Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  “What’s going on?” she asked him quietly.

  “The settlers in Elkana are building on the other side of the Wall.”

  “I know.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, you don’t know about this. You’re talking about the houses after the built part of the Wall in Mas’ha.”

  She nodded.

  “But now they’re getting ready to build on Azzawiya land, where the Wall isn’t built yet. They cut forty trees today, and they plan to uproot them tomorrow. It’s his land,” gesturing to the old man.

  She quickly sucked in breath, making a small whistling sound.

  “Who is he?”

  “Abu Shaadi.”

  “Do you know what he wants to do?”

  “Well, Jaber called us, so probably he wants to resist.”

  Chloe tried to contain her excitement. It wasn’t seemly to jump up and down on hearing that you were going to have the opportunity to breathe teargas and be shot at. Sitting in front of bulldozers to stop them from uprooting sacred olive trees was the kind of thing that had brought her to Palestine nine months ago, but since then, there had been precious little of it to do.

  “What are they talking about?” she asked Avi eagerly.

  “Goats,” he said with a wry grin. She caught his meaning—he had not defied the customs of his land, bluffed his way through checkpoints, and climbed over fences to hear about goats. They endured a few more minutes of chitchat before the old man turned to Avi.

  “Do you think you can stop the bulldozers?”

  Avi surprised Chloe by deferring to her.

  “It is not we who can stop them,” she said carefully. “If you want to try to stop them, we can bring some people to help.” Avi nodded approval as Jaber translated for Abu Shaadi. The old man’s face fell.

  “But you will not stop them?”

  Chloe rolled her eyes at Avi. This was a constant struggle. People wanted to believe that the internationals were the answer to their prayers, that you only had to call them and poof! the army and its tanks and bulldozers would disappear. Jaber stepped in to prevent the old man’s disappointment from insulting his guests.

  “How many people can you bring?” he asked the two foreigners.

  They consulted silently. “I can call INSP,” Chloe said. “I don’t know how many people they have now—they couldn’t bring more than four or five, I would think.”

  “It’s short notice,” Avi said. “But I can usually find five or six.”

  “They will bring ten foreigners,” Jaber told Abu Shaadi. Chloe cringed. She didn’t feel as confident as that sounded.

  “Will others from the village come?” Avi wanted to know.

  “Perhaps. After we eat, we will go and talk to the mayor.”

  Alaa appeared in the doorway. “You’re invited,” she said. That meant dinner was ready. Chloe went to the kitchen to help bring out the food. Ahlam had made all her favorites. In addition to the cauliflower, there was mjaddara, rice and lentils; labneh, yogurt strained of liquid, and a spicy stewed tomato dish.

  Two of Jaber’s sons joined them at the table. Ahlam and Alaa did not eat with them. They would eat later, in the kitchen. Now they hovered, making sure no one wanted for anything. Chloe felt guilty eating while they watched, but to decline their hospitality would be even ruder.

  Avi ate only tiny amounts. Chloe tried to spoon cauliflower and tomatoes onto his plate, as Ahlam did to hers. He waved her away.

  “You’re not eating enough,” she said. “You’ll offend Ahlam.”

  “I don’t eat dairy,” he said.

  “There’s no dairy in tomatoes,” she said, too softly for their hosts to hear.

  “I hate tomatoes,” he pouted.

  “That’s ridiculous. A vegan has to like vegetables.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t.”

  When she was feeling generous, Chloe acknowledged that Avi was an impressive young man. His father, who came from one of Israel’s wealthy “First Families,” was a news anchor for one of the big television stations. As a teenager, Avi had cofounded a small direct action group called Anarchists Without Borders, traveling to Palestinian villages by himself using a combination of settler buses and Palestinian public transit. His English was flawless and he was starting to teach himself Arabic. She seldom thought about how young he was, but every now and then, something like his eating habits reminded her that she could easily be his mother.

  A scant fifteen minutes after the food had appeared on the table, Jaber pushed his chair back.

  “Yalla.” Let’s go, he said.

  When she had first come to the West Bank, Chloe had been startled by the pace of meals. At her parents’ home, meals had been long social affairs, where the events of one’s day or the events of the world would be recited and dissected. She had continued this tradition with her friends in adult life. With the love of her life, Alyssa, whose memory still smarted, preparing and consuming meals had played a central role. Palestinians, by contrast, treated meals as if they were about—well, eating. Guests or no guests, they ate solemnly and nearly silently for a few minutes, then abruptly stood up and left the table. If people were going to linger, they did it in the living room or on the porch.

  Avi slung a fraying black backpack over his shoulder, his body tilting slightly under its weight.

  “You could leave that,” Chloe said. “You’re spending the night, right?”

  “No, I need to get home,” he said. “I’ve gotta find out who can make it tomorrow, and call the press.”

  “Why not do it from here?” she asked. “We can split up the calls.”

  He mumbled something about the mobile being expensive, and it would be better to do it from a land line—an obvious lie. Israelis and their cell phones were like peanut butter and jelly. She had rarely seen Avi without his phone glued to his ear.

