The Jerusalem Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  My fingers touched the edge of the balcony.

  I’d almost made it.

  Then the concrete edge slipped through my fingers and I was falling. It was a jarring, painful, wind-knocking end to my effort when I hit the ground.

  I landed on my side, my breath forced out of me. I didn’t get up for a minute. My arm was tingling from the pain of landing on it, but I could still move it. I was convinced the occupants of the apartment would rush out onto the balcony at any second, and I was planning what to say.

  But they didn’t appear.

  I waited some more. Perhaps they were engrossed in the movie? Or perhaps there was no one behind the curtain and the whole thing was some elaborate electronic charade to convince thieves that the place was occupied?

  Isabel was at the side of the building as I pushed myself to my feet. She had her arms folded. I put a finger to my lips.

  She put one to hers.

  I waved her to go back, glancing around as a car passed.

  My second attempt was more successful. I pushed up, got a grip on the ridge, pulled myself up with the cable fast, just as a creaking noise indicated that someone was coming out onto the balcony below me. The TV was suddenly much louder and a shout in a language that could have been Polish split the air.

  I crouched on the cement floor of Kaiser’s balcony. It was dirty. There was a mud-like sooty scum on the floor. My heart was over 170 bpm now. I didn’t move. I imagined a face peering over the balcony having come up the way I did.

  Then there was another shout from below. I could hear breathing, mine, and hear my heart thumping. I willed myself to calm down. I wasn’t going to be any good like this.

  And where was Isabel? Was whoever was down there going to give her a problem?

  Then the noise of the TV went down abruptly. I crouched, listening, slowing my breathing, my heart returning to something like normality with each passing second. Another car went by. There were no other noises from below.

  Whoever had come out had gone back in again. They must have. I got to my feet, tried the door to the apartment. It was locked, but the glass was broken, just as Isabel had said. There was a big hole, right in the middle of the door. Someone had smashed it. I bent down. It was just about big enough to get through.

  I pulled a jagged piece of glass out, the most likely one I would cut myself against. Then I went through, very slowly, imagining what would happen if I slipped and fell against one of the shards on either side. It wouldn’t be nice.

  Inside, the smell of burnt debris was sour and strong. The light from the street lamps outside was barely enough to see by. I saw chairs overturned, a TV on its side.

  I stood. My stomach was not happy. It was wound tight.

  At my feet there was a piece of burnt carpet. It looked as if it had been pulled from some other room.

  There was a door at the far end of this room. I guessed it led into a hall from which I could find the kitchen and the front door to go out and let Isabel in. As I walked across the room towards the dark oblong of the door, glass crunched lightly under my shoes.

  I slowed some more, touching the far wall as I reached it. Then I took my torch out. When I got into the hall I closed the door to the main room. As darkness engulfed me, I turned the torch on. The hall sprang into existence around me, its walls smudged all over with smoke. The floor was black with dirt, but it wasn’t burnt, it was stained.

  And the smell was even worse now.

  As if there was something evil in the air.

  31

  Lord Bidoner was watching Sky News in his suite in the St George’s Hotel in Mayfair, London. He was sitting up in the imperial-size bed watching the LCD screen that had lowered from the ceiling at his verbal command. The LCD was white-edged to match the décor in the rest of the room.

  The images playing on the screen were of the Egyptian army and a vast mob of demonstrators clashing in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Three dead in Egypt ran the caption across the bottom of the screen.

  Everything was proceeding perfectly. Their last attempt to stir up conflict had failed, but this time the wheels of hatred were moving faster. It would not be so easy for the authorities to clamp down. The change was coming.

  He picked up the iPad from the marble-topped bedside table, and checked for incoming messages. The search team report was due. He scanned the list of emails. It still hadn’t arrived. He clenched his fist, smashed it down into the mattress. This was not good at all.

  If Arap Anach survived this operation in Israel he would get him to teach the search team a few lessons in motivation. Or Lord Bidoner would intervene himself. He closed his eyes, resting his head back on the padded silk headboard.

  He had to stay calm. They were near to achieving their objective. After what was going to happen in Jerusalem things would be very different. Fear would become contagious.

  32

  My heart was back doing double-time again. I could handle it, but I wanted to get out as quickly as possible. I opened the door of the apartment, put a piece of burnt rolled-up mat in the bottom to hold the door open, then raced downstairs to let Isabel in. I didn’t wait for the elevator. I found the stairwell.

  When I opened the front door she was standing outside with her arms crossed.

  ‘What the hell took you so long?’ she hissed.

  ‘Thank you for that vote of confidence,’ I said.

  I waved her in and closed the front door. We went up the stairs fast. As I closed Kaiser’s door behind us I turned on my torch and she stood still in the hallway of Kaiser’s apartment, clutching her arms around herself, as if she wasn’t sure about going any further.

  ‘Which door is the kitchen?’ she said quickly.

  There were two doors to our right as well as the door straight ahead that led into the living room. They were all closed.

  ‘One of those.’ I pointed to the right.

  ‘Great.’ She did not sound happy.

