Just People

by Paul Usiskin

  ‘Yes. Thank God. For people in their seventies they’re both in good health,’ he paused, and Dov said, ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ Brenner asked.

  ‘Yes, but not in the same way you do. I’m more secular, but I can’t ignore my affinity with things spiritual. Maybe the God I believe in and yours are the same after all,’ hoping his sarcasm jarred.

  But Brenner nodded, sympathetically, ‘It’s kind of hard not to have a belief in God in this country, don’t you think?’ Not what Dov had wanted.

  ‘Oh absolutely Nahum,’ his derision plain. ‘You can’t take a step around here without tripping over some spiritual reference, a kippah, a mezuzah, a synagogue.’

  ‘Indeed. But you don’t need to be alone with all our sources of spiritual nourishment.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong Nahum, I’m not alone. I love this wonderful country.’

  ‘So do I.’

  You don’t do irony do you, he thought. ‘We have wonderful people too, no country without people’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more.’

  ‘Yes and it’s only going to work if the deal we made with the government in our social contract, is real. We abide by the law, the government looks after us.’

  ‘Sure. I’ve given much to Israel, worked very hard and been rewarded.’

  ‘So it seems. But the price, in your terms the rewards, have they been enough?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’re a businessman. Successful, several companies, always profiting, another deal, and the next, and the next, more profits to make.’

  ‘Well you can’t stand still, not in this recessionary climate, that’s the nature of capitalism, constantly finding the better opportunity.’ Even now, Dov thought, you’re looking for a break, a chance for a gamble, as if the cards are still stacked in your favor.

  ‘Totally, you need to keep expanding, find new markets, beat the competition.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Brenner waited for Dov to call it, so he could see his hand.

  Dov sat back, his delivery matter of fact. ‘Gayn Corp, your new African venture.’

  ‘How did…’ Brenner looked like his cards were folding, out of his control.

  ‘A sure fire thing when it’s a subsidiary of a conglomerate as weighty and influential as Stonemount.’

  Brenner sat back, lost, the enigmatic gambler’s expression gone from his face, eyes widening, apprehensive.

  ‘Galila, Assaf and Yiftach. Your wife and sons’ names and the N at the end for you. Gayn, a basic tenet of capitalism, to make gains, right? Your very separate, very new company with a smart office in Brazzaville, where you’ve just been. With Barry Hareven.’ He held Nahum’s stare. ‘You look troubled Nahum.’

  Brenner looked scared, a rabbit caught in the glare of Dov’s words, conjecture, oh yes, joining up the dots without the proof, but sometimes that’s how you do it, the grand inquisitor creating facts out of words, facts packed with innuendo, facts that weren’t supposed to be public. Dov waited to be challenged.

  In themselves his last two statements about the relationship between Gayn Corp and Stonemount and Brenner’s visit to the Congo were innocuous. It was the inference that Dov injected into them and now he was on a roll. ‘The software for the accounting programs that hide the truth of these deals, designed by you, you, not some Brenner Tech. employee. Brilliant. You configured it using steganography, and that means you’re using a technique to hide what’s going on. In Seurat’s monkey’s tail. Very sophisticated. If it was legal, you wouldn’t have to hide it, would you?’

  Brenner tried shaking his head and pronouncing steganography, but he got it all jumbled up and what came out of his mouth was ‘stega … steg….’

  ‘Try saying that after a few bourbons. Anyway you’re a master of encrypted steganographic communications which can’t easily be decrypted. You used a popular Seurat pointillist painting because you could hide your encryptions in one of the dots. We identified the dot and decrypted your communications with Hareven. But why use the same painting each time? Because you both imagined steganography was impenetrable? The Germans thought the same about Enigma. Nothing is safe Nahum and if you learn anything from these secret games you’ve played, consider that when you stare at your blank cell walls.’

  Brenner tried to recover, but kept blinking.

  ‘Maybe, at the end, we could do a trade off, you give us the full story on how you did it and we’ll take it into consideration with your prison sentence, hmmm?’

  Brenner blinked more rapidly.

