by Dov Alfon
“But the base approved his trip, he must have brought them some kind of authorisation.”
“I don’t know what the protocol is, I’m not even sure there is a strict protocol. Maybe it’s enough to show text messages in French from a loving girlfriend. But it doesn’t matter. Stop looking for a bride, there is no bride.”
“So what are we looking for?” Oriana said. She sounded nervous, and he regretted being the cause of it.
“We are looking for the real reason he went to Paris,” Abadi said. “When we find out what that is, we’ll understand everything. With a little luck, he’ll still be alive.”
Chapter 46
His bodyguards had changed once again the procedures for exiting the Prime Minister’s building. He liked this military atmosphere around him, the bulletproof vest designed for him, the ride to the bunker at the Ministry of Defence, the motorcycles and the concealed weapons and the close shielding of his body and this suspended moment, waiting for the signal to proceed.
He was engulfed by the usual entourage – consultants and the Chief of Staff, assistants and the Military Secretary, and always someone who asked to ride in the car with him on the pretext of a private update on something important; but he always refused because there was nothing like being alone, just him and two young, silent, armed security men, an ideal setting in which to mull over his next move in the political jungle.
It was also a rare opportunity to be outside, really outside the walls, bathed in an orange sunset over the hills of Jerusalem, caressed by a pleasant, almost cool breeze. “Air,” he said, and the whole entourage nodded enthusiastically: air.
Across the road, on the pavement opposite the government compound, the psychologists’ protest was taking place for the third consecutive day. He could hear them shouting his name, to the rhythm of some stupid rhyme. When his convoy passed by them in a howl of engines and sirens, he saw a few of the signs: “Who’s the Mental Case Here?”, “Social Welfare, Not Corporate Welfare!”, “Where’s the Money?”, “A Normal Country Needs Sane Mental Health Services”.
For many years he had been leading this nation as their Prime Minister, and one thing still surprised him anew, each day, this obsessive desire to be a “normal country”. Speeches by the opposition, newspaper articles, Supreme Court verdicts and heated monologues on Facebook all included a melodramatic outcry with these words: a normal country.
Only once in his life had he seen a normal country.
It was during a family holiday in Tuscany, just before his eighteenth birthday. His father was in low spirits, made lower still by the rain and a grim atmosphere throughout the trip. Nothing helped – not the varieties of pasta they ate, the luxuries of the house they rented, the quality of the Chianti they drank, the impressive expertise of the tour guide they had booked.
And then they visited Siena, and during a tour of the magnificent Palazzo Pubblico, his father suddenly came alive. It happened in the council room, in front of the famous mural “The Allegory of Good and Bad Government”. Introducing the painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s early Renaissance masterpiece, the guide explained that the artist sought to juxtapose the dark forces of religious government (“Here to your right, the tyrant with the horns and the six vices of humanity”) with a good and just government (“On the wall to your left, the chosen ruler, dressed in white”) that bestows upon the people peace and other blessings.
Then the guide pointed at the third wall, a peaceful rural scene, and told them that the painting depicted the positive outcomes of good government. “Here we see the city and the country, and all its residents prospering in their trades and living peacefully. All due to moral virtues. That’s what the painting really means.”
It was cold and he just wanted the tour to end, but then he suddenly heard his father awaken and say, “That’s not all the painting says.”
The guide said something polite along the lines of “Of course, each person can see different things in it,” but there was no stopping his father, who strode up to the wall and pointed at the upper part of the mural. “The meaning of the painting has to do with the figure hovering above it, which some art aficionados ignore,” he said with his measured, didactic tone, pointing at the figure of a bare-breasted angel hovering above the landscape of Siena. “Her name appears here in Latin, above her: ‘Securitas’ – security. It’s thanks to security that this region prospers, without security this democracy would not exist, it’s the key to good government, and it’s as true today as it was for fourteenth-century Tuscany.”
He had since visited Siena a dozen times, including with his university supervisor and even with the Prime Minister of Italy, and every person who accompanied him always failed to notice the figure until he drew their attention to it. Just as everyone around him here missed it today. Psychologists, social workers, tycoons, the poor, the religious, the secular, Ashkenazis, Mizrahis, rock, paper, scissors, a normal country, a normal country, a normal country.
There were tribal conflicts and class conflicts and ideological conflicts and financial conflicts and religious conflicts; there were a million small conflicts in this country as everywhere, and all these conflicts ignored the vital need for security.
As far as he was concerned, the personal attacks against him were also just a distraction from the real, major conflict, the one that would go on forever, the Jewish–Arab conflict, which the world made sure to call the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, as if reducing it to its current phase would transform this eternal war into a problem with a solution. All the rest – from the protests of the Ethiopian immigrants to the inquiry into whether they had travelled to Monaco for his wife to get her hair done – all the rest were distractions intended to prevent him from performing his historical role.
