Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  “Where were you living?” she asked Ursula.

  “Eilat.”

  Eilat! And she was Uzbek. But Ursula shook her head when Chloe asked if she knew a Nadya or a Vicki. She had heard of Dmitri, but not met him. There were lots of men like him, she said. Reluctantly, Chloe abandoned the subject. Instead, she asked Ursula general questions about her life in Eilat. She had liked it, Ursula said. She had an Israeli boyfriend, who was going to come get her out of jail and marry her. Chloe asked what his work was.

  Ursula shrugged. “He’s rich.”

  Pretty Woman syndrome, Chloe thought. Ursula didn’t seem that naïve. Well, who was she to judge? Maybe Ursula really did have a rich boyfriend who would come bail her out and take her home as his bride. She was certainly beautiful enough for a trophy wife.

  “How did you get here?” Chloe asked.

  “From Egypt,” Ursula said. “It took many days. We were thirty or more women, and we had to walk very fast.” She mimed being beaten. Then she was done talking. She wandered off, leaving Chloe to worry about how she was going to get out of there. She had all her things, including Gelenter’s mobile, but the only number she knew by heart was her own and she was afraid to call it, because who knew where Malkah was? She could only wait and hope that someone was doing something to help her.

  * * *

  Just after lunch a tiny, waif-like policewoman with a sleek black ponytail came to get her. According to the badge she wore, her name was Diana. Chloe heard one of the prisoners ask her in Hebrew if she had a good trip.

  “Where did you go?” she asked in English, as Diana led her downstairs and out into the courtyard.

  “My country.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Romania.”

  “When did you come here?”

  “Five years ago, at fifteen.”

  Physically, she could be the sister of many of the women locked up here. If she were not Jewish, she might well have been one of them. Not long ago, Chloe reflected, being born Jewish in Romania would have been no one’s idea of good fortune.

  Diana escorted her into a room where a man and a woman sat. The woman sat behind a desk, and the man to her right.

  “I’m Elisheva, and this is Yoav. We’re from the United States Embassy.”

  They asked if she was being treated okay, and if she had been beaten. When she said no, Yoav leaned forward and asked, “Are you sure?” She wondered, was it so rare that a US citizen was arrested and not beaten? She hated to disappoint them, but she had to confess that she had not been beaten.

  That settled, Elisheva handed her a stack of papers, and then told her what each of them said. One said that they weren’t going to help her get out of jail, regardless of whether she had done what the Israeli authorities accused her of. It told her what would happen when she was deported, making it all sound quite grim and inevitable. The second was a list of lawyers. At the top of the list was a disclaimer, saying that the embassy didn’t know if any of these lawyers were good.

  Chloe decided that even the diversion of speaking English wasn’t worth prolonging this encounter. She took the papers, thanked them for coming, and called Diana to take her back to her room.

  At least the papers were blank on one side, so now she had some scratch paper. She was here because of Nadya’s death. If she wanted to get out, she would have to figure out who had killed her and why. She started making a list of everyone who knew Nadya. “Fareed,” she wrote and drew a circle around his name. “Radwan,” and she drew a line to Fareed’s circle. “Gelenter” in another circle. “Wilensky,” linked to Gelenter. “Dmitri,” down below, for “Eilat,” which was down below. “Vicki.” “Malkah,” she added, with a short line connecting her to Gelenter, who kept her on such a short leash. “Avi,” she threw in. After all, he had been part of the events that had led to Nadya’s getting killed.

  When Diana came to get her a second time, she was absorbed in the chart. Whatever Diana wanted this time, she wasn’t interested. But there was no point in refusing. Police didn’t go away because you told them you weren’t in the mood. She put on her shoes and followed her to the administration building again.

  In the same desk room where she had met Elisheva and Yoav, Avi and Tina were pacing. Tina was as beautiful as she had been in Chloe’s fantasies. Seeing Avi standing there grinning felt like having a brother show up. She hugged them and hung on, hoping their scents would penetrate her body, so she could still smell them when they were gone.

