Murder Under the Bridge

by Kate Raphael

  Her eyes could make out nothing at first. The building was one long room, nearly empty, with walls made of concrete. It looked like a warehouse of some kind. It had no windows, just a tiny slatted opening near the ceiling. Adam didn’t turn on any lights, if there were any to turn on. Instead, he walked halfway across the cement floor and came back dragging something beside him. He set two chairs down facing one another.

  “Sit,” he said.

  Not a gracious invitation, but she took it. The sooner she did, the sooner she would find out what this was all about, and the sooner she would get back to—well, where? Somewhere she wanted to be, which included Hadera at this point.

  He took the gun off his chest and sat down opposite her. He gave her a smile, which didn’t reach his watery eyes. “All right, Chloe,” he said in a tired voice. “Who has the document?”

  She went cold all over. “What document?”

  “Do not play games with me.” Icicles would not have melted in his mouth.

  “How do you know about that? Who are you, anyway?”

  “Do you need to ask?”

  “It’s you!” she breathed. How could she have been so stupid? She had just been so relieved not to be on the plane. Adam, he had called himself. The generic Hebrew word for “man.” She squinted across at him, trying to make out his face in the darkness.

  “But you’re in Italy,” she said.

  “I was in Italy. Now I am here.”

  “How did you get here so fast?”

  “Wonderful things, airplanes. Now where is the document?”

  “I don’t know—there isn’t one.”

  Wait, that wasn’t right. He needed to believe there was a document. He would have killed her already, except he wanted to know who had it. If she could keep him believing she knew, maybe he would leave her alive, but for how long? Not long enough for anyone to find her here. Not long enough to escape. If he left her alive in here and locked the door, she would starve to death unless he let her out. This wasn’t Hollywood, where the heroes always found a way out of every iron trap. In real life, the odds were against you when you were up against someone like this, who had killed with impunity for years. She needed to distract him, give herself time to think.

  “So what’s in the document?” she asked.

  “That is none of your concern.”

  “Maybe not, but what would it hurt you to satisfy my curiosity? You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  He pushed his head toward her and the whites of his eyes swelled, glowing in the darkness. “You think I am going to kill you?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Chlooooeeeee, Chloooooeeee. How can you say this about me? I am not a killer.”

  It was her turn to gape at him. The man was both a professional killer and an amateur. Slowly, it dawned on her what he meant. Sure, he had killed Palestinians, an Uzbek prostitute, but these were not people. She was another story. As despicable as she was, as big a threat to his reputation, she was a Jew.

  “If you’re not planning to kill me, why did you bring me here?”

  “I brought you here so we could talk undisturbed.”

  He looped the gun over his shoulder once more and stood up. He crossed to her chair, and reached out a hand. She screamed. She wasn’t sure where the pain had come from, but her entire body rattled with it. She thought about what Avi had reported from his conversation with Dmitri. One of the men was a little kinky, but the other was called the Butcher.

  He had returned to his seat and was contemplating her with faint amusement around his lips. He enjoyed hurting people, that was clear. That tiny encounter had been an espresso bean for his libido. He wasn’t going to get any more out of her. She would make him shoot her before she would be his play toy.

  “Are you ready to tell me who has the document?” he asked placidly. Like he had all night, which presumably he did.

  Who could she name? Not Fareed, not Malkah. Avi? Would he believe that? But if Avi was on his side, he wouldn’t care.

  “Dmitri,” she said at last. He leaned toward her, as if he found what she said fascinating. She sat on her hands, to keep them from shaking.

  “Dmitri who sold Nadya to us?” She nodded. “You lie. He told me he did not take it from her.” Wilensky was moving toward her again. She bolted for the door. A shot nearly burst her eardrums. The bullet flew past her shoulder and smashed against the concrete wall. She whirled.

  “You said you wouldn’t kill me.”

  “Bullets can do a lot of things besides kill.”

