Missing

by Adiva Geffen

  “We have four churches here.”

  “Pastor Raphael,” I said again, and to gain his trust, I added, “The man wearing the goofy tie from planet Mars is a close friend of his.”

  He pointed at the door of the church we were seeking.

  We entered and quickly examined the large room, the chairs huddled in the corner, the organ with an electric cord snaking from it, and the stage with a hand-lettered sign above it, declaring the place to be holy.

  We found Pastor Raphael in his tiny office, wearing a yellow suit and a proper tie, hunched over a computer keyboard. Photos on the wall behind the desk showed him hugging two teenage boys. Family. Alice wasn’t there. The moment he saw Pops, his face rounded in a spontaneous smile.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Shoshkowitz. What brings you here, my friend?”

  Dad scrutinized the purple curtains covering the windows with a professional eye.

  “I see that the curtains need mending. Why haven’t you called me?” The pastor smiled with embarrassment and Pops continued, “Pastor Raphael, I’d like you to meet my daughter, Dikla. If it’s all right with you, she’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Alice said you’d come.”

  “She told me she’d be here. I was hoping to meet her. Where is she?” I asked.

  “Alice is not here. She was so scared, she decided to send you to me. I understand you are looking for a girl called Daria.”

  “Alice knows something.”

  “You told her that Daria is your sister. I won’t ask you any questions about it, but as far as I know, your father has only one daughter, and her name isn’t Daria.”

  He got me. Pops gave me a searing I-didn’t-teach-you-to-lie look.

  “That’s true. Daria has a father of her own,” I said.

  “And she ran from home?”

  “She disappeared, maybe something happened to her. A lot of people who love her are very worried.”

  “Have you considered the possibility she doesn’t want to be found?”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “That was my understanding.”

  “In that case, I think she should say that to her parents.”

  “Maybe she has something to fear.”

  “We are talking about her parents!”

  “We are talking about her life!”

  “Says who?”

  He didn’t answer, he just fixed his eyes on my embarrassed Pops, who was trying to figure out what sort of conflict he’d gotten himself into.

  “Pastor Raphael, I get the feeling that you know something. You don’t need to turn her in, just give us a hint of what might have caused her to run and where she went. Is she happy? Is she well? Please understand, her parents are insane with worry. You’re a father too, aren’t you?”

  “And what if we suppose” — the mild-mannered pastor lowered his voice a little — “just suppose, that those people are not who they seem to be?”

  “Dikla.” Pops stood between us. “I think we should all stop arguing. The pastor doesn’t know anything, he’s just trying to—”

  “Withhold information from me.” I raised my voice.

  “I most definitely am not,” the pastor protested. “Every man or woman has the right to choose their own direction in life.”

  “I know you’re hiding something from me.”

  He didn’t say anything, he just lowered his eyes to the floor. Now I was the one who’d caught him in a deception.

  “Perhaps we should just ask Superintendent Bender to come over,” I continued to press him. “Maybe he should be the one running this interrogation.”

  Pastor Raphael looked like I’d just slapped him. My dad stared at the ceiling, embarrassed by the daughter he’d so proudly introduced not five minutes before. What the hell am I doing?

  I didn’t like playing the bad cop, and I certainly didn’t like Evie, Deborah, Barak, or anything that had to do with the Magidal Network. That man, the brave leader of a community trying to survive, stood before me distraught.

  “Dikla, stop it,” Pops said angrily. “Please excuse us, Pastor Raphael, my daughter can get very emotional sometimes. That’s enough, Dikla, say you’re sorry and we’ll all shake hands.”

  I desperately needed Sammy G, who was stranded in the stairwell, two flights down.

  “Gladly,” the pastor said and presented me with two chocolate-colored arms and a smile. “I understand. I apologize if I’ve upset you, but I’m afraid I just can’t help you.”

