by Kate Raphael
“Are you sure he is telling the truth?”
“He has no criminal record. His employer verified that he works the night shift, and he punched his time card in and out at the usual times. When he came out of work and found the car gone, he called the police immediately.”
Rania nodded. It would be too easy, that the owner of the car would be the one who left it here. Lehrman said he never went into the West Bank, Ali told her. He didn’t know anyone who went there. It was too dangerous. His car keys were still on his key ring, and he had not given anyone else a key. The car was a late model Citroen, one of the most common cars in Israel, which was probably why it was taken.
Ali handed Rania a gold bracelet with some Cyrillic writing on it.
“We found this on the floor in the front, where the passenger would sit,” he said.
Rania turned it over in her hands. It was heavy. That much gold would be worth a lot of money. She was sure there was more information she should get about the car, but really, she was starting to wonder what she was doing here. It didn’t seem likely that whatever happened had anything to do with her people. Probably some Israeli teenagers took the car for fun, ran out of petrol, and in their panic at finding themselves stuck near a Palestinian village, ran off without closing the doors.
“Does the car have petrol in it?” she asked Ali.
“It is more than a quarter full,” he told her. “No mechanical problem either.”
She peered around, asking the land she knew well to share its mysteries with her. She had only lived in Mas’ha seven years, but she had a deeper sense of this countryside than of the hills around Bethlehem, where she had spent seventeen years. Maybe it was because this was where she had learned to be a detective, to sense with every pore in her body.
Some few hundred meters ahead, toward the Israeli checkpoint, she saw a crowd gathered. There were only men there; she saw no headscarves. She spied a few soldiers among them.
“Thank you for the information,” she said to Ali. He nodded and watched her move toward the checkpoint.
She walked purposefully, careful not to run, which might cause a bad reaction from the army. Chloe shadowed her, about fifteen meters to her left and a few steps behind. It was ridiculous, Rania thought; two women moving together but pretending to be apart, like a kite with a long tail.
When she got closer, she saw that the people in green uniforms were actually border police, who were like soldiers, but worse. In the border villages they were nicknamed Druze, because many of them were Israeli Palestinians belonging to that sect. People said the Druze border police were more brutal even than the Russians. Rania didn’t know about that. To her, they all seemed equally bad.
Only one of the three border police guarding this spot was actually Druze. The other two were Jewish Israelis. One was very tall and lanky, with a bush of dark hair. The other was pale and wore a skullcap, marking him as an Orthodox Jew.
They had rounded up about two dozen men, nearly all between twenty-five and forty-five, and mostly dressed for construction work. Some wore plaid flannel shirts, even in the heat. A few carried metal lunch pails and tool belts. Most carried nothing, only some cigarettes peeking out of a shirt pocket. Occasionally they passed around a nearly empty water bottle. They were lined up along the guardrail, several layers deep. When one of the older men tried to sit down, the tall Druze waved his gun at the old haj and screamed “Kum!” Stand Up! in Hebrew. Rania found it especially galling when Druze spoke Hebrew to the people, as if they were too good to speak their native Arabic.
“Why can’t they sit down?” she asked in Arabic.
“Usquti,” came out of his mouth in a bored snarl. Shut up, without even looking at her. She walked straight up to him and looked up into his face. Her head would just fit under his chin.
“Why shut up?” she asked. “What did they do? It is hot, they are old, they want to sit down. Why should you care?”
“Mish shughlik,” he snarled. It’s not your business. At least she had succeeded in getting him to speak Arabic.
“It is my business,” she said. “I’m a Palestinian policewoman. It’s my job to protect them.”
“You are police?” He looked at her now, and the hatred in his face made her want to recoil, but she held herself steady. “Let me see your ID.”
“I don’t have to show you my ID. You are in my land.”
Almost lazily, he hoisted his gun so it touched her heart. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Chloe jump. The other woman moved quickly to stand behind Rania’s left shoulder.
The Druze ignored her, his piercing black eyes fixed on Rania.
“I can make real trouble for you,” he said in Arabic. “Get lost, or I will arrest you. I will beat you,” he promised, waving his gun slightly to show her how, “even if you are a woman.”
She was irrationally amused by his emphasis, not sure if he meant to suggest that she might not be a woman. She put all her concentration into not laughing, which would probably really push him to violence. Chloe moved back a little and raised her video camera. He noticed and turned toward her.
“Close the camera,” he said in English.
Chloe hesitated.
“CLOSE IT!” he bellowed, starting to lunge toward her.
Chloe snapped the screen shut and lowered the camera, although Rania noticed that the red recording light was still on. As Rania had the thought, Chloe covered the light with her thumb.
The other soldiers were lounging nearby, watching the interaction as if it were a soccer match. The tall one kept up a running commentary, punctuating his words with chuckles. The Orthodox seldom seemed to say anything. Chloe strolled over to stand next to the joker. Rania moved to where she could hear their conversation without being drawn in.
“That man is very violent,” Chloe said. “Can’t you get him to calm down?”
“He is the commander,” the young man responded. “The Arabs call him ‘Top Killer.’”
