“What is it?” he asked, and she said, “A present. For you. Open it already.”
He opened the wooden case and was surprised.
“A pipe?”
“I passed by the store one day and saw it in the window and thought about you and your detectives. You don’t like it?”
He really didn’t know anything about how to smoke a pipe.
But he was happy because she had thought about him one day.
And he heard the rustle of the tobacco burning in Garbo’s pipe during the conversation in which he informed him that Jennifer Salazar had been found.
Could he smoke a pipe, like Garbo?
He pictured himself on the steps of the station, blowing sweet smoke rings into the gray Holon sky.
He said, “I like it very much. I’m just not sure how to use it,” and Marianka said, “I’ll teach you. It’s one of the smells I most like. My father smoked a pipe, it’s the smell I remember from home. I guess I should have also bought some tobacco.”
Something between them had opened up, and Marianka smiled for the first time when Avraham put the pipe in his mouth and bit it with his teeth. He wasn’t about to question her anymore, and only then did she offer, “I didn’t come because I was afraid,” and Avraham asked, “Of what?”
“Of leaving this apartment, and of my work with the police, and of traveling to you without knowing what would happen to us. Losing my whole life again—like what happened to me when we left Slovenia and came here. But mainly afraid of discovering in a few months, or years, that it was a mistake. To give up everything I have and go far from my family to live in a strange country, and then discover that I stopped loving you. Or that you stopped loving me. That you cheated on me with your secretary because you were tired of me. Isn’t that what always happens? I love you now, and maybe you love me, and our summer together was the most wonderful time I can remember, but everything comes to an end. And I can’t allow myself to lose everything again like that.”
Avraham smiled, because all he’d heard were the words “I love you now.”
He said quietly, “That won’t happen to us.”
“How can you know?”
He removed the pipe from his mouth and exhaled an imaginary cloud of smoke into the kitchen.
“It’s elementary, my dear. I simply know.”
“But don’t detectives always get it wrong, according to your theory?” she whispered, and he said, “Not this time. And besides, I don’t have a secretary,” but Marianka didn’t laugh. She said, “Avi, I need to tell you something, to make things easier on myself. This is the real reason I couldn’t speak with you anymore. I didn’t want to lie.”
Had he known, even before she told him, and hidden it from himself?
“I had an affair with another man. Brief. It lasted a few days and was over. I couldn’t have spoken with you as if nothing had happened and hidden it from you, and I couldn’t tell you, either. I think I did it in order to prove to myself that I couldn’t come to you. That we didn’t have a chance. And I succeeded. Are you listening to me, Avi? Are you still here?”
He set the pipe down on the table.
“Who was it?” he asked, and she whispered, “It’s not important.”
It was important, but he didn’t insist on knowing his name.
“Where did you meet?”
“At a family event. But let it go, Avi, please. It doesn’t matter.”
“A family event?”
“Yes. He’s a very distant relative. He lives in Slovenia and was here for a visit.”
He wanted her to say more, and he also didn’t want her to say another thing.
He recalled the questions that he had asked Sara about his wife in the interrogation room at the station, on the night he confessed to murder. Marianka lay on the bed in the bedroom, the bed that was his bed for three months in the summer, and a man he didn’t know and whose face he couldn’t picture slowly opened the buttons of her blouse, from her collar to the button at her navel, and touched her pale shoulder. It was during this time that he was preparing the apartment for her arrival. That he ran after suitcases, and down hospital hallways, always thinking he wanted to go home and call her.
“Did he sleep with you here?” he asked, and she said, “Yes.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t remember. And I’m sorry that it hurts you so much.”
“You don’t remember if he slept here one night? Or a week? Or a month?” His voice nearly broke, and Marianka said, “Don’t interrogate me, Avi. Please. I’m trying to explain to you that it was just an excuse. It won’t help if you know.”
He hadn’t looked at her until then, and when he looked he saw despair in her gaze. A pain he recognized, even though he’d never seen it in her eyes before. His wet pants were still drying on the radiator, but he needed to get up and leave. And suddenly he couldn’t understand why he had come at all. What did he expect would happen if he stood under her window, or followed after her in the street? Would he have returned to Holon without speaking to her if she hadn’t noticed him? And why didn’t he get out of there immediately?
Someone knocked on the door and didn’t stop, and Marianka peeked through the peephole but didn’t open up. He said to her, “You can open it,” and she said, “I don’t want to. It’s the neighbor.” The rain beat against the window, and from outside the rattle of workers dismantling equipment in the street could be heard. Finally evening fell and the kitchen grew dark. They barely spoke until his phone rang, a bit after seven. And afterward he thought that this was the reason he stayed, as if he knew that this call would come and he wanted to answer it next to her.
Marianka looked at him while he spoke, and she understood that something had happened.
He got up from his chair and walked away, then returned to the kitchen and asked her for a pen and paper. His hand shook while he wrote.
Her eyes didn’t leave him, and when he hung up, she asked, “Who was that?”
