A Possibility of Violence

by D. A. Mishani

  Twenty minutes after the start of the trip the radios in both cars broadcast an announcement about an infiltration from the Egyptian border. All policemen in the southern district were asked to join the search, because some of the infiltrators were Bedouin who had smuggled in weapons from the Sinai. The police escorting Uzan and his girlfriend asked if they were to continue traveling to Holon, as planned, and received clear instructions over the radio, which both prisoners could hear. At a gas station they stopped and Ilanit Hadad was moved to the car in which Uzan was being transported, and the other car joined the search. Actually, it stopped and waited two kilometers away for additional directions from Avraham. In the meantime he drank his first coffee since the evening hours and ate a dry cinnamon roll, and went to smoke a cigarette outside the station. A bus rolled by him in the dark along Fichman Street with its headlights on and three passengers inside. Was this really the end? Visions of the reenactment and Sara’s unclear confession wouldn’t let go of him. He returned to his office and opened the investigation file in order to review his notes and suddenly noticed that the old picture of Jennifer Salazar that Garbo sent him wasn’t in the cardboard folder. He had no particular need of the picture, but he looked for it among the documents in the folder and on his desk, and couldn’t find it. He dispatched Zaytuni to search again for the letter that Sara claimed he wrote to his sons in the name of Jennifer Salazar and had buried in the suitcase that was moved from the airport to the station on Friday.

  The police officer who remained at the gas station went to the bathroom, but first he asked the two detainees to exit the vehicle and he handcuffed them to an electric pole next to the entrance to the convenience store. He instructed them not to speak to each other, and when he returned he put them back into the car. A quarter of an hour later he received a radio message that the infiltrators had been caught and that the second car was returning to the gas station. The trip to Holon continued.

  AMOS UZAN SMILED WHEN AVRAHAM ENTERED the interrogation room where Sara had confessed a few hours earlier. He appeared relaxed when Avraham sat down across from him and said, “I promised that we’d see each other again. Do you remember?”

  He wasn’t supposed to interrogate him then; in fact, he had returned to the station for a meeting with Benny Saban, in white pants and the ridiculous peach-colored shirt that Marianka bought him and which he hadn’t worn since then. Uzan laughed. “Right, you promised. So take a good look, so you won’t miss me, because I’m not staying for long this time, either,” and added, “Can I get something cold to drink?” But the smile was wiped off his face when Avraham turned on the recording device and played him the short conversation he and his girlfriend had next to that random electric pole they were handcuffed to at the gas station. “Motherfucker,” he said and added, “That’s not admissible, so you might as well slather it in Vaseline and shove it up your ass.” On the recording Uzan could be heard asking his girlfriend to be quiet during the interrogation and threatened that if she did speak, he’d dump everything on her and say that she had asked him to attack Chava Cohen. Ilanit Hadad didn’t say a word during their brief conversation, only cried, and Uzan said, “Give it a rest. Just watch that mouth of yours and everything will be fine.”

  Now it was Avraham’s turn to smile, but he didn’t.

  In many senses he was indebted to Uzan, he thought.

  If Uzan had broken during the first interrogation and admitted that he was involved in placing the bomb next to the daycare, Chaim Sara would be in Manila now with his two sons, if they were still alive, and no one would have thought of searching for their mother’s body. He just said to Uzan, “We’ll see about that in court. Now tell me, please, why you attacked Chava Cohen. Just because your girlfriend was fired from her job, or were there additional reasons?”

  Uzan looked at him and asked, “Who’s Chava Cohen?”

  There was no point in persisting.