  There was some reason he didn’t want to stay. It was probably his girlfriend, Maya, a Ukrainian-born Israeli. Chloe didn’t know her well, just that she was gorgeous and studied dance at the university. At demonstrations, she hung onto Avi, as if she didn’t trust him more than a few inches from her side. Probably with good reason. If something was going on between Maya and Avi, Chloe had no interest in getting in the middle. She followed Avi into the cooling dusk, where the fragrance of four hundred dinners blended through the open doors.

  Chapter 7

  Before Rania could call Captain Mustafa about Abu Anwar, he called her.

  “Meet me under the bridge,” he instructed. “The Yahud are coming to take the body.”

  When she got to the bridge, she was relieved to see that Abu Ziyad wasn’t with him. A blue jeep with Hebrew writing on it lurched toward them. A beefy, mostly bald man unfolded himself from behind the wheel. His charcoal eyes seemed to pop out of his head as he surveyed the scene.

  “This is Benny Lazar,” Captain Mustafa told her, shaking the man’s hand enthusiastically. The captain seldom showed pleasure, at least when Rania was around, but he actually smiled when Benny asked in Hebrew about his family.

  “Does she speak Hebrew?” Benny asked Captain Mustafa.

  “Lo,” the captain replied. “Yodaat Anglit.” She speaks English.

  Knowing that Mustafa did not speak English, she could have made it easier by admitting that she knew some Hebrew. Benny would have double work translating everything into Hebrew for the captain, but that was fine with her.

  His quick eyes sized her up, and she imagined what he was seeing. A short woman, light on her feet, with strands of dark hair peeking out from under her hijab. She bet he was thinking she would be pretty if her heavy-rimmed glasses did not give her small face a striped look.

  “What’ve we got?” he asked in English. She led him to the spot where the young woman’s body lay.

  “Sinit,” he said. A Chinese woman.

  “Mumkin,” Captain Mustafa mumbled in reply. Rania recognized the captain’s habitual skepticism in his “maybe.” Apparently unlik
e his Israeli counterpart, he disliked assumptions. “Tell me what you know, not what you believe,” Rania had heard from him over and over.

  Benny was circling the body now, much as Rania had done earlier, and talking compulsively about what he observed. He noted the different sets of tracks, just as she had, the girl’s clothes, and the fact that she had no possessions near or on her. She pointed out to him the blood-stained grasses, and the indications of her being dragged over the ground.

  “So,” he said when she was done, “whodunit?”

  She tried to assess what he was after. He couldn’t think she really knew anything about how the girl ended up here. But whether he was trying to challenge her, or if it was a joke, she couldn’t tell. She glanced at Captain Mustafa, but of course, he had not understood their exchange. He stood a little ways from them, smoking. He was leaving it to her to do the show and tell, which she thought meant that he trusted her and didn’t want to interfere. Or maybe he was testing her to see how she would relate to this big, arrogant, Israeli cop. Whichever, she was going to make him proud of her and not be goaded into losing her temper.

  “No idea,” she said. “But it wasn’t a Palestinian, so maybe you would know better than me.”

  “Why do you say it wasn’t a Palestinian?” He stood so close, she could feel his breath. She forbade herself to move back.

  “The only foreign women living in the villages here are married to Palestinians,” she said, realizing as she spoke that it was not quite true. There was the woman she had met that morning, Chloe, who said she was living in Azzawiya. But she was nothing like this girl. “Dressed like this, she could not have set foot in one of these villages. She must have come from one of the settlements, or from the road. Either way, no Palestinian would have a reason to kill her.”

  “Maybe someone objected to the way she was dressed,” he said. “Besides, there’s a kid in Azzawiya with a Chinese girlfriend.”

  “Where did you hear that?” she burst out. That could not be true. She had talked to a number of people in Azzawiya today. None of them had mentioned ever seeing a Chinese woman in the village.

  “I have my sources,” he said, arching an eyebrow at her. She hoped she was not going to have to spend much more time with this guy. He seemed to enjoy annoying people, and she was easily annoyed. Now she wondered if he was telling the truth or baiting her. Israeli police and soldiers loved to set Palestinians against each other by insinuating that they had informers.

  “Who is the boy?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  No, of course you can’t, she wanted to say, because there is no such boy.

  “You can’t believe everything you hear,” she said instead.

  He chuckled and made some notes in a little spiral-bound notebook he kept in his breast pocket. He put on glasses to write, she noted, and then immediately took them off when he was done. She waited anxiously for him to ask what she had been doing since she found the body. She and the captain had agreed that they would not say anything about Abu Anwar until they had had a chance to talk to him. But Benny seemed too well-informed. What else did he know? she wondered. Or maybe he didn’t really know anything, and it was all a bluff.

  Thankfully, the Israeli coroner’s people arrived and Benny rushed away to direct them. They strung yellow tape all around the area. Then they put numbers on the ground and took lots of pictures. Benny called her over to tell again how she had come to find the body. He did not ask her anything about what she had observed. These were crime scene experts, she understood, who did not need any help from a Palestinian policewoman to identify evidence.

  When they had piled the body onto a stretcher and loaded it into their van, Benny shook hands with Captain Mustafa.