  I stepped across the hall and put my hand on the nearest door. I have a tendency to jump in where I shouldn’t. I’d got into a few stupid scrapes in the past and you’d think I’d have learnt my lesson, but some things never change.

  I turned the steel handle and pushed the door open fast. A thick, sooty smell greeted me. It was on my lips, in my mouth. It made me want to throw up. There was a cold sweat on my forehead now.

  On the far side of the room was a window. Starlight was coming in. A ragged curtain was hanging from a rail, as if there’d been a struggle. A mattress was half off the bed. Part of it was burnt. The walls were black with sooty fingers, as if they’d been painted by a demented Goth art student.

  Isabel walked around the room and opened the built-in wardrobe door. There were a few clothes inside hanging up, two jackets, some shirts. She pulled all the drawers on a soot-stained chest out, looked intently into each one.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I was wondering if there was anyone living with him.’ She pointed at a bright silver pair of handcuffs in a bottom drawer.

  ‘What do you think this tells us?’ she said.

  ‘He liked playing cops and robbers?’

  She snorted. ‘Why do you think the Israeli police left them here?’

  ‘I don’t think they take everything when they examine a crime scene.’

  ‘Any sign of a girlfriend?’ I looked around.

  Isabel shook her head. ‘Let’s try the other door,’ she said. She pushed the drawer back in slowly.

  I went out into the hall and over to the next door. The smell that came out was similarly sooty to the odour in the other room, but there was something else mixed in with it too.

  A faint smell of roasted meat.

  It was odd, but it made this room smell more pleasant than the bedroom. The thought of what that meant was sickening.

  There was a window on the far wall of this room too. In front of it was a sink. It was piled high with smoke-blackened dishes, an upturned toaster and cooking utensils. Som
eone had thrown the flotsam of the kitchen there.

  Around the walls there were bare worktops and blackened cupboard doors. The fire in here had been worse than anywhere else in the apartment.

  There was a fridge and a cooker, and a washing machine down one wall. They were all damaged in some way. But what made my blood beat loud in my ears was the chair in the centre of the room.

  It was burnt to a metal skeleton. There wasn’t a seat or a back, just a black skeletal shape.

  I went forward, shone the torch on the remnants of the chair. The hairs on the back of my neck were way up.

  There were marks on the floor around the chair. I pointed the torch down.

  Two faint black marks in front of the chair were where someone’s feet would have been if they were sitting in it. They were dark shadows on the large floor tiles. If there had been any residue of human flesh there it had been cleaned away, almost perfectly. All that was left were the dark stains that revealed everything.

  ‘Mark wasn’t lying,’ said Isabel quietly. In the distance the wail of an ambulance grew. It was a high-pitched squeal, more like the thumping urgency of an American ambulance than a London one.

  ‘Let’s not stay here,’ I said. I’d had a picture flash through my mind of Kaiser sitting in that chair, screaming into a gag and I wanted to throw up.

  ‘Look,’ said Isabel. She was pointing at the floor around the remnants of the chair.

  I shone the torch there. At first I couldn’t see anything, then I noticed the ghost-like traces of powder about a foot away from the chair. In a line. What the hell was that there for?

  The traces were faint lines on the tiles around the chair.

  I bent down to look and shone the torch on the line. It was rough, barely there, jagged, almost cleaned away. And there was something familiar about it. I peered closer. Yes, someone had poured powder in a shape, an H shape, around the chair. And it was barely visible.

  ‘Let’s get some pictures,’ said Isabel. She sounded weary.

  I took pictures of the floor around the chair. The H shape didn’t come out very well, but a part of it was visible.

  We listened at the front door for a minute, my pulse beating fast in my ears, then I opened it a crack and waited, listening before going out. As we exited the front door I heard a noise behind us, but I simply closed it. We kept walking, pulling off our gloves. I didn’t look back.

  A few minutes later we were in a taxi heading to the hotel. It took the whole journey to get my heart beating normally again.

  ‘Before we go back to London I want to take pictures of everyone who comes and goes to that dig,’ I said, as we walked under the stone arch entranceway.

  And then I saw him, one of the immigration policemen who had driven us to the airport. He was sideways to us, standing at the reception desk. There was another man who I didn’t know beside him. And I remembered the guy who’d been staring at us in the morning.

  ‘We’ve got to leave,’ I said.

  I took Isabel’s arm and turned her quickly back outside. There was a chance the immigration guy wasn’t here for us, but there was a better chance he was.

  ‘Stop, you’re hurting me,’ Isabel hissed as we went back out under the arch.

  ‘Sorry, but we can’t hang around.’ I released my grip. We walked out onto the street, then around the nearest corner. I waved at a taxi. He came towards us. Before we got in I explained to Isabel why I’d steered her back out, who I’d seen.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to turn out to be into physical violence,’ she said.

  ‘Only when I’m trying to save your skin.’

  ‘Call Simon Marcus,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll know where we can stay without getting arrested.’

  We got into the taxi. It was filled with Israeli pop music. I could almost recognise the tune, but the singing was in Hebrew. It didn’t cross my mind to ask the driver to turn it down. I was looking out the back window to see if we were being followed. After a minute, with no police car zooming after us, I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket.

