Tel Aviv Noir

by Etgar Keret

  Once the door to Monbaz’s office closed behind us, Srulik took two assertive steps toward him and said, “Monbaz, if you want us to work together, you have to be honest with me. What we did with the leg is against the law. We should have reported it to the police. This will cost you.”

  “You’ll get paid, we had a deal—”

  “All right, never mind that. But what’s the story? What’s with the tattoos? Why did she call him a son of a bitch? If you want our help, you have to tell us everything you know.”

  “Lior and Sharon used to be a couple, but that was a long time ago. I don’t think it has anything to do with what’s going on. That’s why I didn’t mention it. They were together years ago. Now he’s married, and has a child—”

  “Yes, I know. And Sharon? Is she married?”

  “No.”

  “Was she angry with him after the breakup?”

  “Maybe, I’m not sure. I didn’t know them well enough—”

  “And that phrase, in the tattoo, the madness in love, the reason in madness. What’s the story there? Did they have something special?”

  “I don’t know. Anybody who falls in love thinks they’re crazy, that they have something special, don’t they? Srulik, I really don’t think that’s the right direction.”

  “Okay.” Srulik walked over to the window and gazed out at the sea. “Let’s put a pin in that. I want you to tell me now who exactly is going to make a profit from selling the company. Meaning, who will make a profit once Lior Posen’s body is found and the sale can be closed.”

  “Everybody.” Monbaz seemed calmer. Discussing his two partners’ relationship clearly made him nervous.

  “How much?”

  “It varies. The partners would make more than ten million dollars each. And there’s a group of about ten veteran employees who would make between half a million and two million, depending on experience and position.”

  Srulik whistled and looked at me. “You hear that, doctor? We’re in the wrong profession.” He turned back to Monbaz. “I want a full list of employees and the amounts they would make from this deal, and anyone else who might cut a profit. Doctor, go down to the center and walk around. Look for places the body might be hidden. Parking lots, stores, alleys, I don’t know. Then come back up and get a computer from Monbaz and read all you can about the center. Go on, get out of here. Come on, Monbaz, let’s make that list.”

  The Electric Cave, Level -2

  The huge underground space in the depths of Dizengoff Center echoed Srulik’s loud voice. Trucks entered, loaded garbage, and left. Fruit bats hung silently off the ceiling. The cold penetrated our bones. “I know what you were thinking, doctor,” he said, rubbing his gloved hands. “You were thinking, what’s that Srulik doing sending me on online searches? What’s he doing sending me to look for a body in the center? But I had to show Monbaz we’re pros, you see? Investigations are like renovations: you have to prove you know what you’re doing. That’s half the work.”

  I nodded glumly, though I’d already forgotten about his unnecessary tasks from the previous day. “This electric cave used to be a dance club or something,” I said.

  “Let’s wait here for a while. I asked Monbaz to tell the employees about Lior Posen’s leg at the meeting, but to explain that it doesn’t prove he’s dead, and that as long as he isn’t dead, the sale can’t go through. There are lots of people in this company who would make millions from this sale. You get it, doctor? It would take care of them for life. What do they care about a boss they didn’t even like?”

  “What about the woman? The tattoos? The fact that he dumped her?”

  “Unrelated. The way she talked about him, she couldn’t have killed him. But Posen was fucking somebody else with those condoms. I think it’s someone else from the company. Maybe if we find her she can help us, but who knows? I don’t see a motive for murder right now.”

  My head was spinning. It was all very theoretical and cyclical and there was no unequivocal evidence, and we were getting nowhere. “So what are you saying, really?” I finally asked. “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  Srulik said nothing for a few moments, dipping the tip of his shoe in a small puddle. “No,” he finally answered. “Let’s see if Monbaz’s bait gets anything. Whoever cut his leg off must not be too sophisticated. It didn’t actually change anything. We’ll see, there are two days left before the sale deadline.”

  Cafe Neto, Shopping Center, Level 2

  The beeping of an incoming message made me jump in the middle of eating my croissant. Srulik furrowed his brow at the screen. “Monbaz got another phone call. There’s another ‘surprise’ in the large trash bins behind the center, on Bugrashov Street.”

