Pattern crimes

by William Bayer

  "That's coercion. Coerced testimony can't be used in court."

  "Up to Yoni to say whether or not he felt coerced. I'm betting he'll say he wasn't. But let's not argue about it. Let's see how it goes. His ears are ringing and he's scared and he's not all that bright anyway. My people are telling him what they think must have happened, and, believe me, he's getting the idea. You blabbed on the van so we'd bring him out here, but you'd had it wired so it would kill him when he started it up. Something went wrong. The charge wasn't big enough. So he escaped, he's shaken up, and now he's starting to grasp the implications. And here comes the clincher, Ephraim. Watch this carefully. This is the part where you actually get to see him turn."

  Yoni was sitting up now. Dov and Shoshana were talking to him, showing him the kind of sympathy a man betrayed and nearly killed deserved. Shoshana handed him a pair of binoculars, while Dov pointed up at the church. Yoni put the binoculars to his eyes, peered through them, and saw David and Ephraim spying down on him. "See, Yoni," Dov was saying, "he's up there watching. He set you up." And then Yoni grasped it-like a lightning bolt it suddenly struck him in the brain: Ephraim wanted him dead, and the only way he was going to survive was to tell these people every single thing he knew.

  David turned on his field radio.

  "Micha, how's it going?"

  "He says he wants to talk, and that he doesn't need a lawyer. We're setting up now to videotape."

  David shut the radio off and turned to Ephraim. "Well, guess that kind of settles it," he said.

  "You can't do it like that."

  "We can't? Why not?"

  "Because it's not legal, dammit!" Ephraim kicked the wall.

  David turned to him then, and examined him with great curiosity. "Tell me something, Ephraim: Just what kind of game is it that you think we're playing here, where there's one set of rules for you and another set for us?"

  Yoni talked for three days straight; it took him that long to tell them everything. They followed him around frantically with camera and videotape recorder as he led them to the killing house in Mei Naftoah, the place on the Tel Aviv beach where Shlomo had picked up Halil Ghemaiem, the hitching stop at Ben-Gurion Airport, the Damascus Gate, and the place Yaakov Schneiderman had parked his truck the night that Ari had hidden in the back. Then on to all the different places where the bodies had been dumped: the ditch beside the road to Mevasseret; the Old City wall near the Dung Gate; the construction site behind the Augusta Victoria Hospital; the road up the Hill of Evil Counsel; and the dumpster in Bloomfield Park.

  He talked so fast, so furiously, and with such conviction, that no one who would later see the tapes could doubt for a moment that his confession was freely given. He offered so many details that, when the others were confronted with them, they too quickly crumbled and confessed. And then there ensued a kind of contest in which each of the four tried to outdo the other in quality of testimony and remembrance of detail. In the end David had four sets of videotapes containing four interlocking confessions. And whenever he asked the questions: "Who gave these orders?" Who told you to do this?" "Who ordered this to be done?," the answer came back, "Ephraim Cohen," "Major Cohen," always the same, again and again.

  The night after he turned everything over to the prosecutors, David said to Anna: "Now it's done. It involved everything, you know-my father, my brother, my sense of myself. It consumed my life and now that it's all over I feel empty just a little bit. But you know something? The more I think about Gideon, the more I admire what he did. He was a real patriot; he preferred to kill himself rather than start a war. Gati had contempt for him for destroying his aircraft, but if he'd gone quietly, his death wouldn't have haunted me as it did. In a strange and unforeseeable way he sent me a message. If I hadn't been so disturbed by the way he'd died, I don't think I'd have broken the case."

  The next morning he drove down to Haifa, met Hagith, and took her out for the day. Judith was in the front hall when he arrived.

  "Congratulations, David," Judith said. Hagith ran toward him, then threw herself into his arms.

  Later, when he returned Hagith to the house, Joe Raskow opened the door. He didn't say anything and he didn't meet David's eyes. Judith did not appear.

  He had solved his case but still something bothered him: Hurwitz, the phony cop.