  “How’d you know I was here?” she asked.

  “Rania called me,” Avi answered. “The kid from Elkana called her.” Chloe cheered for Malkah in her heart. The girl must have thought to redial the last person Chloe had called.

  “Rachel, the lawyer, is working on getting you bail,” Avi said.

  “Why bail? I haven’t done anything.”

  “As a foreigner you don’t have too many rights. They’ve canceled your visa and issued a deportation order against you. You only have three days to challenge it, and then they can deport you, unless you can get out on bail.”

  “I don’t know how I could pay any bail. I don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Tina said firmly.

  How could she not worry about it? She didn’t like the idea of Tina hitting up her family members for money, if they had any. But she wasn’t going to tell Tina not to do whatever she was doing. She was too afraid she wouldn’t ever hold her again. She reached for Tina’s hand. Their fingers felt like they belonged laced together.

  The phone in Chloe’s pocket jingled. She hastily hit the “reject call” button. When she had been brought in the night before, they asked if she had a phone and she said no because she thought they would take it from her. Now, she feared that they would take it away because she had lied. But Diana didn’t seem to have noticed anything. She wasn’t even looking at them; she was smoking and gossiping with another woman cop.

  “Who was it?” Avi asked. “I gave Rachel your number.”

  Chloe clicked the “recent calls” button. The last number began with 00.

  “It’s from out of the country,” she told Avi.

  “Let me see it.”

  Normally, she would have balked at his bossiness, but after two days of nonstop worrying, it felt nice to have someone else taking charge. She handed him the phone.

  “It’s Wilensky,” he said. “He can use his Israeli phone from Italy.”

  “Maybe I should have answered it,” Chloe joked. “I haven’t been answering any calls ’cause I figured no one knew I had this phone.”

  “I think Rania tried to call you, but you didn’t answer,” Tina said. “Oh, I brought you some stuff.” She went behind the desk and emerged with a small rucksack and a bouquet of flowers.

  “Oh, they’re beautiful,” Chloe effused. She opened the bag. Three shirts, some new pairs of underwear. She couldn’t restrain herself. “No chocolate? Or books?”

  Tina looked apologetic. “They told us we couldn’t bring any food.” She held out one lone book. “We had some others, but they said the captain had to approve them, because they’re ‘political,’ and he’s not here today.”

  Chloe held out her hand for the one book. Raymond Carver short stories. She didn’t even like short stories, but hey, they had tried.

  “This is great,” she said. She hoped Tina couldn’t hear her half-heartedness.

  “Time to go,” Diana said. Chloe put their numbers in her phone. Then she hugged Avi and kissed Tina long and hard.

  “See you soon,” Tina whispered.

  “Inshalla,” Chloe whispered back.

  As she followed Diana back to her cage, she felt lonelier than before they came. She tried to read Raymond Carver, but he was as dour as she remembered. She turned back to her chart. “Rania,” she wrote in one corner, even though Rania was not a player in the case, any more than she was herself. That reminded her, Tina said Rania had tried to call her. If she could figure out
which number was hers, she could save it in the phone so next time, she would know to pick up. She took out the phone and punched up the call list. There was only one call from this morning, at about ten o’clock. The number looked somewhat familiar. She couldn’t be sure, but probably it was Rania’s. Nir Gelenter must not use his cell phone very much, or maybe he had more than one. There were calls on this one going back three weeks. She scrolled through them. One caught her eye. She checked it, then checked again. It didn’t make sense. Avi had said Wilensky was out of the country when Nadya was killed. He had gotten a postcard from him, he had told her. But here was his number, on that very Monday, in Nir Gelenter’s mobile phone without the 00 for out of the country.

  Had Avi lied to her or had Wilensky snuck back into Israel that day? Someone would need to find out.

  “Call me. C.,” she spelled out, then sent the message to the number she fervently hoped was Rania’s.