  ‘Stein and Levin? I know you’ve been trying to reach them. They’re both dead. Drowned in the River Jordan. I did that. Perhaps you can tell me about the body in the bag found in their vehicle, the body of an Alawite Syrian businessman.’

  Brenner’s mouth opened. Nothing emerged. Seconds passed. Then a long strangled breath.

  ‘Knowing that I know so much, I want you to detail the whole operation, leave out the slogans, how the Palestinians don’t belong here etc. etc., but keep in the identities of the personnel involved in the abductions. Because I know them but it’d be good to have you confirm them. What I want you to tell me is who came up with the whole operation, who’s the maestro?’

  When Dov leaned forward again, the top half of his body was arched so far forward, his face was in Brenner’s. And he caught body odor coming through the fading scent Brenner must have splashed on, he guessed yesterday morning, expensive because it lasted this long, faint but still noticeable. The same one he’d bought himself on a whim at Macy’s.

  ‘Start by confirming where Lana al-Batuf and her son Yakub are.’

  Brenner gave a look of disgust.

  ‘OK, we’ll come back to that. Tell me how often the oxygen tanks are replaced for those seven youngsters. And ‘I don’t know’ you should delete from your lexicon.’

  Brenner spoke.

  At first Dov didn’t absorb the words. They were so alien from the mouth of the carefully spoken cultured man. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said you fucked one of them and that child of yours’ll be a terrorist.’

  From the interview room Amos roared, ‘Dov! Stop!’, fists beating at the glass, as Dov reached fast across the table, grabbed Brenner’s head in an arm lock, pulling him in his chair off the ground and shoved the muzzle of his service automatic into Brenner’s forehead, forcing the forged steel harder against Brenner’s skull. Amos was bellowing into the disconnected mic.

  ‘Say that again,’ Dov said gently.

  When Brenner didn’t, the only sound in the room was the hammer as Dov thumbed it back. Brenner’s body odor now filled the room and nauseated Dov. He got over it.

  Brenner whimpered. Tears welled up and began tracking down his cheeks adding to the stuff from his nose on his lips.

  Dov tightened his grip and kept the muzzle where it was.

  His eyes strayed across to the glass like a gladiator seeking the Emperor’s thumb down. He saw Amos and laughed at the sight of his angry open mouth, no sound of it reaching him. Aviel dashed into the observation room and stood next to Amos. His eyes caught Dov’s and he raised his head once, then mouthed, ‘Enough’.

  Dov stopped laughing. He turned back to look at the head he gripped like a vice, at the gun he was holding to it. Using a weapon is lazy, his little voice said peevishly; Dov answered, this isn’t that kind of fight. What he saw was through the eyes of someone else, a tableau, two men, one about to die. He didn’t know either of them. The one held half out of his chair, stretched across the table, his face wet with tears, mucus and sweat, tried to speak. The figure holding the gun urged softly, relentlessly, ‘Again for the record,’ and the mouth in the head trapped in the crook of an arm managed, ‘I’m sorry!’ And the gun holder said, ‘You made it personal, you and Hareven. As if you’d get to me, get inside me. Yo
u did.’ Dov ground the muzzle deeper into Brenner’s forehead. ‘Is this personal enough?’

  After what felt like one earth’s rotation, he stopped.

  He watched himself loosen his grip, lower the trembling man back down. He felt his shirtsleeve damp from the sweat on Brenner’s neck and face. His forefinger relaxed on the trigger and his thumb eased the hammer forward. Another smell filled the room, of piss coming from Brenner, crumpled up, his body beginning to sag, the zip ties biting into his flesh. Dov appraised this variant of Nahum Brenner as if seeing him for the first time.

  He waited. Brenner slowly straightened a little, sought to recover some dignity, his eyes never rising to Dov’s, he spoke in a monotone, his words as devoid of emotion as a computer program he might have written, his list in no order of priority: who ordered the killing of Yardena - Hareven; who ordered the killing of Daoud al Akras - Hareven; how Irit was involved - through Hareven; who ordered the kidnap of the seven Palestinians - Hareven; who had Qassim killed - Hareven; but no location details on Lana and Yakub, ‘I passed on Hareven’s request for surveillance on them to the team’, the team he confirmed that was headed by Eli Eliyahu. ‘That was all I did.’