  Yoni and the others had admitted that "Hurwitz" was a floating false identity. They had all carried fake Hurwitz ID, to be used whenever they felt it necessary. Yet not one of them would admit he had been in the van at the time of the accident, a relatively trivial matter in the context of the seven homicides.

  Amit Nissim, confronted with them in a lineup, could not identify any of them as the difficult cop she'd seen. So who was this Hurwitz, this mean non-English-speaking cop who had driven the three conspirators around Jerusalem?

  The question nagged at David; he could not get rid of it and he knew that it had to be answered. Because the man who had driven the van that day was the only witness to the conversation between Gati, Katzer, and Stone, and thus the only link between the killings and the Ninth of Av conspiracy.

  Although Amit had not picked out Ephraim Cohen, David still thought he might be Hurwitz. He asked Micha to check out his alibi. Two days later Micha reported back.

  "It wasn't him, David. I know most of his alibis are phony, but on the day of the accident Ephraim Cohen was definitely not in Israel."

  "Where was he?"

  "London. Seems he and his wife travel there every spring. Probably to order a couple of new suits, the fancy kind he likes. His passport confirms that he was there, so do the customs and immigration records, and so do the airline passenger lists."

  "Could he have faked all that?"

  "He could have, but he didn't. Look, I know you're wondering how, if he was that far away, he was able to call Dr. Mendler on behalf of Harrison Stone. I don't know how, David, but somehow someone got in touch with him. Because in the billing files of the Hotel Dorset in London there's a record that he called Mendler, and that's something even he couldn't fake."

  He went to see Jacob Gutman. It was late afternoon, the floors of the jail were shiny, the corridors reeked of disinfectant, cigarette smoke, and prisoners' sweat.

  Gutman grinned when the guard showed David in.

  "So it's you, sonny-boy? They're all talking about you now. You did some pretty fancy stuff, I hear."

  David handed him a carton of cigarettes. "From my father. He sends his best."

  "Thank him for me."

  David nodded. "Netzer told me you won't have to go to trial. Said you're going to plead guilty and then he'll move for a suspended sentence."

  "So what do you think of that? You didn't put in the good word by any chance?"

  "I'll testify at your sentence hearing, Jacob. Unless the judge is a creep, you won't serve any time."

  "Thanks, sonny-boy. Anything I can do for you?"

  "Yeah. I want to know more about something we discussed that day we met in the park."

  "We discussed a lot of things."

  "This is about what Max Rosenfeld said. As I remember it he told you that people had stolen my father's files to cover their tracks, and, this is the important part, that they were going to 'set me up.'"

  Gutman nodded.

  "Is that really what he said?"

  "Yeah. Something like that."

  "You remember his exact words?"

  Gutman shook his head. "Max said they had you all set up."

  "But that isn't what you told me," David said. "You told me he said they were going to set me up."

  "Did I? Wait a minute. I'm getting confused. No! I remember how he said it: 'They're even playing games with Bar-Lev's boy, the cop,' Max said. 'They got him all set up.' "

  "You're sure?"

  "Yeah, I'm sure. What's the big deal anyhow?"

  David didn't reply. He simply patted Gutman on the arm, left the cell, then took a long walk through the deserted night streets of M'ea Shearim.


  As he stood beside the schoolyard fence waiting for Amit, he felt a welling up of melancholy. For all his pleasure in seeing Hagith he missed her daily presence in his life.

  A bell rang inside, and then, a moment later, he heard the high-pitched voices of children charging down tiled halls. The kids emerged from the building in a mob, then flooded the playground, laughing, skipping, jumping, running, their packs of books and luncheon boxes bouncing on their little backs.

  It was a while before he saw Amit; she spotted him at the same time. She took leave of her friends, walked slowly up to him, and shyly said hello.

  "Hi," he replied.

  "You want to show me pictures?" David nodded. "Where's Shoshana today?"

  "She's busy. Anyway, this is confidential. Do you know what 'confidential' means?"

  She looked up at him. "That means it's a secret."

  "That's right," he said. "A secret just between the two of us."