In the meantime, the convoy had reached the Ministry of Defence in Tel Aviv, and the driver manoeuvred the large vehicle into the special lift. The soldiers saluted when the entourage entered the building. “Tell Aluf Rotelmann I’m here,” he told the duty officer.
Chapter 47
She waited for Boris to finish his conversation in loud Russian, his umpteenth attempt to get one of Rav Turai Yerminski’s friends talking. The other soldiers in the section were waiting too, since they did not actually have anything else to do. What she saw in front of her when she opened the door, still panting from her efforts to put the bundles of uniforms back in place and return to the section, were people mostly pretending to be busy.
For some reason Tomer had returned to his own computer station. She entered the file from her computer, swiftly going through the few scenarios he had outlined, all based on the elusive bride and the assumption that Yerminski had travelled to Paris for the purpose of getting married. How could she have been so stupid?
“The border police returned our call, but the officer there wants to talk only to you,” Alma said.
“Get me the officer,” Oriana said. She could have dialled herself, but she had already learned that, in the organisational universe in which she operated, refraining from such ceremonies led to a decline in status, including in the eyes of those performing the ceremonies. And indeed, Alma immediately nodded. “No, no, no, you get her on the line first, and then I’ll pass her on,” she scolded the police officer who was presumably fighting just as determinedly for her commander’s status on the other end of the line.
“Why did you switch places?” Oriana asked Tomer while the territorial squabble continued over the phone.
“There’s a proxy error on your computer, so it seems safer to write it on mine,” he said.
“Why would you run a proxy check on my computer?”
“I always run a proxy check before entering data. On my own computer too,” he stuttered.
“She’s on the line,” Alma said.
“But how do you run a proxy check without connecting to the central system?” Oriana said.
“She’s starting to get annoyed,” Alma warned.
Oriana picked up the phone.
“With regard to the query you left us earlier,” the representative of the border police said with a flat and bored voice, “the soldier’s parents aren’t listed in the database of recent exit records.”
“So they’re in Israel? Are you sure of that?” Oriana asked. There was nothing surprising about that – if Abadi was right about the wedding.
“I’m sure they’re not listed in the database of recent exit records,” the officer said. “I’m not familiar with the details of the case. These people could have boarded a yacht and gone to Cyprus, they could have paid cross-border smugglers in Sinai, they could have hopped on a private jet and landed on some other island. But they did not leave from Ben Gurion airport en route to Paris, or to anywhere else.”
“I understand. Just one more question.”
“Shoot.”
“I want to know who went through passport control with him. I mean, who passed through the same counter, a minute before and a minute after.”
“It doesn’t work like that. If he passed through the biometric counter, then we’ll have the exact minute, but if he passed through a regular counter, the passengers aren’t listed according to the order in which they reached the counter, but according to when they scanned their boarding pass before entering the duty-free area. I don’t know who stood in front of him or behind him, I can only try to find a record of everyone who passed through all the counters at the same time.”
“And that is according to the exact time?”
“I don’t have each and every minute, it’s recorded alphabetically every five minutes.”
“How many people is that?” Oriana said. She had not travelled abroad in the past two and a half years, and this conversation was stirring within her a fierce desire to leave everything behind and drive straight to Ben Gurion airport.
“Depends on how busy it was in the airport. That early in the morning, during low season, I’d guess about a hundred passengers.”
I’ll take anything I can get to occupy ten soldiers with nothing to do, Oriana thought, and said, “I’m giving you my secure e-mail. How soon can it be ready?”
“It’ll take about two days,” the officer said reluctantly.
“Let’s settle for tomorrow morning,” Oriana said, unwittingly imitating her commander.
Chapter 48
“Maman, I have to go,” Abadi said. While he had been on the telephone, she had set eight different types of desserts on the table.
“But I made you makroudh,” she protested. As a child he had been crazy about the traditional pastries made of semolina and dates and soaked in hot honey, but when his parents returned to France he parted company with the makroudh as well, and was unwilling to fall in love with it anew. But since he did not have the heart to disappoint his mother, on every visit he had to devour a dozen makroudh.
“I’ll take them with me, Maman. I’m sorry, but I have to go to Roissy. I have to meet someone there before he takes off.”
“Does it have to do with Tzahal?” his mother asked hopefully.
“It absolutely has to do with Tzahal.”
“In that case I’m very happy. May God bless our soldiers with strength, health and luck,” she said and started preparing plastic boxes.
Rav Turai Vladislav Yerminski was certainly going to need every possible blessing, Abadi thought. Along with the makroudh she hurriedly packed the rest of the desserts, and he left his parents’ house with a bulging Carrefour bag.
“Are you staying here for a while? Will you come back to visit?” she said as he stood near the door.
“I don’t know, Maman,” he said. “I managed to steal a couple of days to be here, I was supposed to be starting my new job.”
“In the army.”
“In the army.”
“It isn’t a new job, it’s a life mission. You’re going to help the People of Israel fight its enemies.”
