Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  “Has Abu Walid been in?” she asked.

  “He is with Abu Ziyad,” he responded.

  Abu Ziyad’s office was a block away, in the Baladiya, the municipal office building. She was tempted to walk over there, but it wouldn’t be appropriate. She sat down at her desk, but immediately popped back up, too restless to sit still. She had no open cases, nothing to distract herself with. Her hand went into her pocket almost of its own accord and pulled out the business card Benny had given her. She shouldn’t call him without talking to the captain, but he wouldn’t know that. She dialed the number, and held her breath while it rang.

  “It is Rania Bakara from the Palestinian police,” she announced. “Have you identified the dead girl?”

  She was almost sure he was going to say, “I just told your bosses all about it,” and hang up, but he didn’t.

  “We’re working on it,” he said cheerfully. “The Chinese consulate doesn’t think she is from China, but if she is, they won’t be able to ID her. Nearly all of the Chinese women come here illegally from Egypt, so there’s no record of them.”

  “Why don’t they think she is Chinese?” she asked.

  “Her clothes and haircut,” he said. “The consul suggested she could be Filipina or Malaysian. We’ve sent a picture to the Philippine Consulate as well. The Malaysians don’t have a consulate—it’s a Muslim country.”

  “I know that.” She hadn’t, actually. She just didn’t like the way he stressed the word “Muslim.”

  “She might not be a worker,” he said. “She could be one of those peace activists. A lot of them are hanging around this area now because of the Fence.”

  “It’s not a fence,” she said. “It’s an apartheid wall.” Abdulhakim set down the file he was reading and made a note on a small yellow pad. Her desk was behind his, so she couldn’t tell if he was eavesdropping.

  “Let’s not get into politics,” Benny said. He sounded amused, though. “Our medical examiner says she was six weeks pregnant,” he added.

  “Is that why you say she was an activist? Because only loose women care about Palestinians?”

  “I didn’t say she was loose. She could have been married to a Palestinian.”

  “Not dressed like that. Besides, there was no ring on her finger.” Of course, the killer could have taken the ring. But if the girl was married to a Palestinian, a Palestinian might have killed her, and Rania didn’t want to consider that. “Have you canvassed the settlements?”

  “We are getting ready to,” he said. “Some boys from the immigration police are on their way to Elkana now. They think there are some illegal domestic workers employed there.”

  “I want to go with them,” she announced. She had never before wanted to set foot in any of the colonies built on her people’s stolen land. She looked down on the Palestinians who took jobs there. But this was her case, and she wasn’t going to sit around waiting for the Israeli police to find out who this girl was and why she was killed.

  “No problem,” he said, forestalling all the arguments she had been preparing. “Be at the entrance to Ariel in half an hour.”

  As she raced down the steps, Captain Mustafa was clumping up them. Over his shoulder, she saw a service taxi on the street and waved to it frantically.

  “Weyn rayha?” he asked. Where are you going?

  “I spoke to Benny,” she answered. “I am going with him to Elkana.” Not strictly true, but close enough.

  He frowned more than usual. “There will be trouble,” he said. “The DCL wants to handle the case. It’s Area C.”

  “Area C,” she scoffed. The Oslo accords had divided Palestinian land into a complex web of Areas A, B, and C, ostensibly governing who had responsibility for civil affairs and security in each area. The larger Palestinian cities were classified as “Area A,” and theoretically under total control of the Palestinian Authority; most villages were areas of shared control, “Area B,” but lands nearer to Israeli settlements and roads, including border villages and most agricultural lands, were “Area C,” under complete control of the Israeli occupiers. The Israelis never worried about whether they were breaking the agreements. Since the Second Intifada began, their tanks were in and out of Bethlehem, Jenin, Ramallah, all the cities, almost daily. Under Oslo, the Palestinians were supposed to have their own country by this time.

  “What is Abu Ziyad doing?” she asked.

  “He is in touch with the Israeli DCL,” the captain responded.

  “No, no, no,” Rania said, then stopped herself abruptly. The captain always treated her like a daughter, but even daughters had to observe certain protocols. Her sense of injustice reared up—how dared they give away her case without even consulting her? But of course, no one had ever said it was her case. She had found a body, that was all.

  “Benny invited me to go with him,” she said. “What will it hurt?”

  The captain stroked his mustache, thinking it over. “Tamam,” he said. Okay. “Perhaps it will not hurt.” He might be glad to have her as a mole with the Israeli police. Abu Ziyad was his friend, but she didn’t think he trusted the man completely either. She would have today to convince Benny she could be valuable to him.

  * * *

  She caught a shared taxi to Yasouf and then another to Kifl Hares, and crossed the highway to the long entrance to Ariel. She wasn’t sure if she should wait near the bus stop, or go up to the gate. She would rather not speak to the soldier at the gate, who was already staring at her as if he thought she had a bomb under her jilbab, just ready to blow herself up along with him and the teenagers waiting for buses. She was about to call Benny on her mobile when a jeep screeched to a halt next to where she stood.