  I don’t think so, thought Dov. How often had he witnessed the guilty cloaking themselves in denial?

  Most crucial was Brenner’s final confirmation that Hareven was ultimately responsible for it all. ‘Hareven’s request for surveillance,’ Brenner had said, in passing, as if Hareven was everyone’s favorite murderer, a regular Friday night supper visitor who always brought Mrs Brenner flowers. ‘The team,’ Brenner had also said. He’d gone on to describe a structure of cells that apparently never met together, never knew who the other cell members were and Hareven controlled them all. It didn’t stand up; how did Brenner know that Eliyahu headed the kidnap team, if this really was an old Russian-style isolated cell structure, its constituent parts only known to Hareven? Brenner projected affluence and sophistication, but just below the surface lurked a man who hated, a man who could be crude, a man who lied as often as he prayed to his God.

  Ending the session, Dov said ‘Do you use situational awareness to improve team cohesion? I recommend it.’

  30

  Dov let Aviel in and waited as he cut the nylon ties, helped Brenner up and took him away.

  Amos couldn’t look at Dov. He’d found a mop and some disinfectant and cleaned up the floor and wiped down Brenner’s chair. It left a sharp tang of bleach in the air. ‘That was,’ his head shaking back and forth trying to find the right word, ‘disgusting.’

  Dov remembered the disappointment he’d felt the first time he saw his father as just another being and not the infallible hero he’d always believed he was. The context was gone in the welter of other memories and events since, but the impact had been huge, a big necessary step in growing up. He was quiet for a moment until Amos passed him holding the mop and bucket. He said, ‘Thanks Amos.’

  Amos stopped. ‘People who use violence,’ he said calmly, ‘do it because they like it.’

  ‘It may look like that to you, but that isn’t true for me. Sometimes there’s no choice, moments, like just now, when something happens inside you that you don’t expect. We can’t always use words alone.’

  ‘I hope I never find myself in those circumstances,’ Amos said.

  Dov sat in his office making notes for use in guiding Brenner’s formal confession. For him Brenner now inhabited the legal vacuum between admission of guilt and trial. As for Lana and Yakub, he still had nothing.

  The dance of ideas in Dov’s mind went into a fast tap routine, as he analyzed over and over everything he knew, putting the bits into some kind of order, his mental white board clogged with arrows and link lines. Maoz Yam. If ever Chizzik instinct drove Dov to act, that little thought that had taken its own sweet time to reach his conscious mind, was it. There might be an ugly synergy between the fate of the British sergeants buried in a metal cell, and a 21st century version, hiding the seven Palestinians in empty natural gas storage spheres. It took a monstrously warped mind to contrive such a gross idea, and it took a sharply analytical investigator to perceive its likelihood. No applause please until we get to QED. He had no other ideas for the location of the missing Palestinian teenagers, why not check out this one? He updated the Man and the Chief of Staff. He asked Amos to coordinate with YAMAM to set up covert surveillance at the gas storage site, and suggested satellite thermal imaging, specifying the Ofek satellite.

  ‘Don’t know if Ofek is capable of that,’ Amos replied, his voice dull.

  ‘Well if it isn’t, find a drone, or get a thermal imaging camera and tie it to a balloon Amos, I don’t care how you get it done.’

  ‘OK, ‘ Amos morose and Dov also caught the mix of tension and exhaustion in his voice.

  ‘That’s it? Just OK?’

  ‘That antic with the gun Dov, it was ...’

  ‘Get over it Amos.’

  Aviel came in. ‘We’re getting closer,’ Dov told him.

  Aviel looked as worn out as Amos. ‘Closer to what?’ He started counting. Thumb: ‘Brenner didn’t confirm locations.’ Index finger: ‘The Congolese may be interested in what we turned up in Brazzaville, but so what?’ Mid finger: ‘You have Brenner naming Hareven, but in a court of law?’ Ring finger: ‘All we have is your hunch, your infallible fucking instinct, that someone’s borrowed a model from our history and updated it using empty natural gas storage tanks and individual oxygen supplies.’ Pinkie: ‘Then there’s Stein and Levin, the Jewish Defense League Brenner-Tech. thugs and messenger boys, who could corroborate much of what Brenner said, but,’ after a beat, ‘you killed them. An extra-judicial killing.’ His eyes shot lethal bullets at Dov, who waited to see whether Aviel would go to his other hand; instead he raised them both in the air. ‘So what’s your Chizzik instinct telling you to do next? The election’s next week.’

