Just People

by Paul Usiskin

  Dov again, face impassive. ‘Ruby?’

  ‘Reuben, shortened to Ruby.’

  ‘Like Jack Ruby? Is he a citizen or a temporary resident?’

  Brenner was slower to respond. ‘Why do you need to know all this?’

  Amos said, ‘Saves us time inviting him to the Ministry. Give me his contact details when we get inside?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And the other ZAKA volunteer too.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘What’s his name?

  ‘Jerry Stein.’

  ‘Was that a company car, that Chevy SUV that Ruby was driving?’

  ‘Yes, we have three including mine,’ Brenner said. In the lobby he asked the receptionist to get coffees for his guests.

  ‘Thanks, but we’re a little short of time,’ Dov told her waiting for Brenner to open an internal door. He paused said OK, and led them across a quiet open plan office to a corridor and his office suite.

  He sat at his desk, opened his laptop, tapped, searched and then printed Stein and Levin’s details and handed them to Amos. Dov surveyed the room, orderly, a reflection of the mind that kept a cellphone in a ZAKA Hi-Viz jacket ready for emergencies and wore a loaded heavy calibre handgun with a laser sight to hand. Would Brenner shoot a Palestinian with the handgun and then don the Hi-Viz to deal with the aftermath, Dov wondered sardonically. He watched Brenner’s face. That buck toothed smile lingered and Dov wanted to know what made him so smug. It wasn’t, he decided, that he was successful, that was obvious; new office buildings of this size weren’t cheap even if you rented them. Brenner had said he owned these. No, it was the conflict of the two contexts he’d just conjured up. Brenner was at home in his paradoxes. Dov also knew the answer to his next question. Looking at the sheet, he asked, ‘is Jerry Stein here for us to talk to?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry. He’s out of the office today.’ Hence the smile, the little victory over a defined enemy.

  ‘OK. We’ll take you home now.’

  ‘No, I’m here, I might as well stay, always something to do. I’ll get someone to drop me back home.’

  On the road Amos said, ‘Levin and Stein are the two guys you had held at JFK.’

  ‘Yes. Check what was the result of the New York and Washington Metro police interrogations.’ He paused for a beat. ‘It’ll be interesting to see which one of them was driving the container truck that killed Avi Mazal.’

  ‘Dov instinct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The CCTV enhancement of the truck cabin you asked for should be ready now.’

  In his Ministry office Dov looked at the enhanced freeze frame Amos had grabbed. There were two people in the truck cabin.

  ‘Isn’t that Levin driving? And that’s Stein next to him,’ said Amos. ‘I recognize them from the police photo IDs I sent you at JFK.’

  ‘Yes. Levin and Stein. Sounds like a law firm. Levin’s multi-talented all right. Knows how to drive a truck to use as a murder weapon against a police officer. Can you do enhancement on the container.’

  ‘Sure. Want me to track it through the international container directory?’

  ‘Yes, though I don’t think you’ll come up with anything. How do we find the container?’

  ‘I have an idea it might be somewhere in the West Bank.’

  ‘You mean in a hilltop settlement?’

  ‘Exactly. And there’s one organization that keeps track of every new house built on every settlement.’

  ‘Settlement Watch?’

  ‘Yes. The last leg of the Peace Now dog.’

  ‘I didn’t think they were still around.’

  ‘That leg is and if anyone’d know about that container, it’s them.’

  19

  Dov stopped viewing the truck cabin photo. He ran the original back and forth and at double and triple speed. It looked frenetic, mad even. He wanted that, it contextualized the surreal nature of the Mazal RTA, when two Israeli Jews set out to kill an Israeli Jewish police officer because that officer was sickened about a Jewish terror kidnap and the consequent murder of a Palestinian family. Mazal had rightly wanted to throw up.

