Three

by D. A. Mishani

  On the desk he put down his light brown leather wallet, phone and a big bunch of keys that had been in his back pocket. He asked Orna why she’d asked him in, and she evaded the truth and said the family’s repeated requests that the Israeli police look into the case were being reconsidered.

  “It’s about time. So what do you need from me?”

  Orna pretended she wasn’t even sure there was anything to investigate. “To tell you the truth, I read your request, and the file, and I’m not all that convinced. I understand you had a difficult divorce, and that you left Israel and then came back and wanted to take her son away. That seems to me like a background that pretty much justifies what she did. So how about you explain to me why you don’t think it was suicide?”

  “Because Orna did not kill herself. She wouldn’t have killed herself. So what if we had a difficult divorce? Of course she had difficulties, everyone has difficulties, but she was happy overall, and she would not have left Eran alone. Never. She would never have left Eran.”

  “Eran is your son?”

  “Eran is our son. She wouldn’t have left him for a day, so she definitely wouldn’t have committed suicide. Also, I didn’t come back to take Eran away from Orna, as you put it. I just came to see him.”

  “Then explain to me why she went to Romania.”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why did she go without Eran? You said she wouldn’t have left her son for a day, so how come she went away for a few days without him? Maybe she wanted to get away from him so she could do it?”

  Ronen was wearing the faded red T-shirt that used to be Orna’s favourite. His trousers were new. He was unshaven and the stubble on his narrow face was grey. His brown boots were bulky and very dusty. “I don’t know why she went there. Honestly. That’s something to look into, and I don’t think anyone did. Maybe she went because Eran was with me for a few days on the moshav, so she was able to get some rest. But to leave him for ever? Not a chance.”

  When Orna asked what he thought had happened to her, Ronen said he had no idea but he was positive someone had killed her and she hadn’t killed herself. The Romanian investigation had determined that no witnesses had seen Orna with anyone else from the moment she’d arrived at the hotel, and no one other than her had been seen going in or out of her room. But there were no cameras in the hotel corridors, and of course none in the rooms either.

  “Forgive me for asking,” Orna said cautiously, “but perhaps it’s convenient for you to believe that? It could be that one of the reasons for her suicide was the state of things between you, the divorce and the fight over the boy, no? Isn’t it possible that you’re saying this out of guilt?”

  “Of course I have guilt. I have endless guilt. But that’s not why I’m saying this. I’m saying it because I know Orna didn’t kill herself.”

  “And the goodbye message she sent your son?” Orna read from the translation: “Orna wrote explicitly that she wanted to die and couldn’t keep on living after what had happened, didn’t she?”

  Ronen snapped: “But that’s just it—why would she write something like that to Eran? Would you write something like that to your son if you were about to commit suicide? And it wasn’t true, anyway. When he talked to her on the phone that day she looked fine, and she told him she’d bought him presents, which they found in her room. So why would she say something like that to him? And where’s her phone? How come the Romanians didn’t find it? She sent a goodbye message from her phone and committed suicide and her phone disappeared?”

  Orna explained that the Bucharest police had assumed the phone was stolen by the hotel cleaner who’d found the body, but she herself found that explanation unconvincing. One of the veteran employees of the Trianon was arrested a few weeks later on suspicion of stealing phones, jewellery and cash from hotel guests for years. He was questioned about possible involvement in Orna Azran’s death but denied stealing her phone, and according to hotel records he hadn’t been at work on the day of her death.

  She started asking Ronen different questions, shorter ones, and her tone was softer. “Do you happen to know if she went away with someone? Anyone she might have gone away with?”

  He said he didn’t.

  “Do you know if she was in a relationship with another man? Here or abroad? Do you think Orna was a woman who could have gone out to a bar or a restaurant, let’s say overseas, met a man and gone back with him to her hotel?”

  He said he didn’t think so.

  “Did she ever mention a man named Tadeusz to you?”

  “Tadeusz?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “How about Nachum? Or Gil?”

  “No. But why are you asking me about these names?”

  “Do you know if Orna happened to know a woman named Emilia in Israel? A Latvian woman named Emilia Nodyeves?”

  She kept trying, and Ronen kept saying no. When she asked where Eran lived now, he said, “With me,” and she asked, “In India? I understand that’s where you live.”

  “I never lived in India. We lived in Nepal, but we came back to Israel and now we live in Holon. I didn’t want Eran to have to move to a different country after everything that happened.”

  Orna said she was also from Holon and asked where they lived. But they lived at opposite ends of town.

  “And it’s just the two of you here?”

  “No. We’re here with my second wife and her kids. Our kids. And Eran.”

  With Ruth and Kurt and Thomas and Peter and Julia. And the baby, Lynne, who was born in Israel two months after they’d arrived. And Eran lived with them now. Julia was twelve and in the past year she’d sprung up and become almost as tall as her two older brothers, a head taller than Eran. She and Eran still shared a room, but they no longer got dressed in front of each other and they talked less before they fell asleep.