  They walked a block up from the school to a bus stop where there was an empty bench.

  "Let's sit here," he suggested. And then, after they sat: "I've got six pictures of six different men. I've never shown them to you before."

  "You want me to tell you if I recognize them." She smiled. "You know, I'm not a baby anymore."

  He dealt the photographs onto the bench as if they were playing cards. While she studied them he watched her face.

  "This one," she said immediately, picking up a picture. "This was the policeman who tried to take the lady's camera away."

  David didn't look at the photo. Instead he peered into Amit's oversized eyes. "You're sure?"

  "I'm sure." She stared straight back. "Now can I go home?"

  He waited until she had disappeared, then glanced down at the photograph. Then sadly he shook his head. It was the one he'd been afraid that she would choose.

  It was nearly dusk when David approached the old house on Shela Street which Rafi had inherited from his father and then subdivided, reserving the ground floor apartment for himself. While he waited at the door he marveled at the superb condition of Rafi's garden. Even now, in August, with Jerusalem so dusty and hot, the lawn and shrubbery here were dense and green. There was a sweet aroma too of hibiscus and of the exotic air orchids which Rafi bred.

  Ruth Shahar answered the door. "David!" She embraced him. She was a small wiry woman with gray bangs and nervous eyes. "How's Anna? Rafi keeps saying the four of us are going to get together. But you two guys are always busy." She stood back from him, smiled. "Don't stand out here. Rafi's in the greenhouse. Wander around back. Surprise him. He'll be delighted. I know he will…"

  David retraced his steps, then followed the narrow stone walk that led around the side of the house to the garden in the back. He stood there a while watching Rafi moving inside the greenhouse, an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. The long fluorescent tubes of the greenhouse were lit, bouncing purple light off the top of Rafi's head. He carried a plastic bottle and every so often dipped into it with a dropper which he then squeezed above the hanging plants.

  Rafi must have sensed the presence of a stranger; he froze and peered out toward the lawn. Then, when he recognized David, he smiled and beckoned him in

  "This must be important. I've barely been home an hour. Be with you in a minute, soon as I finish giving dinner to my beauties here."

  He gestured David to a wicker chair, then began to move again among the orchids. They were strange tormented-looking things clinging to bunches of bark and masses of moss that hung from the greenhouse ceiling. Sometimes, after Rafi had finished his hybridization experiments, he would release a group from his control, setting them outside in the branches of shrubs and trees where a few, although not all, survived.

  "I can't tell you how relaxing it is to garden after a day of crime and punishment. Do you have a hobby, David?"

  "Nothing quite like this."

  "I know you love music."

  "I like to listen to it, but I never learned to play."

  Rafi put down his bottle and dropper and slipped into the other chair. "I'm glad to see you. I know we've been tense with each other. I'm sorry that we have."

  "Why do you think there's been so much tension, Rafi?"

  "Strain of the job, I guess. Stress of the case."

  "Do you remember that symposium back in May, the first one we held in Latsky's conference room?"

  "With Sanders and your father? Sure."

  "You told them I was the best detective in Israel. Do you remember saying that?" Rafi smiled. "But you didn't mean it, did you?"

  Rafi squinted at him. "Why do you say such a thing?"

  "You didn't think I'd see through your bullshit then."

  Rafi's face turned stern. "What's on your mind, David?"

  "You were 'Hurwitz.' I know that now. You were the driver of the van. You overheard everything, and you took down all the names so that later the witnesses could be killed. You played me for a fool, Rafi, with your 'our first Israeli serial murder case' and 'consistently marred flesh' and 'you're my best man so I'm giving this to you' and 'it's a pattern crime so you solve it because you're in charge of pattern crimes.' "

  Rafi stared at him. "So that's why you came. You've come here to arrest me."

  "Is that all you have to say?"

  "You sound bitter."

  "I trusted you. How should I sound?"

  "I suppose I ought to say I'm sorry."

  "Don't apologize to me, Rafi. Just tell me why did you do it? Why?"

  "You've heard me complain often enough. You know how I feel about things these days."

