A Possibility of Violence

by D. A. Mishani

  He saw in his mind’s eye the smile spreading over and lighting up Ezer’s dark face when he told them that Mom would be waiting for them at the airport.

  AVRAHAM HUNG UP THE PHONE AND paced back and forth inside the small room. When he returned and sat down, he gazed at the lists he had prepared since that morning with a black pen. The time was nine thirty and he was still at his office.

  A moment before the border police called, it seemed to him that the points were connected and the picture was getting clearer, but now one detail didn’t sit well with the rest. Jennifer Salazar left Israel on September 12 and still hadn’t returned. The exit registry in the computers of the border police confirmed that she left Israel a few days before the suitcase with the fake bomb was placed on Lavon Street and before the warning call was received at the daycare. And she hadn’t returned since.

  Avraham removed the black pen from his shirt pocket and drew three black points on a clean piece of paper, like the corners of a triangle without sides. Next to one point he wrote Holon, next to the second Tel Aviv, and next to the third, a bit farther away from the other two, he wrote Philippines. He continued gazing at the sheet of paper for a while and after this took his notepad and went out to smoke on the stairs of the station house.

  IT WAS A LONG DAY THAT began early with the report about the previous investigation and the phone calls from Ilana that he didn’t want to take. Afterward, Benny Saban had burst into his office and informed him of the assault and he rushed to the scene, and from there went to his meeting with Ilana. He wanted to arrest Sara and interrogate him immediately when they received the list of Chava Cohen’s conversations and it turned out that Sara called her multiple times and briefly spoke with her before she left for the meeting in which she was cruelly attacked. But Ilana refused on the grounds that it was necessary to first collect additional evidence against Sara. Which, in the meantime, was piling up more and more.

  Even though a team of division detectives observed Sara’s every move from the moment he returned to his home from work in the afternoon, Avraham followed him as well, at some distance, on his way from Aharonovitch Street to the city center. He saw him when he entered the Magic Tours travel agency in Weitzman Square. Maybe he shouldn’t have done it; he wasn’t an experienced detective, and Sara knew his face, but if he couldn’t interrogate him he at least wanted to observe him. And perhaps he wanted to make sure himself that Sara didn’t flee. He waited a few minutes in the empty square after Sara continued on his way, then entered the travel agency. This was a mistake as well. At any moment Sara was liable to retrace his steps.

  The travel agent hesitated before giving Avraham the flight details. First she called the manager of the office, who had already gone home.

  Sara purchased three tickets for flight KE 958 from Tel Aviv to Seoul and for connecting flight KE 623 from Seoul to Manila. His flight would take off from Ben-Gurion Airport on the eve of Yom Kippur, Friday, at 8:30 a.m. This was the first flight on which she’d found seats, and Sara wanted to fly as soon as possible. On the return flight to Tel Aviv, his wife would be joining him and their two sons. The travel agent said that Sara’s wife was waiting for him and the boys in the Philippines, but she didn’t know when she flew because she seemed to have purchased her plane ticket somewhere else. Avraham asked her to inform him if Sara contacted her, even though it was reasonable to assume he’d know about this regardless, because they’d already received the court’s approval to tap Sara’s phones. Upon leaving the travel agency Avraham called Ilana and told her that Sara was planning to flee and that airline tickets to Manila were in his possession. She weighed the possibilities before instructing him to nevertheless refrain from making an arrest. “That means we have until Friday morning to gather as much direct evidence against him as possible and bring him in for questioning, right? So let’s wait a bit more,” she said.

  Avraham didn’t want to wait.

  And he had no doubt he could break Sara in a brief interrogation.

  Sara had a motive. He had a violent disagreement with Chava Cohen at the daycare and suspected—justly, it seems—that she was harming his son. He resided two hundred meters from the daycare next to which the suitcase was placed. And when he was questioned, signs of anxiety were evident. He called Chava Cohen and conversed with her before she went out at night to a meeting where she was attacked. And even before this he made it known that his son would not be coming to the daycare the following day. After the assault he ordered plane tickets for himself and his two children in order to flee Israel. Avraham had no doubt that he was the man with the suitcase—and the one who waited at night for Chava Cohen outside the range of the cameras in the parking lot next to the beach and then beat her in the head with a rock and left her unconscious in a ditch.

