A Possibility of Violence (26 page)

Avraham was quiet, and Ilana asked, “Do you understand what the child meant when he spoke about the first father?”

Avraham wondered what she was getting at. “I think so.”

“Yes? What?”

“That he saw Sara with his wife's body. But it was unbearable for him to admit this.”

“And are you sure of this?”

He had no doubt.

“Okay. And do you understand why you're doing everything that you're doing?”

“I think so.”

“Really? You understand why you chose to be a police detective? Or why it's so hard for you to get over Ofer Sharabi? Or why you and I haven't been getting along lately?”

Avraham closed his eyes, and when he opened them he still didn't notice anything.

“We don't get along?” he asked.

 

THEY DIDN'T TALK ABOUT SARA ANYMORE
because the time was short and Ilana asked him to present the findings from the other case.

“There you do understand what happened and why?” she asked, and he smiled and said that he did.

“Ilanit Hadad told Uzan, when she worked at the daycare, that Chava Cohen was abusing children. Everything started from there. Uzan thought that he could make money off of this. She took a few pictures with her cell phone, per Uzan's instructions, and tried to blackmail the teacher, but Chava Cohen refused to be blackmailed and fired her, and Uzan lost it and decided to take a harder line with the extortion. That's the reason why she didn't tell us. She knew all along who placed the suitcase next to the daycare and who called her, just as I thought from the first moment. But she was sure that she could deal with them by herself and didn't want to risk us learning about the abuse. She took a recorder to the meeting, apparently in order to record them saying that they placed the suitcase, and Uzan discovered the device and attacked her. I don't know if he was trying to kill her.”

“And I understand that Hadad confessed, correct? So that case is in fact closed,” Ilana said, and he answered, “Not yet. There is one more thing. I want you to authorize me to open up an investigation of Chava Cohen regarding the abuse of children at the daycare. Ilanit Hadad will send us the photos she took and there will be at least a few parents who will have something to say.”

He thought about Sara's younger son and things Sara had told him about the day he murdered his wife. These two cases were connected in so many ways he hadn't foreseen.

Ilana asked, “We're not going to wait until she gets out of the hospital?” and Avraham shook his head.

“We're not going to wait.”

And it was then, when the meeting was about to end, that Ilana got up from her chair and opened the window facing out onto Salame Street and placed the ashtray on the desk and asked him how he hadn't smoked until now and if he wanted coffee. He lit a cigarette and Ilana said, “I've wanted to tell you something else, for a while now, though maybe you already know.”

Until the moment she told him, he was sure that she was about to say that she was separating from her husband. That strange e-mail address from which she'd sent him the report about the previous investigation; and the family picture that had disappeared from the desk. And because of her hypothesis about Jennifer Salazar, that she had probably lied to Sara and fled Israel with a lover, before the truth was discovered. Until the last moment he was sure she planned to tell him she was getting divorced.

“This is my final week with the police. You know, my final week
for now
.”

He set his cigarette down in the ashtray. He didn't have to ask, because things became clear immediately.

“Cancer. It's unclear if it's fatal or not, but the treatments will last a few weeks. Maybe more.”

He didn't know what to say.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and Ilana laughed.

“
I
think that it's a mistake and the nurses at the hospital switched the test results. But the doctors seem sure.”

Was he supposed to get up and hug her? That's what he wanted to do, but he couldn't. He examined her face and neck, and she noticed his gaze and said, “You can't see it, Avi, it's inside. Very deep down.”

“Can I help with something?”

“You can give me a cigarette. It's not lung cancer. And, actually, that's the reason I went back to smoking with you.”

He brought the lighter up to her pale face and saw spots on the back of her hand, but he couldn't remember if they had always been there. He wanted to ask her so many questions: Are you in pain, Ilana? When did it all start? And why didn't you tell me anything until now?

Are you scared?

They met for the first time more than ten years earlier and a short time after that began working together.

And now he asked himself just one question: How can I continue?

They were silent, and Ilana wanted to make it easier on him and said, “I don't know who they'll nominate to replace me. They haven't asked me yet, but I intend to recommend you. I'm hoping that this office will be yours. Temporarily, of course. That you'll watch over it for me until I'm able to return. And now, since you've gotten over the previous investigation and solved this case, maybe there's a chance that'll happen.”

