Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  She didn’t call. She waited, in hopes he would call her first. It didn’t seem worth making dinner just for herself, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Without Khaled, the Human Tornado, the little house was neat as a monk’s cell. She took down the lentils and put them in a big pot to soak. She turned on the radio and sang along with Fairouz and Nancy while she chopped onions. Matching her knife to the rhythm of the music, she felt relaxed for the first time in many days.

  Someone was behind her. She spun around, knife ready.

  Chloe stood there, backing away from the knife and Rania’s fighting look.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “The door was open but you didn’t hear me because of the radio.”

  Rania took time to calm herself.

  “Welcome,” she said half-heartedly. Chloe hesitated. “Tfaddali,” Rania said, patting the sofa. She settled herself, and Chloe finally sat on the edge of the couch.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “who did you think I was?”

  “I don’t know,” Rania said. “Strange things have been happening.” As her fears subsided, they seemed silly. She went to the kitchen to make tea, and Chloe followed, telling her about the visit with Fareed.

  “Do you believe he did it?” Chloe asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rania said. “You know him. I don’t. I only met him briefly, and not under the best circumstances.”

  “He couldn’t have done it. He’s just punishing himself. He thinks he doesn’t want to live without Nadya, but he’ll grow out of it.”

  “Or maybe he doesn’t want you asking any more questions,” Rania suggested. “Maybe he fears that in trying to help him, you will learn something that will hurt him or others even more.” She could see that Chloe didn’t want to consider the possibility that Fareed was guilty of anything.

  “I wish we knew what Nadya had taken from her boss’s house,” Chloe said.

  “Wait a minute,” Rania said thoughtfully. “You said that she was planning to use it to get her passport back from her employer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That doesn’t make so much sense,” Rania said. “The passports—two of them—were right in his desk drawer. The drawer wasn’t locked. If Nadya was so desperate for the passport that she went hunting around for something to bribe her boss with, surely she would have found the passports.”

  “Couldn’t he have put them in the desk after she was killed, when he knew she wouldn’t be looking any more?”

  “If he was going to do that, why wouldn’t he have disposed of them? Especially since he told us he didn’t have them?”

  “Why didn’t he do that, before he let you in to search his house?”

  “Yes,” Rania said slowly. “I wondered about that too. I even wondered if for some reason he wanted us to find them. But Benny would not have searched the office, because he didn’t have permission. I think Gelenter knew that, and maybe he had some reason to hold onto the passports.”

  “Like he was going to use them for his next illegal maid?”

  “Why not? It would save him the trouble of getting new ones.”

  “That makes sense, I guess,” Chloe said. “So why would Nadya have left the passport there on purpose?”

  “I don’t know. But either she lied to your friend Fareed, or he lied to his friend Avi. Or your friend Avi lied to you.”

  “If she lied, it could mean the DCL was right,” Chloe said half to herself.

  “The DCL?” Rania asked. “You talked to Abu Ziyad?”

  “I didn’t. Jaber did,” Chloe said. “He told him Nadya was spying for the Israelis.”

  Rania contemplated this. It might explain why Abu Ziyad was so anxious to keep her off the case. “If she was working with her employer to trap Fareed and his friends, that could explain it. She took her suitcase and clothes to convince Fareed she was running away with him, but left the passport because she planned to return to her employer’s house.”

  “But the SHABAK had the opposite theory,” Chloe reminded her. “That Fareed was using Nadya to get to Gelenter. If she was working for them, wouldn’t they have known that?”

  “Not necessarily. The people who recruit informers among our people are very secretive about it. They may not even tell each other who are their spies. And even if they did know, they may not have told your friend the truth.”

  So many theories were making her head spin. “How can we find out what the truth is?” Chloe asked. “We certainly can’t ask Gelenter, or the SHABAK.”

  “We know Wilensky met Nadya in Eilat,” Rania said. “The people she was working for there might know how she ended up here. Or her friend, the one Gelenter told us about.” She rummaged through her purse and extracted a spiral bound notebook, flipping the pages quickly. “Vicki.”

