The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The two of them began crawling toward the sapling, toward where they’d left Kobi’s body, turned at the same time at the sound from the trench.

  A man had crawled out, one of the corpses come to life—a ghost that stood, swaying in the darkness, clutching a rifle and searching for a target.

  Gavrieli charged the apparition and took a bullet in the chest.

  He crumpled. Daniel feinted to the right and retreated into the darkness, dropping silently to the ground, his Uzi pinned beneath him. He needed to get at the weapon but feared that any movement would betray his location.

  The Jordanian advanced, stalking, firing where Daniel had been, missing but getting warmer.

  Daniel tried to roll over. The underbrush crackled faintly. His heart was pounding—he was certain the Legionnaire could hear it.

  The Jordanian stopped. Daniel held his breath.

  The Jordanian fired; Daniel rolled away.

  Moments of silence, stretched cruelly long; his lungs threatened to burst.

  Gavrieli groaned. The Jordanian turned, aimed, prepared to finish him off.

  Daniel rose to his knees, grabbing the Uzi at the same time. The Legionnaire heard it, realized what was happening, made a split-second decision—the right one—firing at the unwounded enemy.

  Daniel had no chance to return fire. He dropped, felt the bullet shave his temple.

  The Jordanian kept firing. Daniel molded himself into the earth, wanting to merge with it, to seek the safety of burial.

  The fall had knocked the Uzi loose. It clattered against a rock. The Jordanian swiveled and shot at it.

  Daniel propelled himself forward, grabbed for the Legionnaire’s ankles. The two of them went down, tumbling backward into the ditch.

  They snarled and sobbed, tore and bit, rolling through muck and gore. Siamese twins, the rifle sandwiched between them like some deadly umbilical cord. Pressing against each other in a deadly death-hug. Beneath them was a cushion of dead flesh, still warm and yielding, stinking of blood and cordite, the rancid issue of loosened bowels.

  Daniel’s face was pushed into the cushion; he felt a lifeless hand graze his mouth, the fingers still warm. A syrupy stickiness ran over his face. He twisted around and got his hands around the rifle. The Jordanian managed to regain superiority, freed the weapon.

  The Legionnaire was hatless. Daniel took hold of his hair and yanked the man toward him, could see he was young—smooth-faced and thin-lipped with a feathery mustache.

  He tried to bite the Jordanian’s chin.

  The Jordanian writhed out of his grasp. They tugged and flailed, fighting for the rifle, avoiding the bayonet that capped the barrel.

  All at once the Jordanian let go of the rifle. Daniel felt sweaty hands clamp around his neck. An internal darkness began to meld with the one that time had wrought. He pried the fingers loose, kicked violently at the Jordanian’s groin.

  The Jordanian cried out in pain. They rolled and thrashed through a sea of dead flesh. Daniel felt the bayonet nick his cheek. He clawed purposefully, went for the Jordanian’s eyes, got a thumb over the lower ridge of the socket, kept clawing upward and popped the eyeball loose.

  The Legionnaire stopped for a split second; then agony and shock seemed to double his strength. He struck out wildly, sunk his teeth in Daniel’s shoulder and held on until Daniel broke three of his fingers, hearing them crack like twigs.

  Incredibly, the Jordanian kept going. Gnashing and grunting, more machine than man, he pulled away from the murderous embrace, lifted the rifle, and brought the butt down on Daniel’s solar plexus. The flesh-cushion lightened the impact of the blow but Daniel felt the air go out of him. He was swimming in pain and momentarily helpless as the Jordanian raised the rifle again—not attempting to fire, trying to take this Jew’s life in a more intimate manner: stabbing down with the bayonet, his eyeless socket a deep black hole, his mouth contorted in a silent howl.

  I’m going to be killed by a ghost, thought Daniel, still sucking for air as the bayonet came down. He forced himself to roll; the blade made a dull sound as it sank into a corpse. As the Legionnaire yanked it loose, Daniel reached out to grab the weapon.

  Not quick enough—the Jordanian had it again. But he was screaming now, begging Allah for mercy, clawing at his face. His eyeball was hanging from its cord, bobbing against his cheek, artificial-looking like some macabre theater prop. The reality of his injury had hit him.

