Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  Once behind the wheel, he was in a hurry again, tearing out of the parking lot in a rubber-scorching blur. It was rush hour, and a line of traffic waited at the junction to turn left onto the main road. Rania glanced idly at the red Dan bus disgorging its passengers across the road. Her eyes slowly focused on a young woman with a heart-shaped face and a halo of frizzy brown hair. Benny perked up at the same instant.

  “Got her,” he said.

  The young woman looked both ways carefully, spotting the police car a fraction of a second after Rania spotted her. She hesitated, telegraphing her thought process. Should she brazenly cross the street to Kifl Hares, knowing they could not prove she had not boarded the bus inside the West Bank? Or walk up into the settlement, where a host of security guards lurked to demand her ID? Or maybe she should just sit here in the bus stop, as if she were meeting someone.

  Her decision was made for her, as Rania and Benny did a fast U-turn in the turnaround and squealed up next to her.

  “Marhaba,” Rania greeted her. “We need to talk.”

  Her name was Fatima, and she came from the hamlet of Izbet Salman, near the city of Qalqilya. She had studied chemistry at university. She was engaged, and her fiancé had no work, so she needed money and wanted to work in her field, which was impossible in the West Bank. About a year ago, she had taken a job at a chemical company in the industrial town of Rosh HaAyin.

  No, she answered Benny’s question, the company didn’t know she was from the West Bank. They thought she lived in Jaffa. Her voice trembled. Rania knew she was waiting for them to ask for the name of the company, which she would have to give, and that would be the end of her working there. Rania had no intention of asking for that information. She couldn’t stop Benny from doing it, but she put in a little prayer that his desire to impress her with his righteousness would mean he wouldn’t want to ruin a young woman’s life in front of her.

  For the moment, he seemed focused on other things. He asked Fatima how she traveled from Izbet Salman to Rosh HaAyin. He was standing very close to Fatima, letting his size intimidate her. Rania saw a throng of men across the street, at the entrance to Kifl Hares where the taxis waited, looking over at them. Among them she saw some of the drivers she knew. It wouldn’t be good for her to be seen here, questioning a Palestinian woman on the street in front of the settlement with an Israeli policeman. Better to go across and sit on the roadblock, where everyone could see and hear.

  She stepped around Benny to the street side and took Fatima’s arm gently.

  “You look uncomfortable here,” she said in Arabic. “Let’s go across the street where we can sit down.”

  Before Benny could protest she led the way across the intersection and parked them on the remains of an old stone wall. He had no choice but to follow, only stopping to extract a radio from the police car. Rania nodded to the gathered drivers, and Fatima did too. Benny greeted them in Hebrew and a few of them mumbled “shalom” in return. She imagined they knew him too, from many encounters on the road. If he was as good a guy as he said, they would know that.

  She asked Fatima again about the route she took to her job.

  Each morning, she took a taxi to Azzawiya bridge and climbed up onto the road and walked, or sometimes got a ride to the first bus stop inside Israel. Coming home, it was easier; she could take a bus all the way to Ariel, and then cross the road and take taxis to Izbet Salman. Five mornings a week she left home at four-thirty and returned at almost seven at night.

  She changed in the fields near Azzawiya bridge, she told them. She was in the brush for quite a while on Monday morning, because there were a lot of jesh and she had to wait a long time. She saw many people crossing, like herself, she said. She didn’t notice any of them in particular. She was only interested in the jesh.

  Abruptly, Benny produced the doctored color photo of Nadya’s body.

  “Did you see this woman dead in the fields?”

  Fatima gasped and shook her head vigorously. “Laa laa laa,” she said adamantly. No, no, no. “Don’t you think I would have said, if I had seen such a thing?”

  “What time exactly did you arrive?” Benny asked.

  “Six-fifteen, maybe six-twenty,” she said.

  “And you are sure you did not see her body?”

  “I am telling you, it’s not something you forget.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  He was quiet for a few minutes, writing on a notepad. They were the first minutes she had spent in his presence when he wasn’t talking, Rania reflected.

  “Okay,” he said to Fatima, sounding slightly apologetic. “We’re going to need you to come show us where you were exactly.”

  Rania knew that Fatima was terrified of getting in the police car. She didn’t blame her; she was still frightened too. But Benny’s plan made sense. If Fatima walked right by where the body was at six-fifteen, when the abandoned car was already up above the bridge, and the body was not there, then the relationship between the girl, her killer, and the car was not what they had been assuming.

  Fatima was quiet on the drive through the Deir Balut checkpoint into the Azzawiya lands. She directed them to a tree that looked like any olive tree, but when they got close revealed a hollow in its trunk.

  “This is where I always put my clothes,” Fatima said. She reached into the hollow and removed jilbab, hijab, and a battered pair of sneakers.

  “So on Monday morning, you changed here, and then where did you go?” Benny asked.

