by Elik Katzav
“So where did all this blood-?”
Na’ama doesn’t finish her sentence. She’s too busy looking through the bullet holes in my shirt. “How?” she gazes at my unblemished bare skin and looks me directly in the eye.
The man who had arrived along with Na’ama is coming down from the hill.
Behold: Aharon Hanan.
He smiles at me and proceeds to hug me.
That’s so unlike him.
- Don’t get messy, I’m covered in blood.
“He claims they shot him.”
He looks back at Na’ama, then at what’s left of my clothes.
“Yes,” she continues, “His clothes do have matching bullet holes and there are remnants of blood, but there isn’t a single physical injury. No entry wounds.”
He gazes at me and we exchange a look.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get here earlier,” he says, eventually. “Perhaps we might have been able to prevent all that,” he surveys the entire scene. “You had to be a hero again, but once again, you turn out to be an idiot! You made up your mind to get here without any backup, without even telling us.”
- But I did tell you. I sent an email with all the details. I don’t know why you never got it. I was afraid for Idan. Still, it turned out he wasn’t alone.
I point at the helicopter flying away.
- If you had no idea about these guys, how come they got here before you did?
Aharon shakes his head. “As you recall, there are dozens of cases we report. Some are handled, but a great deal of them,” I can tell how sorry he truly is by his genuine expression of regret, “go unaddressed.” He then looks back at me. “You cracked the case. You saved Idan. That’s what’s important here.” He pats my shoulder fondly, appreciatively.
“Come,” Na’ama grabs me by the arm. “I’ll take you back home. Let’s make this quick. First, we interview you. You know the drill.”
I nod in agreement.
- Why didn’t you tell me? What took you so long to get here?
Aharon smiles at me.
“Your email only came after midnight, and by the time Na’ama checked her emails, it was nearly three AM. We notified the Jerusalem District Police, so they were the first to arrive—well, second,” he corrects himself. “The guys from the security service must have intercepted your email. I don’t know why it was so important for them to be the first to arrive on the scene,” he says, as he watches a man taking pictures of the entire area as he circles the stones that used to comprise the statue of Dagon.
He doesn’t miss a single angle.
“I don’t think we’ll ever know why,” Aharon continues. “It isn’t typical for the security services to share information.”
He then turns to Na’ama and says, “Take him back,” as he hands her his car keys. “Have him interviewed and debriefed for starters. Make sure he knows he’s not to leave the country. Tie him up in the interview room if necessary.”
- Oh, that’s all right. My car is right here. How did you manage to get through? I am practically blocking the path.
“We had to move it by force. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere any time soon. I’ll see it’s towed to the yard the Traffic Police use, where we’ll eventually get it up and running again.”
What’s this sudden weakness in my knees? Or is it I’m just tired from everything’s that’s happened.
I feel dizzy and lean on Na’ama.
“It’s probably best to take Aharon’s car.”
“I’ll meet you back at the squad.”
As Na’ama and I begin to climb back up the hill to where Aharon’s car is parked, I turn back at the summit. The sun is high in the sky and rising still, filling the world with its warmth. Dozens of police agents and officers fill the scene before my eyes. Body bags are beginning to pile up.
I feel for my buckle.
- My Glock is still out there. Please do me a favor and have someone return it to me. It’s the second time in two days that I’ve lost it.
She nods and walks me to Aharon’s police Jeep.
She’s a very good driver. The road is also faster by daylight, so we’re on the motorway leading to Ma’ale Adumim in no time.
“All right then. Do you wanna share what happened last night?” she finally asks me.
I lay my head on the cool window and watch the desert landscape pass me by quickly.
- It was interesting. Eldad was there too, as well as Yuval, his bodyguard, and Nadav, the gardener, who isn’t just a gardener but also a son of Nephilim with superhuman strength. And then there were these members of the Cult of Dagon, and they brought Dagon to life. The statue became alive. And then there was a shootout and then you came.
I tell her all this calmly. Quietly.
“OK, OK. You can simply tell me you do not wish to talk about it. You do not have to tell me the most ludicrous story you could have come up with. Can I put some music on? Seeing as you have no intention of speaking to me, we might as well entertain ourselves. See what Aharon keeps at the glove compartment.”
Reluctantly, I rifle through Aharon’s cache of dozens of discs, until I find the one album that looks like it has been played a lot.
- Here.
I hand her the disc and reattach my head to the window.
“What’s this?” she asks as she opens the disc tray and loads it in.
- ‘Thriller.’ I guess Aharon played it a lot back when he was young and forgot he even had it.
The title song fills the space inside the Jeep. Closing my eyes, I get the familiar image of zombies coming out of their graves.
- It was quite a hit back in the day, you know. Made it to the Guinness Book of Records for selling over 65 million copies.
She looks at me and smiles. “Just like when we used to work together. You have this capacity to remember Michal Jackson trivia in any situation. I get it.”
I return the smile, tired though I am.
- Always.
After all this time, Na’ama still remembers all my little quirks.