  Daniel tried to push himself upward, found himself swallowed by torsos and flaccid limbs.

  The Jordanian was trying to push the eye back in with his broken fingers. Fumbling pitifully as his other hand stabbed wildly with the bayonet.

  Daniel grabbed for the moving weapon, touched metal, not wood. Felt the tip of the bayonet enter his left hand through the palm, a biting, searing pain that coursed down his arm and into the base of his spine. His eyes closed reflexively, his ears rang, he tried to break free, but his hand remained impaled by the bayonet as the Jordanian pushed him down, twisting, destroying him.

  It was that image of destruction, the thought of himself as just more human garbage added to the heap in the trench, that fueled him.

  He raised both feet and kicked, arched his body upward like a rocket. The wounded hand remained pinioned, sinking into the corpse-cushion.

  He was throwing the rest of himself at the Jordanian now, not caring about the fiery mass that had once been his left hand, just wanting something to remain intact.

  Wrenching upward with abandon, he felt the blade churning, turning, severing nerves, ligaments, and tendons. Gritting his teeth, he traveled somewhere beyond pain as his boot made contact with the Jordanian’s jaw and he was finally free.

  The rifle fell to one side, tearing more of the hand. He pulled loose, liberated the ravaged tissue.

  The Jordanian had recovered from the kick, was trying to bite him again. Daniel slammed the heel of his good hand under the bridge of the man’s nose, went after him as he fell, ripping at his face like a jackal gone mad—tearing an ear off, gouging out the other eye, turning the enemy to garbage that whimpered helplessly as Daniel formed a talon with his undamaged hand and used it to crush the Jordanian’s larynx.

  He kept both hands around the Legionnaire’s neck. The injured one was a useless, leaking pad, but what else was there to do with it? Squeezing and clawing and forcing out the life spirit.

  When the young Jordanian had stopped twitching, Daniel turned his head and vomited.

  He collapsed, lay there for a second, atop the pile of bodies. Then gunfire and Gavrieli’s whimpers brought him to his elbows. He foraged in the trench, managed to pull a bloody shirt off a corpse and used a clean corner of the garment to bind his hand, which now felt as if it had been fried in hot grease.

  Then he crawled out of the trench and went to Gavrieli.

  The commander was alive, his eyes open, but his breathing sounded bad—feeble and echoed by a dry rattle. Gavrieli struggled, tossing and shaking as Daniel labored to unbutton his shirt. Finally he got it open, inspected the wound, and found it a neat, smallish hole. He knew the exit side could be worse, but couldn’t move Gavrieli to check. The bullet had entered the right side of the chest, missing the heart but probably puncturing a lung. Daniel put his face close to the ground, touched blood, but not enough to make him give up hope.

  “You’re all right,” he said.

  Gavrieli lifted one eyebrow and coughed. His eyes fluttered with pain and he started to shiver.

  Daniel held him for a while, then climbed back into the trench. Fighting back his own pain, he yanked combat jackets off of two dead Jordanians. Clambering back up, he used one for a blanket, rolled the other into a pillow and placed it under Gavrieli’s feet.

  He found Gavrieli’s radio and whispered a medic call, identifying his location and the status of the rest of the company, informing the communications officer that the trench had been neutralized, then wriggled over to Kobi’s body. The kibbutznik’s mouth was open; othe
r than that, he looked strangely dignified. Daniel closed the mouth and went searching for both the Uzis.

  After several moments of groping in the dark, he found Kobi’s, then his, handle dented but still functional. He brought the weapons back to where Gavrieli lay and huddled beside the wounded man. Then he waited.

  The battle continued to rage, but it seemed distant, someone else’s problem. He heard machine-gun fire from the north, a recoilless response that shook the hills.

  Once, Gavrieli gasped and Daniel thought he’d stopped breathing. But after a moment his respiration returned, weak but steady. Daniel stayed close by, checking him, keeping him warm. Cradling the Uzis, his arm enveloped by pain that seemed oddly reassuring.

  Suffering meant life.

