A Possibility of Violence (22 page)

He asked Zaytuni to try and get ahold of the manager at the Ministry of the Interior in Holon, but this was hopeless on the eve of Yom Kippur. Then he knocked on the door of the room next to the interrogation room and opened it without waiting. Sara's younger son was sleeping in a corner of the room, on the floor, covered in a blue sweatshirt. Ezer and Ma'alul were sitting next to each other at the table and were silent when he entered, and Ma'alul signaled to him that he'd come join him in a moment. He appeared excited when he came out and whispered to Avraham, “I think you're not off, Avi. Something happened there with the mother, and it's possible that his son saw it.”

He didn't need more than this to finally decide that Sara would remain in custody until after Yom Kippur.

And only come evening did he grasp what was liable to have happened to the children had he freed him along with them.

Ilana would probably go through the roof, but Avraham already knew that he wouldn't ask her but would instead call Benny Saban, from whom he'd easily get authorization to detain Sara for twenty-four hours, bring him to the holding cell at the station, and leave him there until after the fast.

“What do you mean, ‘saw'? The older one?” Avraham asked, and Ma'alul said, “I went over the day she disappeared with him a few times. To see if he remembers how long she was gone and when she left. After the little one fell asleep he became less defensive and started telling me about how his father took the mother away at night and told him that she wouldn't be coming back. That is what he told me.”

He wasn't surprised, because it seemed to him that he understood everything when he recalled where he had heard the words “Ministry of the Interior” before, but nevertheless he felt his heart beating fast. Sara was waiting for him in the next room and looked convinced that having told Avraham the story of his wife's disappearance at length he'd be released.

But Jennifer Salazar never left Israel.

He asked Ma'alul, “Do you think he really saw something?” and Ma'alul said, “Could be. But he also says something odd. He keeps repeating that it wasn't Sara.”

Avraham didn't understand what he was saying.

“I don't know what he means either,” Ma'alul said. “He says that it's not
this
dad of his who took her. That it's the previous father. Do you have any idea what he might mean? Is there some other father in the picture?”

Not that he knew of. According to the report that Garbo had sent him Jennifer Salazar was married to another man before she married Sara, but she divorced him after four years of marriage and the couple didn't have any children. And this took place many years earlier.

Was there something else he didn't know?

Only in the evening, after the start of Yom Kippur, did the complete picture become clear to him. The streets were dark and quiet, and faint lights shone in the windows, but the darkness lifted and the strange details came together, as he had expected they would. He then guessed not only how Sara's wife disappeared but why he was determined to kill his children.

It was impossible to track down the chief of the Ministry of the Interior before the start of the holiday, but now there was no need. As he had done on every Yom Kippur since his childhood, Avraham went out to wander though the empty city and walked alone in the middle of the street. When he was a boy, before he learned to ride a bike and take longer trips with his friends, on Yom Kippur his father took him on walks through the city, which seemed to him then as giant as the whole world. They walked westward from Kiryat Sharet to the other side of the city, almost to the edge of Bat Yam, and he remembered that on the way he would pepper his dad with questions about this strange day in which cars didn't drive in the streets and adults didn't eat or drink, and his father tried to explain it to him, but couldn't quite, perhaps because he himself didn't fast. When they returned home the three of them would sit down to eat a festive meal, and one time the young Avraham asked his father, “If you eat on Yom Kippur, does that mean you'll die this year?” His father looked at him and didn't answer, but the question upset his mother and she angrily said to Avraham, “Such nonsense you're speaking to your father,” and asked him to apologize.

If Marianka were here, they would walk endlessly in another direction entirely.

She continued not answering him, even when he called her for a long time without letting up.

A young man passed by him with a
tallit
sack under his arm when he reached that building on Histadrut Street. In the apartment where Ofer Sharabi was murdered a few months earlier, the windows were shuttered.

It wasn't for no reason that he'd walked here, but rather because the circle had closed.

Sara's children were protected, beyond his reach, and he was imprisoned in the holding cell at the station house. Avraham could have entered his cell and continued interrogating him, but he preferred to wait. That evening he didn't walk to the other side of the city, but turned around and returned home.

