by Assaf Gavron
‘Very important,’ he said. ‘All the commandments, all the time. Make use of every opportunity to be a good Muslim and fulfil all six. Every opportunity.’
‘Yes.’
He meant the Croc. It was as if he knew that an opportunity had presented itself, even if he didn’t know its details. He was my brother. He could sense it in my voice, in the fact of my making the call. He could sense an internal conflict, and he was demanding that I keep going.
‘What about you?’
‘All-powerful Allah will decide. When he wants me, I will be there. Let us hope it will be soon.’
It was a short conversation but it carried a lot of weight with me. My brother’s power over me was always stronger than I was willing to admit to myself. Even over the phone, from a prison, in code, he was telling me something clearer than the sun: God had placed an opportunity in my hands. He had walked me through the mountains, on donkeys, broken my back with boxes of apples, he had burst an appendix and broken a computer and with infinite care brought me to the right place at the right time because he had a mission for me: to kill the Croc.
And yet, and yet…I squirmed restlessly in my chair. I was sorry that I’d ever met the Croc; but I was sure that God had sent him to me. I should never have told anyone that I’d met him, but Bilahl had sensed something without my even saying anything. It was destined; it was random. One minute I wished I was somebody else; the next I felt that I had been chosen by a higher power to complete a mission I had started.
At last the thought came to me, like a balm: it didn’t matter. Whatever was fated to happen would happen.
‘There was a female soldier there in a grey uniform with her hair scraped tightly back, blushing and looking insecure. She had glasses with purple plastic frames and three stripes on her shoulder. A soldier shouted, “All rise for the judge!” and everyone stood up. Except for Bilahl, Fahmi! He said: “This is an illegal court whose authority I do not accept. It is illegal just as your occupation is illegal.” The soldier girl in the grey uniform and the purple glasses and tight hair read the indictment. She talked about the attack on Jerusalem. How Halil Abu-Zeid had planned it before they killed him, how Safi Bari had made the bomb…’
Safi? Well, that’s not…what about me?
‘Both of whom are now dead anyway. She talked about how he’d carried out the Shaar Hagai attack with Safi as well. Then she gave a long speech about everything that had happened in Al-Amari. Meetings in secret flats, details of the planning, the bomb-making, recruiting the bomber. But your name never came up. Father was overjoyed. He said he knew you’d never deal with…’
Bilahl. My brother. My big brother…
‘…every Jew killed in the attacks was an intentional murder. Bilahl would get a life sentence for every person killed. It’s going to be something like four hundred years, the sentence. But he’s happy. He says that Allah…’
Wasime knocked on my door and invited me for dinner. We made tedious small talk about pharmacies, the economy and little Atta’s behaviour–the boy was cranky, crying, throwing his food around the table and smearing his own face yellow and brown with egg and Egozan. When we’d finished and Atta had calmed down sufficiently to be put to bed, we had coffee in the living room and watched Noah’s Ark. I was thinking about Al-Amari, and the first time I ever saw the Croc. Tommy was on good form. One couple consisted of the cover girl of a new men’s magazine called Passion and a brilliant student from a rabbinical college in Jerusalem. The model kept saying that she thought the guy was sexy. He wouldn’t look at her. Again and again the close-ups showed him averting his eyes. ‘Almost!’ Tommy said every time. ‘But not quite…’ and the audience laughed and clapped their delighted little hands.
‘Goodnight, Fahmi…’
Don’t go, Lulu…Tell me more about Bilahl. Where is he? Does he have friends with him in jail? What…
‘I wish I could understand your language. It sounds so pretty…’
‘It’s Arabic, Svetlana. It is beautiful. See you. Keep taking good care of him, yeah?’
‘Yeah, I will. Goodnight, Lulu. Goodnight…I…’
‘Svet?’
‘No, don’t worry. I’m sorry. Don’t mind me. I’ll keep taking care of him.’
Oh, Svetlana.
The lights are blinding, and baking, and sweat is pouring from my forehead and armpits.
‘Fahmi Omar Al-Sabich?’ Tommy asks.
‘Yes. Good evening.’