Maybe, he thought as he ran down the staircase, maybe he had re-enlisted in order to help the People of Israel. He had not thought about it that way. He most of all thought it would astonish all his enemies in the unit, and that was a good enough reason to say yes. He stood outside the building and tried to remember where he had parked the rental car.
The two police cars in front of the gate awoke from their slumber, and four plainclothes policemen surrounded him.
“Colonel Abadi? Colonel Zeev Abadi?”
“That’s me.”
“You are suspected of leaking criminal investigation materials. If you could come with us, Commissaire Léger is waiting for you.”
He looked up, to make sure his mother was not watching from the window, and got into the car. The driver turned on an ear-splitting siren and drove off. During the ride to the French police headquarters, Abadi cradled his mother’s semolina pastries on his lap.
Chapter 49
Two of her soldiers had done a pre-army volunteer service year, so they were older than the others. As was Boris, since he had joined the unit through the preparatory programme. Oriana was twenty-two. No matter how she played with the numbers, the average age in the room hovered around twenty, which was not something that would normally bother her, but today she would have been glad to have had at least one researcher on her team who knew something about life.
“How many of you have been to Paris?” she said when they were gathered around her. Three out of the ten soldiers raised their hands, including Alma. Five had been to South America, two to Australia and, quite surprisingly, two had travelled to China before enlisting. None had been to Jordan or Egypt or any other Arabic-speaking territory. She herself had visited Paris once, not that she shared that fact with them. Instead, she said, “Shall we start?” And they started.
Boris chose Tomer as the data co-ordinator, not an obvious choice, and one that Oriana interpreted as an olive branch. Alma volunteered to take the minutes and hooked her computer to the giant screen. The others sat on the floor in a circle, pushing back tables and cabinets. Oriana sat on the floor with them, taking advantage of her rank to grab the only spot where she could lean against the wall. Her team was full of good intent, but young and inexperienced. The chances of saving Rav Turai Yerminski seemed to grow more slender by the minute.
Boris arranged his notes like a news presenter before a dramatic address to the nation, took a deep breath, and started reading.
“So, first we checked with the consular services of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and they confirmed the claim of the new head of section, Aluf Mishne Zeev Abadi, that one cannot get married in France without a birth certificate and/or a population registry extract issued in Israel and approved with a special stamp in the three months preceding the wedding.
“We double-checked with the Ministry of Interior, and they confirmed that the missing soldier had not submitted any special requests to the authorities since joining the army.
“So, formally, this raises a clear suspicion that Rav Turai Yerminski travelled to France under false pretences. Based on this, we believe we should be able to launch an open investigation and submit a request to the head of southern command to question witnesses in the El Dorado department.”
“He’ll never let us in,” Alma said. “He’ll say it’s a disciplinary offence, and that it’s none of our business. The most he’ll authorise is an interrogation of the unit welfare officer who approved his trip to France. We will not be questioning a single El Dorado soldier, we will not be allowed into the department, let alone into the soldier’s quarters. He’ll say it’s a matter for the military police, not for us.”
“It may be only a disciplinary offence,” Boris said, “but given the circumstances and the high sensitivity of the department he serves in, it has all the earmarks of a security offence.”
“The head of southern command has noted your request. He will address your request in accordance with the priorities of the unit,” Alma recited sarcastically. “We don’t stand a chance this way. Either it has to do with the Chinese commando uni
t that kidnapped the Israeli at Charles de Gaulle airport this morning, and then it is our business, or it has nothing to do with it, and then it’s his commander’s business.”
“Does anyone need a reason to go to Paris?” Julie said, with an exaggerated Gallic shrug. “And maybe he did actually meet someone and follow her to France, and said he’s travelling to get married just to get an overseas leave approval.”
This was perfectly logical, and Oriana was normally one to encourage debates in the section. But this was the wrong time for exercises in direct democracy, so she quickly intervened.
“Boris, do we know anything new about Vladislav Yerminski that we didn’t know before?”
“We know a lot,” he said, offended that no-one had taken stock of all the calls he made.
“And can any of it be useful?”
“Since we don’t know what we’re looking for, we can’t know what might be useful,” Boris said.
“Try me,” Oriana said. Boris sighed and returned to his papers.
“Born twenty-one years ago in Ashdod, to parents who emigrated separately from the U.S.S.R. His father, who had been an engineer, was hired as a technician at E.L.T.A., a subsidiary of the Israel Aerospace Industries in Ashdod, and worked there until he was laid off into early retirement two years ago. His mother, who had been an accountant in Moscow, became a bookkeeper in the municipal education department.”
You could guess from Boris’ tone what he thought about the way the Yerminskis had been greeted upon their arrival in Israel, or what he thought about his own parents’ immigration experience.
“Did his mother show up at work yesterday as usual?”
“No. Yesterday she left for a week’s holiday.”