  "I thought you hated the intolerance, the polarization. I thought you hated the way the fanatics have been gaining power."

  "Yes, I hate all that. But you didn't listen carefully. If you had, you'd understand why I think Gati's right, that our only long-term hope is to become bigger and more powerful."

  "And if-"

  "Yes, if that means making alliances with pigs like Katzer or screwballs like Stone, that's okay too. When you need allies you take what you can get. Which is why Israel's allied now with South Africa."

  " A war, Rafi?"

  "A war might be the best solution."

  " Might be! " David shook his head. "But, you see, I don't give a damn about your politics. I only want to know how you could bring yourself to set those people up?"

  "Will you believe me, David, when I tell you that that wasn't what I was trying to do, that the thought that they might be killed never entered my head? When the accident happened and Stone got hurt, my first priority was to salvage our cause. It had taken months to set up that meeting. It was the crucial meeting where the final deal would be struck. So I started shouting and pretending I didn't speak English to draw attention to myself and give the three of them time to get away. Then that damn nun started snapping pictures. I tried to grab her camera, but she wouldn't give it up. Then other people crowded around. So to distract them I took down their names. It was only later, after Cohen's assholes killed the nun, that he decided to get rid of all the witnesses and bury the killings in a case I could control. None of it was directed at you personally. I never doubted you were a fine detective, maybe even the best in Israel. But best or not you're plenty good enough, otherwise I wouldn't have you on my staff."

  They sat facing one another, two men who'd once been friends. Finally David spoke.

  "I can forgive you for using me, but not for being party to the murders." He stood up. "I'll arrest you in the morning. That way you have tonight to explain things to Ruth and organize your affairs."

  "I did what I did for love of Israel. You must believe that, David, if nothing else."

  David looked at him and shook his head. "Oh, yes, Rafi-for love. For love…" He turned away.

  The next morning when Rafi did not appear, David was not surprised. He called the house. Ruth told him that Rafi had been up the whole night working in his study, and then, just before dawn, had driven off without saying good-bye.
/>   That afternoon, when an envelope addressed to David was hand-delivered to the guardhouse of the Russian Compound, he had an idea what had happened. Inside the envelope was a complete sworn and signed confession of Rafi's role as conspirator in the Ninth of Av affair.

  Two days later an army patrol found Rafi's body in the Judean Hills. His police Beretta was still in his hand. There was a single bullet in his brain.

  MUSIC

  At the end of September, just three days before the Jewish New Year, the weather in Jerusalem changed. The sun, which for months had been baking the streets, suddenly became more temperate. The harsh white sky turned a deep fathomless blue, and the dry cutting winds gave way to a gentle breeze. Jerusalemites, welcoming these changes, congratulated themselves on their good fortune. It was such a privilege to live in a city imbued with so much radiance!

  The following afternoon David left work early, then walked from the Russian Compound over to his father's room on Hevrat Shas. The ostensible purpose of this visit was to invite Avraham for Rosh Hashanah dinner. But David had other matters on his mind.

  "Irina Targov is back," he told his father. "Remember how she insisted her husband and Sokolov had to be buried side by side? Now she wants a new inscription cut into the base of Targov's sculpture: 'Dedicated by Aleksandr Targov to His Oldest Friend Sergei Sokolov in Honor of His Lifelong Struggle on Behalf of Imprisoned Soviet Jews.' "

  Avraham shook his head. "On some level she knows she ruined their lives. Now she wants to force them to forgive each other."

  "But they never would have done that."

  "No, of course not. But still I think Irina did a healthy thing. Now she should feel less guilt."

  Hearing his father say that David couldn't help but wonder: Does he now feel less guilt himself?

  They talked for a while then about a conference Avraham was going to attend on Kabbalah and psychology.

  "I think you're still interested in psychoanalysis, Father."

  "On a theoretical level I am."

  "But you won't go back to taking patients?"

  Avraham shook his head. There was silence then between them, a silence David did not wish to break. He could feel there was something the old man wanted to say. He would wait until his father said it-the "tell-your-story method."