“Why do they call him that?”
“He says he killed three Arabs in one day, for no reason.”
“That’s terrible,” Chloe said. “You know, these men are only trying to feed their families.”
“They have to learn that they cannot work in Israel,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, you’re working in Palestine,” Chloe said. He laughed. Chloe pulled a pamphlet out of her backpack and handed it to the soldier.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s written by soldiers, for other soldiers, to tell them why they should not fight in the Occupied Territories.”
To Rania’s surprise, he started reading it right away. He didn’t speak again until he had read every word.
“Where are you from, America?” he asked when he was done.
“Yes.”
“What’s the matter,” he said. “You don’t have enough problems in America, you have to come here? Look what you are doing in Iraq.”
“I agree,” she said, “that’s a problem too.”
“Why don’t you go there?” he asked.
“It’s too dangerous right now. I hope maybe when I am done with my work here, I will be able to go there.”
“What is your work here?” he asked.
“I work for peace,” Chloe said.
“I am also working for peace,” and he rattled the gun that hung by his side. Chloe’s pamphlet didn’t seem to have had much impact.
“Peace will never be won with guns,” Chloe said. “In my country and yours, we all need to understand that.”
“Please go to Iraq as soon as possible,” he said and walked away.
Top Killer was lecturing the group of men now. Chloe and Rania both made their way back there. Top Killer pointed to the Palestinian road that wound through the fields. “Go to Beit Amin and wait,” he ordered them. “Baregel.” On foot.
It was at least ten miles to Beit Amin.
“Fii sayara.” There’s a car, one of the men said.
“No, you walk.” Top Killer motioned with his gun.
“Look, it’s enough they have to spend all day waiting, not working,” Chloe objected. “At least let them take a car.”
He spun around and glared at her. Then, with the concentration of a dance move, he smacked the first man in line in the face with the butt of his gun. Blood spurted from the man’s cheek. Chloe moved toward Top Killer, but stopped.
The wounded man’s friends were gathered around him, stanching the blood with a handkerchief. One of them offered him the tiny bit of water remaining in his small bottle. Chloe turned to Rania, tears glinting in her eyes.
“I should learn to keep my mouth shut,” she said.
Rania shook her head. If this woman was going to live here, she needed to toughen up some.
“You think he did that because of you?” Rania asked. “He did it because he wanted to. He is not a nice man.”
“That’s all? Not nice?”
“What else is there to say?”
The men walked off in a straggly line in the direction Top Killer had pointed. Chloe and Rania watched them silently.
“I’m going with them,” Chloe said.
What did Chloe want? Rania wondered. Permission? Praise? To be talked out of it? It seemed as good a thing for her to do as any, though she didn’t exactly look like ten mile hikes were her daily routine.
“Diiri baalik a la haalik.” Take care of yourself, Rania said, and watched the American make her way into the sad little march.
Chapter 4
Nearly two and a half hours after Rania arrived at the crossroads, the army commander finally kicked away the boulders comprising his makeshift roadblock and gestured to the cars they could pass. The women gathered themselves up from the low walls and rocks where they had sat for so long, brushing the dust from their backsides. Most of them headed back to their home villages. It was already eleven. In most Palestinian offices, the work day ends at two or three in the afternoon, giving everyone several hours to get home before dark. School would be over at half past twelve, so the teachers certainly need not go. Rania wondered uncharitably why they hadn’t figured that out several hours ago. She supposed curiosity had kept everyone glued to their positions, not wanting to miss anything exciting that might happen. In their situation, she might have done the same.
She climbed back down the embankment. In the rainy winter season, it would be treacherously muddy, but now it was no problem to scamper down the baked earth. She pondered the mystery of the abandoned car. Why would someone take a car from Israel, drive it to the edge of the West Bank, and then leave it? The most logical explanation was that they needed to move something from one place to another, but couldn’t risk being stopped at the checkpoint. Weapons, probably, for who would go to so much trouble for anything else? Someone may have brought something from Israel and buried it here in these fields, or they could have snuck into Israel, taken the car, and driven back to the West Bank to load up some cargo. But in that case, why go get an Israeli car, rather than using a local one? Because an Israeli car would not be stopped on the road at night, while a car with Palestinian plates might.
The army had had dozens of men searching the groves. If they hadn’t found anything, they would continue to look for days or weeks, using every unpleasant means at their disposal, mostly informants. They had all kinds of ways of finding informants, willing or unwilling. The people who had the misfortune to live in those tall houses on the edge of the villages would almost certainly be having visits from army units in the next weeks. The open top floors people left so that they could build up made perfect lookout perches. An ugly period was coming.
She glanced around, thinking about where you would hide something in plain sight. She wandered along the sewer pipes, at the bed of the nearly-dry creek. She didn’t see anything weird, just detritus from the new throwaway lifestyle of rural Palestinians, combined with the garbage from the settlement. A pile of rotting meat caused her to cover her face in revulsion. She was about to give up when she spotted a fashionable high-heeled shoe in the brush, not the kind of thing that usually gets thrown away. She looked around for its pair, but didn’t see it.