  Chapter 40

  Rania was in the village of Marda, interviewing a farmer who said his sheep were being stolen. Of course, he suspected the settlers from Ariel, which sits on the hill above Marda. Rania doubted she could do anything to help him, especially if it was settlers. His sons, it seemed, had been charged with keeping track of the sheep. She tried to tactfully suggest that it was possible one of them had sold some of the sheep, but he was adamant. No, no, it had to be the settlers.

  “I will talk to the Israeli police and see what they can do,” she told him, confident that the answer would be absolutely nothing. “Meanwhile, you may want to spend more time with the sheep yourself.” He muttered something about being too old to herd sheep, but thanked her, and his wife produced the obligatory cup of coffee.

  She took out her phone to call Benny and saw a message from Chloe.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the farmer. “I will be right back.”

  She walked outside and called Chloe back. As soon as they were done, she called Benny, who said he would come meet her. The farmer seemed impressed at her clout with the Israeli authorities and pleased at the opportunity to rail against the settlers to one of their own officials. Benny saved her the trouble of working the conversation around to the Nadya murder.

  “How is your boy Fareed?” he asked as they walked away from the field where the sheep were grazing.

  “What makes you think I know?” she asked. He simply gave her that look that said, I know what I know.

  “He is tired of being in jail,” she said. “And he should not be.” She told him what Chloe had found out. “I need to know if Wilensky was really in Italy at all, and if so, how he came back,” she said.

  She had prepared elaborate arguments that stopped short of begging. She was almost disappointed that for once, he wasn’t in the mood to make her jump through hoops. It took him only a few phone calls to tell her that the colonel had flown to Italy on Air Italia on Friday night, and had not returned on any commercial flight.

  “Commercial flight? What other kind—oh! You mean he came in a military plane?”

  “It seems possible,” he said. “You’d better call Mustafa and tell him we’re going to be a while.”

  “I warn you,” Benny said as he started the car. “You are making some very powerful enemies.”

  “I’m a Palestinian,” she said. “I’m accustomed to having powerful enemies.”

  They drove for a long time, deep into the Nakab desert. As they plunged deeper into the scorching heat, Benny loosened his tie and opened the neck of his blue policeman’s shirt. After nearly three hours, they drove through a series of gates. Benny got out of the car and shook hands with a blond young man who must have been nearly seven feet tall, wearing the special light-colored fatigues of the air force. Nearby, a group of similarly dressed young men kicked around a soccer ball. A tiny slip of a dog was playing goalie.

  While Benny spoke to the airman, Rania took in the scene in the distance. Military aircraft sat in neat rows, like toys or sheep, looking so harmless. Yet she recognized the F-16s that terrorized her childhood in Aida, with the huge Stars of David painted on them in bright white paint. After a long conversation with the blond giant, Benny climbed back into the car and revved the engine on the way into the bowels of the base.

  “Where are we?” Rania asked.

  “Hatzerim,” he answered. She knew the name Hatzerim mainly because of one incident, years ago, that had been widely reported in the Arab press. Two planes had crashed in a training flight, a number of Israeli soldiers had been killed, and the Israeli prime minister had become ill when he came to look at the damage. The Palestinians had loved the image of the head of Israel emptying his guts all over the wreckage.

  They were ushered into the captain’s office and served weak tea without enough sugar in it. After the pleasantries, the captain called in two young men who stood before her with sullen condescension in their faces. The captain introduced them as Uriel and Gadi. They were draft age, but they were not just serving out their time until they could go to India and climb mountains. They were Israel’s finest, the Baraks and Sharons and Wilenskys of the future. They were the ones she had nightmares about.

  Benny did all the talking. It irritated her, but there was nothing she could do about it. She barely understood what they were doing here. And even if she knew what to ask, her chances of getting any information out of these arrogant officers was nonexistent. So she sat in her chair and fidgeted as loudly as she dared.

  “Tell me what happened the night of seven May,” Benny said.

  “A reserve officer needed to take a plane out and return in a few hours,” said Uriel.