  In the adjacent interrogation room Zaytuni played the same recording for Ilanit Hadad and easily convinced her to talk. And she told him everything: how Uzan thought up the plan to blackmail Chava Cohen, and how the teacher didn’t give in to his demands despite the threats and fired her from her job, and how she placed the suitcase with the fake bomb that Uzan assembled next to the daycare, and arranged, at his request, the meeting with Chava Cohen by the beach in south Tel Aviv. She hadn’t suspected that he planned on assaulting the teacher, and as far as she knew maybe he hadn’t planned to do that at all, but the meeting turned into a violent argument and she wasn’t able to stop Uzan when he lifted a rock and struck Chava in the chest and head.

  Avraham rose from his seat and left, and Uzan called out behind him, “Did you give up? Just like that? Don’t I even get a kiss good-bye on the cheek?”

  In the entrance to the station Ilanit Hadad’s parents sat waiting, and at first he didn’t recognize them. But her mother ran up to him, weeping bitterly, and he remembered as she grabbed both his hands and said to him, “Let my girl go, I’m begging you. He kidnapped her, I swear, he took my girl and made her his puppet. None of this was her fault.”

  The father stood next to her and didn’t say a word, just as he had during the questioning in their apartment.

  And only then did Avraham grasp what had happened since the day before.

  Policemen stopped in the hallways of the station in order to shake his hand and his cell phone rang much more than usual, until he turned it off. Even Shrapstein knocked on the door of his office, peeked inside, and let slip, “Way to go.” At noon Benny Saban’s secretary invited him up to his office and Saban received him at the entrance to the room with an awkward pat on the shoulder. He said to him, “You did great work, Avi. If you get a call from the commissioner, pretend you’re surprised and don’t let him know I told you he was going to call. And get ready for the star treatment from me,” and Avraham thanked him with an embarrassed smile.

  The two investigations that had started together, without him knowing at first, concluded on the same day.

  One opened with a suitcase holding a fake bomb placed near a daycare on Lavon Street in Holon, which had led only him to a second suitcase, in which were packed the clothes and toys of two little boys who were en route to be murdered in Manila, and to a third suitcase that was hidden in a shed and into which were hastily stuffed a dead woman’s personal possessions.

  Had he eaten in the cafeteria the flow of praise would have continued, but he ordered a tray and shut himself up in his office. He tried to transcribe the full confession that Sara had given at night in order to attach it to the investigation summary report but he couldn’t do it. He ate slowly and felt the exhaustion spreading through every part of his body. The stewed beef he chewed had a strange taste, and he left most of it on the tray. There were moments from the tape of the interrogation that he watched again and again, but in the meantime he hadn’t written a word.

  He wanted to go home, to sleep, but he still had a long day ahead of him. He again searched for the photograph of Jennifer Salazar in the cardboard folder and among the papers scattered on the desk but he didn’t find it, and he debated whether or not to call the jail and ask the guards to search for it among Sara’s possessions. But there was something else he was missing, other than the picture, as if there was a false bottom in one of the suitcases that he hadn’t discovered, or a secret compartment hidden inside it. He went to the evidence room, where Sara’s suitcase was being kept, and tossed it onto the table, rummaged through the children’s clothes, and even checked the toiletries bag. The letter that Sara claimed he wrote to his children in Jenny’s name wasn’t there. Had he lied about that as well? But if he hadn’t lied, how had the letter disappeared?

  The telephone in his office rang and Anselmo Garbo was on the line.

  The Philippine detective sounded excited when he said to him in his sharp voice, “Inspector Avraham? Is that you? Can you hear me?”

  He forgot that he had promised to keep Garbo apprised of developm
ents.

  “I have good news. We located Jennifer Salazar’s sister in Berlin.”

  Avraham waited a moment before saying quietly, “We already found her,” but Garbo misunderstood his response and asked, “The sister?” And Avraham said in a louder voice, “No, no. I mean Jennifer Salazar. The missing person. We found her corpse this morning. She’s dead.” He apologized for not contacting him earlier, because he was busy with the investigation. The connection was bad, or Garbo was phoning from a place with poor reception, because he didn’t hear his voice for a few seconds.

  “How did she die?”

  “She was murdered. Her husband murdered her.”