  Orna debated briefly, then asked Ronen, “Do you think I could talk to Eran?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure it would be good to take him back to all that. Can I consult with his therapist? He might have some advice.”

  “Of course. You can call him now. And it’s all right with me if he wants to be present for the conversation.”

  “But why do you need to talk to him at all? What do you think he can tell you?”

  She wasn’t sure what to answer, because she couldn’t say that she simply knew she had to see Eran.

  9

  Three days before they are supposed to go away together, an almost identical story will run in the crime sections of the two major dailies. The headline in Israel Today will be: “Romanian Police Reopens Case of Israeli Woman’s Death,” and in Yediot: “Was Bucharest Hotel Death a Murder Staged as Suicide?” Both stories will run in the inside pages, not particularly prominently.

  The stories themselves will explain that, following new information obtained by the Bucharest police in recent weeks, they have reopened the investigation into the death of Orna Azran, a thirty-eight-year-old divorcée with one son who was found dead in a hotel room in the Romanian capital. New testimony from a frontdesk employee, which was apparently overlooked previously, led Bucharest detectives to widen the scope of their search and collect additional testimonies indicating that, in the hours prior to her death, Azran had been seen with an unknown man. The Romanian police estimated that the anonymous man was local, but they were also looking into the possibility that he was an Israeli citizen. A sketch drawn in Bucharest, based on the new accounts as well as video footage, had been transferred via the embassy in Romania to the Israeli police.

  The piece in Israel Today will also feature a small photograph of Orna—the same one that ran in the paper when her death was initially reported, which Emilia had found—and a black-and-white police sketch of the unknown man. At the end of the stories there will be a reminder of the details of the case, which ha
d generated brief interest in the Israeli press a few years ago because of the family’s insistence that Azran had not committed suicide but had been murdered, and because she had a young son.

  She will photograph the story on her phone and send it to Gil. Under the picture she will write: “Hey, this isn’t you, is it? Should I be scared?” A few minutes later she will send him another message: “Aren’t you coming to the café today? Fleeing the law?” The face of the man in the police sketch, even though it will be a general outline that lacks precision or detail, will broadly resemble Gil’s familiar face: round, too wide, fair eyes and a relatively full head of hair.

  He will not answer her all day, so she will send him another message in the evening: “That was a joke, in case you didn’t know. I didn’t mean to annoy you and I hope that’s not what’s happened. It was just the similarity in the picture and the trip to Bucharest, you understand, right? I thought it was funny. Anyway, you look better in real life. Less Romanian. Are you packing yet? Because I am, at least in my mind.” But that same night Gil will cancel the trip. First he will write tersely that something came up at work and he has to stay in Israel, and that he’ll talk to her in a few days. She will send back a stunned, short email, after 3 A.M.: “I don’t believe you’re cancelling now, after everything I went through for this. You’re not really cancelling, are you?”

  In the morning, at the café, she will write at length and more sharply: “Are you serious, Gil? After I made up a whole story about going for research, with non-existent archives and meetings with imaginary researchers, you’re calling it off? What could be so urgent at work? And at the weekend? I hope you understand that this was our only chance and there will not be another.” She will stay at the café until eleven o’clock, but will not write a word and will go out to smoke more frequently than usual. The next day she will come back and wait for Gil, but at ten o’clock she will shut down her laptop and take a cab home.

  In the evening she will try a different tactic, a gentler one. She will email to ask if he can at least explain what happened and reassure her, tell her he’s okay, that nothing’s happened to him. He will not answer, and the next day she will not write and will not go to the café. At night she will do what she’s never done before and try to call him from her phone, but his phone will be off and there will be no way to leave him a voicemail.

  She will write the last email on Thursday night and Gil will read it on Friday. The subject line will be blank but the body of the message will say:

  So here’s the deal: on Monday I sent you—as a total joke—a story from the paper about a woman in Romania, but because of what’s happened since, I’m really not sure any more. Is it you, Gil? Should I go to the police? Are you somehow connected to that woman? Did you do something to her, and that’s why you’ve disappeared? I’m going crazy because I feel like I’m imagining things, but on the other hand, what are you afraid of and why have you suddenly vanished??? You were so sure of yourself up until a few days ago, and you reassured me and made me believe it was so easy to go away together and that I had nothing to be afraid of. So what happened? If you don’t write back and explain what really happened and why you disappeared on me, I think I really will do it in the end. I will tell the police I think it’s you and that you were supposed to take me to Romania too. Maybe even to the same hotel??? But I’m giving you the chance to explain yourself and spare me all the paranoia. And to think that at this very moment we should have been together for the first time! I have chills just thinking about it now. I deeply regret everything.