  Fatima showed them a spot where the reeds were well tamped down by years of feet and behinds, crossing and sitting, just as she had done. From there she would have had a good view of the goings-on on both roads, the Palestinian one below and the Israeli one up above, but she would not have been visible from either. When she got there, she explained, the jesh were all along the road above, but after an hour or so, they moved down to just where the car was stopped. Then she had been able to climb up to the road and catch a ride across the Green Line.

  Benny had her go through the motions of changing her clothes, waiting, and climbing. He mirrored her, to get her perspective.

  “What are you doing to her?”

  Rania looked up to see Chloe standing there, hands on hips. Her brush with the police had apparently not dampened her desire to butt into every situation.

  “We’re getting ready to beat a confession out of her with a rubber hose, so scram,” Benny said.

  “You think that’s funny?” Chloe asked hotly.

  “I think you’ve been in enough trouble today, so unless you really do want to be deported, you’ll get out of here.”

  Chloe looked to Rania.

  “Ruhi,” Rania said, jerking her head toward the Azzawiya road. “Kul ishi tamam hon.” Go, everything’s fine here.

  Chloe looked at Fatima for a cue. The young woman was impassive, just watching with interest. Chloe walked about fifty meters and sat down on a rock. The other three continued what they were doing and ignored her.

  Fatima continued to insist she had not seen anything unusual that day except for the army —but that wasn’t unusual, she said with a sly look at Rania.

  “There must have been lots of people in the fields, more than usual,” Benny observed. “Did you speak to any of them?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “They were all men, and I don’t like to speak to them.”

  “But you must have noticed them,” he pressed. “What were they doing?”

  “Waiting,” she said. “Eating breakfast, talking, like always.”

  “Nothing else?” Rania interrupted. Fatima was not revealing something. If she could tell, Benny could tell. She hoped the girl would not be stupid enough to think she could hide whatever it was. It would only make trouble for her.

  “There was one man,” Fatima said finally, “who was running through the fields. He wasn’t dressed for work, he looked like a student.”

  “Can you describe him?” Benny perked up, reaching for his notepad.
/>   “He was ordinary looking,” Fatima evaded. “Young, Palestinian, nice pants, and a light colored cotton shirt.”

  “You say he was running? From where? To where?”

  “I don’t know where from. He was going toward Azzawiya, and he had something in his hand, a bag like you would take to go away for the weekend.”

  She could not, or would not, tell them anything more about the young man. Rania declined Benny’s offer of a ride, and called Bassam to come pick her and Fatima up at Mas’ha Junction. She would persuade him to drive Fatima to Izbet Salman, so at least the young woman wouldn’t arrive home much later than usual. Rania watched as Chloe rose from her perch and headed off toward Azzawiya. She wondered if she should warn Chloe not to tell anyone in the village that she had seen Fatima talking to them. But she wasn’t so eager to answer the woman’s questions about what she was doing here, and didn’t imagine her advice would make much difference. She would have to rely on Chloe’s discretion, if she had any, and the good judgment of the Azzawiyans, which she wasn’t sure existed.

  Chapter 15

  When Chloe got back to Azzawiya, the story of her arrest had preceded her. Some of the men who were waiting to cross to Israel were from the village, and had seen her taken away. A few people stopped her as she walked home, asking “Shu sar?” What happened? She just shrugged. She was too tired to chat, and anyway, she wasn’t really sure what to tell them.

  Before she turned off the main road, she ducked into her favorite store to buy some bread and hummus.

  “Do you have bread?” she asked Dilal, who lived above his store. He and his brothers were sitting around in green plastic chairs, watching al Jazeera. He rose and went over to the cooler where he kept bread, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Often all the stores in the village were out of bread by evening. She didn’t want to have to make rice. She wanted to plow into some comfort food.

  As he counted out her bread rounds, two men walked in. Maher and his brother Samer were her least favorite people in the village. They were both tall, with light hair and blue eyes, and would have been handsome if they didn’t wear permanent sneers. Maher in particular had seemed to resent her presence in the village from day one. His children often threw stones at her, and while she never heard him actually encourage them, he would watch them without objecting.

  Now he cast a cold look up and down her body, and said something she did not understand to Samer. The brothers were close in age and pretty much inseparable. They were also close friends with Dilal and his brothers, which she tried not to hold against the shopkeeper. In villages, you didn’t necessarily pick your friends, at least not the way westerners did. They were a product of complex family relationships, neighborhoods, political affiliations, and probably more things that she didn’t know about. Dilal never appeared to share Maher and Samer’s hostility toward her, but he also never tried to protect her from them. She guessed she couldn’t hold that against him—after all, he had known these people most of his life and her only a few months, and he would continue to know them long after she was gone. Still, it always disappointed her when he didn’t stand up for her. She knew he would never allow Maher to speak to or look at a Palestinian woman the way he did her, but then, Maher would not treat a Palestinian woman that way.

  You’re not a Palestinian woman, get over it, she told herself sternly.

  “You were at the police station?” Maher asked her.

  She nodded. She put a five shekel coin on the counter, took the plastic bag with her purchases and turned to go. She was out the door when Maher’s voice caught up with her. “Why did they release you?”