  “Why don’t I go down there?”

  Rania shook her head. “These are dangerous people. You are not police.”

  “Well, someone has to talk to them. You can’t go.”

  That was true, but Rania didn’t particularly appreciate Chloe bringing it up. She almost wanted to go, to spite everyone—Chloe, Abu Ziyad, Abdelhakim. But she couldn’t really see herself traveling four hours through Israeli territory, running around Eilat by herself, asking Israelis how to find a woman—whose last name she didn’t know—who worked in a brothel.

  “I’ll get Avi to come,” Chloe pleaded. “He knows lots of people.”

  Rania doubted he knew any better than she how to find someone in Eilat. But she did want to know how Nadya ended up in Elkana, and she wanted to help Fareed if he could be helped.

  “This woman, Alexandra Marininova,” she said. “She said she had no idea how Gelenter got her passport, but she knew Wilensky. It doesn’t quite work.”

  “Where do I find her?” Chloe asked.

  “She told us she works at a restaurant. Here it is, Chaverim. Friends.”

  “Did she say where in Eilat it is?”

  “No. Just near the beach.”

  “The whole city is near the beach,” Chloe grumbled.

  Chloe declined Rania’s offer to stay to dinner, saying a friend was staying with her in Azzawiya and she needed to get home to her. Something about the way she said that made Rania wonder… but she couldn’t even articulate what she was wondering. When Chloe was gone, the house felt twice as empty. She felt the echo of Khaled’s sharp laughter in every corner. She stared at the telephone on the end table. If she stared hard enough, perhaps she could make it ring.

  When it started to ring, she was so startled she dropped the receiver on the floor. When she retrieved it, there was no answer. She hung up. Maybe it had been a wrong number.

  A minute later, it started to ring again. She snatched it up, holding it firmly this time.

  “Yes?” she said.

  No one answered.

  “Hello?” she said. “Who is this?”

  The response was low and hateful—the same filthy expression the settler boy had yelled at her the previous day. She couldn’t remember when anyone had said it to her before that.

  Chapter 34

  Tina took for granted that she was accompanying Chloe to Eilat, and Chloe didn’t try to dissuade her. Spending the night on the beach with her lover appealed to her. They met Avi at the Tel Aviv bus station and boarded an Egged bus to Eilat. Chloe felt uneasy as the bus rumbled down the highway. She usually tried to avoid long bus trips inside Israel.

  “Wouldn’t it be ironic if after everything we’ve done, we died in a bus bombing?” she whispered to Tina.

  Tina didn’t answer, just raised an eyebrow. Doubly ironic for her, Chloe reflected. She wouldn’t be the first Palestinian victim of an attack against Israel, but she might be the first with an Australian passport. Not a distinction she would want, for sure.

  Just before noon they reached Eilat, a completely different kind of beach city than Tel Aviv and Jaffa. It reminded Chloe of Virginia Beach, where her family had sometimes gone in the sum
mer, with its tacky tourist places. Men were constantly pawing at her and Tina.

  “I thought I was too old for that kind of attention,” she said to Avi, after the third man had tried to coax her into the bushes with him.

  “If you can breathe, you are not too old,” Avi said.

  “I guess that will help with what we’re here for,” Chloe observed. “Go ask one of those guys where we should go.”

  He obeyed. The conversation didn’t take long, nor would the walk to the neighborhood the man had indicated. Chloe wanted Avi to be their pimp, trying to sell them to one of the houses, but he refused. “I’ll be a client,” he said. “We can split up and cover twice as much ground and maybe find this woman Vicki.”

  “If you have sex, I’ll tell Maya,” Chloe teased him.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I can’t afford it, anyway.”

  Chloe was enjoying the sibling-like banter, but she noticed Tina was being very quiet. She pushed aside the tension building in her gut and looped her arm through Tina’s. “I don’t think I’m going to be believable,” she said.