They are coming to get you, all these demons, everywhere, coming at you from all directions. They’ll get the better of you unless you change course. The clip features Michael running away from those undead hordes, until we realize he is actually leading them. Change course. Hmm.
The events of last night hit me.
Yes, I certainly did find myself at the very edge of my belief. Gods being resurrected, human sacrifice… and all that, just so that one person could fulfill his own egotistic desires.
I seem to be filled with a kind of rage I have never felt before.
He was prepared to kill all those people simply out of the belief that he was better than them; that he’d put his power to better use than their lives were worth! And still, although everything was stacked against me, I got out of there, alive, and Idan with me. Well, I’ve achieved that, at least. So his parents won’t cry. Well, maybe tears of joy.
The voices in my head tell me what I am about to do next.
The song keeps playing.
I sincerely hope he gets what’s coming to him. Karma. Last time I saw Eldad he seemed to have lost himself in all that energy. Got too big for his britches. Proper end to someone driven mad by an overwhelming desire for power.
The landscape changes by the time we reach Sha’ar HaGai. The motion makes me sleepy. Next thing I know, I fall asleep.
Chapter 36
The weeks after the events that night on Mt. Azazel just flew by. Well, those were highly turbulent times for me.
I spent the following days after that night under protective custody, although, to Aharon’s credit, I must say he did try his best to spare me that. Once ballistic analysis proved the bullets found in the bodies at the scene were not fired from my gun, which they did find there, I was released
under my own recognizance.
I was subjected to whatever those investigators from homicide thought they could throw at me, noting my testimony, then trying to take it apart and shouting at me over and over to report whomever it was I was cooperating with, orchestrating those events up on Mt. Azazel.
Each time I described Yuval stabbing me in the chest, or how he emptied an entire magazine into me, they played it down or dismissed this altogether, saying no knife was ever found at the scene and that there was no sign of any injury on my body, neither from the fight with Nadav nor from the shots I claimed Yuval had fired.
My testimony was also met, from the very first day, with a number of other ‘challenges:’ first, they cited the fact that both Eldad Ben Ya’ar and his bodyguard Yuval were out of the country. My interrogating officers made an outgoing call to France in my presence. Second, Eldad was interviewed, sitting in that wheelchair of his and wrapped in his blanket. He admitted he knew me and that we had met, “once or twice,” when I came to his house inquiring about some missing child and asked for his assistance. Then, he insisted, I took to pestering him and his staff, tried to break into his home, and was even caught attempting to steal some of his collection!
Lucky for him, Eldad told them, he had such devoted security staff. They took great care to ‘neutralize’ me as a threat. They must have felt sorry for me, seeing that I was “in such mental distress,” so they did not initiate any proceedings that would have left me with a police record. They were under the assumption that Eldad’s departure to Paris for a long time would make me drop the matter and leave him be.
I, in turn, claimed he was lying and asked the police to examine Eldad’s itinerary as well check his security detail. Besides, I asked:
- He’s talking about some ‘security detail,’ so where is his bodyguard, Meir? Why isn’t Meir with him?
Eldad didn’t bother answering the police, or me via the police. Rather than reply himself, he had Yuval tell them that “Eldad is feeling very tired from the journey and the treatments,” and that “we weren’t even in the country when Maharani claims we were,” so my story “|doesn’t make any sense,” adding in conclusion that, “you, the police, ought to make sure he is all right in the head before bothering ordinary, upstanding civilians, with that sort of thing.”
Then along came those investigators from the General Security Service. They referred to the events that night on Mt. Azazel as “mass suicide” and “the ritual murder attempt of three children,” Idan included, who “have been saved,” and are now undergoing treatment at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.
The police found Nadav’s body under a rock. In the absence of heavy machinery, it took no fewer than six police agents to move the boulder. Besides, the circle of rocks left the police investigators at a loss for words, perplexed as to how they came to be positioned in such a way, at the top of the mountain—all the more so after discounting the involvement of equipment, which, they claimed, “would not have gone unnoticed.”
So, true to form, the police did what it has always done with evidence that doesn’t fit their version when it came to my testimony—on top of all the hard evidence in the field, such as boulders that were undoubtedly brought over there, since they were not typical of the area: they simply removed from the final report anything that wasn’t in line with their story.
Aharon came to see me during the investigation. He figured it all out very quickly and realized the security services were indeed attempting to call all the shots and dictate the final outcome of the report, regardless of my testimony.
As for the media coverage, at first, the newspapers and the TV referred to the events as “carnage,” “horrific,” and “a catastrophe,” but within days, the news cycle had died down, so they soon became known as “ritual suicide,” as well as “attempted murder.”
Uri Zadok, my boss, was featured in an article published by the very newspaper Noga Ophir had worked for. Uri gave an interview about her assassination and his own connection with the “massacre on the mountain.” He owned up to the fact that it was his own private investigator, “under retainer,” a person of interest in an ongoing police investigation, who conducted the surveillance of that cult, which he, Uri, held responsible for Noga’s murder. He went on to describe the three survivors of the massacre and the way their injuries were an exact match for those sustained by the late Noga.