She picked it up and walked on, paying closer attention to patches of tall grass that seemed to have been tamped down, as if by something being dragged over them. She climbed a ways up the other hill from the one where she had talked to the police, the one leading toward Elkana, getting enough distance to survey the area below. It was easier now that she knew what she was looking for; the path made by the flattened rushes jumping out at her. She memorized its path before descending again, knowing that it would look less clear up close. She followed it for about two hundred meters and caught a flash of lavender fabric. She fought her way through the brush, snagging her sleeve on a tangle of brambles. She impatiently tore it off. She wondered if she could coax one of her nieces or sisters-in-law to mend it for her. If she did it herself, she’d probably end up sewing the sleeve to the skirt.
Obviously some other woman had been less lucky than she—her flouncy sleeve had shorn straight off on the sharp thorns. But why would anyone have gone this way when there were clear paths from the village to the groves? These bushes were good cover from the border police, but a woman trying to cross illegally would not do it in high heels and a lavender blouse. This would not make a bad hiding place, she supposed, for whatever cargo might have been in that car, but again, no one would let a woman go out to make a drop in party clothes.
She looked down, canvassing the area for footprints that might match this misplaced shoe. She saw none. She could make out one set clearly, but they were made by flat sandals. She stepped into the tracks until she reached a spot where something heavy had been pried loose. From the impressions in the muddy ground, it had been a wide board, probably the soggy remains of someone’s cart. A clump of mud on a limp tire drew her eye briefly, but it told her nothing. She straightened up from her examination and caught another glimpse of lavender. Over there, something was hidden in the grass. She couldn’t imagine it had anything to do with the stolen car or whatever the army was after, but she was curious and you never knew. She pointed to the bright spot in the distance, and keeping her arm oriented in that direction, sidled carefully through the high grass.
“Wallah!” Her exclamation seemed to ricochet in the quiet valley. She hastily peeked around, imagining soldiers leaping out at her. But nothing moved, least of all the blue-gray corpse of the young foreign woman.
Rania had seen plenty of death. Her first boyfriend had bled out in her arms, as she screamed at the soldiers who refused to let the Red Crescent medics come through. But in her years with the police, she had never been confronted with a dead body. Most deaths in this area were not mysteries. People were killed by the army, or by Israeli settlers, or they were collaborators, or a family feud exploded in unfortunate violence.
Rania squeezed her eyes shut, breathed deeply, opened them again. She needed to think.
There had to be some relationship between this woman and the stolen car, right? But what? Was she the driver, and something had scared her so badly she had left the car and run? Had whatever frightened her chased after her and killed her? Or had she fallen and injured herself? She could not have made it far wearing one high-heeled shoe, and the other had been two hundred meters back. And there would have been tracks.
Rania fished a plastic bag out of her work supplies. She tore it open, spread it on the wet ground and knelt next to the body. Even after she pulled on latex gloves, her hand hovered over the other woman’s head, loathe to violate the sanctity of death. But then her police training took over and she clinically parted the matted black hair on the woman’s forehead. Her fingers located a wound the size of a baseball, from the temple to just above the ear. The blood was still a little wet. She pulled her hand away and looked at the blood on her glove. Memories of Qais—she pushed that aside. This wasn’t a time for sentiment.
Had the girl been clubbed or fallen
and hit her head on a rock? Rania walked back to where the drag marks began. Now she saw tiny traces of rust-colored blood on the brown grass, but no obvious instrument that would have caused them. That suggested her death was no accident. If she had fallen and hit her head, the rocks would not have gotten up and walked away. If, on the other hand, someone hit her with something, they could have taken it with them.
She wondered for a moment how she could have found in an hour what the army had missed in twice that time. Was it possible they had found the body but left it? She dismissed the possibility. They had been looking for something very different. They would have concentrated on places where something might be buried and marked so it could be easily found again. They would not have paid attention to Palestinian garbage, or looked in places that might be so easily stumbled over.
She climbed back up to the road, wondering what to do if the Israeli police were still there. She did not want to tell them about the body before she had had a chance to talk to Captain Mustafa about it, but even less did she want to risk them finding it for themselves. Fortunately, they were gone. She returned to the place where the dead woman lay and called the captain.
“I am coming,” he said.
While she waited, she examined the area, moving cautiously to avoid disturbing anything. Several people had been near the body, she could tell. There were the sandal tracks she had noticed before, going up and back and up again. That would have been a farmer, and from their unevenness, she thought he was old—she detected a slight limp. There were also donkey tracks.
Donkey droppings under this tree, so the donkey was tied up here. The old man’s tracks went this way, then veered off to pick up the shoe, and back onto the so-called path. He stopped here, next to the body’s left hand, and crouched down, no doubt to make sure she was really dead. But there, by her head, was another footprint, made by a little-worn running shoe. She found the others that went with it, running up toward the road. The tracks were uneven, the right ones more pronounced than the left. The person—almost certainly a man from the size of the shoe—was carrying something in his right hand as he ran. He was running fast, so probably he was young.