A Possibility of Violence

by D. A. Mishani

  Did anyone from among those sitting in the church even know Jennifer Salazar? Did the priest see her when she sometimes came alone to the church on Sundays, as Sara told him she had in one of the interrogations? From time to time the congregation stood up from their seats, according to some hidden signal, and Avraham got up with them in order not to stick out, but when they knelt on the wooden pews, he stayed seated. A tall Filipino woman passed among them with a padded straw basket and they put bills and coins in it, but Avraham avoided her gaze and did not reach for his wallet. He didn’t believe in any God, yet still it occurred to him that he might well pay dearly for his visit to the church.

  He noticed the children only after the service. The priest approached the first pew and shook the hands of the worshippers, and that’s when Avraham recognized the older son, wearing a dress shirt, and the younger boy, and a woman next to them with long black hair.

  A chill passed through him.

  From where he was sitting she very much resembled the young woman in the old picture.

  The priest paused before the children and placed his hands on the head of the smaller boy, as a blessing, and afterward bent down in order to whisper something to him, perhaps words of condolence, and Avraham recalled that a few days earlier he’d thought he should adopt the children and raise them himself, but that was an idiotic thought that came to him only because of a novel he’d read years ago. He introduced himself, in English, to the sister, who up close resembled the murdered woman less, her face more narrow and delicate, and told her that there were items belonging to her sister in the police’s possession that she could take.

  She thanked him and asked what items and Avraham said, “Mainly clothing and jewelry that were found in a suitcase. And a few documents and pictures that we found at their home. And there are letters that you wrote to her that you probably will want back,” and she looked at him with surprise and said, “I never wrote Jennifer letters. We haven’t been in touch since I went to Germany.”

  He presented her with the picture of the man that was found in her sister’s wallet, but she didn’t want it, because despite Ma’alul’s assumption, it wasn’t a picture of their father, but rather a picture of Jennifer Salazar’s first husband, Julius Andreda, “The man who broke her heart,” her sister said.

  Ezer stood next to them during this conversation and didn’t let go of his younger brother’s hand, as if Sara’s final injunction in the interrogation room continued to echo in his ears.

  Avraham walked the narrow alleyways of Jaffa’s old city, down to the old port, and sat next to a fisherman who with his net caught small, dead fish that floated with eyes open in the shallow water near the boat docks.

  Perhaps because he saw the children alive, a sense of satisfaction rose in him, even though he still felt that the case wasn’t completely settled, as he had admitted to Ilana; and one night when he again couldn’t fall asleep he would go to Lavon Street and with a small flashlight scan the courtyard where the suitcase with the fake bomb had been hidden, as if he might find something there so many days later.

  The wind picked up, and the waves that crashed against the docks soaked his shoes and the cuffs of his pants, and he went back to the station.

  THE NEWSPAPERS’ INTEREST IN THE SALAZAR case was brief and superficial.

  Information about the murder and the plan to dispose of the children in Manila appeared in the back pages of most of the daily papers, and in one of them Avraham was mentioned by name. On the same day he was interviewed by telephone for a radio program on the Voice of Israel, but two minutes after the broadcast began, it was cut short for a report on the elimination of a senior member of Hamas in Gaza, and he didn’t even get a chance to say the murdered woman’s name on the air. He sat by the phone in his office and waited, because the program’s producer promised that they’d get back to him, but that didn’t happen.

  And life continued.

  Sara’s lawyer offered to sign a plea bargain according to which Sara would confess to the murder of his wife while the prosecution would shelve the baseless accusation regarding the plan to kill the children, and even suggested that the police were responsible for the disappearance of the letter that Sara had hidden in the suitcase, which would have proved his explanation for the trip. Avraham vehemently opposed the deal and no one was about to disagree with the opinion of the detective who had solved the case: his investigation proved that the plan for the trip was born in Sara’s mind after his son hinted about what he had seen the night of the murder, and the fact that he ordered return tickets for both his wife and children confirmed that his pattern was identical. And they decided not to prosecute Sara’s mother, due to her age.

  The next case that was placed in his hands dealt with the assault of a bus driver who had been beaten with an iron rod by two passengers, and there was an additional case, exceptional and wrapped in mystery. It began with some writing that had sprung up on walls all over the city, in black spray paint, Soon you will understand why, and continued with three break-ins of senior citizens’ apartments in the course of a single night. Nothing was stolen from the senior citizens’ apartments, but in the three bedrooms were placed rusty metal cases in each of which was a folded page of an old newspaper.

  In one apartment, on De Shalit Street, it was a page from Yediot Ahronot from Thursday, May 5, 1949. The central item on the crumbling paper told about a plane crash in Italy, on Mount Superga, south of the Po River, in which all the players on the celebrated Turin soccer team perished. Underneath it, circled with a black marker, was an item about a murder in the city of Holon: The body of a widower was found in the sands in the Moledet neighborhood.

