by By Jon Land
“Indeed.”
“You tricked me.”
“I baited you.”
“The missing journal—what’s in it?”
“The bait.”
“Why?” Danielle asked, and lit her cigar.
David Wolfe frowned. “I expected more of the great Danielle Barnea, someone who has done a remarkable job of putting so much together already.”
“If you wanted to talk, why not just pick up the telephone and return the messages I left for you?”
“Good question. You’re the detective, so tell me.”
“I think I’ll just enjoy my cigar and let you supply the answer.”
“Deniability,” Wolfe started. “So long as you came here on your own, against the express and explicit orders of your superiors, I could deny any involvement. Certain secrets could remain safe, since your credibility would be nonexistent.” Wolfe stepped away from his chair toward her. “Do you not think that your superiors and other Israeli authorities are already aware of your trip to the United States?”
“You told them, of course.”
“I made sure they found out.”
“Why?”
“Insurance.”
“What do you need me for?”
“How’s your cigar, Chief Inspector?”
“Disappointing,” Danielle said, and snuffed it out in the nearest ashtray.
“You’ve had better?”
“Only one.”
“You’re quick to judge, aren’t you?”
“Leaves time for more important things. Like reading, for instance.”
“Then go back to what you read in those three journals and everything else you have been able to learn or put together. Start with a common denominator.”
“Children.”
“More specifically . . .”
“Babies,” Danielle said, thinking of the offer Esteban Ravel had intended to make her in the hospital, the wife of Jacob Rossovitch, who had suffered an ironically similar fate, and also of the twin rows of cribs she had seen on board the Lucretia Maru. “Infants.”
“Keep going.”
“Hyram Levy was involved in trafficking for a white-slavery ring.”
“Was he the leader?”
“No, merely an underling for a criminal of legend, a monster the Arabs call Al Safah.”
“And?”
“Levy had arranged for me to receive one of the babies he stole or purchased after I . . . miscarried.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I never had the chance to say no. I’m not sure I could have.”
“And what of Revkah Rossovitch?”
“She gave birth to a stillborn. Was almost driven mad as a result.”
“Something,” Wolfe started softly, the regret in his voice genuine, “you sadly can relate to. But, of course, Hyram Levy was not yet able to make her the same offer he intended to make you.”
Danielle’s head suddenly cleared. She felt lighter, relieved, the way one does when coming to the end of a long journey. “What happened that morning fifty years ago? What did you and the others do at the kibbutz, Mr. Wollchensky?”
The old man nodded expectantly. “I would say it’s time you heard the rest of the story. ...”
* * * *
CHAPTER 68
B
en saw at once that the entire inside of the sprawling mansion had been gutted and rebuilt to fit the new specifications required of it. He had entered through a long one-story section of the structure that was now lined on both sides by small dormitory-style rooms that must have served as barracks for the complex’s guards. Ben shuffled by those doors, past a few men still emerging without paying them a second glance. His coat, cap, and rifle still made him appear as one of them, so long as he didn’t give any of the men too long a look.
At the end of the hall, Ben turned right up a single flight of steps, the wood paler in the center from where a runner had been removed. He opened a door at the top of the stairs and found himself standing at the head of what looked like a prison wing. Directly before him a pair of guards armed only with batons and Mace spray rose stiffly.
“What the hell’s going on?” one of the guards asked Ben in English, already edgy from all the commotion downstairs.
Beyond them, large, heavy wooden doors lined both sides of what must have once been the mansion’s second floor, at least one wing of it. The doors had steel-barred portals at face level and iron bars slung into slots across the front to prevent them from being opened from the inside. Judging by the irregular distances between the doors, the rooms beyond them varied in size; they were easily large enough to accommodate several dozen prisoners.
All children, he hoped.
This, Ben realized, was the chance he had been awaiting since his own children had been murdered. This was his chance to recover the lost five minutes that had changed his life. Begin the process of bringing down the mysterious Al Safah’s network here and now, so no more children would be stolen or coerced into a life of misery and degradation.
“The house is on fire! We’ve got to evacuate this floor!” Ben ordered the guards, making his voice sound desperate. “The whole place might go up!”
“Jesus . . .”
“I think it’s an attack. They haven’t said, but I think—”
“Let’s get them out of here,” the other guard interrupted anxiously, pulling his arms through the sleeves of his jacket.
“The front’s not safe,” Ben said.
“We’ll use the back way,” the first jailer said.