14

EVEN DAYS LATER, CHAIM WASN'T SURE
what happened on the night that he admitted to the murder.

Had the police been honest with him? Had they lied?

Perhaps the order of the events had gotten mixed up and forgotten, but he did remember the small actions they took, and it seemed to him that all of them had a significance that he didn't notice that night. For instance, the chair that he was asked to sit on. Or the detective's violent outburst and his hand banging the door of the interrogation room. Were these part of a plan? He had no one to ask, but maybe it didn't matter anymore. The only question that continued bothering him was whether or not the things the police said about his son Ezer were true, and he got no answer to this, and perhaps he never would.

 

HE UNDERSTOOD THAT THE YOM KIPPUR
fast was over by the noise that reached him in the police station.

The phones outside the holding cell began to ring again, and people disturbed the silence with the sort of shouts he hadn't heard earlier. A radio was turned on, to the Voice of Israel, and through the door it was possible to hear the news, as well as the sounds of cars being started in the parking lot that the lockup's only window faced.

He understood that in a short while the interrogation would start up again.

His cellmate was lying on a cot and Chaim stood by the door in order to listen to the sounds up close and wait. A few minutes passed before the door opened and a policewoman instructed the cellmate to accompany her. Chaim asked the policewoman if he could get warm water and something to eat to break the fast and the policewoman said to him, “Inspector Avraham is on his way for you. He'll make sure you get a snack.” The two inmates didn't say good-bye because they'd barely spoken during the hours they'd shared in the holding cell. The cellmate was brought there during the night, while Chaim slept, and at first he suspected that they'd put him there in order to get him to talk. He was twenty years younger than Chaim, wore glasses, and looked intelligent and stylish. From the scraps of conversation with the cops who brought him food and water, Chaim understood that the cellmate drove his car on Yom Kippur, hit a bicyclist, and fled. Had he turned himself in to the police or did he try to escape and was caught? He didn't dare ask. After the cellmate arrived, Chaim hadn't been able to get back to sleep, perhaps for fear that he'd get up in his sleep and say things that he mustn't say, and perhaps because his cellmate kept on crying. But the cellmate didn't try to start a conversation with him, not even in the morning, and only once, when he was served a meal, did he politely ask Chaim if his eating next to him on Yom Kippur was bothering him, and Chaim said no.

A long time passed between the moment the cellmate was taken away and when Inspector Avraham opened the door, peeked into the cell, and left.

 

CHAIM WAS WRONG ABOUT THE DETECTIVE,
and he was convinced of this even before what would happen later on.

The day before, at the airport, when he told him about Jenny's trip, about the wife who disappeared on him and the children without notice, it seemed to Chaim that Inspector Avraham looked at him with understanding. That maybe he believed him when he said that he wasn't sure about the voice on the phone because he hadn't heard Jenny's voice in a long time, and that therefore he kept the conversation going and didn't immediately tell the agent that the voice speaking to him wasn't hers. Deep inside, did he still hope that he could get away, even though he knew that the police were searching for Jenny? He felt that he had been caught even before he opened the door to the small room at the airport and saw Inspector Avraham inside, and then the hope arose in him that he was wrong and he told Avraham that Jenny had left them. The hope arose because Avraham's questions grew less aggressive and his face softened, and the panic Chaim felt at the start of the interrogation relaxed into an inner silence. Avraham was a bit shorter than he was and looked like a simple man. And Chaim wasn't as scared of him as he had been when Avraham questioned him a few days before about the suitcase that had been placed near the daycare. He had asked Chaim how he met Jenny and where she worked and who she spent time with in Israel, and didn't yet accuse him of knowing where she was. But then the detective left the room, and when he returned he announced to Chaim that he had decided to detain him at the police station and continue the interrogation after the holiday, and the hope was gone. He asked what they were going to do with the children and was alarmed when Avraham informed him that his mother was on her way to the airport. He didn't see her when the detective brought Ezer and Shalom inside to say good-bye to him. He said to Ezer, “Go sleep at Grandma's, okay? We won't fly to Mom today because there's a problem with the plane. And I need to stay here a bit more in order to help the police,” and Shalom, who looked as if he had just woken up, asked him with tears in his eyes, “But what do you need to help them with?” Ezer was tired as well, but tried hard not to cry like his brother.