  From a recess in his mind, Dov retrieved something he’d seen on a TV art show about Edouard Manet scraping away at night what he painted during the day. The markings on the container door had been obliterated, not just painted over, scraped off: its ISO code, check digit, owner’s name, and the various certification plates fixed to the bottom of the doors, all removed. It had been a rush job. The company name on the sides of the container had gone, but the shape of the letters remained on the paintwork together with the outlines of what had been the two rows of white Stars of David. Dov laughed out loud. Idiots. In long shot they were obvious, ZIM, the Israeli shipping line.

  Then he noticed something at the rear of the truck cabin he hadn’t seen before, a huge black folded crane arm, mounted on the truck bed. This was a self-delivery vehicle.

  Dov called the ZIM head office in Haifa and asked for the Managing Director. ‘Is one of your containers missing?’

  Containers were unaccounted for all over the world, he learned, and the removal of the company name wasn’t new. Containers are frequently stolen and sold on illegally, or may have been sold after coming to the end of their viability, roughly ten to fifteen years. Yes there was a list of such sales and yes it would be e-mailed to Dov.

  He got up from his desk and went to the white board. The core activity of all good investigators was exacting analysis, the search for patterns, and Dov was a good investigator even if most of his time was supposed to be dedicated to administration and supervision of the Department’s investigators. He would never claim to be a good administrator, it was why he and Liora had clashed so often over his future. She wanted a husband who was a high flyer and not a detective. He liked what he was and who he was. Flying a desk wasn’t for him.

  What have we got so far? He wrote Biderman on one side of the board and Mazal on the other and began listing information. Under Biderman he added:

  Inspector Gurwitz – resident of Alfei Menashe

  No prints, no DNA, no fotofits of terrorists

  Gurwitz withheld data. No Progress

  Hassid warned me off probing Gurwitz

  Under Mazal he noted:

  RTA report suspect.

  Poss Perps = Levin & Stein, employees of Brenner Tech, ZAKA volunteers with Nahum Brenner

  Container not yet traced

  Why the calls to Mazal?

  What’s Mazal’s link/knowledge of TNT2 abduction/murder?

  Little Progress

  Hassid warned me off probing all this further.

  ‘You still think these two cases are linked?’ Amos queried surveying the board. Dov hadn’t heard him enter. It didn’t bother him.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘One sparked the other. Palestinians are the nub of all this; but there’s no progress in finding the team who carried out the benign Biderman kidnap.’

  ‘And the memory stick you got from Zvi Yaakov?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks, forgot about that,’ and next to Why the calls to Mazal? Dov added: Speak to Eli Eliyahu.

  ‘What did you find in the Settlement Watch data?’

  ‘I haven’t had time to go over it. I’ll look it over later and you read the summaries of that cadet shooting case and write up some guidance for our investigators to keep the Minister happy.’

  ‘I was just going to say that.’

  ‘Stateside, no charges were brought against Levin and Stein; it was your word against theirs. Dr Freund couldn’t fully identify them. If you authorize it I’ll have them brought in…’

  ‘Not until we’ve found that container.’

  His phone rang. It was Aviel.

  ‘I’m on my way to Ben Gurion and I wanted to thank you and tell you it won’t surprise me to hear y
ou’ve begun investigating Gurwitz. I think that guy’s more bent than an Uri Geller spoon.’

  ‘The Minister’s not keen on pursuing him but if I join up the dots and Gurwitz shows up guilty, you’ll have to come back and testify.’

  ‘Everything changes and everything stays the same. Keep in touch.’

  *

  Kav Tet Be’November, November 29th 1947. If there was a date that would live on in the annals of Israeli history, this was the one, not a day that would live in infamy, quite the opposite. It was the day the UN General Assembly voted on the partition of Palestine and the vote was for the Jews of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, a seal of approval for the birth of Israel. There was dancing in the streets.

  29th November 2012 was a day of infamy for many patriotic Israelis. On that day the UN General Assembly voted to upgrade Palestine to non-member Observer State status, recognizing the Palestinian Liberation Organization as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The Israeli government retaliated angrily by announcing that 3000 new settler homes would be built in East Jerusalem, with the aim of blocking future division of the city into Israeli and Palestinian capitals. To Dov that was the behavior of a scalded cat, an Israeli Sylvester, over the fact that the Palestinian Tweety Pie it was hungry to chomp on and swallow up, had not only eluded it but nibbled at its nose. ‘That’s all folks?’ Not yet. The reality of this status recognition was that it changed very little in the status quo.

