"Your name on it too?"
"Fuck you, policeman. Why you giving me all this shit?"
"If you want to help us out and you don't want to identify yourself, kindly drop your list to us in the mail."
"Can't do that."
"Why not?"
"You want the list or no?"
David thought a moment. "Okay, I want the list."
"Come to Anna Freud Garden. Givat Ram. Three this afternoon."
"Wait a minute! I didn't say—"
"Don't stall, Bar-Lev. And come alone. Nobody else. Or you don't get the list." He hung up.
"It's just a patch of bushes in the middle of the campus," said Dov. Not isolated at all. At three o'clock there'll be a mob."
"So what kind of a secret meeting place is that?" Micha asked.
"Suppose some kid comes up to David with a slip of paper. Go to
X. Then go to Y. Treasure
-
hunt style. It would be tough to keep him
covered."
"Anna Freud—maybe he knows about your father," Shoshana said.
"That's pretty sophisticated. This guy didn't sound like that."
"Suppose he's for real?"
"Fine. We could use a list. And if he's faking, part of the conspiracy, we need to know that too." They all looked at him. Dov seemed worried. "What's he going to do?" David asked. "Shoot me in the head?"
"I don't like it. All of a sudden like this. I mean, now we're way past Peretz."
"But we've been working on a list. Word could have gotten around. We know details on the marks have gotten out. Listen—I know if I don't go we'll kick ourselves tomorrow. So I go. Okay? Everyone agrees?"
He waited in the Anna Freud Garden from a quarter of three. The sun was hot and the bullet-proof vest they'd urged him to wear was uncomfortable and made him sweat. Students lay about on blankets sunbathing, talking, several couples kissing, a few actually reading books. By five he'd had it. He got up, shook his head and stalked off. He met Micha and Dov in the parking lot.
"It was a test, David. To see if you'd show up alone."
"Could be. Hundreds of windows around. I could have been easily observed. Or maybe it was just a stunt. So to hell with it! Guy calls back, I don't want to talk to him. Then we'll see how bad he wants me. Next time
he
can sweat."
At ten that evening he was listening to one of Anna's records, an old Pierre Fournier recording, when his telephone rang. It was the same caller. "You walked out on me."
"Fuck you," David said, and hung up.
When the phone rang again he sat watching it, letting the rings penetrate the music, echo against the apartment walls. Finally, after fifteen rings, he picked it up. "Yeah? What do you want?"
"Sorry. Got held up. No way to get in touch."
"No big deal. Forget it."
"Don't you want the list? I can give it to you tonight."
"Call my office in the morning. Work it out with someone else."
"Wait! I'm serious."
"Funny, I don't think you are."
"Give me another chance."
"Tell me: Why do you care so much?"
"When we meet I'll tell you everything. Then you'll understand." A pause. "I know you're not afraid, Bar-Lev. What have you got to lose?"
"My sleep."
"Oh come on..." There was something coaxing in the man's voice this time, taunting too, that went beyond mere toughness and made him curious.
"How about a café on Ben Yehuda?"
"Uh uh. The Biblical Zoo."
"They lock up at sunset."
"You're a cop. The guard'll let you in."
"What about you?"
"I'll be there."
"So, are you a cop too?"
"Come alone, Bar-Lev. Midnight by the leopard's cage. If I don't show up within ten minutes, go home. Forget me. You'll know I'm just a fake."
Midnight by the leopard's cage—something appealingly melodramatic about that. Stupid, perhaps, to go alone, but even more stupid if anyone tried to harm him. The people who'd done the killings were certain to know that they couldn't stop an investigation
by murdering the officer in charge.
Still, he put on the sweaty bullet-proof vest, tucked his Beretta in his belt, and, on his way out, stopped, went back, and picked up an extra clip.
The Biblical Zoo was in Romema, only a twelve-minute drive across the city that time of night. Here were collected all the animals mentioned in the Bible, each cage bearing an appropriate quotation: "He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord"; "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" He knew the place well, had taken Hagith there many times. A good refuge from the noise of the city, a nice quiet place to spend a Sabbath afternoon.
He circled the zoo, noted that in some places its exterior fence would not be difficult to breach. On one side shanties were built right up against it. On another he saw tears and holes.
This, he decided, would be his way in—no reason to use the entrance and alert the guard. He parked, armed his car alarm, walked slowly back to a place where he'd spotted a rip in the lower part of the fence. It was eleven-thirty. He looked both ways, then crouched, spread the fencing, and crawled in on his belly, being careful not to scratch his head or back.
He made his way cautiously into the park. The ground was sandy, the foliage dry. He caught the sharp smell of wild animals, then began to hear strange noises, bleats and howls ("The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb . . ."), squeals and hoots of exotic birds, and an occasional serpent's hiss.
The leopard's cage was between the bears and the storks, beside the pit that contained the lions. A popular place in the zoo. There were wooden benches before it erected under trees. A concrete path wound among the cages. Faint light cast from street lamps across the road filtered through the dusty leaves.
He chose the darkest most shadowed bench, quietly took a seat. As his eyes adjusted to the dark he tried to familiarize himself with the many sounds around. He differentiated among the grunts of the animals, the traffic, and the low-level background noise of late-night Jerusalem. After a while he felt confident he would be able to tell if anyone approached.
Eleven-fifty. There was a disturbance up the hill behind him between the beavers and baboons. The animals up there had suddenly turned silent. David froze, his body tensed. When he first heard the ping against the railing two feet to his right he thought someone had thrown a pebble or a stone. Then, a split-second later, when he heard it again he knew what it was, leapt off the bench, and dove face-first for the ground.