He couldn't look her in the eyes. Was it so she wouldn't see what he wanted to tell her, that she was actually right?

That he hadn't gotten over it.

That he had indeed fabricated another missing-persons case in order to make right what he'd mishandled in the previous investigation.

That since his return to Israel he sat for long hours facing the sea that had swallowed up Ofer Sharabi's body.

That he still desperately wanted to save him.

That, to be honest, he was still searching for that suitcase.

Ilana hugged him at the door, and only then did he feel how thin she had become. Her body was so fragile, it seemed to disappear in his arms.

 

HE DIDN'T GO HOME, DESPITE HIS
exhaustion, because he sensed he wouldn't be able to bear the grief in solitude. He returned to the station house, which was almost empty in the late evening hours, and made himself a cup of coffee. Across his office desk lay a bouquet of flowers.

He didn't think about the investigation any more that day, only about Ilana, and perhaps for this reason he found the strength to watch the interrogation video again and finally transcribe Sara's confession. Looking for a pen in one of the drawers, he found the lost photograph of Jennifer Salazar, which he didn't recall putting there, but he no longer had any interest in it and turned it over quickly and filed it away in the investigation folder. He wrote and erased for a long time.

Question: You said earlier that you had planned to murder her for a long time, so why did you do it on that particular night?

Answer: Because the day before, my boy returned bruised from daycare.

Question: Which boy?

Answer: Shalom. The younger one.

Question: Okay, continue.

Answer: On Tuesday he returned from daycare with serious bruises on his forehead.

Question: Right. You said this. And what happened then?

Answer: I asked how he got the bruises and she said she didn't know and that it didn't interest her. I said to her, why didn't you speak with the teacher, ask her how it happened, maybe some kid hit him, and she said, you speak with her, they're your kids, I'm not interested in how they get their bruises. She would talk about them like that all the time.

Question: Then what?

Answer: The children were standing there and heard her, both of them. She didn't say it quietly. Ezer heard too.

Question: When was this?

Answer: When I returned from work. In the afternoon.

Question: So why didn't you kill her that same day? How did you answer her?

Answer: I didn't answer. What could I have said?

Question: And you murdered her because of this?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Did you suspect her of beating Shalom?

Answer: No. She wouldn't dare touch them.

Question: So, then, I don't understand what you're saying. Did she threaten to take the children from you?

Answer: She wouldn't have taken them because she didn't want them with her. One time she said that she'd take them just so I'd suffer like she suffers in life. She knew how much I'm attached to them, and because of this she would insult me around them.

Question: When was this?

Answer: That was a long time ago.

Question: And why didn't you do anything then?

Answer: I hadn't thought about it yet.

( . . . )

Question: But on the day the child returned from daycare with bruises you did think about it?

Answer: (nods) She refused to speak to the teacher, and so because of this I went to the daycare myself the next morning, and then there was the fight with the teacher. She didn't listen, either.

Question: That was on Wednesday morning?

Answer: Yes.

Question: And what happened later that day?

Answer: Nothing happened. When I returned home from work we ate dinner, and afterward Jenny put them to bed
and went to sleep early and I finished working in the kitch
en, and then I prepared the blanket.

Question: Was there another incident between you that same evening?

Answer: What do you mean, “incident”?

Question: She didn't feel that you were planning to do something?

Answer: Why would she feel that?

Question: Did you beat her in the past?

Answer: I never in my life touched her.

Question: And was there anything different she did that evening? Describe for me exactly what she did.

Answer: There was nothing different. She watched TV in the living room and then went to bed.

Question: Did you sleep with her that night?

Answer: (no response)

Question: Did you have sex that night?

Answer: No. I worked and she fell asleep.

Question: And did you already know how you would kill her?

Answer: Yes.

( . . . )

Answer: I set an alarm clock for four a.m. but I didn't fall asleep.

Question: Why didn't you do it as soon as she fell asleep?

Answer: Because she sleeps deeper in the middle of the night, and so do the boys. And then it would be easier to remove her without anyone seeing.