  She didn’t doubt it. What was she going to do? She couldn’t leave, and she couldn’t stay.

  “I lied,” she said finally. “There’s no copy. At least not that I know of.”

  “Why did you tell me there is a copy?”

  Why indeed? It had seemed like a good move in a theoretical chess game.

  “To see what you would do, to find out if you really killed her.”

  “That was clever,” he said, lifting the gun and aiming it straight at her. Her knees were foam rubber. Her face was a thousand degrees. She thought she was having a stroke.

  “Khara!” echoed from outside. Shit. A stream of Arabic curses followed. Wilensky swung toward the sound, away from Chloe. She took steps toward the door, then stopped. She was pretty sure who was out there, but if she made it to them, Wilensky might kill them all.

  Someone was shaking the door now. “It’s locked,” Avi said in English.

  “Get back,” a woman’s voice responded. Chloe was between Wilensky and the door. She turned to face him. His gun was pointed directly at her, and at whoever was about to come through the door.

  “We might as well let them in,” she said conversationally.

  He hesitated. Before he could move one way or the other, the deadbolt exploded and the door swung open wide. Chloe almost didn’t recognize the settler woman in the peasant blouse with the gun in her hand.

  Chapter 45

  Rania was looking directly into the barrel of the machine gun. Wilensky’s finger was on the trigger and he would have pulled it, but he stopped short when he saw who was with her.

  “Avi, what is going on?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you.” Avi said.

  He moved slowly but deliberately, coming to stand right next to Chloe. Rania remained a little bit behind them, her gun pointed down at the floor.

  “Who is that?” Wilensky demanded, pointing at her with his chin.

  “No one you need to worry about,” Avi answered.

  “You should not be here,” Wilensky said to Avi. “You don’t know what you are dealing with.”

  “I know enough,” Avi said, maintaining direct eye contact. He moved to stand in front of Chloe, blocking her with his body. His chest was less than a foot from the barrel of the gun.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Kill me, like you killed Nadya.”

  This kid had guts, Rania had to concede. She had never thought she would see an Israeli show that kind of courage, to stand unarmed facing a loaded gun. They were so used to having weapons at their disposal.

  The gesture moved Wilensky too. Incongruously, his cheek muscles slackened, his eyes softened. He relaxed his death grip on the weapon, let it fall to his side.

  “I couldn’t kill you, Avi,” he said. “You’re like my own son. Besides, it doesn’t matter if you accuse me of killing Nadya. No one will believe you.”

  “They’ll believe me,” Nir Gelenter said.

  None of them had heard the car, but when Rania looked outside the dim hangar, there it was, next to Avi’s.

  “Shaul Gabi called and said Chloe didn’t get on the plane,” Nir said to Wilensky. “He said a colonel came and stopped her flight.”

  “I never thought I’d be glad to see him,” Chloe whispered to Rania.

  “Are you sure he’s here to help?” Rania cautioned.

  The two men were focused on each other now, completely ignoring the rest of them. The other three moved ba
ck, until they were nearly in the doorway.

  “How did you know where to find me?” Chloe whispered to Rania.

  “We found that captain, Shaul, and he told us an air force colonel took you away. Avi said he knew where you would be. He came here as a child, with his father and his uncle.”

  “How could you do it, Israel?” Nir was asking Wilensky.

  “She said someone had a copy of the letter,” Wilensky explained, gesturing toward Chloe. “I needed to find out…”

  “I meant Nadya,” Gelenter clarified. “How could you kill her? I loved her!”

  “She didn’t love you,” Wilensky said. “She betrayed you.”

  “I know,” Gelenter said. Rania almost felt sympathy for him. “You told me you were going to pay her.”

  “I did pay her,” Wilensky said. “But she would not give me the paper.”

  They were speaking in Hebrew. Avi translated in a soft voice for Chloe and Rania.