‘Good evening! So, after three major attacks, Fahmi, you decide it’s time to finish off the Croc, the great CrocAttack, the symbol of our survival, is that right?’
‘That’s correct, Tommy.’
‘I’m sure you know what happens next…’ he says and the audience scream. ‘Two by two! Two by two!’ Among the audience I can see Bilahl, Abu-Zeid, Rana and Grandfather Fahmi. They’re all giving me encouraging smiles and making victory Vs with their fingers.
‘That’s right: two by two! So now, let’s meet Fahmi’s partner on Noah’s Ark this evening…ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm Noah’s Ark welcome to–who else?–the Croc!’
The audience go wild and I go white. I hadn’t been expecting this. My downpour of sweat is becoming a monsoon. The Croc bounds on to the stage, waving to the audience and the cameras, clasps my hand in both of his and sits down.
‘So, Croc,’ says Tommy Musari, ‘tell us what your first thought was when you heard about Fahmi’s exciting new plan…’
39
Friday was the beginning of the end of the summer. The wind had gained a little strength, and clouds were cooling some odd corners of the sky. The first days of the end of the summer are the best days of the year. They’re the farthest point in time from the next summer.
Bar bought a large bouquet in the lobby of Ichilov and described nuclear medicine to me on our way to the department. ‘It’s basically mapping of the body. Huge cameras that photograph the inside of the body.’
‘X-rays,’ I said.
‘Not X-rays. It’s similar but a lot more top-end. In X-rays you can only see the bones, but nuclear mapping lets you see everything.’
‘What’s nuclear about it?’ I was picturing the blood flowing, white blood cells, muscles being stretched and relaxed, fat, microbes, lungs dirty from nicotine.
‘The nuclear cameras can decipher radiation emitted by the body,’ continued Bar. We’d arrived at a quieter part of the hospital. ‘They inject this radioactive fluid, a really low isotope, whatever, into the blood and the…’
‘Can I help you?’ asked a brown-haired nurse.
‘Ah, yes, we’re looking for Professor Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski.’
‘Can I ask what it concerns?’
‘Yes. He recently treated our mother, so we just wanted to give him these flowers and ask him a couple of brief questions about the diagnosis.’ I don’t know how Bar comes up with this stuff sometimes.
‘And your mother’s name?’
‘Enoch,’ Bar said. I kept my head down in a women’s magazine, whose cover promised me twenty-five tips for a perfect sex life in Chapter 5. I flicked through to Chapter 5.
‘Sorry, sir. There doesn’t appear to be any Enoch in the system.’
‘Look, is he here? We just need to ask him one small thing.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. The professor’s extremely busy this morning.’
‘Tell him it’s related to Giora Guetta,’ Bar said, deciding to deploy the one weapon we had in our armoury.
He came out immediately. He looked old. Later, we would learn that he was only sixty-one, but our first impression of him was of a man in his mid-seventies. White hair, white beard, a high-blood-pressure colour to him, a wide mouth and large tombstone-like teeth. His eyes were clear and intelligent, but there had been fear in his first glance towards us. It was the fear which had made him seem old. Weak handshake. He took us to the cafeteria and ordered coffee for us and tea for himself.
‘Who are you?’ he s
aid. Professors of nuclear medicine tend not to watch Noah’s Ark.
‘We’re investigating the death of Giora Guetta,’ said Bar.
‘Guetta…he was killed in a terrorist attack, wasn’t he?’
Warshawski’s hands were both palm down on the table, like he was braced against a shock. His voice was weak and defeated-sounding.
‘Yes he was. But a short time before the bombing he met a Professor Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski in a café in Yehuda Maccabi Street.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Let’s just say that we know,’ said Bar. ‘And we know that money was involved.’
Warshawski raised his eyes and looked at us in turn.
‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘Why did you meet Guetta?’ asked Bar, with a persistence that reminded me of Duchi.
Warshawski didn’t answer for a while.
‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ he repeated. And we could have told him the truth: that we were trying to find out about Guetta as a gesture to his girlfriend, who had since died. He looked like a basically decent man to me. I thought he’d give us the answer and we could put the whole story behind us. But Bar suddenly stood up, scribbling his phone number on a piece of paper:
‘We’ll be back, Professor,’ he said. ‘If you remember why you met Guetta on the morning of his death, give us a call.’
‘What was all that about?’ I asked Bar, trying to catch him up. ‘What are we hiding?’
‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ he replied. ‘And other leads to check. We don’t have to reveal everything, do we?’ Bar stopped next to a bin and threw the bouquet into it. ‘Listen, Croc, if he realises that he’s dealing with a couple of nerds playing at being detectives because they’re bored, he won’t tell us anything.’
‘I’m not playing at detectives because I’m bored,’ I said, but Bar was already striding ahead of me into the Sarsur grocery.
We asked Amin whether he knew Warshawski, and he did: he and his wife Dvora were regular customers. They lived near the store, in King David Street. But when we asked him whether his brother had any dealings with the professor, Amin clammed up. It was Friday and there were a million customers to deal with, and he was suddenly too busy to talk.
‘Interesting,’ said Bar, and we went back to the hospital to look for Tamer. But he wasn’t at work, and his next shift wasn’t before the middle of next week. Another dead end, in my opinion. It infuriated Bar whenever I said that–and I said it pretty often.
‘No, man–we’re almost there. Stick with it. All we’ve got to do is connect Warshawski and Tamer, and then we’ll get the link to Guetta.’
‘Yeah, but how are we going to do that?’
‘We’re a couple of bored nerds playing at detectives. We’ll find a way.’
On Sunday morning I recorded the Arab guy who had replaced this rather cute cleaner we had at Time’s Arrow, a kid with a wispy moustache and a startled look. I wouldn’t have given him a second thought except he’d fixed my PalmPilot. After lying dead on my desk for almost a year, my Palm was reborn after a couple of hours in the hands of Fahmi the Cleaner from Kafr Qasim–who’d have thought? I can’t even remember how it came about. Once upon a time, he told me, he’d been an electrician. Then he asked whether I was the Croc from Noah’s Ark. Weird to think of Arabs watching it. Anyway, the Belgians had asked for a North African Arab and I suppose if I’d searched hard enough I could probably have found a Moroccan or a Tunisian, but what the hell, I thought, let’s see what our software can do with a Palestinian accent.
He was a little nervous when he showed up on Sunday, so I told him not to worry–no one was going to bite him. He told me he wasn’t worried, just a little sick in the stomach. I wanted to say something like ‘Too much hummus, eh?’ but I managed to stop myself. There’s a limit.
I think I used the hummus joke later that day, because it turned out that Fahmi was an all-right kid. He did Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese accents, which he’d picked up off the TV. He didn’t know a North African accent, but the system got along fine with him. He had a funny ‘Hello’, which he kind of mooed while lowering his head: ‘Hellooooo.’ I started to imitate him and he laughed and said that at least he didn’t keep a broken PalmPilot on his desk for a whole year. At lunch I asked him whether he wanted to let me buy him a falafel and a Coke. The falafel was OK, he said, but not as good as in his village.
‘You ever tried the falafel in Tel Aviv?’
‘I’ve never been to Tel Aviv…’ he said, and we were interrupted by Bar’s arrival. I introduced him to Fahmi and he inexplicably shot me a look as if he wanted to kill me. Maybe he was angry because I was lunching with an Arab. Or just annoyed that I’d forgotten him: it used to drive Talia Tenne nuts when people ordered food without telling her. But he took me aside and told me I was an idiot.
‘Don’t you get it? He’s from Kafr Qasim!’
‘Yes, so?’
‘The Sarsurs are from Kafr Qasim.’
‘So?’
Bar shook his head at me and then his anger dissolved into laughter. ‘Oh, man. You’re the true heir to Poirot, aren’t you? Fucking…Hushash the fucking Detective is nothing next to the CrocDetective. It never crossed your mind to ask him about the Sarsur brothers?’
‘Well, what could he find out?’
‘I don’t know, Hushash, but we need to try. Don’t you think?’