Question: So the murder was carried out at four?

Answer: Slightly before. And I checked that the children were fast asleep.

Question: And then? How did you carry out the murder?

Answer: I suffocated her with the big pillow.

Question: Which pillow is that?

Answer: From the living room.

Question: And is it still there?

Answer: Yes. A blue pillow.

Question: Show me how you did it. Did you put it on her face?

Answer: Yes. I put it on her face and pushed with both hands. (extends his hands forward)

Question: And she didn't struggle?

Answer: No. Well, she tried grabbing with her hands, and kicked the bed with her legs, but after a while she stopped. I stayed there with the pillow on her face for a long time.

Question: Have you washed the pillow since then?

Answer: No.

16

AVRAHAM SAW THE CHILDREN WHOM HE
so badly wanted to save one more time, at a mass in St. Peter's Church a week after the body was discovered.

It was a gray Sunday morning in the middle of October, and even though winter was still far off, strong winds blew outside, battering the tops of the palm trees. Avraham searched for Sara's sons but didn't spot them. Dozens of Filipino women were already crowded into the church pews, some of them with children. And that was the only reason he came. Two days earlier, Garbo sent him a fax with an announcement about the mass in memory of Jennifer Salazar and about the fact that the murdered woman's sister would be arriving from Berlin to take part, as well as a representative from the Philippine embassy in Israel, and it seemed to Avraham that Garbo expected him to be present as well. He told no one from the station that he planned to go to the ceremony. He sat down in one of the rear pews and waited.

The American priest who rose to the pulpit looked like a hippie who came home from Vietnam in the sixties and became religious. His mane of hair was white and his beard long. He started by saying that he was dedicating his sermon to Jennifer Salazar, a beloved member of the community who was murdered, but he didn't mention her again in his sermon, whose subject was miracles. He tried to impress upon the believers that even if they had never seen a miracle in their own lives, that didn't mean they don't take place all the time, and that if they continued to hold their faith dear to them, one day they'd be granted the vision, with their own eyes, of a miraculous revelation.

Each of Avraham's coughs echoed inside the space of the church like thunder.

Orange lights flickered around him in the dark space, and colorful figures gazed down on him from the stained-glass windows.

He was certain that someone would speak in her memory, but it didn't happen.

Did anyone from among those sitting in the church even know Jennifer Salazar? Did the priest see her when she sometimes came alone to the church on Sundays, as Sara told him she had in one of the interrogations? From time to time the congregation stood up from their seats, according to some hidden signal, and Avraham got up with them in order not to stick out, but when they knelt on the wooden pews, he stayed seated. A tall Filipino woman passed among them with a padded straw basket and they put bills and coins in it, but Avraham avoided her gaze and did not reach for his wallet. He didn't believe in any God, yet still it occurred to him that he might well pay dearly for his visit to the church.

He noticed the children only after the service. The priest approached the first pew and shook the hands of the worshippers, and that's when Avraham recognized the older son, wearing a dress shirt, and the younger boy, and a woman next to them with long black hair.

A chill passed through him.

From where he was sitting she very much resembled the young woman in the old picture.

The priest paused before the children and placed his hands on the head of the smaller boy, as a blessing, and afterward bent down in order to whisper something to him, perhaps words of condolence, and Avraham recalled that a few days earlier he'd thought he should adopt the children and raise them himself, but that was an idiotic thought that came to him only because of a novel he'd read years ago. He introduced himself, in English, to the sister, who up close resembled the murdered woman less, her face more narrow and delicate, and told her that there were items belonging to her sister in the police's possession that she could take.

She thanked him and asked what items and Avraham said, “Mainly clothing and jewelry that were found in a suitcase. And a few documents and pictures that we found at their home. And there are letters that you wrote to her that you probably will want back,” and she looked at him with surprise and said, “I never wrote Jennifer letters. We haven't been in touch since I went to Germany.”

He presented her with the picture of the man that was found in her sister's wallet, but she didn't want it, because despite Ma'alul's assumption, it wasn't a picture of their father, but rather a picture of Jennifer Salazar's first husband, Julius Andreda, “The man who broke her heart,” her sister said.