  In the second apartment it was a newspaper clipping from November 4, 1979. There was a central item in it as well, this time about a massacre in North Carolina: Ku Klux Klan operatives opened fire on activists marching for human rights who were joined by representatives from labor organizations and Communist movements, and five were killed. Next to it was a smaller item about an eighteen-year-old woman, a resident of Holon, who was abducted from her home. In the third incident, which was reported a few days later, a section of the November 18, 1962, Davar newspaper was found, in which was an item about the murder of a disabled shoemaker in a suburb of Tel Aviv.

  Moshe Stolero, age 35, hunchback and limping, locked up his store for household goods, books, and newspapers and prepared to go up to his parents’ apartment on the third floor of the same building. He had with him the day’s revenue in the amount of three hundred lira and began the climb home. When he entered the stairwell and extended his hand to turn on the lights, a volley of three shots was fired in his direction. He was struck in the chest, shoulder, and head. The unidentified shooter fled the scene.

  On each of the three newspaper clippings an anonymous person wrote in black marker: Soon you will understand why.

  For the first time since joining the force Avraham visited the police’s archive basement and met the archive’s director, a strange man in his seventies who was known as Dr. Bartoshek, even though that wasn’t his name. Despite his age, Bartoshek was restless, fueled by some kind of inner fire, and as he moved with dizzying speed in his wheelchair among the shelves of old files he treated Avraham to a short lecture on the history of police work in Israel.

  “Did you know that thirty years ago when a policeman needed to report a criminal incident, he had to run to a public telephone and call the station with a phone token?” he asked, and his eyes sparkled. “And that’s if he had a phone token on him, of course! But in those days every policeman had in his shirt pocket a small sack of tokens. Can you imagine?”

  Together Avraham and Dr. Bartoshek discovered that the three old crimes had a common denominator: none of them had been solved. And none of the three senior citizens had a clue as to why the newspapers were placed in their apartments.

  The case stirred Avraham’s curiosity, but he struggled to be drawn into it. He had a feeling that there was something
contrived about it and that it wouldn’t lead to a crime carried out by a real person, as if he had read about it in one of the detective novels he loved and wasn’t actually investigating it himself. For long hours he stared at the old news items about the disasters and the dead and the crimes that had no apparent meaning or explanation. And to make matters worse, he couldn’t speak about the case with Ilana. Ostensibly his work continued as usual, but there was no “as usual” without Ilana. Not a day passed without him wanting to talk with her, but she asked not be visited in the hospital nor to be called during therapy. In his imagination he saw her sitting up in a hospital bed, her head bald, wearing a green robe. Her feet bare and her skin hard and rough. From time to time things were whispered about her replacement in the corridors of the station, but in the meantime no one had been nominated to replace her nor had it been hinted to Avraham that he might get the job. And until the last moment he hoped that she’d surprise him and come to the decoration and promotion ceremony, which took place on a Wednesday afternoon, in the courtyard where the Rosh Hashanah toast had taken place back in early September.

  The station’s courtyard again filled up with policemen and -women in uniform, and the wooden tables were covered in tablecloths and plastic plates with small sandwiches and bottles of soda. Avraham searched for Ilana among those who came and saw his parents, who stood at the entrance to the courtyard, embarrassed. His mother was well dressed and wore makeup, as she used to wear makeup during his childhood when she would go hear a concert in Tel Aviv, and he saw his father for the first time in a while wearing jeans and the black beret that he began wearing after he retired. They sat next to him in the first row during Saban’s speech, which the district commander presented in a lazy manner, repeating entire paragraphs from the speech he’d given at Rosh Hashanah, about his vision for a safe district free of violence, and at the end he added that thanks to the diligence and courage of police officers such as Avraham this vision was becoming a reality.

  When Avraham spoke there was complete silence in the audience—anyway, that’s what his father told him afterward.

  His mother complained that his words of thanks were too brief, and that he didn’t speak about himself enough.

  He thanked Sergeant Lior Zaytuni and Sergeant Major Eliyahu Ma’alul, without whose contributions the case would not have been solved, and especially Commander Ilana Lis, who all the officers of the district are praying will soon return. Like the priest at St. Peter’s Church, and like Saban in his speech, he didn’t mention Jennifer Salazar, even though in the first draft he had written the night before at home there were a few sentences devoted to her memory.

  TWO DAYS LATER, A FRIDAY MORNING, Police Superintendent Avraham Avraham flew to Brussels.

  He kept the trip a secret, and told his parents that he was going for three days of professional development in Nazareth.

  He landed in Brussels in the early evening and took a train from the airport to South Brussels Station, and continued from there by cab to the Hotel Espagne, where he’d stayed during his first trip to the city.

  Room 307, where he’d slept then, was occupied, and so he settled down in a pricier, more spacious room, on the seventh floor, with a beautiful balcony facing north and looking out onto the residential neighborhoods leading into the city.

  He left his small suitcase in the room and, just like during the first visit, immediately went out to Avenue Brugmann, but this time he knew the way and walked quickly parallel to the tram tracks until the turn at Rue de la Victoire. Darkness had fallen and the streets had emptied out when he arrived at Alfred Bouvier Square, out of breath. From a distance he noticed the window of the room that had been his room for three months, in the summer, with the light off, but he nevertheless went closer and stood under the gray, industrial-looking building, which Marianka said was the ugliest building in Europe but in his eyes was more beautiful than any palace.