Ben blessed the thick scent of burning that had begun to drift up from the first floor. No smoke trailed it, but the stench was more than enough to roust the jailers into taking quick action. With Ben bringing up the rear, feigning a protective watch, the jailers moved down the prison hall, throwing back the iron bolts and opening door after door.
Instantly children of all ages began spilling out unsurely, appearing sad and terrified in dirty clothes that were their only possessions. The vast majority of the children were girls, divided into the rooms by age. The youngest were little more than seven or eight; the oldest were probably in their midteens.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” the guards continued to yell as they banged their batons repeatedly against the walls.
Ben moved on down the hall, prodding the laggards on with his rifle as he brought up the rear. Speed was of the essence now. Escaping the grounds before the rest of the keepers of this prison realized what was going on. He searched for Leila Fatuk amid the sea of frightened, unhappy faces but couldn’t find her and fought the temptation to shout out her name.
He stole glances into the now abandoned rooms as he passed them. Thin springless cots were squeezed in with barely any room between them. Garbage was scattered everywhere. Grime coated the walls and floor. A sickening sewerlike smell sifted out of some of the rooms, evidence of backed-up or broken-down sanitary facilities.
He made a rough count of nearly sixty children on this hall alone. The infants he had seen carried off theLucretia Maru were not among them, and he was almost reluctant to leave without searching for the wing on which they had been imprisoned as well. But he couldn’t take all the children and adults imprisoned here back to the world from which they had been stolen, or had left for a lie. Try for more and he would likely lose his chance to free even these relative few.
Free how?
It was a question to which Ben had not yet found an answer. His ruse could only last so long, and pursuit was a certainty once the guard in the bell tower noticed these children fleeing.
He followed the charging tide of bodies down another set of stairs and through a door out into the rear of the compound. The two guards he had tricked upstairs led the way to a single locked gate built into the wall enclosing the fortress at its rear. Ben could see one of them fumbling with the lock and angled himself sideways so he would be the first to see anyone coming. The guard finally got the lock off and yanked open the door, leadi
ng the way out, while the other guard herded the children through.
“What about the others?” that guard asked when Ben reached him.
“They’re coming!”
The children and other guard had moved for the road that ran beyond the back of the property, leaving the two of them alone.
Something in the jailer’s eyes changed. “If this was an evacuation, then—”
Ben didn’t wait. He brought his rifle up in an underhand motion that cracked into the jailer’s chin and snapped his neck sideways. Dazed, the man reeled backward, unable to steady himself before Ben lashed the stock against his skull like a baseball bat. Ben could feel the bones give, splintering on impact. The guard collapsed, and Ben hurried to catch up with the pack of children.
The second jailer was moving ahead of them, a pistol Ben hadn’t noticed before in his hand.
“The airfield!” Ben said, surely, as if that had been his plan all along. “That’s where we’re supposed to go! They’ll be waiting for us!”
The second jailer gazed back down the road in search of his partner.
“He’ll catch up!”
The second jailer nodded, reluctantly turning back to the front. “Let’s go, then.”
And he set out in the lead, while Ben drifted to the rear again.
* * * *
CHAPTER 69
D
avid Wollchensky offered her a chair before he began, but Danielle didn’t take it, preferring to stay on her feet. He picked up the story exactly where Levy’s first journal had left off, with the three surviving friends huddled outside the kibbutz hospital where Revkah Rossovitch’s baby had just been born dead.
* * * *
“If you’re with me, get into the jeep and let’s go,” Wollchensky said adamantly.
Levy and Pearlman could only look at each other and shrug. Their sense of honor overcame their reluctance to follow the man whose methods had grown increasingly violent over the years. But loyalty blurred their sense of right and wrong. In that instant they were younger men again, with much less to lose, following the man who had saved their lives and fighting a war in which they made up the rules as they went along.
Wollchensky drove the jeep out of Israel into the West Bank almost to Jericho. David knew the back roads that were never watched and hardly traveled; they had taken a similar one the night they had raided the refugee camp from where Jacob Rossovitch’s killers had come. He took a different one today, longer since they did not have the night for cover. But both Pearlman and Levy sensed Wollchensky didn’t care if they drove into a full-scale ambush. Nothing was going to stop him today. Nothing.
He drove to the entrance of a refugee camp that seemed almost identical to the one they had raided only a few weeks before. He parked in plain view and turned to his friends.
“Keep your rifles where they can see them, but don’t aim or steady them unless you have to.”