  “My friend,” Pops spoke up, “now that we’ve restored peace and security, at least in this church, I’d be happy if you would come with us to meet Sammy, a friend and a dear woman who wanted very much to visit your church, but was unable to because of a terrible knee condition. She is waiting for you downstairs.”

  Sammy sat exactly where we’d left her, surrounded by a multitude of black-eyed children, who listened with fascination to her stories about visiting Morocco, chasing criminals in Belgium, and preparing a grilled cheese sandwich for the King of Senegal. We needed only to exchange a brief glance for her to realize I’d failed.

  She extended a hand to the pastor, who still seemed a little stricken, and dished out her loveliest smile for him. It was the easiest of tasks for her. She and the pastor fell in love in five seconds flat. In five minutes, they looked like war buddies sharing memories. A few minutes, jests, and gestures later, Sammy asked if the pastor could tell us anything about Daria.

  “There is nothing to tell,” he insisted.

  “Are you sure? Not even some small detail that could help us?”

  “Believe me, dear, I’d gladly help if I thought this was about helping her, but I don’t. Please, let’s just leave this subject alone.”

  Sammy wasn’t about to give up. “I respect your request,” she said, “but we won’t stop looking for her. True, Dikla didn’t tell Alice the whole truth. Daria isn’t her lost sister, but this is the mission we’ve undertaken in life, locating missing persons. And we’re good at what we do. The best. Do you understand? And when we find her, you better hope we don’t find out you were hiding something. I’m with you, not against you. Let me help.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I hope you don’t have anything to be sorry about. I don’t want this story to harm you and your church.”

  “That would be a real shame,” said the pastor calmly. “We all need to act according to our beliefs.”

  “Would you say the same if it were your own son who disappeared and came to hide in my house, for example?”

  “If he decided my way in life was not his own and was over twenty-one, then the answer is yes. I would accept it with love and understanding.”

  “Well, I guess that’s why you’re the pastor and I’m just a stubborn mule with a busted knee.”

  They both started laughing together. Praise the Lord, now I’ve seen everything.

  10

  I hugged Pops before he got in the car and sat behind the wheel. I continued to wave goodbye until old Mrs. Ford disappeared. I always get this pinch in my heart when he leaves me. Ever since Tamara, his beloved second wife passed away, he has been gradually shriveling as if trying to get closer to the ground, closer to her. As always, I realized I hadn’t taken the time to tell him just how much I love him. Perhaps tomorrow. We need to be kind to those who are dear to us, tell them how much they mean to us. How much we need them. My dad was one of the few people I could safely lean on in this dark and stormy world.

  “He’s going to be just fine,” said Sammy, giving my arm a gentle squeeze. She knew me inside out, up and down, every wrinkle, and every freckle. “Can we continue?”

  I nodded.

  “Call Ginger. I have a job for him. Have him get over here.”

  “Didn’t you say he was on
strike?”

  “Tell him I have a check for him.”

  I called Ginger, asked him to come to the corner of Levanda and Levinsky, and gave him the good news.

  “Levanda? What are two uptown girls like you doing there this time of night?” he asked and said he was on his way without waiting for an answer.

  He showed up a few minutes later. Seeing him again made me wonder once more why he’d earned the nickname Ginger, since his hair was brown, not red. Maybe because his first name’s David. Whatever the reason, Ginger is Sammy’s favorite taxi driver for special projects. The fact that she’d decided to call him meant she finally had a plan.

  “It’s not going to bounce, is it?” he asked and slid the crumpled check into his shirt pocket as we climbed into his taxi.

  Sammy snorted contemptuously. “I’ve got a job,” she announced. “I hope you’re free and up for it tonight.”

  “For you, I’m always free and up for anything. Now tell me, what are you doing here?”

  “Just having a good time.”

  “Here? You and your disintegrating knee? But like you always say, it’s none of my business. Let’s go then, what’s the plan?”

  “In a few minutes, a certain pastor is going to come out of this building — yellow suit, purple tie. Can’t miss him. You get on his tail, and you don’t let go, got it?”

