who claimed her baby had been stolen fifty years before. He started three weeks back and worked forward, covering six papers before he found the article in question.
It was shorter than he had recalled and contained very few hard facts, accompanied by a picture of a near toothless old woman named Ramira Taji who had the saddest, most plaintive face Ben had ever seen. Even in black and white, her skin looked like thin, wrinkled paper a pull away from tearing. Her eyes were blank and her hair bald in thin patches along the nearest edges of her scalp.
Her baby, she claimed, had been stolen from the squalor of a refugee camp. The story went on to the relate how Ramira Taji had fought her way out of the camp her family had fled to after their village had been overrun by Jews in 1948. She had spent the next fifty years relentlessly, and futilely, searching for her lost child.
Ben couldn’t help but be struck by the similarities between Ramira Taji’s story and that of Palestinian Authority finance minister Fayed Kabir. In fact, their lives had almost mirrored each other’s, even though Kabir was now building a villa on the Jordan River while Ramira Taji lived out her life in a Bethlehem rooming house. The last paragraph of Jabral’s article on her promised a follow-up the next week.
Ben searched back issues ofAl-Quds, wondering if he had somehow missed that follow-up. But he could find no trace of it, and, after scanning additional issues up through yesterday’s, he determined it had never run. Even more strangely, not a single article penned by Jabral had appeared in the two weeks since his story on the old woman had been published.
Had something she told him set Jabral off on his story of a lifetime, a story somehow linked to Fayed Kabir?
Maybe there was a way the journalist could still tell him.
* * * *
F
rom the Library, Ben drove to Jabral’s modest apartment in the center of Jericho. He kept another apartment in East Jerusalem he preferred to this one, but current Israeli travel restrictions had made it inconvenient for him to use, and, as a result, he had been spending more time lately in Jericho. Ben had visited Jabral once in East Jerusalem. Sipping wine on the front veranda of Jabral’s two-story residence, Ben had a postcard-perfect view of the walled Old City and the golden-domed Qubat al-Sakhra. Beyond, the hills of southern Jerusalem stretched to the horizon. He had asked Jabral how he could ever leave such a home. His friend’s answer had been to take Ben around to the back, where the only view was that of a recently built Jewish housing complex.
Well aware of how slowly his fellow officers worked, Ben knew the detectives assigned to the case would not get to the apartment until tomorrow at the earliest, so he would be the first to see its contents. But he didn’t have a key and had never been much for picking locks. Fortunately, the owner of the building lived downstairs and let him in after Ben showed the man his identification.
Jabral’s Jericho apartment was a single reasonably sized room with a small bath. The room’s lone window had been left open to keep it cool through the long, hot day; Jabral, of course, had had every intention of returning tonight when he had left this morning. Somehow that thought stirred by the open window deepened Ben’s regret, and he returned his focus to the apartment. It was sparsely and simply furnished, clearly a secondary residence. The sofa must have pulled out into a bed, though judging from the flattened and unkempt cushions Ben guessed Jabral had been sleeping atop them instead.
There was a thirteen-inch television and an ancient VCR on top of which rested a rented video Jabral would never be returning. A small wooden desk set near a window contained numerous pieces of correspondence and notes that yielded nothing of any help to Ben.
Lying on the floor beneath the desk, however, having been blown off by the breeze, was a sheet of paper with Hebrew writing printed across the top. Ben retrieved it and saw that Jabral had been issued a warning summons by the Israeli army for presence in an unauthorized area. Only the fact that he was a journalist had probably saved Jabral from instant arrest. Ben smiled sadly at the thought of his friend trying to talk his way out of jail.
The summons had been issued four days earlier, just two days before Jabral’s meeting with Fayed Kabir. Ben studied the location of the offense listed on the simple form and memorized it, then moved on.
He checked the rest of the apartment carefully and found nothing that seemed to have any significance to the story th
at had gotten Jabral so excited. Ben ended up sitting in his late friend’s easy chair, picturing him at work behind his desk, remembering him for his tenacity and honesty. That honesty had made Jabral more than his share of enemies, any number of them a candidate for tossing a bomb into his newspaper’s Jericho bureau. Such an explosive was easy to make and even easier to come by.
Before leaving, Ben retrieved the video, intending to return it to the store for no real reason, other than he thought that was what Jabral would have wanted him to do. He opened it up, curious as to the journalist’s taste in film, expecting the case to contain some classic movie.
Instead he found a plain, unmarked tape that could be purchased in any convenience store, not a rental at all. As did everything else in the apartment, the tape’s plastic housing had a thin coat of white dust on it, evidence it had been in the apartment for some time.
Feeling his heart quicken a little, Ben slid the tape into Jabral’s VCR. Then he turned the small television on and pushed play.
* * * *
CHAPTER 28
Y
ou wanted to see me, Pakad?”
Danielle Barnea was waiting behind her desk when Yori Resnick knocked on her open door.
“Yes, Yori. Please come in. . . . And close the door.”
“We finished lifting the fingerprints from Hyram Levy’s shop late this morning. I’m sorry it took so long but the damage done made finding prints almost impossible. I’m sure we have many duplicates and it took much more time getting them printed on that—”
“There is no need to apologize. I asked you to be thorough. You were.”
“I’ve already passed all the prints we gathered on to the tech people downstairs. We’ll know soon whether any of the names on the list of smugglers you provided match up with them.”