Pffm-pffm! Pffm-pffm!
The sound of a Beretta .22, armed with a silencer, fired in rapid double bursts the way they taught trainees at the intelligence schools. As he crawled off the concrete walk into the trees, he knew there was more than one man firing. From the number of double bursts he decided there were two, possibly three, and that they were rapidly closing in.
He drew his own Beretta, fired once, blind, into the shrubbery, then caught a quick glimpse of a figure running, stooped, above him to his left. He was being flanked. He turned the other way, fired again, then rose to a crouch. Then he dashed, head low, to his right past the wild boar, toward a cage where a solitary water buffalo stood gazing out at him with stupid glassy eyes.
Yes, there were three of them, spread out in a line on the high ground, slowly forcing him down into the lower corner of the zoo. He wouldn't be able to crawl out under the fence down there; he wouldn't have the time. But if he could get one of them he might have a chance to break through and lose himself in the woods on the other side. Time now, he decided, to go on the offense, take one out, then try and slip by the other two. He was wondering just how he could do this when he heard a new sound,
burp!-burp!-burp!-burp!,
fire from an Uzi directed from the sector where he'd first entered the park. But this new fire was not aimed at him. Someone, an unseen ally, was there spraying the high ground with bullets, driving his attackers back.
"Hey! Hey, Bar-Lev! They're gone." He recognized the voice and it was not the voice from the phone. He crouched by the buffalo's cage until he saw Peretz, Uzi slung low over his shoulder, striding toward him down the path.
"It's okay. Really. I scared them off. Fuckers too chicken-shit to make a stand...."
David stood up, furious. "This your set-up, Peretz?"
"Relax, Bar-Lev."
"'Peretz and his boys.' All that phony crap about a 'list.'"
"For a guy who's just been rescued you're a pretty ungrateful son-of-a-bitch."
"You're telling me you were just passing by and just happened to hear the noise? Far as I'm concerned, this was your little show. Consider yourself under arrest."
"For what? Saving your life? Don't make me laugh." But Peretz was laughing anyway.
"You think it's funny?"
"Three guys trying to kill a cop—no, not funny at all. Look, I saw you were in trouble so I decided to intervene. I've been following you the last ten nights. Saw all the stuff you've been doing up on Berenice Street."
"Following me?"
"Bet your ass. I told you: I want this guy. I want to break his head."
"You're crazy!"
"Aren't you glad? If I weren't so crazy, you'd probably be lying dead right now down there by that cage full of baboons."
David shook his head. He believed him. Peretz was a killer, not a man who arranged elaborate practical jokes.
"You and I have to talk."
"Sure. Okay. But let's get the hell out of this zoo. Stinking animals. Another minute here and I'm going to puke."
From Peretz's apartment, David phoned Dov, woke him up, told him to have the zoo sealed off, and then at dawn to send in a team to search for slugs and shells. Then, while Peretz opened a bottle of red Carmel, he went out onto the terrace where he found an odd contraption, a cushioned three-seater swing hanging from a rusting frame.
He walked across the terrace, grasped hold of the railing, and stared out at Jerusalem. Across the Old City he could see the Dome of the Rock, at night a mysterious floating presence, its golden dome glowing softly beneath the three-quarters moon.
His hands were shaking even as he gripped the ironwork. A delayed reaction to the ambush, he knew. He'd been stupid to go to the zoo alone.
Maybe I'm getting soft,
he thought.
Stephanie warned me and I didn't listen. Taking it
for g
ranted that no one would go after me—that was really dumb.
Peretz appeared with the wine and glasses, set them down, sprawled out on the swing and began to push himself back and forth. For a while David continued to stand at the railing. Then, as the creaking of the swing picked up in tempo, he turned and faced Peretz. He didn't bother to conceal his disgust.
"You were following me—why ?"
"Nothing illegal in that."
"You said you'd be looking up your boys." Peretz nodded. "So, why follow me?"
"I want this guy real bad."
"If I find him, you don't get him, Peretz. Don't you realize that?" No answer. "Mess around with the police, you're going to be in a lot of trouble."
"Okay, Bar-Lev. Let's make a deal. I'm an officer. Put me in your unit. That shouldn't be too hard to arrange. We'll work together. The two of us will be unstoppable. We'll make a terrific team."
When David shook his head, Peretz stuck out his foot and stopped the swing. "Why not? Just tell me—why the fuck not?"
"First, I don't want to work with you. We hate each other's guts —remember? Second, the last thing I'm going to do is give you a license to break somebody's head."
Peretz gazed at him, furious, then shrugged and poured himself a second glass of wine.
"Interesting bunch of guys there in the zoo tonight," he said casually. "First-class ambush tactics. Really had you by the balls. Course they couldn't do much to you, not with those baby pistols. Things are only good for close-up work. If they'd really wanted to nail you they'd have brought in bigger stuff."
"So what are you trying to tell me?"
Peretz hauled his legs up onto the swing, then lay down across the three seats and stared up at the sky. David could imagine the many seductions he must have engineered on this old, rusty, swinging outdoor bed.
"You see, Bar-Lev, I don't think they really wanted you dead. More like they wanted to scare you off. Or, since they probably know you're not the type who scares, wanted to let you know they know you're there and let you know that they're there too. Because those guys weren't amateurs. They were well-trained men. Elite military training. Could be veterans of a crack unit. Or Mossad. Or Shin Bet guys. Or even active IDF Intelligence Corps. So Big-Shot, ever think of that?"
Sunday at noon he drove down to Ben-Gurion Airport to meet Anna's plane from Brussels. He used his credentials to enter the customs hall, and then, when he saw her, he watched her a while, savoring his joy in her return.