The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

by D. A. Mishani

  Mali wasn’t used to driving a large car. She turned right on Sokolov and left at Shenkar, and only when she reached Fichman Street did she realize that she was about to pass by the police station, the same station that she’d find herself inside of a week later, but how little she knew then about what was likely to happen; how little does a person know about what will take place in his life? The night without Kobi and the memory of Eilat brought back the fear, and it didn’t leave her throughout that entire day. The Swiss tourist again lay in wait for her in the darkness without her knowing where. But her anger at Kobi dissipated after he revealed to her that the police were looking for him and asked for her help. The danger of the collapse was palpable, but it wasn’t taking place inside him or inside her but rather there was an external threat against the two of them, a threat they had to fight, and something was tensed in her in order to protect him. Or them.

  A traffic patrol car pulled out of the parking lot and traveled behind her. At the intersection the cars stood next to each other at a red light, and Mali didn’t look to the right so that the cops wouldn’t see her. Her phone rang in her bag, and only when she arrived home did she see that it was her sister, Gila, who seemingly felt how much she was in need of help. When the light changed she accelerated too quickly, but the patrol car turned right. And from among all the things Kobi had asked of her, the hardest thing was not to reveal his story to anyone. She knew what Gila would say and heard her voice even without them speaking, and nevertheless she wanted to tell her. And only when she parked the car in the parking lot under the building did she dare to examine the car, without really lingering next to it and without bending down toward the bumper, and she didn’t see any signs of damage or abrasion. Under the front windshield wiper there was a ticket and a few leaflets that the rain had turned into papier-mâché, and she tossed them into the garbage can in the stairwell on her way to the elevator. Her phone was ringing again.

  She didn’t answer Gila throughout the whole day because she didn’t know what to tell her. She couldn’t say that on Monday, on his way back from a job interview, Kobi struck a pedestrian with his car who had charged into the street without looking. That was their anniversary. The day when a storm raged outside. The roads were slippery and the visibility was poor, and Kobi drove quickly and thought about the failed interview when the woman went out into the street between two parked cars. He didn’t notice her in time to be able to stop, but turned the steering wheel a little to the left at the last moment. Despite this, he heard the body hit the car.

  Mali’s heart beat rapidly as she listened to him in the early morning, when he came back. Everything that had frightened her in recent days took on a different meaning. She had no reason to think that he wasn’t telling her the truth, because the accident bestowed an explanation on everything. On his closing himself off when he returned from the interview, on watching the news that same night and reading the newspapers the next day, on the message he left his father about the trip to Australia, in which it seemed to Harry that he had cried. Even on the gun that was lying on the table in the utility room on the roof that same day, though they didn’t speak about that.

  In the papers there was no item about a hit-and-run in Holon, and this relieved both of them. Kobi didn’t even know if the woman was hurt or how severe her injuries were because he fled from there quickly, without slowing down, and only saw her lying on the ground in the car’s rearview mirror. Mali googled “woman injured in accident in Holon” but didn’t pull up any results from the last week, just more and more items about the murder of the old woman. For a moment she thought about calling the hospital and asking if on Monday a woman struck by a car downtown had been brought to the emergency room and in what condition she was, but she didn’t call that day. Nevertheless she didn’t stop thinking about her. Was she still hospitalized? And from the moment she imagined the woman on the street, it was for some strange reason the girl with the black hair and the black nails who sold her the umbrella at the mall.

  Kobi continued driving, without knowing to where but not in the direction of their apartment, because he feared that a driver who saw the accident would follow him, and so he decided to park the Toyota in the place he was at that moment and continue home on foot or by cab. When Mali asked him, “Why didn’t you stop?” he just said, “I was afraid. I fled without thinking.” If someone wrote down the license plate number and the police came to them, he would say that the car had been stolen. But because three days had passed since the accident and no policeman had yet arrived, he thought they could retrieve it, and asked Mali to do this because he didn’t want to return to the place where he had abandoned it, panic-stricken.

  The second thing that Kobi asked of her was to say that they were together on Monday afternoon, if someone asked. He knew this would be hard for her because she didn’t know how to lie, but he said there was almost no chance she’d need to. Every moment that passed since the accident minimized the possibility that they’d reach him or that the injury to the woman was severe. And if, despite this, the police arrived, Mali would need to say that their car had been stolen the day before and that he had waited for her outside her work and that they traveled together to pick up the girls from day care and school. They hadn’t yet reported the theft simply because they hadn’t gotten around to it.