  It took an hour for the rescuers to arrive. When they put him on the stretcher, he started to cry.

  Three months later Gavrieli came to visit him at the rehab center. It was a hot day, choked by humidity, and Daniel was sitting on a covered patio, hating life.

  Gavrieli had a beach tan. He wore a white knit shirt and white shorts—après tennis, very dashing. The lung was healed, he announced, as if the state of his health had been Daniel’s primary worry. The cracked ribs had mended. There was some residual pain and he’d lost weight, but overall he felt terrific.

  Daniel, on the other hand, had started seeing himself as a cripple and a savage. His depression was deep and dark, surrendering only to bouts of itchy irritability. Days went by in a numbing, gray haze. Nights were worse—he fell into smothering, terrifying dreams and awoke to hopeless mornings.

  “You look good too,” Gavrieli lied. He poured a glass of fruit punch and, when Daniel refused it, drank it himself. The discrepancy between their conditions embarrassed Gavrieli; he coughed, winced, as if to show Daniel that he, too, was damaged. Daniel wanted to tell him to leave, remained silent, bound by manners and rank.

  They made small talk for a turgid half hour, reminisced mechanically about the liberation of the Old City: Daniel had fought with the medics to be released for the march through the Dung Gate, ready to die under sniper fire. Listening to Rabbi Goren blow the shofar had made him sob with joy and relief, his pain spirited away for a golden moment in which everything seemed worthwhile. Now, even that memory was tarnished.

  Gavrieli went on about the new, enlarged state of Israel, described his visit to Hebron, the Tomb of the Ancestors. Daniel nodded and blocked out his words, desiring only solitude, the selfish pleasures of victimization. Finally, Gavrieli sensed what was happening and got to his feet, looking peeved.

  “By the way,” he said, “you’re a captain now. The papers should be coming any day now. Congratulations. See you soon.”

  “And you? What’s your rank?”

  But Gavrieli had started to walk away and didn’t hear the question. Or pretended not to.

  He had, in fact, been promoted to lieutenant colonel. Daniel saw him a year later at Hebrew U. wearing a lieutenant colonel’s summer uniform bedecked with ribbons, strolling through campus among a small throng of admiring undergraduates.

  Daniel had attended his last class of the day, was on the way home, as usual. He’d completed a year of law studies with good grades but no sense of accomplishment. The lectures seemed remote and pedantic, the textbooks a jumble of small-print irrelevancies designed to distract from the truth. He processed all of it without tasting, spat it out dutifully on exams, thinking of his courses as tubes of processed food ration, the kind he’d carried in his survival kit—barely enough to sustain him, a long way from satisfaction.

  Gavrieli saw him, called out. Daniel kept walking—his turn to feign deafness.

  He was in no mood to talk to Gorgeous Gideon. No mood to talk to anyone. Since leaving the rehab center he’d avoided old friends, made no new ones. His routine was the same each day: morning prayers, a bus ride to the university, then a return, immediately after classes, to the apartment over the jewelry store, where he cleaned up and prepared dinner for his father and himself. The remainder of the evening was spent studying. His father worried but said nothing. Not even when he collected the jewelry he’d made as a teenager—mediocre stuff, but he’d saved it for years—and melted it down to a lump of silver that he left on a workbench in the shop’s back room.

  “Dani, hey. Dani Sharavi!”

  Gavrieli was shouting. Daniel had no choice but to stop and acknowledge him. He turned, saw a dozen faces—the undergraduates following their hero’s glance, staring at the short, brown student with the kipah pinned to his African hair, the scarred hand like something the butcher had thrown away.

  “Hello, Gideon.”

  Gavrieli said a few words to his fans; they dispersed grudgingly, and he walked over to Daniel. He peered at the titles of the books in Daniel’s arms, seemed amused.

  “Law.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hate it, don’t you? Don’t tell me stories—I can see by the look on your face. Told you it wouldn’t suit you.”

  “It suits me just fine.”