  She knew what he was implying. When Palestinians were picked up by the Israeli army or police and returned quickly, it often meant that they had given information to help themselves. This was not the first time that Maher had suggested to people in the village that she was a collaborator. People whispered that accusation against him; she figured that was why he was so anxious to cast suspicion onto someone else.

  “They didn’t have anything to hold me for,” she said.

  She knew that in their experience, that often didn’t make a difference, but what else could she say? It was the truth, and they could believe her or not. She walked home quickly, imagining that she was getting suspicious looks from others she passed on the road. Or was she imagining it? There were plenty who said that the Foreigners were all traitors, giving information about the villagers to the Israelis. Well, there was nothing she could do about it now. She hadn’t asked to be arrested, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. They would just have to see that no one got in trouble because of her, and then whatever buzz there might be would quiet down.

  When she got to her house, Avi was sitting on the porch with Jaber. Had he come because she was arrested? The thought cheered her.

  “Hamdilila assalam,” Jaber said.

  “Allah ysalmak,” she responded. It was comforting, that he gave her the traditional Arabic greeting for someone who has returned from a trip—or from jail.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Was it paranoia, or was there a hint of guardedness in his voice? She told them the story as simply as possible, but left out the part about the folders she had seen. She didn’t know if that was the right decision. She didn’t want to worry Jaber, but she did want to warn him. She would try to get Avi alone before he left.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked him. “You didn’t come because of my text message?”

  “No,” he said. Of course not. How could she have thought what happened to her was so important—and besides, anything he might have done to help her could as easily be done from home. Still, it cut into her joy at being home.

  “Well, why then? Did something happen with Abu Shaadi’s land?”

  “No, not that either. Fareed’s missing.”

  “What do you mean, missing?”

  “No one has heard from him since Monday, and we can’t reach him by phone,” Jaber supplied.

  “Well, you know how unreliable mobile phone service is in Nablus.”

  “His phone is closed,” Jaber said shortly.

  “Maybe he forgot to charge the battery.”

  Neither of the men looked convinced. They did look at each other. Chloe felt resentment welling up. They were hiding something from her. Jaber hadn’t invited her to join them. She should go inside her house and leave them to whatever it was. But she was tired of being out of the loop.

  “Do you think he could have been arrested?” she asked, hoping a bold question would shake loose some information.

  They both looked startled.

  “Why do you say that?” Jaber demanded.

  Now she regretted her self-absorbed ploy. She had not meant to increase his concern about his son.

  “Well, you know, the checkpoints going to Nablus are so bad,” she stammered. “I just wondered, because you seemed so worried.”

  “A friend of mine works in the muhabarat,” Jaber said. “He told me the SHABAK is looking for Fareed.”

  That could explain the files she had seen in the police station. “Did he say why?”

  “No,” Jaber said. He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. Avi spoke up.

  “We think it could have to do with the girl who died.”

  “What girl? The foreigner? What would she have to do with Fareed?”

  “Fareed knew her,” Avi said. “Her name was Nadya, she was from Uzbekistan, and she worked in Elkana. She wanted to run away, but her employer had her passport. Fareed asked me to help her get it, so she could go free.”

  “I still don’t understand,” she said. “How did Fareed know a woman who was working in Elkana?”

  “He found her crying in the groves one day, when he was on his way back from Nablus. He told me something bad had been done to her. I think she’d been raped.”

  “Raped? How do you know? Who raped her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know she was raped
. But Fareed fell in love with her.”

  “Fareed? Seriously?” Chloe tried to imagine the shy young man falling in love with a foreign woman. She had never seen him talking to a girl except his sisters. All of his friends were young men, mostly other students. She didn’t know why she was so shocked. She had met women from a number of Russian-speaking countries in the area. They were married to Palestinian men who had studied in the Soviet Union. Nadya would have had no trouble finding people to talk to.

  “Did you know?” she asked Jaber. He shook his head.

  “How were you helping them?” she asked Avi.

  “I hadn’t really figured that out yet,” Avi said. “The day they found her, I was supposed to meet them at the checkpoint. They didn’t show up. Since then I’ve been trying to call Fareed, but he doesn’t answer.”

  “So maybe he doesn’t even know,” she suggested.

  “Maybe.” Avi sounded doubtful. He rose and shook hands with Jaber. “If I hear anything, I’ll call you,” he said in Hebrew. Jaber said he would do the same.

  “See you,” Avi said to Chloe.

  “Wait,” she took off after him. “Where are you going?”

  “I have to get back. Maya has a gig tonight, and I’m doing the door.” Maya sang in a punk band called the AK-47s.

  “Wait. There’s something I need to tell you.” Quickly, she told him about the folders.

  “You couldn’t tell what was in them?”

  “No, I don’t read much Hebrew. But I’d texted you I was there. If you’d called me, maybe we could have figured it out.”

  If he’d called her, she wouldn’t have answered because her phone was in Benny’s office, but he didn’t know that.

  “What are we going to do about Fareed?” she asked. “He could have been arrested already, or he could be hurt.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure.”

  “You have reasons?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, are you going to tell me what they are?”