  “You are the policewoman?” one of the young men inside called loudly in English.

  “Yes.”

  He gestured for her to get in. It was an enormous step up, and she nearly didn’t make it. She felt a little pull in her groin muscle as she hoisted herself onto a half-seat covered with guns and flak jackets. Once she was as settled as she could get, she inspected the company.

  Two of the young men looked like they were doing their compulsory military service; they could not have been more than nineteen. The third was a little older. They were full of jokes and at the end of a joke, they would punch each other in the arms, like ten-year-olds.

  They reminded her of the soldiers who used to come into the camp when she was in high school, driving slowly, baiting the young men to come out and throw stones so they could shoot at them. That was the First Intifada, and Rania was heavily involved with the Fatah youth movement, organizing among students, and sneaking off to meetings at night. Her parents didn’t want her involved. Two of her brothers were already in prison.

  She threw stones at the jeeps too, when they did their constant sweeps through the camp. She was good with a slingshot. The boys would praise her aim, better than most of theirs, but when the soldiers got out of the jeeps and started running after them, looking for kids to arrest and beat, two older boys whose houses were near hers would grab her arms and run with her to her house and throw her inside, telling her, “Stay here, you have another role to play. You will not serve your country from prison.” She never understood it, they were out there, they would probably end up in prison, if they were not killed first. But she accepted it, because their caring was obviously genuine. They were not trying to exclude her. They saw in her something special and part of their job was to protect certain leaders. So she would stay in the house and peek out of the windows and see which boys got snatched up, who was shot or beaten until he was bloody.

  “I am Nimrod,” said the tall man sitting next to her. She restrained a grin. One of the soldiers who used to terrorize Aida had that name, and then she read something like it in an American novel, but there it wasn’t a name, it was a word that she gathered meant “idiot.” She loved thinking of that evil soldier as “Stupidhead.” Nimrod introduced the driver as Dani.

  The third guy’s name she d
idn’t catch, but he was talking to her now, asking in Hebrew if she wanted a cookie. She hesitated, trying to decide if it was advantageous to let them know that she knew some Hebrew. They would accept her more readily if she spoke Hebrew with them, but she didn’t know if she wanted to be accepted by them. If they didn’t think she understood them, they would talk more freely and she might learn more.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Hebrew,” she said in English.

  The guy whose name she didn’t know said to Nimrod, “Ask her if she wants a cookie.”

  Nimrod held out the package of cookies to her, and said in English, “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” she said, but she took a cookie. She should take anything she could get from the Israelis. They got her land, at least she should get a cookie.

  They ignored her now and talked to one another in Hebrew. They didn’t say anything interesting, but she gathered they were excited to be on this mission because they might get to beat people up. As they sped down the highway, Nimrod and Dani told the other guy about some Nigerians they arrested yesterday, who had tried to run.

  “We beat the shit out of them,” Nimrod said, and they all laughed.

  One of them had to go to the hospital, Dani said, but they held him in an ice-cold cell for a few hours with his bleeding head first, to punish him for giving them so much trouble. Nimrod said the Nigerian women always lied and claimed to have kids.

  Just when she thought she might explode and say something she would regret, the car screeched to a halt before the yellow gate that led to the settlement of Elkana. The soldier in the guard booth pressed the button that lifted the gate. Rania took a long look around her as they drove into the settlement. She had only seen the identical rows of red roofs from the hills above it. She had always wondered what it would look like inside. She had never seen anything like it, a town seemingly cut out with a cutter, like the handbags in her aunt’s factory in Aida. Every house was exactly like every other, with identical small yards of green grass and a few flowers. All the streets seemed to go around in circles, each leading to another circle that looked exactly the same. She figured the policemen would never leave her alone in here, but they better not because she would never ever find her way out. She would wander in Elkana for the rest of her life.

  Behind some of the houses, she glimpsed oblong swimming pools, filled with still turquoise water. There were no chickens or sheep, like you found in the yards in Mas’ha, nor fragrant patches of mint and sage for tea. Every house had a terrace, and on the terraces there would be a wooden table and two big wooden chairs, not the stacking plastic ones many Palestinians kept in a corner in case a host of family or friends decided to drop by. There seemed to be water spurting out of the ground, drenching the lawns and keeping them bright green.

  “What is making that water?” she asked Nimrod.

  “What water?”

  “Coming out of the ground like that.”

  He followed her outstretched hand. “Oh, sprinkler systems.”

  “Do they go like that all time?”

  “Most of them are on a timer, so they start and stop every so many minutes.”

  She considered that. All this water. In Aida in the summer, there was never enough water for everyone in the camp. You got it on a rotating basis, but sometimes there was not enough pressure to pump it up to the houses at the top, even when it was their turn. You were lucky if you got to take a bath twice a week.