  “Does this happen often?” Benny asked.

  “Not often, no.”

  “But sometimes.”

  “Sure.”

  “So when it does, what is the procedure?”

  “We check their ID, we check the plane, and they have to sign the log.”

  “So this man, who came here that night, signed the log?”

  Uriel and Gadi exchanged glances. “Of course,” Uriel said.

  Rania could not contain herself any longer. Finally, she was going to get her proof. “May we see the log?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” the captain answered. “We have to call the commander of the base to get permission to show it to you.”

  “Oh, come on,” she blurted out, “stop stalling.”

  Benny flinched. She saw he was about to touch her shoulder, but stopped his hand in mid-air, brushing his own head instead.

  “Did you know the man?” he asked Uriel.

  “I knew who he was.”

  “What do you mean? You knew him or you didn’t know him.”

  Gadi said, “We had never met him, but when he came in, we knew who he was.”

  “Well?” Rania thanked Allah that Benny had asked the question, because she couldn’t have contained herself. Even he seemed to be tiring of dragging information out of these soldiers’ mouths two words at a time.

  They said the name. It wasn’t Wilensky and it wasn’t Gelenter. It was impossible.

  “Let me see the log book,” she demanded. All of them stared at her in astonishment, but apparently now that they’d said the name, they didn’t see the need to call anyone for authorization. Gadi rummaged in a tall metal filing cabinet, which had a lock with a key hanging from it, and drew out a thick clothbound book. He flipped the pages and found the one he was looking for and handed it to her open. Of course, after all that, she couldn’t read the Hebrew words. She showed it to Benny, who confirmed the name for her without drawing unnecessary attention.

  “The name sounds familiar,” she said softly in English. “Who is he?”

  “Perhaps you have heard of him,” Benny said. “He gives the news every evening on Israeli Channel 2.” She supposed she might have heard of a popular Israeli newscaster. She never really watched Israeli news programs, but you couldn’t avoid Channel 2. But she still didn’t want to accept, couldn’t accept, that they hadn’t given her anything
on Wilensky or Gelenter.

  “You say he left and returned the same night?” she asked Uriel.

  He nodded.

  “And he didn’t say where he was going?”

  “No.” He was looking like she was more or less an idiot. Obviously, conscripts, even air force ones, didn’t ask important older men where they were going or why.

  “Did anyone come back with him?”

  “Not that I saw,” Uriel answered.

  “Not that you saw?” Benny said. “Did you have some other reason to think…”

  “No one was with him as far as we know,” Gadi amended.

  Rania accepted it, because they obviously weren’t going to get anything else. She was nearly silent on the long drive back. It was fully dark when Benny dropped her at the Qarawa blocks. She dialed Chloe’s number while she waited for a cab. The phone rang and rang and then Nir’s voicemail came on.

  When she opened the gate to the family compound, she saw lights on in her house. Her first thought was the army. But there were no jeeps, no sentries, no spotlights. When the army came to your house, they didn’t come in secret. She recalled the settler youths with their eggs and the dirty phone call a few days ago. Was she being stalked? She mentally flipped through the people who were angry with her—Nir Gelenter, Abu Ziyad, Abdelhakim. Would any of them have been able to get someone into her own house?

  She fished her phone out of her purse, wondering whom she could call. If it turned out to be nothing, who would not remind her of her foolishness for the next ten years? The only person she could think of was miles away in Jericho. She stole up to the front door and threw it open. She could hear voices.

  “Hello?” Her voice came out as a little choking sound. She was shaking. She couldn’t be this scared, standing in her own doorway. “Who’s here?” she managed to get out in a fairly authoritative voice.

  “Rania?” Her mother-in-law called from the kitchen. Great, now that they were so chummy, Um Bassam was going to be breaking into her flat whenever she felt like it? That wouldn’t do. She would tell the old woman, kindly but firmly, to wait until she was invited to come downstairs. Steeling herself, she took a few steps inside.