Classic Uri: some ‘internal source’ of his ‘gave him internal material of an active police investigation,’ and it was he who cracked the case wide open. Thanks to ‘one of his own men’ who was in the field, the murder of three children was averted and the fanatical cult stopped.
He continued to ride this wave of publicity, appearing on several morning shows, as well as turning in an appearance as a “guest specialist” on current affairs programs. His plan to become “investigator to the stars” was beginning to come true for him.
About two weeks after that infamous night, the newspapers began covering the members of the “cult.” They featured “personal stories” about Adam Hacohen and his daughter Lynn. The story of her recovery came to light, as well as the speculation that her father had attributed her complete return to health to some “higher power,” and thus came to establish the cult whose members committed suicide on Mt. Azazel. Lynn herself simply vanished without a trace—but only because no one bothered to even try to track her down.
By the third week after the events of that night, the affair died down and was relegated to a minor story. A month had passed, so the pressure on the police to conclude the case abated, all the more so when they announced they were closing the case and considering it as a “mass ritualistic suicide.”
The police cleared me of all suspicions, but not before the security services took the trouble to tell me I was still under their surveillance and that they were not content with my own account of my whereabouts. They plainly told me they knew I “know more than what I am telling,” so they are still monitoring my movements. All that was missing was some investigator literally telling me he was watching my every move.
Being released from temporary police custody into “house arrest” presented a problem, as I did not have a house, nor a home, for that matter… So the only solution was to put me back in jail. But then the whole story was leaked to the press, somehow, causing an uproar: “How is it that the hero, the private investigator who saved three kids from being murdered by a cult, was ‘doing time’ rather than living on the street, because he doesn’t have a home to go back to.” So the commotion all over the internet generated dozens of offers to put me up. So much so that the owner of Noga’s newspaper took it upon himself to offer me room and board in Florentin, not far from the upholstery shop. He paid up my upkeep in full for an entire year in advance.
This is how I came to have a studio apartment on the ground floor of a building in Florentin—under house arrest, mind you. My primary occupation there has been to reconstruct events from the photos Na’ama had carefully seen to it that I receive: pictures of the crime scene at Mt. Hell.
Here’s where I got stabbed in the chest, like the statue.
The blades, both made of shell, had shattered to dust. The shell which had adorned the statue of Dagon had lost both its color and texture, or composition, and now seemed more like limestone, crumbling to the touch. It appeared as though anything connected to the shell had run out of its intrinsic energy. Once this occurred, it became so brittle it crushed at the slightest touch.
The Ben Yehudas came to see me in my new digs first chance they got: immediately upon my release to house arrest, albeit accompanied by a horde of journalists desperate to “document” our reunion. Michal and Yonatan wanted to thank me for finding their son. She cried, again, and Yonatan kept hugging her. The excitement was genuine throughout the meeting, as was their insistence on thanking me for my work, both of which made me uncomfortable in equal measure.
“He’s too self-conscious. He’s not ready to be in this situation, so we didn’t want to insist too much,” they both said. Besides, his memory of events was pretty dim. Idan’s testimony to the police matched that of the other boy and the other girl who were also tied up and stabbed as offerings. The other two were also kids who had left home some time before, and had also met Lynn in connection with some project she had told them about. Lynn had also confessed an attraction for each.
Well, good enough a reason for any young kid to get together with her...
At some point, each of the kids was drugged. The next thing they remembered was waking up at the hospital. Idan did recall the basement of the house where he was tied to an iron bed frame for a few days prior to being taken to the mountain. Nevertheless, from the moment they covered his head with that hood, he’s not sure about the timeline, having lost all sense of time and place.
He remembered his relations with Lynn prior to “what happened,” along with the fact that she did tell him about her father’s work, which led Idan to follow up for himself on the theme of Dagon. Idan does remember going on his own to Savyon, but he has no clue as to why.
All my attempts to extract any information from Idan that would have corroborated my claims concerning Eldad’s involvement were met with frustration on Idan’s part that he couldn’t recall anything. In addition, both Michal and Yonatan expressed their wish that I let him move on and that I stop trying to make him “relive” those traumatic events. I was to allow him to get past this. They thanked me repeatedly. Then, I never saw them again.
I was paid handsomely for services rendered, on top of a generous retainer from Uri, whose attempt to present himself as the go-to investigator for celebrities was marred by the news that his private investigator had lived on the streets. He also wanted to make sure I played along with his own story, so he paid extra, not just for a job well done.
Chapter 37
Rose called when I got out of detention. She felt bad for not calling earlier, and then felt bad about taking so long before she did call. She said she was waiting for the media to ‘ease up’ on me so the two of us could talk. She sounded much more skeptical about the events of the night on Mt. Azazel as I recounted them. Perhaps the whole thing was so far from her perception of reality that she got to a point where she began doubting my version of events.