  “He says he didn’t mean to kill her. The day before he left for Italy, she told him she had something that would destroy him. She said if he didn’t give her ten thousand dollars, she would go to the police. He told her to forget it. But then after he was gone, he thought about it and decided the risk was too great. He called her at the house and said he would pay. But she said it was too late, she was selling it to someone else. She said, ‘Tomorrow I destroy your life.’ So he came back to stop her. He knew she met Fareed in the fields; he had followed her there once. He waited there for her. He saw her talking to Dmitri, and then he saw Dmitri walking away. He intercepted him and demanded the document. Dmitri said he didn’t buy it, her price was too high.

  “He went after Nadya. They sat in his car and argued. He demanded she give him the document, but she wouldn’t. He tried to grab her bag from her, and she ran from the car. They struggled, and she fell down the embankment and hit her head on a rock.”

  Nir was wavering, Rania could tell. He wanted to believe it.

  “Why did you steal the car?” Rania stepped out of the shadows. She could see Gelenter’s steely eyes glinting in the dark.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked through clenched teeth.

  “Trying to learn the truth,” she said. “And what you just heard is not the truth.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We found fragments of Nadya’s clothes scattered over the land in a lateral pattern. There was blood on the grass from her head wound, but no rock with blood on it. Someone dragged her along the creek bed.”

  “We already know that the Palestinian kid moved her,” Gelenter objected.

  How had he gotten access to the kid’s confession? How could she imagine that he wouldn’t have? It wasn’t that important, but it galled her.

  “If you know that much, you know that he didn’t drag her, he carried her.”

  “So he says.”

  “The physical evidence confirmed it.” She turned back to Wilensky.

  “If you paid her, what happened to the money? She had no money when we found her.”

  “So the Palestinian kid took it.”

  Once again, Fareed was proving a convenient scapegoat. “If she had fallen down the embankment, she would have dropped her bag and it would not have been next to her when Fareed found her. I think she ran away, and you followed her, because you could not allow her to live with what she knew.”

  “No. It wasn’t that way. It happened just as I said.”

  “Did it?” she turned to Gelenter. “Think about my question. If he did not plan to kill her, why did he go in a stolen car, instead of his own?”

  Logic, she could see, told him she was right. Everything he believed told him not to take the word of a Palestinian woman over his oldest friend’s.

  “Nir,” Wilensky said.

  Gelenter cut him off with a wave of his hand. He turned away from them all, wrestling with his own demons for a long few minutes. When he turned back, he was in command again.

  “Avi,” he said, “You cannot tell anyone about this.”

  “Fareed is my friend,” Avi said. “I won’t let him sit in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “You don’t know all the facts,” Gelenter insisted. “Tell him,” to Wilensky.

  “Tell me what? What are you talking about?”

  Chloe and Rania glanced at each other.

  “How do you think I got back into Israel and back to Italy, with no one knowing?” Wilensky asked Avi.

  Confusion played on the young man’s face. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say,” he said. His eyes scanned one face, then another, finally locking on Rania’s.

  “It was your father,” she said. “He took a plane from Hatzerim.”

  “My father?” He looked around for confirmation from the others, and received it.

  “You knew too?” he asked Chloe.

  “She told me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “We weren’t sure you didn’t know.”

  He sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged, head in his hands. Chloe stooped next to him, awkwardly patting his shoulder.

  “We just didn’t know what to think,” she said softly. “This country, it screws with your mind.”

  “Yeah, well, unfortunately it’s my country.” He sat a few minutes longer, his fingers making designs in the dust.

  “My father didn’t know what you were going to do,” he said weakly.

  “Who can be sure?” Gelenter asked. “In your father’s line of work, a person must be completely free from scandal. Don’t you think this might cause difficulties for him?”

  For a long moment, no one and nothing in the old hangar stirred. Rania thought she could hear blades of grass blowing in the breeze outside.

  “What about Fareed?” Avi said.

  “If I get him out, will you let this go?” Gelenter asked.