  This time it was a hand.

  Sharon Reich recognized the ring on the finger as belonging to Lior Posen.

  Srulik said, “Is he crazy? This still doesn’t prove death.” He went to buy a fingerprint kit and checked the fingers on the dismembered hand and the mouse on Lior Posen’s computer—there was a match.

  Monbaz, looking more scared than ever, asked, “Shouldn’t we call the police now? What am I going to tell his wife?”

  Srulik said, “Let me try one or two more ideas.”

  Before we returned the arm to the trash bin, he cut a square off the polyethylene cover and told me, “Doctor, check out stationary stores or something like that, stores where you could buy this kind of thing. And ask Sharon where they got their matching tattoos.”

  Psycho Tattoos, Shopping Center, Level 2

  Sharon said they’d gotten them at one of the stores in the center. “What difference does it make?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what to say. Really, what difference did it make? “We’re checking all possible angles,” I said.

  As I was leaving her office, she said, “I know he fucked Tamar. Obviously it made me crazy, of course it did. First he leaves me, then he marries some bimbo, and then he goes and fucks around with someone else from the company?”

  I turned around, my hand still on the doorknob. She peered out the window. She didn’t have a view of the sea, but rather of the apartment tower where Monbaz lived. Ugly roofs, covered in puddles, flecked the landscape with white squares.

  “Like a threefold betrayal,” she said, not waiting for me to respond. “Every time he turned the screw just a little more.” She stared at me intensely. “But that’s no reason to kill him. The fact is, we continued to work together after he left me, right? You think I would do a thing like that?”

  I shook my head quickly. “No,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, so I left the room.

  Tribal Tattoos and Piercing is located in a small hallway that forks by Agvania Pizza. It’s one of the emptiest, sleaziest hallways in the center, a few feet yet light-years away from the shiny ground floor, filled with coffee shops and appliance stores. Planet Tattoos and Psycho Tattoos are right next door to Tribal Tattoos. I walked past all those stores but didn’t go in. What for? At the end of the hallway was a stationary and art supply store called My Art.

  I showed the clerk the polyethylene.

  “Yes,” she said. “We have that. You need some?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Then why do you ask?”

  “Just checking.”

  She had a bleached streak in her hair and wore too much makeup. She looked at me with a quizzical half-smile.

  I asked, “Did anyone buy one of these in the past few days?”

  She kept her quizzical half-smile on, but then something flickered in her eyes and she asked quietly, “You want me to take a look at the receipts and check who bought this recently?”

  I said yes, and she flipped through the invoice book and found one in the name of Olga Kozushko. She made a copy for me.

  “Nice,” Srulik said when I showed him the copy. “I like the way your mind works, doctor.”

  We questioned Tamar about Posen and she admitted to having been his lover for the pa
st year.

  We questioned Olga. She admitted to buying the polyethylene at My Art. She claimed to have used it to wrap up things in her private storage space in Bat Yam, to protect them from the unending rain.

  The rain really was unending.

  “Bat Yam?” Srulik asked, rubbing his eyes. “What do you think, doctor, should we go check out Olga’s storage space?”

  I didn’t know what to say. We found lots of stuff, but we still had no idea how it was all connected to Lior Posen’s dismembered limbs.

  Maccabi Boxing Club, Parking Lot, Level -2

  “What did you say Olga’s last name was?” Srulik asked.

  “Kozushko.”

  “Pssssh, what a name.”

  We were sitting inside his car in the parking lot. It was a quarter to seven in the evening. Srulik held on to the wheel with his gloved hands, but we weren’t moving anywhere. It was two days before the end of the year. Monbaz and Sharon Reich were hysterical. They’d just finished yelling at us earlier. Srulik had told them everything was under control, that we were closing in on the killer, but now, all he could say was “Pssssh” about Olga’s last name.