  They split into pairs. She was paired with Nimrod, because he spoke English. He handed her a picture of the dead girl, printed on a color printer. It had been digitally cleaned up so she did not look dead. They went house to house. Most people were at work, and the first ten people who were home did not recognize the girl. At a grocery store with signs in English, Hebrew, and Russian, the woman said yes, she came in sometimes, but no, she didn’t know her name or where she lived, who she worked for or where she came from.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, looking curiously at Rania, “I didn’t pay that much attention. We’re very busy during the days.” Rania looked around the empty store and wondered.

  “Are there other stores?” Rania asked.

  “Not ones with vegetables like mine,” the woman said firmly.

  “Is that what she usually came for?”

  “Not just. She bought everything from me, milk, toilet paper, everything.”

  “Then it makes sense that she lived in this area of the settlement?”

  “I guess so,” the woman acknowledged.

  They concentrated in the neighborhood around the store. They were approaching a house where there were four small children playing in the front yard with a young Asian woman. She saw them and vanished into the house, slamming the door after her. The children started crying. While Nimrod struggled with the locked front door, the nanny burst through the back door and headed for a series of fences. Nimrod took off after her. Rania hesitated. Her clothing was not designed for jumping over fences. Maybe she should stay with the kids. She looked around. She saw no one on the street. Surely a religious Israeli settlement would be safe for its children for a few minutes alone. She tore off after the woman and the policeman.

  By the time she caught up to them, Nimrod had pinned the young woman against the wall of another housing complex. The young woman was out of breath and crying.

  “No, no, please don’t take me away,” she begged in Hebrew.

  Rania gestured to Nimrod to let go. She ushered the young woman to a picnic table in the middle of a courtyard and they sat down close together. Nimrod stood nearby, clearly annoyed at being dismissed but not interfering.

  “It’s okay,” Rania said in English.

  “No, not okay. I don’t want to go back to the Philippines,” the young woman said in English.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Delmarie,” the young woman sobbed out.

  “Delmarie, I am not with immigration,” Rania said, thinking that that should be self-evident. Although there were many Palestinian Israelis in the police, she highly doubted there were any hijab-wearing women in the immigration police. “But,” she said in a warning voice, “that man over there is an immigration policeman. If you cooperate with us, nothing will happen to you, but if you don’t, you could find yourself going home very quickly.”

  She pulled out the picture of the dead girl, and asked Delmarie if she knew her. Delmarie barely looked at it and shook her head.

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Please look more closely.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “I think you do know her. Tell me what you know, or these police will take you away and you’ll be deported.”

  She hated herself for bullying a terrified girl, but she was sick of people lying to her. It was not usually so hard to get to the truth; just another reason not to get involved with Israelis.

  Delmarie said, “I know her a little, but I don’t know anything about the trouble she is in.”

  “What trouble is she in?”

  Delmarie looked away. Rania pointed to Nimrod, who was standing nearby, fingering his handcuffs.

  “Maybe you’d rather talk to him?”

  Delmarie shook her head vigorously.

  Rania said, exasperated, “Delmarie, I am very busy. What is her name?” She tapped the picture.

  “Nadya.”

  “Nadya is dead, and we need to find out who killed her. If you know something, tell me now.”

  At the word “dead,” Delmarie made a small uss sound and crossed herself. “She had a problem with a man,” she said.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I don’t know. But I saw them arguing, and he said he would call the police on her, and she said she would call them on him.”

  “When was this?”

  “One week ago.”

  “Did you know this man?”

  Delmarie shook her head again.

  “Describe him.”

  “Big,” she said, lifting a
palm high above her head. “Hair short, and a beard. Religious.” She drew a circle on her head, where a skullcap would sit.

  “Was he the man she worked for?” Rania pressed.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know who she worked for. Sometimes she brought the children to play here.”

  “Where do they live?”

  Delmarie started to explain it, but Rania couldn’t keep track of the lefts and the rights, and looking around here, with all the houses looking alike, she would never be able to give them a landmark.

  “Show me,” Rania said, getting to her feet and indicating for Delmarie to do the same.

  “But the children are by themselves,” Delmarie objected.

  “You already left them by themselves,” Rania said. She realized Delmarie had left in a panic, and now that she was calmer, she was worried about the kids, or maybe about what their parents would do if they got home and found them alone.

  “We will go back to the house now, and you can go ask a neighbor to look after the kids for a few minutes.”

  Delmarie agreed, since she had no choice. Once the children were safely ensconced with a cartoon on television and a neighbor to keep them company while they watched it, she showed them to a house about two blocks away. En route, Rania asked her more questions about Nadya.

  “Was she also from the Philippines?”

  “No.”

  “Where was she from?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t want to say.”

  “Then how do you know she wasn’t from the Philippines?”

  “She didn’t speak my language.”

  “How did you communicate?”

  “We spoke Hebrew.”

  “What language was she arguing with the man in?”