  ‘Yes I know the fucking clock’s ticking ineffably away.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Get a site recon on Maoz Yam, and prepare an operation on the storage tanks the moment intelligence confirms which of the spheres those poor kids are in.’

  ‘And if they’re not?’

  ‘We’ll have to think again.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘You know about black sites.’ Not a question.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For Hareven.’

  He shook his head. ‘No Dov. There’s no factual evidence against him. Eliyahu’s recovering in the ICU and Brenner’s squeezed dry.’

  ‘You and Amos should take a break. And Brenner confess.’

  ‘Not as long as you’re going solo. We both need to stick around.’

  ‘Take it in turns.’

  ‘OK, I’ll send Amos home.’

  ‘No, I’ll tell him.’

  Aviel gave him an if-that’s-the-way-you-want-it shrug and started for the door. ‘I forgot. Call Ephraim Cordova.’

  Dov sat in his office, picked up his cell to call Ephraim and saw the time on the phone. Dawn had begun, a smudge of a different shade brightening an edge of the night sky. It was just before 06.30 and outside the snow had finally turned to dirty slush as temperatures rose and the thaw set in. He opened the window. The silence from the blanket of snow of the previous days was replaced by water trickling from roofs and the occasional bus and cab turning the perfect white and the ice beneath to black from tires and fumes. He got a coffee from the machine on the corridor and sat drinking and brooding before calling Ephraim half an hour later.

  ‘Ah Dov, good you called back at last. First, the tire casts do match with that Suburban Utility Vehicle extricated from the River Jordan.’ Dov loved Ephraim’s linguistic precision and the confirmation. ‘Also, we have news on the DNA matches. The items you brought me have enabled testing which has produced direct links with the hairs found in the
two burned vans and Miss al-Batuf and her son, your son, so to say, Yakub. Secondly the partially burned matchsticks gave us minute but recoverable DNA and together with the sputum we have a DNA profile that matched with an IDF officer listed in police records for criminal activity, and lastly although the cell phone was badly burnt, which was the intention, I mean they must have thought the phone would be destroyed, we were still able to find a fingerprint on the battery and it belongs, the fingerprint so to say, to Mr Eliyahu who you have already questioned.’

  It would be so easy to find Hareven and kill him. Dov allowed that thought to percolate and unlocked his desk drawer and removed his automatic, wiping off any residue of Brenner’s sweat. It was a double-action Jericho 941, a product of that area of Israeli endeavor, weapons development, for which his wonderful country was as renowned as its hi-tech. He checked it wasn’t loaded, and pulled out the full clip and placed it next to the gun on his desk. ‘So,’ he said to the empty room, tapping the gun, ‘I find him and shoot out those raptor eyes and...and what? Will I get Lana and Yakub back? Will the seven Palestinians miraculously appear at their homes, free and alive after I’ve obliterated the man behind their kidnap? How many shots would it take or would I let the pressure of my finger on the trigger keep pulling until there were no more bullets left?’ He flicked the sixteen bullets one by one from the clip onto the desktop and wondered at them. As he arranged them in a neat circle, one thought blotted out all others: I fucked up.

  He’d given Amos until lunchtime to sleep then sent a car to bring him back. A small buffet lunch from a local Arab restaurant was waiting for him and Aviel when they came in. What is it about us that we love their humus, felafel, pita bread, and pretend it’s always been ours? Aviel looked haggard, but they were all hungry. When the remains of the meal were cleared, ‘Damn fine felafel, not as good as my mother’s’, Aviel said, Dov began sketching all he knew on the white board. They followed each piece of information and the neat red lines and arrows Dov drew. He looked it over before sitting down; it was an exact but much tidier replica of what was in his mental version.