Fahmi and I continued working through the afternoon. Once I’d filled out the test forms, we drank coffee and chatted for an hour in the dining area. His Hebrew wasn’t bad and improved as he loosened up: I liked him. He told me about his grandfather, and how he used to ride a white horse through the hills of Samaria. So I told him about Duchi’s grandfather, who was in the patrol that bumped into Izz ad-Din al-Qassam himself in 1935.
‘You know who Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was, right?’ I asked.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘God,’ I said, ‘it used to be like cowboys and Indians around here,’ which made him laugh.
It was Sunday evening in a deserted Bar BaraBush: Fahmi, Bar and me at the bar. Fahmi was running his finger down an almost empty pint glass of beer and telling us more about his grandfather, also named Fahmi.
‘You know where Beit Machsir is?’ Neither of us did. ‘These days the Jews call it Beit-Meir. Above Bab al-Wad,’ he said.
‘Yeah. We know all about Bab al-Wad,’ I said.
‘He was a teacher who got involved with operations against the British during the thirties. With the Jews he was actually OK, but he hated the British. Because the whole thing was their fault. He killed three British soldiers. But they caught him and put him in the prison in Acre.’
A couple of girls came in who were so good looking they stopped the conversation. One of them approached Noam behind the bar and asked for a couple of Orgasms. Three heads turned towards her: she was already waiting for us with a smile. Short brown bob, apple cheeks, sweet little pout, a total babe. Torture. She flicked her attention back to Noam, already busily fulfilling her needs, and Fahmi sighed and continued. ‘They sentenced him to be hanged. He sat in the prison in Acre and waited for the end. He had to wear these red overalls you wore if you were to be hanged. One day they told him his last day had come. They led him from his cell to the gallows and asked him if he had a last wish. What do you think he asked for?’
‘What was it?’
Fahmi pointed to his nearly empty glass.
‘His last wish was a beer. The first time in his life. We Muslims aren’t allowed alcohol, you know? So he says: one time, I will try it. They bring him a glass of beer, just like this, and he starts drinking.’ Fahmi broke off and concentrated on his own beer. He seemed to be following a train of thought somewhere else. Bar and I drank quietly.
‘Well?’ said Noam, from behind the bar. ‘What happened after the beer? Did they hang him?’
‘No, they didn’t,’ Fahmi said, coming back to us. ‘In the mi
ddle of his beer, a miracle happened. An Englishman rode up on a horse and told him he was free to go. They let him finish the beer, made him take off his red overalls and set him free.’
‘You serious?’ asked Bar.
‘Totally serious.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘He never knew till the day he died. No one explained, not then, not ever. He thought it was probably a mistake. They’d mixed him up with someone else. But he never knew who or why.’
Bar and I chuckled, and Noam too, his pointed sideburns seeming to smile more widely as he laughed.
‘Maybe it was the beer,’ I said.
‘That’s what he always said. So after that he drank beer all the time. Everyone in our family does. And he also stopped hating the British. He never got into any trouble again for the rest of his life.’
‘Thanks to the beer, huh?’
‘Thanks to the beer. If someone is angry, he needs beer. That way there are no problems. I’m going to take a piss.’
‘Complete and total horseshit,’ Bar said when he was gone.
‘Well, maybe…he sounded kind of honest to me.’
‘Yeah, well. I just hope he’s not going to bullshit us about Tamer Sarsur.’
Tamer Sarsur. I’d almost forgotten why Fahmi was sitting with us in Bar BaraBush. It had been Bar’s idea to invite him to Tel Aviv. Fahmi had been nervous initially, worrying about the Jews’ attitude. I told him that he’d be with us, and that I’d take him back to Kafr Qasim afterwards, which seemed to do the trick. And after his first ever beer in Tel Aviv he relaxed and started telling his grandfather stories.
When Fahmi came back from the Gents, Bar started in on Sarsur. Did he know a Tamer Sarsur in his village?
‘Sarsur? There are many Sarsurs in Kafr Qasim. It’s a big family there. But I don’t know a Tamer.’
‘Or Amin?’
He frowned and thought. ‘No, sorry. Why?’