“They know we’re Israelis.” Levy could tell that already from the huddled stares being cast their way from within the camp.
“That’s what I’m counting on. They’re far less likely to attack Israelis than each other.” Wollchensky handed Pearlman a long-dead walkie-talkie. “Pretend to talk into this from time to time. Make them think there are plenty more of us patrolling the area.”
Pearlman took the dead walkie-talkie and nodded. He and Levy watched Wollchensky shoulder his rifle and unhesitantly enter the squalid refugee camp composed of dilapidated, makeshift structures and tents. He passed quickly out of sight, and the two men fought to keep their faces hard and fierce.
Some minutes later, it seemed much longer than it was, Wollchensky appeared walking side by side with a Palestinian about his age. The Palestinian seemed to be very short, but as they drew closer Pearlman and Levy could see he was stooped over and hunched, something obviously wrong with the spine. The two moved like old friends, no one they passed challenging David’s presence in the camp.
This in spite of the fact that David was holding something in his arms, something wrapped in a tattered blanket. At the entrance to the camp, the Palestinian slapped David’s shoulder as a friend might and David extracted a hand from the blanket in order to shake. There was something orderly and businesslike about the transaction, whereas Pearlman and Levy had been expecting something else entirely.
“Here,” Wollchensky said routinely when he reached the jeep, “take it.”
He passed the blanketed bundle to Hyram Levy and settled in again behind the jeep’s driver’s seat. Levy pulled back the tattered, soiled blanket and winced.
“My God,” Pearlman gasped from the back.
* * * *
“It was a baby,” Danielle said when the man who was now David Wolfe stopped. “You went and stole a Palestinian baby to replace the one Revkah Rossovitch had lost.”
“I didn’t steal the child, Chief Inspector. I purchased it. And for the going rate.”
“Going rate?”
The old man shrugged. “The Palestinians, I’m afraid, had very little else to sell at that point.”
“So they sold their children?”
Wolfe nodded. “To brokers who came from all over the Middle East in search of boys to enslave to labor and girls to use for prostitution. The practice began in this one refugee camp, but quickly spread throughout the West Bank, fueled by desperation and eventually overseen by a single individual.”
“Al Safah,” Danielle realized.
Wolfe suddenly seemed unsteady on his feet. He reached over and grasped the chair back for support. “I see you have uncovered more about all this than I had heard.”
“Al Safah’s real and you know who he is, don’t you?”
For a time it looked as though Wolfe would not respond. Then, suddenly, he nodded.
“That man you bought the baby from?”
The old man shook his head. “No. Not him.”
“You brought the baby back to Revkah Rossovitch at the kibbutz.”
Wolfe nodded again. “Normally in those days, we had a much more civilized way of dealing with such tragedies. Recent Jewish immigrants from Yemen were kept in camps until they could be resettled. Here we were a young country ourselves, without the social or economic strength to support even ourselves, opening our doors willingly to all comers. But we knew then that our future security lay in building our numbers, so no one was turned away.”
The old man smirked, the expression one of irony and regret at the same time.
“But we also were secure in our own racial superiority to these new immigrants who were, in fact, no different from what we had been at the beginning. This was our country they were coming to. So when an Israeli woman’s child died, it seemed more than fair to replace it with a Yemenite baby stolen from the camp after its mother had been told it was dead. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to take those steps with Revkah.”
“Because you wanted her to think the baby you had acquired for her was really hers.”
“It was what she wanted to think, Chief Inspector. We returned to the kibbutz to find her sleeping with her dead infant against her chest. I replaced it with the infant we had obtained at the refugee camp without her ever knowing.”
“What happened when she woke up?”
Wolfe’s expression softened, became almost dreamy. “I can’t be sure, but to this day my heart tells me Revkah still believes the child we brought back to be hers.”
“She’s alive?”
“In her eighties. She has more bad days than good. I call her from time to time. Sometimes we can talk.”
“Honoring the pledge the three of you made to your dead friend ...”
Wolfe shrugged humbly. “Do you recall what that pledge was, Chief Inspector?”
“To protect and watch over his wife and child for as long you lived.”
“That pledge is why you are here today,” David Wolfe told her.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will in time. You will understand everyth
ing in time.”
“Will I also understand how Hyram Levy became involved in smuggling Palestinian children out of Israel?”
Wolfe turned and sank wearily into his chair. Danielle walked up around it in order to face him. He looked to her suddenly like an old, tired man losing a race with the years.