  ‘Don’t ever say elections don’t play a role in government policy,’ Dov muttered to Amos.

  ‘I didn’t. But I know what you mean. The Prime Minister’s party had its primaries last week and the ‘old gentlemen’ on the party list lost out to the new younger far right. So the Prime Minister had to be tough after the UN vote, show he could stand up to all our enemies, real or imagined.’

  ‘You’re becoming a cynic like me.’

  Amos scowled.

  But the trenchant Israeli reaction didn’t dampen the celebrations in Ramallah. Hisham left the PCP HQ and allowed himself to get caught up in the jubilation in al Manara Square. It was choked with people celebrating, children holding pictures of the late Yassir Arafat smiling and President Mahmoud Abbas grinning, car horns honking, Palestinian flags waving, chants of Allahu Akbar, God Is Great, and cheering at images from the UN in New York on large screens. The feed cut to scenes across the West Bank and in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan, of dancing, shouting, laughing Palestinians, with something at last to celebrate.

  For several hours all antagonisms were forgotten. Hisham hugged men he knew were staunch Hamas supporters, UN officials who rarely mixed with their PCP colleagues, EUPOL COPPS officers he’d seen at their HQ, and even a couple of so-called reformed thieves he’d once caught red-handed. If Israelis had turned up, they too would have been greeted and welcomed; cheers greeted the on-screen celebration in Tel Aviv of Left-wing Israeli peace activists supporting the UN vote.

  Since the cemetery of numbers he’d been trying to convince the PCP Chief that if his cousin Ziad couldn’t be released, his case should be fast tracked and resolved one way or another. Ziad had been in limbo in the cells for over a month and it was a miracle he hadn’t fallen ill.

  Meanwhile the Shehadeh family had kept their promise to remain silent about the cemetery of numbers discovery. They had arranged for specimens from the remains to be sent for DNA testing in Cairo, but it wasn’t clear when the results would be ready.

  Will the Shehadehs keep quiet forever, he asked himself? Would I? No. But what would they do if the DNA proved that Farouk, his wife and their two children had been murdered and their bodies hidden in the cemetery of numbers? What evidence was there about their deaths? None. Who’d killed them? Israelis were prime suspects but no IDs had materialized and no factual corroborating evidence.

  Hisham was certain Daoud knew much more than he’d revealed for what the Shehadehs had paid him.

  A week later the PCP Chief stood over him at his tidy desk and described in a string of curses what he thought of Ghazi Shehadeh and his new found Hamas friend Sherbaniyah. Hisham listened as other staffers avoided his embarrassed glances through his office door. He thought, if members of your family had been disappeared, you’d have gone to anyone, the devil, the Israelis, to discover their fate. He waited for the tirade to end.

  ‘How shall I proceed with the investigation?’ he asked.

  ‘There isn’t one, you cretin. It finished at that cemetery.’

  ‘They’re waiting for the DNA results from Cairo.’

  ‘Nothing to do with us. Write a summary paragraph and shelve the file.’

  ‘But respectfully, Sir...’

  ‘Never mind that crap. Shelve it!’

  He did as he was told, and sat looking through the pile of notes and sheets of paper in the white plastic tray he’d bought himself. He was fed up.

  Another week passed before he found an excuse to do some detecting. One morning Corporal Faris left him a scribbled note about a phone call from a farmer near Nablus. Something about a shipping container dumped on a hill, Highpoint Hill a local landmark, near the city of Nablus. Hisham used to climb it as a boy and on clear days count the seas, west to the Mediterranean, north to the Sea of Tiberias as Arabs called the Sea of Galilee, then south to the Sea of Lot as the Dead Sea was called.

