by Paul Sussman
She read through her notes again and again, then picked up the print-out she had made the previous night of the St John's College History Society web page and re-read that. In this illuminating and typically colourful disquisition Professor Topping explained how his research into 13th Century inquisition records had revealed an unexpected link between the fabled treasure of the Cathars and the so-called 'Secret of Castelombres'. The more she thought about it the more convinced she became that Topping was the key; that she could surf the net ad infinitum, call every expert going, but without talking to him directly she was never going to move forward with this thing. And from what the college porter had said the only way she was going to be able to talk to Topping was to get on a plane and fly all the way over to England.
'No way,' she muttered. 'Absolutely no fucking way.'
Even as she said it, however, she was laying aside the print-out and starting to leaf through her address book, looking for the number of her travel-agent friend Salim.
JERUSALEM
Back in his office, Ben-Roi took a swig from his hipflask and stared at the three-quarter-page report on the computer screen in front of him. He had, he told himself, done everything that could reasonably be expected of him. He'd interviewed the old woman on Ohr Ha-Chaim; called Kfar Shaul to enquire about Schlegel's twin brother (still alive, apparently, although in a 'very disturbed' state); even contacted Yad Vashem to confirm that Schlegel had actually been an employee there (she had, part-time, in the archives department). OK, there were other avenues he could have pursued; he hadn't exactly driven himself into the ground. But then why should he? 'A little background information', that's what Khediva had asked for. And that's what he'd given him. He'd type a couple of extra lines, push the report up over a page and leave it at that. Email it across and wash his hands of the whole damned thing.
Except . . . except . . .
That bloody house fire. He couldn't get it out of his mind. The last thing the Weinberg woman had told him, about all Hannah Schlegel's possessions being destroyed in an arson attack. He just couldn't get it out of his mind. Why, he kept thinking to himself – this despite his best efforts not to keep thinking to himself – would a group of Arab kids risk going into the Jewish Quarter and shinning all the way up a drainpipe for the sole purpose of covering an elderly woman's flat in petrol and setting it alight? It simply didn't make sense. He'd dealt with Arab burglars before, and Arab vandals, but this didn't fit into either category.
The bellyaches. That's what his mentor, old Commander Levi, used to call them. 'The bellyaches, Arieh, are what make the difference between a good detective and a great detective. The good detective will look at the evidence and use logic to work out there's something wrong. But the great detective will feel there's something wrong even before he's seen the evidence. It's a gut instinct. A bellyache.'
He used to get them all the time, those bellyaches – an uncertain tremor in the pit of his stomach, a sixth sense that things weren't quite what they seemed. He'd got them on the Rehevot fraud case, when everyone had told him he was shooting at shadows until the computer expert had recovered those dumped files and proved his suspicions right after all. And he'd got them on the Shapiro settler murder, when all the evidence had pointed at the Arab kid, every bit of it, yet he'd still been convinced the kid was innocent, that there was some other angle. He'd taken a lot of flak over that case, but he'd kept digging, and of course eventually they'd found the cleaver in the rabbi's cellar and the truth had come out. 'I'm proud of you, Arieh,' Commander Levi had told him as he presented a citation for outstanding police work. 'You are a great detective. And you'll become even greater, so long as you keep listening to those bellyaches.'
But of course he'd stopped listening this last year. Stopped even having the bellyaches, aside from the whole al-Mulatham thing. He went through the motions, did what he had to, but the old fire, the passion for getting to the bottom of things, the desire to be like Al Pacino in the film – that had faded and died. He just didn't care any more. Right, wrong, truth, lies, justice, injustice – it no longer mattered. He didn't fucking care.
Until now. Because now he had one of the strongest bellyaches he'd ever experienced and it just wouldn't go away. He didn't want to have it, he was angry that he did have it, but it was there all the same, gnawing away at his insides. Kids, arson, murdered woman, Jewish Quarter. It was wrong. It was all bloody wrong.
'Damn you, Khediva,' he muttered. 'Bloody fucking damn you.'
He procrastinated a few minutes longer, desperate just to wash his hands of the whole thing, not get sucked in any further. Then, unable to stop himself, he snatched up the phone and tapped a number into the keypad.
'Feldman?' he said when it was answered. 'I need to find the file on an arson case from fifteen years ago . . . None of your fucking business. Just tell me where to look.'
It took almost two hours to track down the file, which had for some inexplicable reason ended up in the archive at Moriah, one of the city's other regional police stations. He'd had it sent over by bike, and now sat with his feet propped on the edge of his desk reading through it, taking occasional deep swigs from his hip-flask.
The thing that immediately leapt out at him, and only served to deepen his misgivings, was the date and time of the fire. Mrs Weinberg had told him it had happened a day or two after Hannah Schlegel's death; according to the notes, it had actually occurred on the very same day as her murder, just a matter of hours later, an extraordinary coincidence and one that even the most obtuse of investigators would have been pushed not to find suspicious.