  “You will get him out?”

  “I promise.”

  Rania exhaled. She was disappointed, but she shouldn’t have been. People were who they were. In his place, she would probably have done the same. Gelenter seemed relaxed now that he had Avi’s agreement. He wasn’t worried about her or Chloe at all, Rania thought. It was like they didn’t even count. But of course, in his world, they didn’t.

  She and Chloe headed for the door and no one stopped them. Avi followed, saying nothing to the two men who were huddled together, Gelenter with one arm across his friend’s shoulder. They climbed back over the fence where she had cut her hand on the razor wire in the rush to save Chloe. It took them ten minutes to walk to the place where Avi had stashed his parents’ car. An hour earlier, they had run the distance in under half the time.

  Avi wanted to go through Deir Balut checkpoint, or Azzun gate, to take her all the way to Mas’ha. She insisted he drop her on the road.

  “The checkpoints are closed,” she said.

  “Not for a yellow-plated car,” he objected.

  “I don’t want anyone asking where I’ve been.”

  “Give me the gun,” he said as he stopped the car above Azzawiya bridge.

  “Why? It was my husband’s.”

  “Because soldiers are going to be searching your house for it sometime soon. It can’t be there when they do.”

  She handed him the gun. And thanked him, though it rankled to do it. Then she ran down the embankment, praying she could find the place where she had left her clothes. She wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Bassam how her trip to the store had worked out.

  Chapter 46

  The smell of fried cauliflower and fresh bread greeted Chloe before she reached Ahlam’s door. She could hear lots of happy chatter inside.

  It was a double party—Fareed’s homecoming and Chloe’s leaving. Rachel, the lawyer, had been able to recover her passport, but she had to agree that Chloe would leave Israel within ten days. The good news was that supposedly the Ministry of Interior would not stop her from returning at another time. Rachel didn’t know how good he
r chances actually were of getting in again, but she emphasized that they would be much better if Chloe left now as agreed.

  The living room was full of children and young men, Fareed’s friends from school. Chloe studied Fareed’s face. He had already started to lose his prison pallor and gained back a little of the weight he had lost. He looked older, too. He was telling prison stories now, surrounded by his friends and younger brothers. Avi sat next to him, listening, not saying anything. Everything seemed normal again, but Chloe suspected there would never be quite the same easy trust between them. Well, nothing would ever be quite the same for Fareed. He had been through a rite of passage.

  Avi would be spending more time in the village in the coming days, so they would have plenty of time to work out their relationship. The injunction against the construction on Abu Shaadi’s land had been lifted. Avi had met with Jaber and Abu Shaadi and the mayor that afternoon to plan strategy. Fareed had gone too. Before his arrest, he had not had much interest in activism; he had been too busy with school. The Israeli authorities had created one more radical, Chloe reflected.

  Alaa ran to Chloe to be swept up in a hug.

  “Imi fi matbach,” the little girl said, and obediently, Chloe followed her into the kitchen. Ahlam kissed her twice on each cheek, murmuring “Hamdilila assalam.”

  “Allah ysalmik,” Chloe gave the ritual response, her eyes drifting to the figure peeling cucumbers at the sink. She didn’t think she could stay in here. She wanted to wrap her arms around those slender hips and plunge her hands places that she couldn’t see. If she was going to kiss Tina, she didn’t want it to be on the cheeks. She hoped her face didn’t show her “flustration,” but she wouldn’t have wanted to take bets.

  She put a soft hand on Tina’s shoulder. Even that little contact made her crazy. “I’m going outside for a while.”

  She made her way back through the mob and stood on the porch, breathing hard. Shit, she needed to stop acting like a horny teenager. She needed to stop feeling like a horny teenager. How was this happening to her, and could the timing be any worse? Hopefully she would stop being obsessed with Tina when she was back in the States. Otherwise, she was going to be buying a lot of batteries for her vibrator.