“There’s something else, Yori.” Danielle shifted slightly behind her desk. “Something unfortunate has happened. The phone records you delivered to me the other night have been mislaid. I called to obtain a duplicate set, but apparently there’s been a computer malfunction, a head crash or something, and the records have been permanently lost.” She leaned forward. “Now I assured the Rav Nitzav that there were no other copies in existence. But then I remembered the order I gave you.”
“Order, Pakad?”
“I know, I know. It was such a long and busy night, I almost forgot myself: I made sure you made copies before you delivered the originals to me. You did make those copies, Yori, didn’t you?”
Resnick was silent and still for a long moment before saying, “Yes, I did.”
Danielle rose happily. “You are the model of efficiency. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She met him in front of her desk and grasped his arm tenderly, steering the young detective back toward the door. “You hid them safely, of course, as I instructed.”
“Of course, Pakad.”
“And you can get them for me now.”
“Instantly.”
“Very well then.”
She stopped at the door. Resnick proceeded tentatively into the hall alone, gazing silently back.
“Oh, and Yori . . .”
“Yes, Pakad?”
“One copy is sufficient. We don’t need any more lying around.”
* * * *
R
esnick delivered the photocopies of Hyram Levy’s phone records minutes later, stiffly and without comment. Danielle thanked him and locked the door behind her. She went through the records again, noting on her scratch pad any unidentified numbers outside of the country. Originally, when she was simply searching for Levy’s killer, there seemed little need to note the foreign numbers. But now that she was searching for David Wollchensky, things were altogether different.
Danielle found that Levy had called only two overseas phone numbers: a Manhattan exchange three times and a Connecticut exchange once. Each of the calls had been brief in contrast to his conversations with Max Pearlman.
This time she decided not to be subtle, simply picked up her phone and dialed the long series of numbers to reach the United States. The phone began to ring.
“Wolfe Enterprises.”
Danielle swallowed hard.
“Wolfe Enterprises,” the polite female voice repeated.
She decided to take a chance. “Is Mr. Wolfe in, please?”
“Who should I say is calling?”
A pause. “Levy, from Israel.”
“I’m afraid he’s out of the office, Ms. Levy. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No. No, not now,” Danielle said.
She hung up and then immediately dialed a second New York number.
“Directory assistance.”
“The number for Wolfe Enterprises in Manhattan, please.”
“One moment. . . Hold for the number. ...”
A computerized voice repeated it twice and Danielle jotted it down, comparing it with the one she had just called. The number ended in 5000, meaning it must have been the main listing for Wolfe Enterprises. The number Hyram Levy had called three times, meanwhile, was probably Mr. Wolfe’s direct line. And she guessed the Greenwich, Connecticut, number was his home.
Danielle slid over to her computer and keyed into the Internet. It took longer than usual, but when she finally got on line, she ran a search under wolfe enterprises. Seconds passed, the time kept by a small round clockface in the right-hand corner.
Finally the screen jumped to life:
1,275 ENTRIES FOUND
Danielle did a double take: 1,275 entries would have made this a major company indeed. She began scanning them, gaining a rapid education on Wolfe Enterprises in the process. It was a major conglomerate, with holdings in a variety of industries, concentrated mostly in the media but including oil and gas. A major motion picture studio, a newspaper, book publishing, radio, even a growing television network. A public company for which the controlling interest continued to be held by its founder, a man named David Wolfe.
The on-line search had cross-referenced a number of entries on Wolfe himself, including profiles inTime, Newsweek, and People. He was mentioned in the same breath as Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner among high-flying media moguls. And, like Turner, Wolfe prided himself on being a philanthropist, by all accounts one of the most generous and giving men in the world. His charitable foundation had funneled over a billion dollars in the past ten years into schools, hospitals, scholarship programs, college endowments, research, and virtually every other grant imaginable.
A hundred million dollars given away every year!
The figure was too large even for Danielle to imagine. Intrigued, she tried to find more information on the foundation, yet came up empty when she searched under wolfe foundation. A closer scan of the entries pertaining to it told her why, because it was called something else entirely:
THE FOUR FRIENDS
I’ve found him! . . .
Other than changing his last name, Wolfe had done nothing to disguise the fact that he was really David Wollchensky. In fact, every profile of the man himself mentioned his heroic past in some depth, some even touching on stories almost identical to the ones told to her by Max Pearlman and, later, Hershel Giott.
It made such great press that Wolfe’s entire life seemed the creation of a public relations machine. A brave hero who became a business phenomenon while never losing his compassion for others. Danielle skimmed dozens of versions of the many stories and legends that were already well known to her. For reasons that none of the articles could make clear, though, in 1976 Wollchensky had left Israel for the United States, where he surfaced again in 1980 as David Wolfe, by all accounts already an immensely successful businessman.
Then how had he become a millionaire?
It seemed impossible that Wolfe, who came to Palestine penniless as a teenage boy in the early 1940s, would have taken much more out than he brought in. Career soldiers and freedom fighters had little opportunity to accumulate much capital. And yet there was no indication Danielle co
uld find of what had happened in those missing years that changed everything for him.
Danielle was still scanning files when the phone rang. Repeatedly.
“Yes,” she answered finally.
“Computer lab, Pakad. We’re ready for you.”
She cleared her throat, checked her watch. It was almost two o’clock.
She’d been at this for over four hours. . . .
Only then did she realize how much her eyes ached, a deep-rooted pain that seemed to come every time she blinked now.
“Please call Detective Resnick and have him meet us,” she told the technician, gently rubbing her closed lids.