  Gil will answer within a few hours, but without saying a word about Orna or what happened in Romania or the news item. He will say he’s sorry, he had an income tax audit at work and he was busy all week running around to come up with documentation. He understands how disappointed she is, but he is even more disappointed and he promises to make it up to her. If she is still willing to go with him, he is sure they could find another date. When she doesn’t answer his message, he will call her and she will answer in whispers from the bedroom. Gil will sound relaxed, and this time he will mention the newspaper story: “You’re not serious, are you? About what you said in your last message? I don’t know which is more insulting, the fact that you thought I was a murderer or that you claim I look like the man in that picture.” She will not answer.

  Then he will say he has to see her that weekend, and she’ll whisper that there’s no chance. He will insist and explain that he wants to apologize and get her forgiveness. She will say she can’t talk any more and will hang up. He will call her again five minutes later and she will not answer, but he will keep calling and she will eventually answer from the bathroom and say she’s begging him not to call now and they can meet at the café on Sunday.

  But Gil can’t wait. She will hear him say, “You know, you’re not the only one who can threaten. I can threaten you, too, can’t I, Ella?”

  She will not answer immediately. After a few seconds, she will say, “What do you mean by that, Gil?”

  “What would your husband say if he saw our emails? He’d probably be interested, wouldn’t he? He’d also probably be interested to know why your research trip was really cancelled.”

  She will sit down on the edge of the bathtub, shut her eyes for a moment, then open them. She will say she can meet him the next day, on Saturday, but only for half an hour. She will ask where he wants to meet, and he will suggest Yarkon Park.

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m not hanging around with you in Yarkon Park on a Saturday afternoon.”

  He will suggest they meet in his flat instead.

  “Are you sure no one can see us there?” she will ask, and he will promise.

  She will not have to write down the address because she will remember it.

  When she arrives the next day, Gil will be waiting for her.

  She will walk up the stairs in the dark, without switching the stairwell light on, and she will pause outside the door for a moment.

  And then she will knock twice. And once more.

  10

  The meeting with Eran took place at his therapist’s office in Tel Aviv, two days after she met Ronen. The therapist had warned her over the phone that it would be difficult for Eran to talk about what had happened, and when Orna walked into the groundfloor office that looked on to a shady inner courtyard and stood in the doorway to the room where Eran was waiting, he said, “If I feel it’s necessary to stop the conversation, I suggest we do so and continue in a few days, all right?”

  She immediately noticed Eran’s resemblance to Ronen, because he wasn’t a child any more. His eyes were black and direct like Ronen’s the first time he’d looked at her. She shook Eran’s hand and sat down on the wooden chair nearest to him. He was holding a mobile phone, and he slid it under his thigh on his red armchair. The therapist began by saying, “So we’ve talked a little, Eran and I, about why you’re here, but would you like to tell us some more?”

  Orna said that due to the family’s requests, she was looking into what had happened to Eran’s mother again, and that she wanted to ask him a few questions. In the preliminary phone call with the therapist, she’d agreed not to raise Eran’s hopes of hearing new information, the way his father sometimes did, and not to ask him questions about the divorce or the relationship between his parents, for now.

  Orna took out a new cardboard file containing a list of topics she wanted to discuss with Eran. The protective presence of the therapist in the room was distracting and she wished she’d asked him not to be there, just as she’d insisted Ronen could not be in the room. He’d seated her opposite his own armchair, so that she was sitting next to Eran, rather than facing him as she would have liked. And she didn’t feel that either of them needed the therapist there.

  “You were the last person to talk to Mum that day, weren’t you?” she began, even though she knew the answer from the reports.

  That
day’s conversation had been so short:

  “How are you, my love?”

  “I’m fine, Mum. Where are you?”

  The last thing he asked you was if he could stay with Dad for a few more days, and you said no because you missed him.

  “I wanted you to tell me a bit more about that phone conversation, because I don’t know enough about it. Maybe you had the feeling something was wrong with how Mum was behaving or talking? Or she said something that you remember being surprised by? Or you saw something strange? You were on Skype, right?”

  Eran looked at the therapist sitting in front of him, and then at the rug.

  In the preliminary call, she’d asked the therapist if she could say in front of Eran that the assumption was that Orna had committed suicide, and he’d said yes. Eran knew, and most of their talks in recent years had been devoted to trying to convince him that she hadn’t committed suicide because of him, or because he’d gone to stay with Ronen and his new family. That was why this meeting was so important. “I don’t know exactly what you’re looking into,” the therapist had said, “but if there’s a chance that Orna did not commit suicide and something else happened to her, it could be very significant for Eran. That’s why I thought we should have this talk.” He said the term they usually used was “decided to die,” rather than “committed suicide,” but Eran did sometimes say that “Mum killed herself.”

  “Maybe you remember if Mum seemed like she was in an ordinary mood, or if she looked different?” she asked.