Unfortunately, frustratingly, there was nothing in the rest of the file to explain this troubling synchronicity. There were statements from Schlegel's neighbours, including Mrs Weinberg; photographs of the gutted flat; and arrest forms for the three Arab kids who'd been brought in for the crime, two of whom had pleaded guilty and got eighteen months' youth detention each, while the third, the youngest, identified on his arrest sheet only as 'Ani', had been released without charge on account of his age – seven at the time – and a lack of evidence against him.
Why they had chosen that particular flat to torch on that particular day at that particular time, and what, if anything, the attack had to do with Hannah Schlegel's murder – all were questions that remained unanswered. 'We did it for a dare,' was all the boys had said, and the police interrogator, evidently satisfied with having wangled an admission of guilt out of them, seemed to have made no effort to delve any deeper into the matter.
Ben-Roi went through the notes twice, then leant his head back and drained the remaining vodka from his flask. It was all wrong. Massively, bellyachingly wrong. The question was, what could he do about it? The fire had been a decade and a half ago, the leads were all dead, the perpetrators had most likely moved or changed names, or probably both. He could spend months trying to get to the bottom of it. And for what? Some pushy, Jew-hating raghead.
'Zoobi!' he muttered. 'Fuck it. What's the point? Bellyaches or no bellyaches.'
He closed the file, threw it on the desk and, picking up the phone, punched in the number of the Moriah archives, intending to tell them he'd finished with the notes. As he did so something caught his eye, a line scribbled on the back of the file, in faded pencil. He hadn't noticed it before. Reaching out, he pulled the folder towards him. It was barely legible, and he had to squint to read it: 'Ani – Hani al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal. Born 11/2/83. Al-Amari camp.'
He stared down at the note, eyes narrowed, then, leaning to his left – slowly, as if reluctant to do so – he fumbled through a pile of papers, pulling out the case file for the Palestinian he had chased after the Old City drugs bust. He opened it and stared down at the man's arrest form.
Name: Hani al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal
Age: 22
D.O.B. 11 February 1983
Address: 14, Ginna Lane, Al-Amari camp, Ramallah
'Shalom, archive.'
The receiver echoed in his ear. His eye
s were flicking from the scribbled note to the arrest form and back again.
'Archive,' repeated the voice.
'Yes,' he said. 'It's Ben-Roi. At David.'
'Hi. You finished with that file?'
Ben-Roi bit his lip, torn.
'No,' he said after a pause. 'I think I'm going to be needing it a while longer.'
LUXOR
It was dark when Khalifa eventually emerged from the internet cafe, eyes bleary, mouth thick from cigarette smoke. He wandered back through the souk – bright lights, blaring music, jostling crowds –
and down to the Corniche el-Nil, stopping en route to buy himself a can of Sprite before descending a set of worn stone steps onto the Nile quayside, the dark water slopping and glugging at his feet.
Strangely, after everything he had seen and read, all the images and statistics and testimonies and descriptions, the only thing he could think of was his family. Zenab, Batah, Ali, little Yusuf – the four cardinal points of his world, his light, his life. How would I feel if it was them, he wondered: Zenab standing skeletal and hollow-eyed, staring into the camera like some deranged ghost; Batah and Ali heaped in a pit with a thousand other corpses, anonymous as stacks of rotting lumber? What would that do to me? How could I ever live with the torment of something like that? He had lost loved ones before, of course – his father, his mother, his elder brother Ali, in whose memory he had named his own son. But to lose someone to senseless, hateful butchery; to see them starved and beaten and broken and slaughtered – this he had never experienced. Could not even imagine experiencing. It was too terrible, too painful, like the sound of fingernails being scraped down a blackboard.
He sighed and drained off the last of the Sprite, his mind drifting back over all the happy times they'd had together, those gentle, joyous family moments. The day they had sailed upriver on a felucca for Batah's thirteenth birthday, stopping to picnic on a small deserted island before skimming back to Luxor with the sunset, Batah standing on the prow with her dark hair stretched out behind her in the wind. The time they had visited the Bil'esh Camel Market in Cairo, before baby Yusuf was even born, when Batah had cried because the camels all looked so sad, and Ali had had a joke bid for one of the animals accepted by the auctioneer, causing all sorts of arguments and mayhem. His own birthday just gone, his thirty-ninth, when his wife and kids had arranged a surprise party for him, dressing up as ancient Egyptians and cheering and whooping as he came in through the front door.
He laughed out loud at the memory – little Yusuf burbling in a tissue-paper nemes head-dress; Zenab as Queen Nefertiti – the sound echoing through the masts of the feluccas lashed to the quayside before abruptly catching into a sort of choking half-sob, his eyes blurring as though he had opened them underwater. These people are so precious, he thought to himself, yet I spend so little time with them, provide so badly for them with my crappy police salary that hasn't gone up for the last five years and is less than what Hosni earns in a single month. And if they were to be suddenly taken away from me – how could I ever cope with that? With the thought that there is so much more I could have done for them, so much more of myself I could have given.
I'll try harder, he whispered to himself. Spend more time at home, not work so hard. Be a better husband and father.
Only when this case is over, however, came another voice. Only when I know the truth about Piet Jansen and Hannah Schlegel. Only when I have all the answers.