  He had observed him from a considerable distance when he entered the Magic Tours travel agency that afternoon.

  Just like during the interrogation at the station, Sara’s clothes looked old to him. He wore the same brown pants, fastened with the same brown belt. Before entering the travel agency Sara sat on a bench in the square for a few minutes and scattered some dry pieces of bread he found for the pigeons. Was the urgency Avraham felt related only to the report about the previous investigation he’d read that same morning? From the need to prove to himself, and to Ilana, that he had learned from his mistakes and could head a team investigating a serious crime and solve the mystery within a few hours? During their discussion Ilana said to him, “When we solve this case no one will mention Ofer to you. But you have to put him behind you and focus on the new case.”

  But the problem wasn’t only Ofer Sharabi.

  Chava Cohen had been lying in a recovery room in a hospital since noon, still unconscious. And he hadn’t visited her room yet. In the days before the assault he cast doubt on everything she had said and sensed his disgust intensifying each time he heard her name. He still thought that she had lied to him and that she knew who placed the suitcase, and who the assailant was—but now he also felt a sense of duty toward her, almost a desire to apologize. She was a victim of an assault. And she had a son who hadn’t even known that his mother was leaving in the middle of the night, not to return. The day had been so packed with events that Avraham almost hadn’t thought about the report from this morning, but now he recalled the urgent calls from Ilana, who wanted to inform him of the assault. Like a child, he had sat at his office desk and refused to answer.

  And Marianka hadn’t called, even though she had promised.

  Suddenly Avraham felt the pen continue on the sheet paper in front of him as if on its own and connect the black point next to the word Philippines to Holon and Tel Aviv with a continuous line. Even if Sara’s wife was abroad, that didn’t mean he was mistaken. His and Ilana’s working hypothesis was that they were looking for a man and a woman. The man placed the suitcase on Lavon Street and the woman called to make the threat. The woman arranged the meeting with Chava Cohen and the man showed up in her place. But the first phone call, at least—which they knew with certainty was made by a woman—could have been made from anywhere. They hadn’t succeeded in locating its source, but it was certainly possible to ascertain if it was made from Israel or abroad. He thought about calling Ilana to share the idea with her but knew that she wouldn’t change her mind with regard to the arrest and the interrogation. And, anyway, they were supposed to meet in her office tomorrow morning.

  A YOUNG PATROLWOMAN IN UNIFORM SAT by the door of Chava Cohen’s room in the Trauma Unit.

  On a bench in the corridor outside the room sat a stocky man in an undershirt, his arms tattooed, and next to him slept a tall, thin youth. His head was resting on the man’s shoulder and his body, folded up below, was covered with a blanket. Avraham thought that the man was Chava Cohen’s ex-husband, and only later on did it turn out that he was her brother. The sleeping youth was her son. The son who was called into the operating room and looked at his mother over the shoulders of the surgeons in order to
confirm her identity for the police. He hadn’t gone home since. Avraham presented his ID and the cop opened the door to the room for him.

  “Do you want me to call one of the doctors?” she asked, and he said no.

  He wanted to be alone with her.

  But it was difficult to see Chava Cohen in a room that was lit only by a small, weak light above the bed. Her face was bandaged and her body was covered with a blanket. The right side of her head, which wasn’t bandaged, was shaven. Dark signs of the injuries stuck out on both her neck and the exposed parts of her face, on her right cheek and forehead. Her eyes were closed.

  Avraham didn’t see anything that he didn’t already know after the phone call with the doctor who operated on her. Nevertheless he sat next to her for some time, as if he hoped that she would wake up while he was there. The doctor said on the phone that Chava Cohen might open her eyes at any moment, but was also likely to remain unconscious for many days. And there was no way of knowing in what condition she’d wake up because it was impossible to measure the severity of the damage.