  He read Faris’ childlike writing again. The note included the name of the farmer complainant and his phone number, time and date of the container’s arrival, the damage its delivery had caused to parked farm vehicles on the narrow road leading to the hill. The truck had had a two-man crew, a driver and an armed bodyguard. When the farmer protested at the damage to his vehicles, the bodyguard had hit him with his weapon butt, swearing in an American accent, and then broke the farmer’s arm.

  The detail on the Settlement Watch video file was startling: This new house completed at this settlement, date and time; these new buildings; this new hilltop settlement here; water and power lines installed there; population statistics; type of settler, age group; projected costs of each new development. And in a number of case studies, aerial video files. Under Latest Changes were a series of brief reports of illegal hilltop activity. On one hilltop in Samaria, northern West Bank, he watched a video sequence of the delivery of a shipping container. He checked the date, a combination of instinct and hope producing a quick smile as he saw what he was sure was the container he’d seen in the CCTV enhancements, being unloaded. Increasing picture size gave him a man operating the crane with a remote control console worn around his waist. The camera angle didn’t allow for full identification, but Dov guessed it was either Stein or Levin.

  Meanwhile ZIM’s e-mailed ex-container list arrived. There were three companies listed as purchasing five containers over the last year. The number for the second company rang out. A police visit to the address in Ashdod produced an abandoned yard and a container that had been used as a toilet. The first and third companies were legitimate and insisted they’d never sold containers to settlers. Neither had self-loading cranes on their truck units.

  Time to do an Scene Of Crime visit, he decided. He read the file on the organic farmer Hassid wanted him to look into. The location was a settlement near Nablus. It was the same as the location for the delivery of the ex-ZIM container.

  It was the third day of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights, celebrating the liberation of the Jews and The Second Temple from the ancient Greek occupier. In Israel the festival was an excuse for an advertising spree. TV and radio were full of Hanukkah deals, from glossy to chintzy, repeated so often Dov found himself singing the ‘prices are low enough’ Electric Warehouse jingle. TV news featured a doodle the Man had drawn on a visit to the new Google HQ in a just completed Tel Aviv tower. The doodle was irritatingly good.

  The drive out of Jerusalem depressed him. There was something medieval about going from a fenced and guarde
d Israeli Ministry building, intentionally located in East Jerusalem, to a settlement in the occupied West Bank, like a lord of the land leaving his castle to visit his recently captured fiefdom.

  20

  Dov had driven along a narrow track approaching the viewpoint on Highpoint Hill. Parking on open ground, he zipped up his quilted jacket over his automatic in its small-of-the-back holster and made his way up to the corrugated steel container, with the letters Z, I and M still visible. A large wrought iron Hannukiah stood in front of the container, empty fruit cans used as oil lights, three of them sputtering, signifying the first three nights of the eight day festival, black and smudged from being lit earlier. From the other side of the hill came a mechanical clattering. Dov passed the container to the source of the sound. Below, two yellow JCBs gouged away at the hill’s natural contours, destroying thousands of years of natural formation, acrid diesel fumes mixing with smell of ancient scraped earth.

  He turned back to examine the sides of the container.

  Middle Eastern hospitality dictates that as a stranger, eyes of warmth will welcome you, happy to exchange looks with you, promising sympathy in tough times. The eyes of Ron Calev gave no hint of welcome; they were malachite green, in a sidelong stare, head to one side, two deep etched lines below his cheeks hinting at a smile under the thick mustache and a chest-long white and mud colored beard. The smile said you can’t touch me. Dov remembered that the ancient Egyptians associated malachite with death.

  ‘I’m Ron Calev. This is my land. Get off it,’ he said, emphasizing his order with a short swing of his M16 barrel. Another man, bulkier than Calev, younger, also bearded and wearing a large Arab style skullcap, pointed his M16 at Dov’s chest.

  ‘I’m here about that container,’ Dov said. No time to draw his gun or tell the truth. The file said Calev was ex- Sayeret Matkal, the elite special ops commando unit; the Man had been a member in his youth. The other man was weapons’ trained by the way he held the assault rifle, not nervously tight to his side, but easily, familiar.