  “You will when I’m done with you.” Chloe was glad to see a mischievous sparkle in Tina’s eyes. They ducked into a hotel bathroom and Tina went to work with eyeliner and blush. Chloe was unexpectedly pleased with the result.

  “Maybe I’ll do this all the time,” she said.

  “I like your laugh lines better,” Tina said and kissed one of the now hidden lines at the corner of her mouth. They exited the hotel arm in arm. Chloe stole a look at Avi, who had parked on a bench to wait for them. He seemed okay about hanging out with a lesbian couple. She kind of wanted to ask him about it directly, but it would be too much like talking about sex with a son.

  Avi took one side of the street, and Chloe and Tina the other. They agreed to meet in two hours. They would try to find Vicki, but if they couldn’t, they would try to find anyone who knew Nadya.

  Tina couldn’t even get through the doors. “No locals,” everyone told her. Chloe wondered if that referred to Israelis as well as Palestinians. She had once seen a movie about Algerian Jewish prostitutes in Eilat, but that had been years ago. Possibly the explosion of immigrants from the former Soviet Union had put those women out of business, or pushed them up the food chain.

  Chloe was an oddity. No one in these places had seen an American woman looking for work before. The bouncers did not turn her away themselves, like they did Tina. They went and checked with the owners, and the owners or managers would take her into their offices, mostly to flirt, which she didn’t do well. When they asked her how she came to them, she answered that her friend Vicki told her about them, and then they all threw her out because they didn’t know any Vicki.

  The fourth bell they rang was answered by a Palestinian security guard. When Tina told him in Arabic what they wanted, his expression turned fatherly, though he was not much older than she was. “Arab girls do not do this work,” he said. “It is not right.”

  “But it’s okay for you?” Tina replied.

  “I protect the girls from men who want to hurt them,” he said. Chloe wondered if he believed that made it okay.

  “Is the owner here?” she asked.

  “Wait,” he told her. A few minutes later, he opened an inner door for her, as all the other security guards had done. As Chloe walked through it, she saw him leading Tina back outside. She hoped Tina would be able to get some useful information from him. So far, this whole escapade had been a big waste of time.

  The office was a converted dining room, big, white, and comfortable. The woman sitting behind the graceful desk of polished dark wood reminded Chloe of her grandmother. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun and Chloe was sure an old-fashioned corset held her huge bust completely rigid. She gestured Chloe into a red velvet arm chair.

  “What are you doing here, really?” she asked in heavily accented but perfectly clear English. “We have never had an American come here looking for work.”

  “I’m surprised. This is what I do in the States,” Chloe said innocently.

  “You are a Jew,” the woman stated. How could she be so sure of that? Chloe wondered. It was like Israelis had a sixth sense for Jewishness. “Jews in America do not do this.”

  “Some do,” Chloe said. She spun a tale of a feminist whorehouse in Berkeley, drawn from the true story of a woman in her writing group who got a temp receptionist job in what turned out to be a brothel. The old woman appreciated the story, though she didn’t look like she necessarily believed it. She told Chloe to wait, asked her if she wanted tea. Chloe accepted.

  The woman was gone for ten minutes. Then the door opened and a man came in. “At HaAmerikayit?” he asked her, and looking at his face, she felt a raw terror. He meant her harm, she was sure. Almost against her will, she nodded.

  “Come with me,” he ordered, taking her arm in a tight grip. For a moment, she thought he was opening the door that led to the front room, and she felt relief. But then she found herself led into an inner room, where a four-poster double bed loomed.

  “Take off your clothes.” The man’s gesture helped her understand his Hebrew.

  “I don’t speak Hebrew,” she said, hoping against hope that somehow this would derail his intent. She started toward the door. He wrenched both wrists behind her back and she had a moment of absolute panic, that he would have handcuffs, she would be imprisoned and raped, all the horrible stories she had heard about what happened in places like this were about to happen to her. What was she thinking, imagining she could play private eye? She wanted to scream, but she realized it wouldn’t help her, no one here would come to her rescue, the people who might want to would be afraid to, and the people who could wouldn’t want to. Silently, she cursed Rania, who sent her here, and Fareed, who was the reason she was involved in this case, and herself for staying in this country so long, and Tina for not being here to help her.