  “Who’s coming with me?”

  “No one. Dikla can’t do it; he suspects her. Try not to lose him. Anyone he meets, anything he does — take a picture. Don’t make faces at me. I trust you. You’ve done more complicated things for me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. So, now I just take off and leave you here?” Sammy nodded, and he continued, “Safest area in town. Watch her back, Dikla.” He winked at me.

  We got out of the taxi and left him there.

  At the corner of Chlenov Street we found a place to get some coffee, take a leak, and wait. Ten minutes later, Sammy’s cell phone rang.

  “Twenty-four to station, good evening.” Ginger sounded unnaturally official. “Just picked up a fare.”

  “Where to?” Sammy did her best taxi dispatcher imitation.

  “Sirkin Street, Tel Aviv.”

  “Confirmed, check in when you’re done,” Sammy said and looked at me, beaming. Her plan had worked. “Our naive pastor, the one who wouldn’t have bothered to look for his own son, knows something,” she said confidently after she ended the call. “And now, I’m famished. I have to put something in my mouth. Come on, let’s find a taxi to take us to the Laughing Chicken. Text Ginger and ask him to join us once he’s done.”

  ◊◊◊

  The Laughing Chicken was part fast-food joint, part torture chamber for the unlucky fowls grilling on a spit and rolling all the way to chicken heaven. They weren’t doing much laughing on that Spanish Inquisition version of a Ferris wheel. But the customers were sure having a good time. Sammy flagged down a waiter wearing a red hat with chicken legs dangling from it, and he returned shortly with victim number one. Sammy ripped the bird apart, reduced it to a pile of bones, and asked the waiter to bring victim number two. Chicken heaven was about to get another clucking citizen.

  “No wonder your knee has decided on a rebellion,” I told her when she tore another piece of ciabatta bread. “It’s probably not easy for it to play Atlas and support the weight of your fat ass.”

  “I’m eating for the both of us, sweetie.”

  “You’re a rare person.”

  “Not as rare as my favorite taxi driver who just came in. Hey, Ginger!” She waved her hand at him. “Come here, my wheel-wielding genius. Tell us what business the pastor had on Sirkin Street.”

  Ginger sat across from us. “So, it goes like this,” he started. “I’m sitting in my taxi, waiting, just like you told me to, in front of that tall building that looks like a retirement home for bats. While waiting, I take some photos with my iPhone. Less than ten minutes later, just like you thought, two people come out. One is tall, the other is shorter and wearing a hat. But guess what?”

  “I’m too busy eating chicken for guessing, just go on.”

  “They see me and flag me down. Well, I’m a taxi, aren’t I? So I get closer, and the shorter one asks if I’m the cab he ordered. ‘What is your name, sir?’ I ask, just to make sure I’m not missing anything, and he says he’s Pastor Raphael. So I tell him, ‘Yes, I’m your taxi,’ and they get in and ask me to take them to Sirkin 12.

  “They kept their mouths shut the whole way there. I stop next to the house at Sirkin Street and they pay me. I give them change, they don’t ask for a receipt, just thank me politely, get out and march toward a building begging for a wrecking ball to come and save it from its misery. And what do I do next? Now you have to guess, Sammy, you won’t believe how resourceful I was.” He stopped and waited.

  “I’m not guessing. What did you do next, Mr. Resourceful?”

  “I keep sitting, and I see them looking for something next to the mailboxes at the entrance, and then they go inside. When they are at the stairs, I open the door and I listen. They go up the stairs. I keep waiting, like a hunter, not even breathing, just listening, motionless, like skillful Indian hunter.”

  “Would you cut it out?”

  “Right. So, I wait a minute, and as soon as they ring the doorbell, I go up after them just in time to see a door closing with the name Ehud Gal on it.”