  That afternoon we had questioned Tamar again. “I already told you we were together,” she raised her voice at Srulik. “What happened, did that jealous bitch send you over again? Do I look like a killer? Who are you, anyway? Two losers!”

  She was the closest one so far to calling our bluff.

  They had twenty-four hours to approve the deal. They needed Posen—dead, alive, or missing a couple of limbs, it didn’t matter.

  The lights of a moving car shone over us in the parking lot. “Do you believe Sharon? Maybe it really was her. Maybe it was revenge.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Srulik. “It goes against her current interest. If it was important for her to kill him because he betrayed her three times, she could have waited another week and done it as a millionaire.”

  “And Tamar?”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed them again. He was insulted by her attitude. We had done a background check on her. There was a group of friends she had lunch with, there was her department, Quality Assurance. But it brought us nowhere.

  That morning we visited Olga’s storage space in Bat Yam. Nada.

  Srulik’s regular phone rang. He looked at the screen and answered. “Yes,” he said tiredly. Then again, “Yes.” Finally, after a long silence, watching a woman with grocery bags through his window and nodding quietly, he said a final “Yes,” after which he hung up. “It was the pool lady. The weather report says the rain will stop tonight. It hasn’t rained like this for seventeen years, she said, with the sun not even peeking out for a whole week. She wants us back at work the day after tomorrow.”

  I nodded and said nothing.

  Srulik had been wearing a long overcoat these past two days. And a top hat. He went back to holding the steering wheel with his gloves after putting the phone back in his coat pocket. “Got any plans for tomorrow night? New Year’s?”

  I didn’t. I didn’t even like going out on the weekends, so why would I go out on New Year’s Eve?

  “What’s with you?” he asked.

  “Nothing. It sucks that we can’t solve this.”

  “Don’t take it to heart. Hey, did you hear about the tunnel that leads from the Kirya military base to Dizengoff Center? They dug it so that the bigwigs can escape into the center in case of a nuclear attack or something.”

  “Really? Have you seen it?”

  “No, I think it’s just an urban legend . . . Give me some of that stuffed cauliflower.”

  I passed him the tinfoil container we got at the Tunisian stall at the center’s food fair. He poked his fork through it, jabbed a few pieces, and chewed them patiently. While he concentrated on the food, I glanced up and saw Vladi, the company’s bald system operator. He was walking by the bare concrete wall right in front of us and then disappeared into a fold in the wall. I opened the car door and got out.

  “Where’re you going?” Srulik mumbled, still focused on the food.

  “Follow me,” I said. I heard the door and his footsteps behind me. The fold in the wall that Vladi disappeared into was the doorway to a bomb shelter. I stepped inside carefully, followed by Srulik. The hallway behind the doorway was dark and smelled of urine. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a large, lit room. On the floor was a blue mattress and there were air conditioners installed on the walls, alongside some martial arts posters. Along two of the walls there were heavy punching bags and boxing pears. A trophy cabinet was attached to the wall by the door.

  “Can we help you?”

  We turned around. The voice came from a near corner, where a man in a sweat suit sat on a bench. A few younger guys sat next to him, dressing up for a workout. One of them was Vladi.

  “What is this place?” Srulik asked.

  Vladi must have recognized his voice, and looked up with obvious alarm.

  “A boxing club. Can we help you?” the older guy asked again.

  “We’re here to see him,” Srulik said, walking toward Vladi.

  But Vladi didn’t have much to tell us. He practiced boxing here three evenings a week, after work. Once he’d given us this information, he put on a mouth guard, wrapped bandages around his hands, and pulled boxing gloves over them. Practice was about to begin.

  We took another long look around—the punching bags, the pears, the trophy cabinet, the bare concrete walls—and headed back to the car.

  Srulik drummed on the steering wheel.

  Something was bothering me. Vladi’s nervous face. The boxing ring. I recalled the company meeting where he discussed the sale. Something . . . something had to . . .

  “Hold on a minute,” I told Srulik. I got out of the car and hurried back to the boxing club.