He said, “Eliyahu Ma’alul. He called from the station.”
Ma’alul’s voice also shook when they spoke. He said to him, “Avi, I’m here with Chaim Sara’s lawyer at the station.”
“Did something happen?” Marianka asked, and he nodded.
She didn’t recognize the name Chaim Sara, because before this he hadn’t mentioned the murderer by name.
“His letter was found. The letter that he wrote to the children in his wife’s name.”
He hadn’t told her about the letter that Sara insisted he had written and hidden in the suitcase, which was supposed to prove that he didn’t intend on harming his sons in Manila but instead was going simply to stage a sort of farewell from their mother, and which had disappeared with no explanation.
“So how did they find it now?” she asked, and he answered, “His son returned it. The older son. His name is Ezer. He says that he stole it from the suitcase the night before the trip and kept it with him until now. This morning he mentioned it to the grandmother, or the lawyer, and the lawyer contacted Ma’alul and presented the letter to him. We still need to verify that it’s Sara’s handwriting and try to confirm when it was written, but Ma’alul believes the child.”
“And what does this mean?”
“I don’t know yet. But maybe that he didn’t plan on killing them there, like I thought. That he was almost charged with the attempted murder of the children because of me, and that this is what the children have heard since he was arrested.”
Marianka looked at the foreign letters he had jotted down and asked, “And that’s the letter?” He nodded and stared at the words in front of him.
“Can you read it to me?”
“What for?”
“I want to know what’s written in it.”
He would have preferred not to. If Sara’s version of events was correct, he had been planning to read this letter aloud to his sons in Manila, and here was Avraham reading it to Marianka in Brussels, trying to translate the conte
nts of the letter but at the same time trying to resist the meaning of the words, or to forget them, as if he was afraid they’d stick to him somehow.
Shalom and Ezer, he finally read,
I know that you came from very far away to look for me with Daddy and that you want to see me and bring me back home, but I can’t meet you here. I decided to leave you and our home because I didn’t want to be your mommy from the beginning. I know that it will be hard for you without me in the beginning and that it will be hard for you to forget too, but you have a father who will protect you and take good care of you. He loves you very very much and he’ll be a good and strong father for you and in the end you will grow up and forget me and start new lives with him. Please help him, because in the beginning it won’t be easy for him alone. And maybe one day, when you grow up and are adults, we’ll be able to meet. Mommy
Marianka hid her eyes from him. And Avraham said, “Do you understand that the child might have saved him?” And suddenly he also understood that he hadn’t asked Ma’alul if Ezer had read the letter and if he thought that his mother wrote it or knew that his father had written it in her name. But, really, which was more terrible? He didn’t want to know.
Marianka brought her head close to him and rested it on his shoulder for the first time. He said to her, “Every time it seems to me that the ending will be different, you know? At the start of every investigation. That everything that had happened can be erased or fixed. But nothing is erased, it only piles up from case to case. I was sure that this time I did it, but I didn’t manage to save anyone this time either. Not her, and not them, and not even myself,” and Marianka came closer to him and said, “Avi, I don’t think it’s possible to save children from their parents,” and then added, “but maybe you’ll succeed one day.”
He listened to her and closed his eyes.
The next day, when he was at the train station, on his way to the airport, he saw a teenage boy and girl kissing.
They were wearing heavy backpacks, and Avraham stared at them for a little too long, until they noticed him, and he thought that when people hold each other in their arms they don’t ever see the other person. And apparently he and Marianka also said the things that they had said that night, without seeing each other, like blind people, or like people talking to themselves. He had said to her hair, “I want us to get married, Marianka,” and she had whispered to his neck, “After everything I told you?”
“Especially after everything you told me,” he answered, and even though he didn’t understand what he meant, he knew that it was the right answer.
He asked, “Do you agree?” and she said only, “Yes, I think so.”
On the table before them were two empty mugs and an uncovered bowl of sugar and two teaspoons, and wrapping paper that had been torn hastily, and a wooden case, and also a pipe—which Avraham packed in his suitcase and took back with him to Holon.
About the Author
D. A. MISHANI is a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature. His first novel, The Missing File, was the first book in his literary crime series featuring the police inspector Avraham Avraham.
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Also by D. A. Mishani
The Missing File
Credits
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor
Cover photograph © Sally Mundy / Trevillion Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A POSSIBILITY OF VIOLENCE. Copyright © 2014 by Dror Mishani. English translation © 2014 by HarperCollins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as Efsharut shel Alimut in Israel in 2013 by Keter Books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-0-06-219540-1
EPUB Edition JULY 2014 ISBN 9780062195418
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* Israel’s strict religion-based marriage laws mean that Jews who wish to marry non-Jewish partners must make arrangements to marry abroad and then prove to the Ministry of Interior that their marriage is authentic for it to be legally recognized by the state. Many of these couples choose to marry in Cyprus because it’s close to Israel, and the market meets demand with cheap wedding packages.
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