  Garbo asked him to wait on the line and his voice disappeared again. The time in Manila was 7:00 p.m., and he was calling Israel in the middle of a dinner with the minister of police and other senior officers, and so he went out to the smoking vestibule at the Hotel Makati Shangri-La in order to continue the conversation without interruptions.

  “Can you hear me better, Inspector Avraham? You said she was murdered by her husband?” he asked, and Avraham confirmed this. Jennifer Salazar was asphyxiated, in her sleep, in the bedroom of the apartment where she resided for eight years, since she had married Sara.

  “So why did he plan to enter the Philippines?”

  “In order to murder the two children there. One of the children was a witness to the mother’s murder, and he discovered this. He denied that this was his plan, but we think that he planned to murder them and then return to Israel without them. To say they stayed with her.”

  Again there was silence. From the other end of the line the sounds of a match lighting and the rustle of tobacco burning in a pipe could be heard. Garbo blew his nose a few times. Was he crying? Avraham said, “I can send you the summary of the case in another day or two, if you want, in English,” and Garbo suddenly asked, “Did you identify the body with certainty? Did you see it?”

  For some reason he said that he saw it himself.

  “What will you do with it?”

  He hadn’t thought about this before. The body had been moved to the Institute for Forensic Medicine, but he had no idea what would be done with it after that. Was the Philippine detective offering to transport it to Manila for interment?

  Garbo said, “I will nevertheless give you the sister’s details. Her name is Grace Ilmaz and she resides in Berlin. Perhaps she can help you with the children. And besides this, I succeeded in speaking with Jennifer’s first husband. Andreda. They divorced in 1994, after four years of marriage, because he traveled to work in Qatar, but they kept in touch by telephone and mail for some years because they still loved each other. So he said. Her most recent visit to Manila, in 2005, was the last time they met; she learned then that he had married again and had children, and since then they didn’t speak anymore. He did not know that she married in Israel and had two children.” Avraham didn’t understand why he was telling him all this now, when the investigation was over. Before they got off the phone, Garbo said to him in an official tone, “Inspector Avraham, I would like to thank you in the name of the Philippine police for your efforts. In the Philippines we say, ‘Wherever there is life, there is still hope.’ But I believe that even when life comes to an end, we must continue to hope. Do you not think this way?”

  They promised each other that they would keep in contact in the coming days.

  Avraham decided to put off transcribing the tape of the interrogation until the evening and went off by himself to Ilana’s office at the Tel Aviv district headquarters. The car windows were closed, and the traffic in the streets on the Sunday after Yom Kippur was sparse, and for a moment he drove in complete silence. He opened the window and a dry wind came inside. Ilana was wearing her rectangular glasses and had her uniform on when he arrived at her office. She rose slowly from her chair in order to close the door behind him instead of asking him to close it. “How are you?” she asked him, and he said, “Tired, mainly.”

  She said further, “You need to celebrate, no?” And he answered, “This is how I look when I celebrate.”

  Ilana laughed.

  THAT DAY OFFERED MORE THAN A few sights and sounds that would stay with him afterward, but he would never forget this conversation with Ilana. They sat across from each other and she removed her glasses, and he didn’t notice the spots around her eyes. She glanced at him with her painful look and said immediately, “I owe you an apology,” and he asked, “For what?” even though he well knew.

  “For doubting your gut.”

  He had imagined this moment differently.

  He was waiting for her to apologize, but when it happened he didn’t feel happy. Three days earlier he sat in her office and she insisted that he was fabricating another missing-persons case and another father who planned to harm his children, and for a moment she succeeded in shaking his confidence. And now he had returned to her office, victorious. She looked tense to him, and he thought that this was because it was hard for her to acknowledge her defeat and his victory, and later on he would be ashamed to have thought this.