He gazed out across the river, the water slurping at his feet, the green lights on the minarets of a pair of neighbouring mosques peering at him out of the dark like snake eyes. Then, crunching his empty can into a ball and drop-kicking it into the river, he turned and climbed back up onto the Corniche.
JERUSALEM
Hani al-Hajjar Hani-Jamal had been transferred the previous day to a holding cell up at Zion, the largest of Jerusalem's regional police stations, and it was there that Ben-Roi had to go to interview him, phoning ahead to get the necessary authorizations.
A dour, forbidding complex of buildings on the edge of what had once been the city's Russian Compound, the station had grimy barred windows, a patchy eczema of ivy crusted across its face and walls topped with tangled tubes of razor-wire. As well as ordinary criminals it had long served as the main interrogation centre for those suspected of Palestinian militancy, in the process gaining an unwholesome reputation for brutality and ill treatment of prisoners. Al-Moscobiyyeh the Palestinians called it, after the Arab word for Moscow, speaking its name with a mixture of dread and foreboding.
Ben-Roi had always had a bad feeling about the place – a couple of years back he'd turned down a promotion because it would have meant transferring there – and as he entered now through a door at the rear of the station, past a gaggle of distraught Arab women clamouring for news of some loved one who was being held there, he felt his stomach involuntarily tightening, like a frightened animal curling itself into a protective ball.
He announced himself to one of the duty sergeants, signed a couple of forms and was escorted through a maze of grim, harshly lit corridors and down into the basement, where he was shown into a small interview room with a table, two chairs and, incongruously, a poster of a bright purple tulip taped to the rear wall. Muffled sounds seeped into the room from elsewhere in the station – a ringing telephone, someone shouting, a barely audible staccato wail that could have been laughter or sobbing – leaving him with the uncomfortable feeling that he was listening not to external noises but to the ghostly echoes of every person who had ever had the misfortune to find themselves in this particular space. He waited until the sergeant had left, then sat down, pulled out his flask and took a long, comforting swig.
Five minutes passed, then the door of the room opened again and another policemen came in, leading the man Ben-Roi had arrested a few nights ago. For some reason he was wearing just a T-shirt and oversized boxer-shorts, no trousers. The policeman brought him over to the table and sat him down, handcuffing his left wrist to one of the chair legs, an unnatural position that left the prisoner bent forwards and to his left.
'Call when you're finished,' he said. 'I'll be down the corridor, third room on the right.'
He walked out and slammed the door behind him, leaving Ben-Roi and the Palestinian alone.
As well as the black eye he had received on the night of his arrest, the man now sported an ugly rosette of bruising on his upper left cheek. He was unshaven, and exuded a sour, sweaty, faintly faecal odour that slowly permeated the room. He looked up at Ben-Roi, then down at the floor, shifting back and forth in his seat, clearly uncomfortable in the position the handcuff had forced him into. Ben-Roi pulled a tab of chewing gum from his pocket and slipped it into his mouth.
'What happened to your trousers?'
The Palestinian shrugged, but said nothing.
'Someone steal them?'
Still the Palestinian didn't reply. Ben-Roi repeated the question.
'No-one fucking steal them,' snapped the man, his bloodshot eyes flicking upwards and then down again.
'So what happened to them?'
The man twisted his wrist in the handcuff.
'I ill,' he mumbled after a brief pause, face reddening. 'I need shit. I tell guard but he no let me out, so I shit my trousers. Other men in cell, they give me these, but no-one have new trousers. OK? Happy?'
He looked up again, eyes full of humiliation and hatred. Ben-Roi stared at him, taking in the purpled cheek, the shorts and the handcuffed wrist, the squadge of his chewing gum echoing around the room like the sound of feet traipsing through a muddy bog. Thirty seconds passed, then, with an annoyed grunt, he got to his feet and, warning the man that if he tried anything funny he'd give him another black eye, except worse, left the room. He returned a moment later with a set of keys and, bending, undid the cuffs. The Palestinian straightened, rubbing at his wrist. Ben-Roi sat down again and opened the arson file he had brought with him.
'I've got some questions,' he growled, star
ing down at the notes. 'Same rules as before: you bullshit me, I hurt you. Clear?'
The Palestinian was still massaging his wrist. Ben-Roi looked up.
'Clear?'
The Palestinian nodded.
'OK. On March the tenth 1990 you and two other guys went down to the Jewish Quarter and set light to an apartment there. You remember?'
Hani-Jamal mumbled a grudging affirmative. Ben-Roi leant forward.
'Why?'
In the end he didn't get much out of him. The Palestinian was nervous and evasive, convinced Ben-Roi was trying to trap him into some sort of admission of guilt. It wasn't this that was the problem, however, but the fact that he simply didn't seem to know very much. His cousin Majdi, one of the two boys who had actually been convicted of the arson attack, had roped him into the whole enterprise, promising him twenty dollars if he came along and acted as lookout. He himself had not climbed up to the flat, just waited in the alleyway below while the others went up and set light to the old woman's property. Why they had done so and what, if anything, they had against the old woman he had no idea. Ben-Roi pushed and cajoled and probed, but to no avail, and eventually he realized he was not going to get anything more from the man and brought the interrogation to an end.