  “See you later,” he said in Hebrew. He opened the door of his jeep. She didn’t like the sound of that. The Israelis had taken over, just as she had feared. She wondered momentarily why she cared. She felt a proprietary interest in the body because she had found it. Plus, if she had noticed the donkey tracks and the shoe prints, the Israelis had too. They would be snooping around in the villages before long, and she intended to be there to protect the people who needed protecting.

  “What happens now?” she asked in English.

  “We’ll get in touch with the embassies, and try to find out who she was.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll find out how they want to handle it.”

  Could that be it? She supposed so. She had never thought about what it would be like, to die far away from home, with no one to care. But why did she assume that? Maybe the girl had a family in Israel, who would call the police when she didn’t come home.

  Benny turned again to get into his jeep.

  “Keep me informed,” she said. He looked at her in surprise and then at Mustafa as if to say, “Rein her in.” The captain stayed a little removed, smoking and saying nothing. She was taking advantage of the fact that he didn’t speak English, but she guessed he was also happy to let her do the interfering, keeping it semiofficial.

  “No problem,” Benny said with a shrug. He even fished a business card out of his front pocket and scribbled a number on the back. “My mobile,” he said.

  * * *

  Captain Mustafa sat ramrod straight on the floral-cushioned couch. It was a little too low for his long legs, which nearly met his chest. Rania tried to emulate him, keeping her hands folded in her lap.

  Abu Jawad lit one cigarette from the end of the last. He sucked on the new one, puffing out his cheeks slightly. “Hai mushkele kbiire.” This is a big problem, he said.

  That’s the understatement of the century, Rania thought. “Indeed, Abu Jawad,” she said. “Why didn’t Abu Anwar come to us directly when he found the girl’s body?”

  “He wanted to talk to me first.”

  “But he didn’t go straight to you either. He worked all day in his fields. Didn’t you find that strange?”

  “Not really. His groves are an hour’s walk from the village. He had already gone half way. If he had to come back, and find me, and talk about the girl, and then go back to the field, it would have been very late when he got to work.”

  “But the girl was dead.”

  “Yes, and she did not get any more dead.”

  “If she had been a Palestinian, don’t you think he would have acted right away?”

  “She was not a Palestinian.” He puffed on his cigarette some more, then put it out in the dregs of his tea. “I think he hoped someone else would have discovered her by the time he got back, and he would not have to say anything.”

  The door opened and Abu Anwar entered, his cane tapping on the wooden floor.

  “Assalamu aleikum,” he said. The fact he did not knock meant that this was a second home for him.

  “W aleikum assalam,” they all murmured.

  Rania spooned sugar into a glass and poured tea from the steaming pot in front of her. She slid it before the old man, who had settled in an armchair opposite them. She hoped assuming the traditional female role might set them at ease with her. When he had taken a sip or two of the tea, she began, taking care to speak softly and not to sound aggressive or anxious.

  Although it had been she who invited the captain to come to this interview, now that he was here, she felt she was being inspected. She wished he would simply take over, but he seemed to have no interest in doing that. He was trying to act like he had no interest in the proceedings at all; he was just now cleaning under his fingernails with a business card. She knew, however, that he was hearing and remembering every word.

  She began by asking Abu Anwar the same questions she had already asked his brother. Why hadn’t he come directly to the police when he found the body? Whom had he talked to during the day? Who else did he see in the morning? What did he think when he found the body?

  He didn’t know what to think, he answered. It’s something very unusual, to find a dead person on your land. It unnerved him. He didn’t want to be invol
ved. He had not seen anyone else on his way to the land. He seemed embarrassed about his decision, and he also seemed afraid. She supposed it made sense to be afraid, when you found a dead body and didn’t tell anyone, and now the police were here questioning you. But she thought that was not quite all.

  “If there is anything else you know or observed, you need to tell us right away because the Israelis already know you were there,” Rania said sternly.

  She felt a twinge about lying to him in this way, knowing that he had been in an Israeli prison, and now had two sons in prison, but it was part of the job. He insisted that he had just wanted to get his work done. He never saw the girl before. He explained how he was looking for a board to put across the river of sewage, and found the shoes and how he fell down and thought he was sick.

  “So, you see, Um Khaled,” he appealed, “I wasn’t right in my mind.”

  “And?” she encouraged. She stole a look at the captain, but he was still sitting like a statue. Why had he come if he wasn’t going to help? she asked herself and then answered her own question. He came to show that she had the backing of someone who mattered, a member of the club. But if he gave them the chance, they would only talk to him. Only by maintaining his silent presence could he bestow on her the authority she needed to conduct the investigation.

  She waited Abu Anwar out as he wrestled with himself. At last he slurped a bit of tea and heaved a deep sigh.

  “There was a woman,” he admitted.

  “A woman where?”

  “Crossing the fields. An Israeli woman.”

  The woman had on dark glasses, he said, a long dark skirt and white blouse, and a scarf over her head like the settler women wear. He could see her hair was dark. She was about thirty, maybe a little younger, attractive.

  “You observed her very well given your distracted state,” she commented.

  “I must have been aware of her without realizing it. In my subconscious.” Seeing her smile, he added, “My son, Ahmed, studied psychology at the university.”