In his cell at the station Chaim thought only about the two of them on Yom Kippur, and sometimes about his mother, too. About the fear that must certainly have gripped her. And hoped that the children believed what he said to them about the reasons for postponing the trip.

Avraham returned to the holding cell with a large bottle of water and a prepared serving of couscous with vegetables in a plastic cup. He stood in a corner of the cell, his hands in his pants pockets, and looked at Chaim, without saying a word, while he sat on his cot and ate. When his prisoner finished eating, he instructed him to come follow him. Avraham wore blue jeans and a black shirt, and Chaim hadn't yet identified in his eyes the crazed look that would be in them later on. Avraham opened the interrogation room door and Chaim entered before him; he wanted to sit down in the chair close to the door, but the detective asked him to sit on the other side of the table, in the far chair, facing the door, and he sat down across from him. This couldn't have been a coincidence.

He turned on the recording device and asked, “Would you like to see a lawyer?” and Chaim said no.

Avraham opened the folder sitting before him, glanced at his watch, and wrote something with a black pen on a sheet of paper.

 

THE INSPECTOR'S OUTBURST WAS APPARENTLY PLANNED
as well, since at the start of the interrogation Avraham was calm and asked his questions in a quiet, unaggressive manner. His face was wide and tired and he hadn't shaved. His gaze sought out Chaim's eyes throughout almost their entire conversation.

He asked Chaim if he insisted on continuing to claim that his wife had left Israel on the twelfth of September and Chaim didn't answer. Just as at the airport, in his questions Avraham didn't call her Jenny but rather Jennifer Salazar.

Avraham waited a moment before saying, “Because I know that that isn't correct,” and asked, “Do you want to know how I know?” Chaim tried to avoid his gaze. He didn't want to know. He tried to hear sounds from the other side of the door, maybe the radio that was on.

He felt a dull pain in his stomach and chest since being arrested and brought to the police station, and the pain grew more intense when Avraham said, “I'll tell you anyway, because I'm sure you're curious, even if you're embarrassed to ask. Do you know why it took me a while to get here this evening? I had a long talk with a man you know. Ilan Babachiyan. You know Ilan, at least
that
you won't deny, right, Mr. Sara? He's your cousin, if I'm not mistaken. And you can imagine what he told me.”

His last hope of escape was gone, but he still didn't intend to speak.

The pain inside him grew still more intense, and he held fast to his silence and continued to lower his eyes, and only when Avraham read to him from the scribbled-on piece of paper that he held in one hand did he raise his eyes for a moment and look at him. “Ilan Babachiyan acknowledged the following facts. You requested from him, by virtue of his work at the Population Management Authority at the Ministry of the Interior, to forge a false exit registration for Jennifer Salazar, purportedly because of problems with her visa. You explained to him that your wife's visa was running out, which according to him checked out, and that the documents you were asked to prepare in order to submit a request for citizenship weren't ready, and that it was necessary to create an exit registration for her so that she wouldn't become an illegal alien. Do you confirm these facts?”

The pain pierced his stomach and his chest but was still bearable—at least he hadn't yet burst.

The idea wasn't his but rather his mother's; it popped into her head two days after he killed Jenny. He had thought it was a mistake from the beginning. He'd planned to tell everyone that Jenny just went away, without forging any registrations. And he was right. Had they not forged the exit registration, Avraham wouldn't have had proof that something was fishy, he thought then, before Avraham shocked him again.

It seemed to him that the pain didn't stem from anger. He wasn't mad at his mother, nor at himself. He felt that something would burst in him when the pain exploded. He wouldn't blame anyone for his getting caught, not then and not later, it was just the bad luck that always dogged him. His mother had simply convinced him that they had to forge the exit registration, because if they didn't do this, one day the immigration police would come looking for Jenny, and that seemed logical to him.