  “Sure, sure. Listen, I just finished a guest lecture—war stories and similar nonsense—and I have a few minutes. How about a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Come on. I’ve been planning to call you anyway. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  They went to the student cafeteria. Everyone seemed to know Gavrieli; the woman serving the pastries took extra time to pick out an especially large chocolate roll for him. Daniel, basking in the light reflected by the halo, got the second-biggest one.

  “So, how’ve you been?”

  “Fine.”

  “Last time I saw you, you were pretty damned low. Depressed. The doctors said you’d been that way for a while.”

  Damn liar Lipschitz. “The doctors should have kept their mouths shut.”

  Gavrieli smiled. “No choice. Commanding officer has a right to know. Listen, I understand your hating law—I hate it, too, never practiced a day, never intend to. I’m leaving the army, too—they want to turn me into a paper shuffler.”

  The last statement was uttered with dramatic flourish. Daniel knew he was supposed to react with surprise. He drank his coffee, took a bite of chocolate roll. Gavrieli looked at him and went on, undaunted.

  “A new age, my friend. For both of us. Time to explore new territories—literally and metaphorically, time to loosen up. Listen, I understand your depression. I was there myself. You know the first few weeks after I got out of the hospital, all I wanted to do was play games—kid’s games, the stuff I never had time for because I was too busy studying and serving. Checkers, chess, sheshbesh, one from America called Monopoly—you become a capitalist, amass land, and wipe the other guy out. I played with my sister’s kids, game after game. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I was just starved for novelty, even stupid novelty. After that I ate nothing but hamburgers and champagne for three weeks. You understand.”

  “Sure,” said Daniel, but he didn’t. New experiences were the last thing he wanted. The things he’d seen and done made him want to pass through life with a minimum of disruption.

  “When I finished with the games,” Gavrieli was saying, “I knew I had to do something, but not law, not the army. A new challenge. So I’m joining the police.”

  Unable to conceal his surprise, Daniel said, “I wouldn’t have thought it.”

  “Yes, I know. But I’m talking about a new police force, highly professional—the best technology, a boost in pay, parity with the army. Out with morons, in with intelligent, educated officers: university types, high school diplomas at minimum. I’m being put in as a pakad, which is still a significant drop from my army rank, but with major supervisory duties and plenty of action. They want me to reorganize the Criminal Investigation Division, draw up a security plan for the new territories, report directly to the district commander, no underlings, no red tape. In six months he’s promised me rav pakad. After that it’s straight up, in time for his retirement.”
Gavrieli paused. “Want to join me?”

  Daniel laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “What’s to laugh at? Are you happy doing what you’re doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure you are. I know your personality—law won’t work for you. You’ll sit on your ass wondering why the world’s so corrupt, why the good guys don’t win. On top of that the payoff is always muddled, nothing’s ever solved. And there’s already a glut—the big firms aren’t hiring. Without family connections it’ll be years before you make a living. You’ll have to handle tenant-landlord disputes and other nonsense just to scratch by. Sign up with me, Dani, and I’ll see to it that you zip through the rookie course, skip through all the dirty work.”

  Gavrieli made a square frame with his fingers, put Daniel’s face at the center. “I picture you as a detective. The hand won’t make a difference because you’ll be using your brains, not your fists. But it’s still action, street work, not talk. You’ll get priority for every advanced course, be assigned to CID and leap-frogged to rav samal. Which means the best cases—you’ll build up a record quickly, be a mefakeah in no time. As I move higher, I’ll take you with me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Daniel repeated.

  “That’s because you haven’t thought at all. You’re still floating. Next time you’re studying, take a good look at those law books, all that English common-law crap, another gift from the Brits—their judges wear wigs and fart into their robes. Stop and consider if that’s really what you want to do with the rest of your life.”

  Daniel wiped his lips and stood. “I’ve got to be going.”

  “Need a ride somewhere?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “All right, then. Here’s my card, call me when you change your mind.”

  Two weeks into the new academic year, he called. Ninety days later he was in uniform, patrolling the Katamonim. Gavrieli had offered to skip him through it, but he declined the favor, wanting to walk the streets, get a feel for the job that Gideon would never have—for all his intelligence and savvy, there was a certain naïveté about him, a delusion of invincibility that surviving Ammunition Hill had only served to strengthen.