  Her name was still inscribed on the mailbox.

  And no lights were on in the rest of the rooms in the second-floor apartment.

  Avraham stood next to the doorway to the building until he realized that Marianka would see him if she suddenly arrived, and he retreated to the abandoned garden in the middle of the square. He smoked a cigarette under the protection of the darkness and the bare trees. A neighbor whose face was familiar to him walked through the garden with his dog, and the dog barked at Avraham as if it remembered him. From time to time he looked up at the dark window. But the cold grew sharper and deepened, piercing his thin jacket like a knife, and at ten thirty he decided to go back to the hotel. On his way there, he was overcome by hunger and stopped at Le Prétexte, and the waitress smiled at him and asked how he was doing, and he managed to answer her with the few French phrases he had learned over the summer. He ate pasta with seafood in a bland cream sauce and watched the chess game two loud old men were engaged in at the table across from him.

  He was still quite familiar with Marianka’s schedule, and the next day, at seven in the morning, he again hid in the garden across from her building.

  His heart pounded powerfully when he saw the door open on the other side of the parked cars and his Marianka exit the building in a dark tracksuit and running shoes. She looked around and didn’t notice him, warmed her hands with her breath, and then started on her established run, in the direction of Rue de Lausanne, and disappeared. Following the plan he had conceived in advance, he waited in a café through whose window he would be able see her upon her return.

  But he didn’t see her return.

  And when he went back to the square, at nine fifteen, the window of her room was open.

  The windowsill was decorated with the small cyclamen plant that he’d bought for her a few weeks before he went away.

  And each and every one of her movements, when she came out again, before ten, was completely familiar to him.

  The quick, springy gait. The leather bag hanging from her shoulder.

  Even when they walked together, he remembered, he always lagged slightly behind her.

  He raised the collar of his jacket and wound the blue scarf around his mouth and nose and followed her at a safe distance so that she wouldn’t spot him. As he expected, she stopped in the small Polish store, in which he bought her, every morning before she woke up, dark rye bread, and afterward she walked quickly down Rue de la Victoire, toward the market. While she waited at the crosswalk for the light to change there was a moment when she turned around suddenly and might have caught sight of him, but he managed to hide behind a recycling can. She passed by the stands of fresh meat and stopped to buy fruits and vegetables, and he too paused in front of the stands and looked at the cheeses like any other customer. The market filled up and it grew difficult to keep Marianka in his line of sight without getting too close to her, and then she suddenly disappeared. He increased his pace and turned into streets he didn’t know, because he thought she may have turned down one of them. He didn’t have a map and didn’t know the neighborhood he had wandered into, and even though it seemed to him that each turn would lead him back to the market, he was actually walking farther and farther away.

  Rain began to fall, and he walked without an umbrella down a street that went on and on in who-knows-what direction. Suddenly he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around.

  Marianka was as wet as he was.

  She asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he said, “I came for a visit.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I didn’t know if you’d want to meet.”

  He hadn’t expected to see her from such a short distance, and up close her face surprised him. She asked him, “Were you following me?” and he answered, “I wanted to see you,” and in truth that was all he wanted.

  “And you weren’t going to let me know that you’re here? You didn’t think I’d see you when you’ve been walking behind me since this morning?”

  Really, his only plan had been to look at her from a dista
nce.

  AFTERWARD THEY WALKED DOWN THE STREET in silence. She in front of him and he a bit behind, as usual.

  Marianka asked him if he remembered where the shower was and how to turn on the faucet, and under the stream of hot water he heard her open the bathroom door and lay dry clothes on the stool. The white undershirt was his. It had been forgotten in the dryer. She went into the bathroom after him, and he waited in the kitchen. On the dining table were two mugs of boiling-hot tea and a bowl of sugar. His wet pants were drying on the radiator, which gave off a pleasant warmth. And the photo of the two of them, from the summer, in Bruges, was still on the refrigerator. Marianka sat down across from him with her hair short, wet, and dark, and said to him, “I know that I have to explain to you what’s happened, but tell me first how you’re doing,” and he said, “Fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Why not?

  “How did the bomb case end?”

  When they last spoke it was still an investigation into a fake bomb inside a suitcase that had been placed next to a daycare. And Chaim Sara was merely a witness then. She didn’t know that Chava Cohen had been assaulted, or that it turned out that the witness had murdered his wife and planned to murder his two children. He told her everything: about the suspicions stirred in him, and Ilana Lis’s opposition to detaining Sara for questioning, and the ticking of the clock and the urgent communications with Anselmo Garbo and the arrest at the airport and the boy’s ambiguous testimony and Sara’s confession and the re-creation of the crime in his apartment. Did he explain everything at length because it was easier than to talk about himself? Perhaps he hoped that, like the time before, Marianka would say something that would open his eyes and clarify for him what he didn’t understand.

  But this time she said nothing.

  And when he told her that thanks to his uncovering the murder and saving the children he was decorated for his service and promoted to police superintendent, Marianka got up from her chair, said to him, “Wait a sec,” and disappeared into the bedroom. She returned with a small package wrapped in gold paper, which he began to remove gently, so as not to tear it.