  As soon as Simon answered and I told him who it was, there was silence. Then he said softly, ‘You’re back in Israel.’

  He must have heard the music.

  ‘We need somewhere to stay. Do you know anywhere?’ I was hoping not to attract too much suspicion from the taxi driver. There was more silence. I had no idea what he was going to do. Would he turn us in?

  Then he said. ‘Come to my place. I’m crazy, I know, but my mother taught me never to turn anyone away.’ He gave me his address. It was near the central bus station.

  ‘Leave the taxi at the bus station,’ he said.

  Fifteen minutes later we were outside a four-storey apartment block that looked as if it had been designed in the ’60s by a determined modernist. There were little Stars of David on each plastic buzzer by the front door. Simon came down himself to let us in.

  He put a finger to his lips to get us to stay silent as we went inside. Then he went outside to look around before showing us upstairs. His family was away, he said, but from the mugs still on the dining table I got the impression they had scarpered in the last few minutes.

  He hadn’t told me he had children.

  ‘My wife and daughter, she’s thirteen, went away a little while ago to stay with her mother in Tel Aviv,’ he said, as if to explain the mugs.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here long,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anywhere people can stay in Jerusalem if they don’t want their details to be seen by the Israeli police in a few hours?’ I asked, as we sat down on a long brown sofa.

  ‘You will stay here,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ I said.

  He was standing in front of the door to go back out.

  ‘You must. You will.’

  ‘You’re very good,’ said Isabel. ‘Thank you.’ She stood, walked over to him and put a hand on his arm. ‘Is there somewhere I can lie down?’

  ‘Are you okay?’ I said.

  She turned to me. She looked pale. It had crossed my mind that I should insist we leave, but now I was rethinking.

  She shrugged. ‘I’m just tired. And I have a terrible headache. That’s all,’ she said.

  ‘This way,’ said Simon. ‘You can use my daughter’s room.’ He showed us to a room with a single bed. He got out clean sheets and soon Isabel was sleeping and I was in the front room of his apartment admiring the photographs on the walls. There was one of him and Yitzhak Rabin in dinner suits and another of him in military fatigues in the desert.

  ‘You get around,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t put them there,’ he said, ‘but my wife likes them.’

  ‘I hope we aren’t bringing problems down on top of you.’

  He put a hand out in front of him, as if he was appealing to me for something.

  ‘So why did you come back? What do you hope to do here?’ His tone was aggrieved.

  ‘You know Susan Hunter is still missing?’

  ‘And you are the investigating team now, is that it? Are you qualified for this?’ He was clearly not going to give me any credit for coming back.

  ‘Nobody in the Israeli police force seems to give a damn about finding her.’

  ‘You seem very well-informed. Have you met all the officers working on her case?’

  ‘No, and I’m sure you’re right. Some of them will be doing their job properly, but that wasn’t the impression I got when I talked to the police here.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I know things that might help find her. Do you think we should go home and sit on our hands, maybe wait until we hear they’ve found her body?’ I was getting annoyed now.

  ‘Because I won’t do that. You don’t know what happened to my wife, do you? You don’t know that she was murdered in a roadside bomb attack. That no one told me a goddamned thing about what really happened for a long time. You’re talking to the wrong person if you think I’m going to sit at ho
me and wait for someone to knock on my door or to read about her death on a web page.’

  He put his hands up.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know about your wife. Come on, sit down. I will make tea.’ He paused. His expression had softened.

  ‘My wife likes peppermint tea. Would you like to try some?’

  I nodded, but I couldn’t sit down. I paced and started looking at the books on his shelves. It was difficult to wind down after what I’d seen at Kaiser’s and then having to run from our hotel.

  When he came back with the teapot, a tall Ottoman-style silver thing, alongside delicate green cups and saucers, I sat opposite him. As we drank I told him about what we’d found out at Kaiser’s. He didn’t ask how I’d got in.

  I told him about the stain on the floor and about the H shape. I showed him the picture of it.

  There was silence in the room for a minute. Something had changed in his demeanour. If he seemed a little frightened before, it was amplified now. He went to the windows, pulled a thick brown curtain over, though it looked as if the curtain was never pulled given the trouble it took to get across.

  When he was finished he went to a glass cabinet, took out a bottle of Russian vodka with a gold eagle on it and poured a good dollop into his tea.

  He looked at me over the bottle.

  ‘You want some?’ His tone was querulous, as if he didn’t really expect me to say yes.

  ‘You bet. That’s just what I need.’ I held my cup out.

  The tea tasted very different now, sharp, mucus-clearing. I could feel the vodka warming my insides up.

  Simon went to the bookcase that lined one wall and took down a small green volume. He looked through it, opened it wide at a page, and held the page in front of me. It was covered in proto-alphabetic symbols. He pointed at an H symbol.

  ‘This is a very old symbol,’ he said. ‘It is an H now, but this was Heth in the Canaanite alphabet, their eighth letter. It is used to signify laughter.’ He sipped his tea.