  The man shoved her against the wall. He pressed his body against hers, one hand pinching her right nipple, the other crawling between her legs. She felt his erection against her hip, and his stubbly face was all over hers as he pressed his mouth on hers and his tongue roughly forced her mouth open. His stale cigarette-breath tripped her gag reflex. She couldn’t breathe. She felt faint and then she thought, yes, that’s it, and let herself collapse.

  Maybe it was the fainting spell which convinced him she was scared enough, or perhaps he never intended it to go any further, but suddenly he was unlocking the door and shoving her out the front door, where Tina was cozily smoking and speaking Arabic with the kindly security guard.

  “Don’t come back,” the man yelled at her. She couldn’t talk. She stumbled down the sidewalk and heard Tina quickly taking leave of the security guard. Tina ran after Chloe and put her arm hesitantly around her shoulders. Chloe shrugged it off. She leaned over and retched. Tina stood close to her, one hand hovering over Chloe’s shoulder, waiting for permission to touch her, which Chloe couldn’t give. She felt like she could barely stand up. She wanted to curl up in a fetal position and scream and cry, she wanted to be in her house in Azzawiya right now.

  She couldn’t believe how filthy and violated she felt, and how terrified she was, yet she wasn’t even raped. She thought about Nadya, and how many times she was raped in her two-plus years here. How did she endure it, day after day? It must have felt like a recurring nightmare. And she was pregnant. Especially when she had a daughter in Uzbekistan whom she could not see, another child surely would not seem like a blessing to her, but a curse. Chloe suddenly felt sure that Nadya’s pregnancy was the key to her murder. She just had to find the lock it fit.

  Amid the thoughts swirling in her brain, Chloe was vaguely aware of Tina, still waiting for her to communicate in some way what she needed. What did she need? Chloe wondered. What was there in the whole world that could make the hideous parasite she had allowed into her body shrivel up and leave her a place for herself again? She looked into the face of the woman who, fifteen hours e
arlier, had made her feel like the most blessed dyke in the Middle East. She tried to read in Tina’s eyes if the evil she had encountered had transmogrified her own face somehow. In the other woman’s expression, she read only concern, not revulsion. I’m going to keep it that way, Chloe promised herself.

  “What did the security guard tell you?” she made herself ask in a normal tone of voice. Tina looked taken aback, but after a second’s delay, she answered in a comfortingly conversational voice.

  “He said the owner bribes the immigration police with money and sex,” she said. “It’s not illegal to run a brothel here, if all your workers are legal. But if they had Palestinians working there, they would have problems from the regular police, or maybe the SHABAK. He wanted to get me a job in his cousin’s restaurant.” She laughed a little. Chloe tried to laugh too, but it didn’t come out right. Tina glanced at her, and then hurried on with her story.

  “I asked him about the girls who work there. He said men always bring them in the middle of the night, usually in groups of six or eight, and the owner has sex with each one in turn. The ones who don’t please him, he sends back to the man they came with.”

  “Can the girls who work here go out by themselves?” Chloe asked, as if Tina were the one with inside knowledge.

  “He said some of them can, the ones who have been here a while. They can’t go too far because the immigration police will find them, and if they run away, the people who own the house will come after them and hurt them when they bring them back.”

  “Hurt them how?”

  “He said there are places they can press, that cause enormous pain without leaving any marks.” She shuddered to tell it. “He told me he doesn’t do that,” she added.

  “What difference does that make?” Chloe asked hotly. She found herself infuriated, that Tina only cared about whether an Arab man was participating in the abuse, rather than that the abuse was happening at all.

  “It doesn’t,” Tina said. “I don’t know why I even brought it up.” She touched Chloe’s arm lightly, and the touch made Chloe want to dissolve in tears. She turned away from Tina’s hand.