  He tried to avoid her stinging gaze and told her that it didn’t matter, and Ilana said, “It actually does matter, Avi. And I’m glad you went with your instincts against what I asked you to do. You conducted this investigation alone, and at times behind my back. I know I should be angry with you, but this means that you’ve grown as a detective. And mainly it means that you’ve gotten past the trauma of the Sharabi investigation.”

  After their conversation, Avraham didn’t understand why he felt that these words had crushed something inside him. It was then that he remembered Sara’s meeting with his children in the interrogation room at night.

  He had reviewed the meeting over and over again in his office while he ate lunch. And knew the words by heart, though he still hadn’t written them down.

  The children stood in the entrance to the interrogation room but didn’t dare enter until Avraham gestured his permission. And then the younger son ran toward Sara. The older one remained in the entrance to the room, next to Ma’alul, and didn’t move.

  He didn’t know what Sara wanted to say to them and warned him that if he said anything that might hurt the children or affect the investigation, Avraham would remove them from the room immediately. Sara breathed heavily and stroked the hair of his younger son, who burrowed in between his knees. But when he spoke, he spoke to the older son, the one far from him, as if he were the only one in the room. Sara said to him, “Ezer, they’re going to tell you all sorts of things, don’t believe them. Believe me only. You know I had no choice, right? Shalom doesn’t understand because he’s still small. And from now on you’ll have to protect Shalom. You’ll be like a father and a mother for him now, okay? Like I was . . .” and then he crouched on his knees in front of his smaller son and a strange sound emerged from his mouth, deep and unintelligible, and Ma’alul called out, “Enough, Avi, that’s enough,” and Avraham pulled the boy’s hand and removed the two of them from the room.

  Ilana felt that something was a little out of balance with him and asked, “Avi, are you okay?” and he answered her without thinking, “Something’s not sitting right, Ilana. Something’s missing.” He hadn’t planned to talk to her about this, but he was so used to this sort of exchange with her over the years, here in this room, and before that in her old office on the second floor of the Ayalon district station.

  “Do you mean with the case?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “You have the suspect’s full confession and a video of the re-creation and a body, no?”

  She asked if it was the testimony that Sara’s mother gave that was bothering him and he said no. In the morning hours, when the backhoe operator was disinterring the body, Ma’alul had questioned the mother in her home and she testified that her son killed his wife in his sleep. Or at least that’s what he told her when he brought the body to her house after the murder. Sara had been a sleepwalker since he was a child, she said, getting up at nig
ht and doing things without knowing it, in his sleep. But this wasn’t what was bothering him, because they didn’t believe her story. And Sara explicitly confessed to premeditated murder and made no attempt to imply that he killed his wife accidentally. And the new testimony from the son about the “first father” wasn’t the problem, either. The child repeated that he saw his first father take his mother down from the apartment with a suitcase, but he insisted that the first father wasn’t Sara and that Sara was asleep in bed the whole time. After Sara’s detailed confession they had no need of his testimony, and, anyway, it was clear to everyone that the child was having difficulty dealing with what he’d seen and therefore was transferring the responsibility for the murder to an imaginary father and clearing his real father of blame. According to the report he submitted, Ma’alul asked the child, “Do you know where your father took your mother?” and the child said, “Yes, to her country.” And when he asked him why his father took her there, the child said, “Because she missed it. She wanted to live in her country with our first father and have new children.”

  Ilana didn’t understand.

  “So tell me what’s not sitting right,” she said.

  What bothered him wasn’t only the photograph of Jennifer Salazar that had disappeared from the investigation file, or the letter that wasn’t found in the suitcase.

  “I just can’t understand him,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t understand Sara. Why did he do what he did?”

  “Didn’t he explain it to you?”

  He tried to explain. But the more he explained the less Avraham felt he understood. The confession Sara gave was detailed, but something in it remained unclear, and Avraham had a sense that the more details they added to it the blurrier the picture of the murder actually became. “He said that he did it in order to protect the children. Because she didn’t love them.”