  “I have to check something,” I told the trainer, who stared at me with surprise. I walked over to the punching bags and felt them. There was something about the bags in the deeper, darker, less frequently used part of the ring that had seemed strange to me before. Only when we got to the car and I tried to interpret Vladi’s alarmed look did it hit me: there was an odd protrusion in the third sack. I unzipped it.

  Office Tower, 24th Floor

  No one was sitting in Monbaz’s office. Monbaz and Sharon Reich, Tamar and Olga, Srulik and me—everyone was standing up.

  Tamar told us everything. She’d made an appointment with Posen in his office for Friday afternoon, after he went to the gym. It was a regular date they had at a time when the offices were empty. They got almost completely naked and were about to have sex on the sofa in his office when Vladi walked in and hit Posen over the head. It had been Tamar’s idea, and she’d recruited Vladi and Olga to the mission. It wasn’t about the money, she said, not only about the money. He had promised to leave his wife. Not only did he not leave her, but Tamar found out that he was still fucking Sharon. So Vladi hit him over the head and Olga walked in with the plastic sheet. Vladi had the key to the boxing club and they scattered the body in three different punching bags and planned to quickly get rid of it. True, looking back it was a bad idea, because of the elbow that was bulging from one of the bags, but Vladi thought the boxers at the club wouldn’t notice. On the contrary, a punching bag filled with body parts is a better simulation of an opponent than one filled with sand, rice, cloth, or whatever is normally stuffed in them.

  Srulik was the one who’d gotten the confession out of Vladi. He told him Tamar had explained everything to us, so Vladi told Srulik the whole story. He said Tamar got them on board, he didn’t even know how. I understood it perfectly. Tamar had such intense charisma. It wouldn’t surprise me if Vladi had a little crush on her and she knew and used it. Olga had a crush on her too. She used that fact to get her carried away with the idea. Plus, let’s not forget, all three of them were in for two million dollars if the sale went through. Then Srulik had Monbaz call Tamar and Olga in separately and told each of them that Vladi had spilled t
he beans. We cross-referenced the three testimonies and got the entire story.

  Dizengoff Street

  We stood outside. It was close to ten p.m. Late December. The air was cold and sharp, but the sky was completely clear. “There’s the moon,” said Srulik. “I haven’t seen that son of a bitch in a week.”

  Monbaz and I gazed up.

  “Did you see how our doctor solved the mystery?” Srulik asked Monbaz proudly. “I told you it would be all right, didn’t I?” He seemed pleased, though Monbaz was pale and I was nauseous. “But between you and me, Monbaz,” he went on, “I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re asking yourself, do Srulik and the doctor know who the real brain behind the murder was, the guy those three are protecting? Isn’t that so, Monbaz? Isn’t it?”

  Monbaz glanced up and said, “What?” He eyed Srulik nervously, then opened his mouth and began mumbling something.

  “Just joking, man!” Srulik rumbled with laughter and gave Monbaz’s thin shoulder a hard slap. He chuckled loudly for a few more seconds, his large palm never leaving the company man’s shoulder.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Gai Ad was born in Beersheba and at the age of seventeen, following her father’s death, moved to Tel Aviv, where she still lives with her family today. She is a graduate of life sciences at Tel Aviv University. In the 1990s she lived in New York and worked with Alzheimer’s patients, which was the basis for her novel 7 Harimon St., winner of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize. She has published four books and the latest one, The Gauchmans, was long-listed for the Sapir Prize.

  Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, in 1972 to parents of Moroccan origin. He has published three collections of poetry and six novels. His third collection of poetry, Aviva-No, won the Yehuda Amichai prize in 2010, and his novel Mox Nox won the Sapir Prize for Literature in 2013. He resides in Tel Aviv and teaches creative writing and literature at Ben Gurion University.

  Gon Ben Ari is an Israeli writer, screenwriter, musician, and journalist. He was born in 1985 and has published two Hebrew novels—the second of which, The Sequoia Children, is now being translated into the English. Ben Ari won a 2013 grant from the Jerusalem Film Fund for development of his script for the Yiddish-language Western Der Mensch, directed by Vania Heymann, which is now in preproduction.