Ezer stood next to them during this conversation and didn't let go of his younger brother's hand, as if Sara's final injunction in the interrogation room continued to echo in his ears.

Avraham walked the narrow alleyways of Jaffa's old city, down to the old port, and sat next to a fisherman who with his net caught small, dead fish that floated with eyes open in the shallow water near the boat docks.

Perhaps because he saw the children alive, a sense of satisfaction rose in him, even though he still felt that the case wasn't completely settled, as he had admitted to Ilana; and one night when he again couldn't fall asleep he would go to Lavon Street and with a small flashlight scan the courtyard where the suitcase with the fake bomb had been hidden, as if he might find something there so many days later.

The wind picked up, and the waves that crashed against the docks soaked his shoes and the cuffs of his pants, and he went back to the station.

 

THE NEWSPAPERS' INTEREST IN THE SALAZAR
case was brief and superficial.

Information about the murder and the plan to dispose of the children in Manila appeared in the back pages of most of the daily papers, and in one of them Avraham was mentioned by name. On the same day he was interviewed by telephone for a radio program on the Voice of Israel, but two minutes after the broadcast began, it was cut short for a report on the elimination of a senior member of Hamas in Gaza, and he didn't even get a chance to say the murdered woman's name on the air. He sat by the phone in his office and waited, because the program's producer promised that they'd get back to him, but that didn't happen.

And life continued.

Sara's lawyer offered to sign a plea bargain according to which Sara would confess to the murder of his wife while the prosecution would shelve the baseless accusation regarding the plan to kill the children, and even suggested that the police were responsible for the disappearance of the letter that Sara had hidden in the suitcase, which would have proved his explanation for the trip. Avraham vehemently opposed the deal and no one was about to disagree with the opinion of the detective who had solved the case: his investigation proved that the plan for the trip was born in Sara's mind after his son hinted about what he had seen the night of the murder, and the fact that he ordered return tickets for both his wife and children confirmed that his pattern was identical. And they decided not to prosecute Sara's mother, due to her age.

The next case that was placed in his hands dealt with the assault of a bus driver who had been beaten with an iron rod by two passengers, and there was an additional case, exceptional and wrapped in mystery. It began with some writing that had sprung up on walls all over the city, in black spray paint,
Soon you will understand why
, and continued with three break-ins of senior citizens' apartments in the course of a single night. Nothing was stolen from the senior citizens' apartments, but in the three bedrooms were placed rusty metal cases in each of which was a folded page of an old newspaper.

In one apartment, on De Shalit Street, it was a page from
Yediot Ahronot
from Thursday, May 5, 1949. The central item on the crumbling paper told about a plane crash in Italy, on Mount Superga, south of the Po River, in which all the players on the celebrated Turin soccer team perished. Underneath it, circled with a black marker, was an item about a murder in the city of Holon:
The body of a widower was found in the sands in the Moledet neighborhood
.

In the second apartment it was a newspaper clipping from November 4, 1979. There was a central item in it as well, this time about a massacre in North Carolina: Ku Klux Klan operatives opened fire on activists marching for human rights who were joined by representatives from labor organizations and Communist movements, and five were killed. Next to it was a smaller item about an eighteen-year-old woman, a resident of Holon, who was abducted from her home. In the third incident, which was reported a few days later, a section of the November 18, 1962,
Davar
newspaper was found, in which was an item about the murder of a disabled shoemaker in a suburb of Tel Aviv.

Moshe Stolero, age 35, hunchback and limping, locked up his store for household goods, books, and newspapers and prepared to go up to his parents' apartment on the third floor of the same building. He had with him the day's revenue in the amount of three hundred lira and began the climb home. When he entered the stairwell and extended his hand to turn on the lights, a volley of three shots was fired in his direction. He was struck in the chest, shoulder, and head. The unidentified shooter fled the scene
.

On each of the three newspaper clippings an anonymous person wrote in black marker:
Soon you will understand why.

For the first time since joining the force Avraham visited the police's archive basement and met the archive's director, a strange man in his seventies who was known as Dr. Bartoshek, even though that wasn't his name. Despite his age, Bartoshek was restless, fueled by some kind of inner fire, and as he moved with dizzying speed in his wheelchair among the shelves of old files he treated Avraham to a short lecture on the history of police work in Israel.