He maintained his silence, and Avraham said, “You don't need to confirm the facts, Mr. Sara. And I understand that it's hard for you to speak. It would be hard for me, too, if I were in your shoes. In any case, Ilan Babachiyan offered to help you in getting Jennifer Salazar's visa extended—without the missing documents, apparently—but he says that you refused and urged him to execute a false exit registration. That was the explanation you gave him. He vigorously insists that he didn't know that your wife had disappeared, and we will examine this claim before deciding what to charge him with.” And suddenly he raised his glance from the piece of paper and looked at Chaim, and added in a less official voice, “You hoped that everyone would accept that she traveled to the Philippines and didn't return, correct? But if that's so, you need to explain something to me, because I want to understand how your mind works, if it works at all. Didn't you think Ilan would ask questions? Didn't you think that in a few weeks he'd ask if he should create an entry registration for your wife? Or that he might ask you where she was when he didn't see her?”

The detective's attempts to hurt him didn't hit home.

From outside the room he heard a man and a woman conversing, and the sounds of laughter. He had no intention of telling him that he thought that they'd forget. That in the first days this was his only plan. That Ilan wouldn't think of it afterward. After all, he rarely saw Jenny. Nor was he about to explain that in the beginning he even hoped that, little by little, the children would also just . . . forget. He told himself that as time passed things would fade, the way things always do. He was mistaken.

Why did no one forget this, of all times?

If he remembered the order of things correctly, a short time after these questions were posed, the interrogation room door suddenly opened and he saw, for a split second, his son Ezer standing in the opening with a policeman he didn't recognize. That was the most horrible moment that night. And if he had been sitting in the chair closer to the door he wouldn't have noticed Ezer, even if he had managed to spin around when the door opened.

Ezer was wearing the festive clothes that Chaim dressed him in before they left for the airport: the blue pants and the white shirt with the picture of the boat. Chaim immediately noticed that his hair was mussed and that his eyes were red. The older policeman placed his large hand on Ezer's narrow shoulder, and therefore he could not run to Chaim and hug him, even if he had wanted to. They stood close together, and Ezer didn't flinch at the touch of the policeman's hand on his shoulder, even though he was extremely sensitive to foreign contact, and this pained Chaim, because he felt that someone was already trying to take his son away from him. He wasn't able to say a word to Ezer because the older policeman shut the door, panic-stricken when he recognized Chaim, and Inspector Avraham tried to continue with the interrogation as if nothing had happened, merely saying to him, “Sorry, that shouldn't have happened.”

Chaim asked, “Why is Ezer here?” and Avraham didn't answer. These were the first words he spoke in the room, and this was the first time their glances met. He asked again, “Why did you bring Ezer here?” and Avraham said, quietly, “Mr. Sara, in this room I ask the questions.”

 

FROM THAT MOMENT ON, CHAIM SAW
nothing before his eyes other than his son, and his frozen expression, and the hand resting on his shoulder.

The pain in his stomach and chest exploded but the explosion didn't flood him with blood, as he had imagined, but with memories. From somewhere beyond his thoughts he heard how Avraham's questions were becoming more aggressive, even violent, and he recalled Ezer falling asleep on the sofa next to him the day before the trip, and how his son's head fell on his shoulder while he read to him from the children's book and made up the rest of the story. A blindfold of moments from recent days was tied over his eyes, and through it he saw Avraham, blurry and distant, and listened to the words of the detective as if they were coming from another room as he raised his voice again and again and said to him, “I know that you murdered her. Tell me how it happened and where you buried her.”

This lasted for what felt like a few minutes, and afterward a brief silence prevailed in the room.

And only after this did the cop's temper flare, though that may have been faked, but he didn't know it then. He thought that Avraham lost his cool, and that through his blindfold he identified the crazed look burning in his eyes when the detective got up from his chair and approached him from behind, as he had done at the airport. This time he didn't whisper. He screamed into his ear, in a voice that grew louder and more frightening: “She cheated on you, Mr. Sara! Isn't that it? How many men did she sleep with before you discovered it? Did you find her in bed with someone that day? With a younger man? You can't get it up anymore, can you? That's your problem, isn't it? That's why she went looking for younger men. And when you discovered it, she announced to you that she was taking the children and leaving you?” And suddenly he turned around and walked away from Chaim and struck the closed door forcefully with the flat of his hand as if he couldn't contain his fury.