  When he left the room Avraham introduced himself to her brother as the commander of the investigation team. The son didn’t wake up even though they spoke loudly next to him, and Avraham wondered if the son could ever forget the picture he had seen in surgery. He asked the brother a few routine questions, even though he wasn’t interested in the answers. The brother didn’t know a thing about the daycare his sister ran, or about Chaim Sara. He lived in Haifa and last saw Chava Cohen on Rosh Hashanah. Before he said good-bye to him, the brother asked, “You still don’t know who did this?”

  Avraham shook his head no because the contents of the investigation were confidential, but he was convinced he knew.

  Only upon his return home did he find a message from Marianka.

  It was after midnight, and Avraham took off his shirt and poured himself some cold water, and after this he opened his in-box and his eyes froze.

  He had a feeling that she would write to him, because she hadn’t called, but he hadn’t imagined what she’d write. The lines were short, like a mourner’s notice. Marianka wrote:

  DON’T WAIT FOR ME, AVI.

  NOT NOW.

  I KNOW THAT THE TIMING ISN’T GOOD AND THAT YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF AN INVESTIGATION. TRY TO CONCENTRATE ON IT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN AND DON’T THINK ABOUT ME.

  MAYBE ONE DAY IT WILL BE DIFFERENT.

  I WILL CALL TO EXPLAIN WHEN I CAN.

  Part Two

  9

  THAT NIGHT AUTUMN ARRIVED.

  The heat stored over the summer in the narrow spaces inside and between the walls of the buildings didn’t dissipate, but strangely dark clouds spread out in the sky and before morning cool drops of rain began falling on the protective nylon tarps that covered the scene of the assault.

  Avraham couldn’t sleep, though he tried.

  When the night turned blue and he understood that sleep was beyond him, he rose from his bed and got dressed. He searched all over the city for an open café because he wanted to be among people, but he couldn’t find one. For some time he continued driving with no specific destination, until finally he understood where he had to go.

  The police radio that morning was mainly reports of traffic accidents. At five thirty a truck slid on an oil stain that the rain had loosened from the asphalt and struck a motorcyclist traveling in the opposite direction.

  Avraham suggested to the policewoman sitting in front of Chava Cohen’s room that she should go and take a break. She said, “Are you sure? Because if you’re serious, I’m going home to wash up and see my kids. I live here, close by,” and he said that he could stay until eight thirty. A meeting of the investigation team had been set for nine at the Tel Aviv district headquarters.

  After she left, he opened the door. Chava Cohen lay in her bed, unconscious. Her face looked more peaceful than it had the day before. Outside the room, on the bench in the dark corridor, her son still slept. Avraham didn’t see her brother anywhere. He bought instant coffee from a machine and returned to his place across from the son. He didn’t actually have any reason to be there. He no longer thought that she’d feel his presence and wake up. Suddenly it seemed to him that he came to the hospital to watch over not Chava Cohen but rather her son sleeping with his body folded up, alone, outside her room. And there, of all places, facing the sleeping son, his eyes slowly closed.

  The corridor was silent and dark, and only at its far end, at the nurses’ station, a light glowed.

  He woke up when one of the nurses tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he would like something to eat. The bench the son had been lying on was empty, and he saw him coming out of the bathroom after washing his face.

  IN CONFERENCE ROOM C AT THE Tel Aviv district headquarters waited Sergeant Lior Zaytuni, the young detective whom he had met in Ilana’s office. He had been the first to arrive at the investigating team’s meeting, and the cuffs of his pants were soaking wet, as if he’d skipped through a puddle on the way to headquarters. His face was youthful and smooth, and to Avraham he looked too young to be a police detective—perhaps in his early twenties. During the meeting he barely opened his mouth, and when he spoke, a flustered quiver could be heard in his voice. He had difficulty connecting his laptop to the projector by himself and had to beg the assistance of Ilana, who arrived exactly at nine and asked, “Why the hell isn’t Eliyahu here yet?”