  While Ginger was talking, I googled that super-Israeli name and learned that Ehud Gal is a freelance reporter. Started out at a few crummy local newspapers, gradually climbed his way up and worked as an investigative reporter for channel 10. He was credited with a few impressive exposés, and that might connect him to our missing Daria. I even found a photo. Slightly short, nose too wide, wearing glasses, with a bald spot not too far on the horizon. Not my type. Information gave me his telephone number, and I called him right away, not bothering to mention it to Sammy and Ginger.

  I asked to speak with Daria in a sweet voice drenched with innocence.

  “Who?” asked the surprised man on the other end.

  “Daria, I’m her friend.”

  “I think you have the wrong number. There’s no Daria here.”

  “Are you sure? Because she gave me this number.”

  “Lady, you have the wrong number.” He hung up.

  What a disappointment. All that effort, chasing Pastor Raphael, Ginger’s surveillance — it had all been for nothing. And why the hell had Alice sent me all the way there? Maybe I needed to get that cute pastor on a nail-covered sofa and have Sammy sit on him till he sang. Unfortunately, my dad would disown me right away.

  “Either he’s lying, or Operation Resourcefulness was a big waste of time,” I said and repeated the conversation for Sammy and Ginger.

  Sammy and Ginger looked at me, and I could see my disappointment reflected in their eyes. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  11

  I sometimes think Sammy was blessed with an extra pair of lobes of gray matter at the bottom of her stomach. Every time logic came up dry, she snacked on something, fueling that extra stomach-brain, which then sent a message from the fifth dimension to its desperate twin brother upstairs. Sammy wasn’t disappointed or desperate. What seemed to me like a dead end, appeared to her like a treasure trove of clues worth investigating. “Strange,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Maybe Daria is hiding out with that journalist guy.”

  “And just where did you get that from, Sammy?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe we’re onto a secret love affair?”

  I raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “No. Not a love affair, journalists care about information, not love,” Sammy continued. “Maybe Daria had some information for him.”

  “And sent the good pastor to give him that information? And let’s suppose you’re right, how doe
s that help us?”

  “Listen, sweetie” — she laid a tired hand on her chicken-stuffed stomach — “my alarm bells are ringing. We still haven’t exhausted our Yokneam investigation. That Alice had a good reason to send us to that pastor — we must have missed something. But I’m telling you we’re on the right track. You need to get back to Yokneam, baby. I’ll ask Eve to arrange an authorization for you to visit that center where the preschool staff is meeting. But before you do that, we’ll both take a little trip to the magical city of Herzliya. Time for a little home visit. When was the last time you were in Herzliya, Ginger?”

  ◊◊◊

  Tall walls surrounded the not-quite-mansions in the richer parts of Herzliya. Behind them, dogs snarled and barked, obviously trained to protect their owners from the coming proletarian revolution.

  The walls of Eve and Barak’s house were even higher than the others. When the gate opened to admit us, we saw they hid banana trees, poincianas, a race boat, two motorcycles, and a parking area for four vehicles.

  “Welcome,” Eve called to us from the doorway. She led us through a stadium-sized living room full of glass and bronze sculptures, decorative porcelain bowls, and a million other rich people’s knickknacks. She led us to the dining area, where we got lost in a room the size of a tennis court. There were lots and lots of chairs, as if the Brady Bunch and the Huxtables met there every morning for breakfast.

  She invited us to sit then began to run back and forth, filling the table with chocolate cookies and a pitcher of freshly squeezed, or so she promised, lemonade, made from lemons picked in the garden not five minutes before.

  There was no trace of the army of maids that must have toiled all morning to polish the glassware and copperware exhibited on the white wooden shelves across the room, dusted the white grand piano at the end of the oversized hall, and scrubbed the marble floor until it reflected every single hair of Eve’s mustache.

  Eve asked me to tell her about my visit to Yokneam. Sammy had already sent her the report, but Eve insisted on hearing it again from me. I gave her an abbreviated version. When I was done, she lowered her eyes to the polished surface of the table, wiped a tear, then another, then sank into a catatonic silence.