“Did you know that thirty years ago when a policeman needed to report a criminal incident, he had to run to a public telephone and call the station with a phone token?” he asked, and his eyes sparkled. “And that's if he had a phone token on him, of course! But in those days every policeman had in his shirt pocket a small sack of tokens. Can you imagine?”

Together Avraham and Dr. Bartoshek discovered that the three old crimes had a common denominator: none of them had been solved. And none of the three senior citizens had a clue as to why the newspapers were placed in their apartments.

The case stirred Avraham's curiosity, but he struggled to be drawn into it. He had a feeling that there was something contrived about it and that it wouldn't lead to a crime carried out by a real person, as if he had read about it in one of the detective novels he loved and wasn't actually investigating it himself. For long hours he stared at the old news items about the disasters and the dead and the crimes that had no apparent meaning or explanation. And to make matters worse, he couldn't speak about the case with Ilana. Ostensibly his work continued as usual, but there was no “as usual” without Ilana. Not a day passed without him wanting to talk with her, but she asked not be visited in the hospital nor to be called during therapy. In his imagination he saw her sitting up in a hospital bed, her head bald, wearing a green robe. Her feet bare and her skin hard and rough. From time to time things were whispered about her replacement in the corridors of the station, but in the meantime no one had been nominated to replace her nor had it been hinted to Avraham that he might get the job. And until the last moment he hoped that she'd surprise him and come to the decoration and promotion ceremony, which took place on a Wednesday afternoon, in the courtyard where the Rosh Hashanah toast had taken place back in early September.

The station's courtyard again filled up with policemen and -women in uniform, and the wooden tables were covered in tablecloths and plastic plates with small sandwiches and bottles of soda. Avraham searched for Ilana among those who came and saw his parents, who stood at the entrance to the courtyard, embarrassed. His mother was well dressed and wore makeup, as she used to wear makeup during his childhood when she would go hear a concert in Tel Aviv, and he saw his father for the first time in a while wearing jeans and the black beret that he began wearing after he retired. They sat next to him in the first row during Saban's speech, which the district commander presented in a lazy manner, repeating entire paragraphs from the speech he'd given at Rosh Hashanah, about his vision for a safe district free of violence, and at the end he added that thanks to the diligence and courage of police officers such as Avraham this vision was becoming a reality.

When Avraham spoke there was complete silence in the audience—anyway, that's what his father told him afterward.

His mother complained that his words of thanks were too brief, and that he didn't speak about himself enough.

He thanked Sergeant Lior Zaytuni and Sergeant Major Eliyahu Ma'alul, without whose contributions the case would not have been solved, and especially Commander Ilana Lis, who all the officers of the district are praying will soon return. Like the priest at St. Peter's Church, and like Saban in his speech, he didn't mention Jennifer Salazar, even though in the first draft he had written the night before at home there were a few sentences devoted to her memory.

 

TWO DAYS LATER, A FRIDAY MORNING,
Police Superintendent Avraham Avraham flew to Brussels.

He kept the trip a secret, and told his parents that he was going for three days of professional development in Nazareth.

He landed in Brussels in the early evening and took a train from the airport to South Brussels Station, and continued from there by cab to the Hotel Espagne, where he'd stayed during his first trip to the city.

Room 307, where he'd slept then, was occupied, and so he settled down in a pricier, more spacious room, on the seventh floor, with a beautiful balcony facing north and looking out onto the residential neighborhoods leading into the city.

He left his small suitcase in the room and, just like during the first visit, immediately went out to Avenue Brugmann, but this time he knew the way and walked quickly parallel to the tram tracks until the turn at Rue de la Victoire. Darkness had fallen and the streets had emptied out when he arrived at Alfred Bouvier Square, out of breath. From a distance he noticed the window of the room that had been his room for three months, in the summer, with the light off, but he nevertheless went closer and stood under the gray, industrial-looking building, which Marianka said was the ugliest building in Europe but in his eyes was more beautiful than any palace.