  Ma’alul arrived a bit late, as was his habit, owing to the traffic the sudden rain created. Avraham asked Ilana to add him to the team, even though for now the file didn’t contain interrogations of children or teenagers, and Ilana agreed when the Juvenile Division responded that Ma’alul wasn’t involved in any pressing investigations. He put a brown leather carryall on the table and asked for their permission to eat during the meeting, since he hadn’t had any breakfast at home. Ilana’s secretary served everyone weak coffee in paper cups.

  Before setting out an egg salad sandwich wrapped in tinfoil and a peeled cucumber on the table, Ma’alul polished the area of the table in front of him with a white handkerchief that he removed from his bag. When he saw Avraham waiting for him in order to open the meeting he said, “Start, Avi, start. Don’t wait for me. I eat through one ear and hear with the other,” and Avraham looked at him with searching eyes, though Ma’alul couldn’t have known why.

  It was the sentence that Marianka wrote to him.

  Don’t wait.

  Ilana laughed out loud, and Ma’alul apparently noticed something being crushed in Avraham’s eyes and whispered voicelessly to him, just moving his lips, “You okay?”

  A slideshow of images from the night of the assault was projected onto the screen. Chava Cohen in the ditch under the bridge among empty plastic bottles and rags. She had been left lying facedown, and the forensics investigators who analyzed the scene determined that she had sustained the final blows to her head while laid out like this, motionless. She had looked so sure of herself when she got out of the red Justy in the parking lot, about an hour before she was found in the ditch, and Avraham thought about the difference between the before and the after. How a person’s life can change in a moment. Ilana said to him, “Come on, Avi, let’s move it along, we’re running late. Go ahead and explain to us what happened.”

  He was still trying to understand.

  THAT NIGHT, IMMEDIATELY AFTER READING THE message, he had called Marianka, even though she asked him not to do this. The telephone in the small apartment in Alfred Bouvier Square in Brussels rang but she didn’t answer. If he could have walked on foot or driven to her in a car, he would have. Knocked on the door and demanded an explanation despite her request. In the end he wrote her an e-mail, just one line: WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING ME?

  For a moment he thought that perhaps he hadn’t communicated with her enough in recent days, because of the investigation, but he knew that wasn’t the problem. He had felt her disappearing on him, and even asked her if something had happened, but she avoided answering
. She was in his apartment for just one week back in June, more than three months earlier, but he felt her there in every corner: on the porch, which was his and Marianka’s porch, in the living room, whose walls were supposed to be painted white and light blue, in the bedroom, where the closet was half empty and the old wooden shelves were awaiting her clothes. Before morning, prior to going out to the hospital, he again checked his in-box. No answer to the e-mail he had sent her.

  Ma’alul patiently chewed his sandwich and covered his mouth with his hand, and Avraham said, “Chava Cohen, a forty-two-year-old resident of Holon, a teacher by profession, was assaulted at night between Sunday and Monday near the beach in Tel Aviv. As is visible from the pictures, it was a brutal attack and was carried out with a rock found at the scene. Threats preceded it, apparently as well as a fake bomb that was placed next to the daycare that the victim runs on Lavon Street. The scene is messy, and it looks like we will have numerous findings from the forensics lab. There will be fingerprints as well as shoe prints. So when we arrest a suspect in the assault we’ll have something to work with.”

  Ma’alul put his roll on the table and wiped the tips of his fingers with his handkerchief. He said, “Excuse me for interrupting you, but what does this mean that the assault was apparently preceded by threats and a fake bomb?” and Avraham said, “There was a fake bomb, not apparently, and there was also a threatening call to the daycare. We haven’t located the person or persons who placed the bomb or made the phone call, but we’re certain there’s a connection between the crimes, even though the victim concealed the threat from us and claimed she had no information about the identity of whoever placed the bomb.”