  When Mali returned home Kobi was calmer. He said, “Was it there?” and asked if she saw anything unusual around the car, and Mali shook her head. “There aren’t any scratches or dents on it, either,” she said.

  In his eyes and in the way he wandered around the apartment she saw that he wasn’t yet entirely at ease, but as the hours passed the tension passed to her. He prepared lunch for them while she again searched for news about the accidents without him seeing. Gila called her almost every hour, left her messages and asked her to call back, and Mali still didn’t answer. When they sat down to eat, Kobi tried to talk about other things.

  “Did the girls say anything about me not being home?” he asked, but when she asked him suddenly, “Why did you decide to tell me?” he fell silent. Afterward he said, “I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t have anyone else to tell. Would you rather me not say anything?”

  But he nevertheless called his dad first. And planned to travel to him without her knowledge. “Did you seriously plan to flee to Australia?” she asked him, and Kobi said, “On the first day, I did, yes. I didn’t know what to do.” He didn’t say it to her and she didn’t ask, but she thought that since the accident there were certainly also moments when suicidal thoughts came to him. Chills went through her when she saw him again in her imagination sitting alone on the roof, that same night, she imagined him weighing the gun in his hand.

  “And now? Do you still plan to go?”

  “No. I think it’s not necessary now.”

  What she actually should have done was encourage him to go. Or tell him about the pregnancy during those hours when they were alone in the apartment. Before Eilat they spoke about another child, but after that it wasn’t possible, and from a financial perspective as well it was hard to think they’d manage with another baby. The fear that returned at night and the adrenaline that flowed in her body in the morning hours changed into a deep, emptying sadness. She told him that she wanted to sleep a bit before Daniella and Noy returned home, and turned off the cell phone, because Gila kept calling. Before she fell asleep she thought that she was doing exactly what he had done in recent days: hide, conceal. As if she had caught it from him. Her sleep was long and deep, and Kobi went instead of her to get the girls, and that was good, because she was too tense, and even when they returned she tried to avoid them, and Kobi sat with the two of them in the living room and watched television.

  Shortly before sunset, when Mali went up to the roof to hang laundry, she looked at the water heaters and antennae spread out before her. She thought about the sentence that Kobi said to her at noon. I didn’t have anyone else to tell.

  She was still c
ertain that they needed to consult with a lawyer, or at least with one of their friends, but after Eilat she didn’t want to speak to anyone else, either. There were days then on which she couldn’t get up in the morning and live. When she tried to get dressed or put on makeup it was as if she were dressing a doll or another woman, and only when she looked at Kobi did she sometimes remember that she was still Mali Bengtson and that she had two girls and a home and a job. Once, she asked Kobi how he could do it, how he hadn’t despaired and given up on her, and that was one of the few times he spoke with her about his mother. During her illness his father, Harry, was almost never home, and Kobi actually took care of her completely by himself. “Harry escaped because he couldn’t see her suffer,” he said, “but I had nowhere to escape to. And beyond that, she had no one else in Australia. He would return once or twice a week from the university in order to confirm that she hadn’t yet died, and you could smell his lovers on him.”

  Evening descended and it was chilly on the roof, though it was no longer rainy but almost springlike instead.

  Mali remembered the portrait photograph of Kobi’s dead mother that she saw in his room, and she, too, got mixed up in her imagination with the woman who was still lying on the street after the Toyota had struck her. If it weren’t for the storm, would the accident have happened? The woman wouldn’t have fled from the rain and rushed to cross the street, and even if she had burst out at him between parked cars, Kobi would have noticed her.

  If only the storm would have arrived one day before then or one day after. Or if Kobi’s interview had gone differently. If they had been just a bit luckier.

  She never had any luck, but she didn’t expect anything else for herself. It was Kobi’s life that was supposed to look different. Her job was okay and she was grateful for the patience they demonstrated toward her at the bank, after Eilat. She got used to the apartment they rented, too, even though it wasn’t a home. When they moved there they decided not to invest money in it because they hoped to save for a place of their own, and the walls remained naked. They didn’t buy new furniture, either, and they used what they brought from the previous apartment and those that the owner’s son had left behind. She was used to walking around her apartment as if it were someone else’s house, but Kobi never stopped dreaming about the place they’d buy. And Gila, too, didn’t stop asking her when they were finally moving to a real home.

  Daniella called her from below, but Mali wasn’t yet ready to go downstairs. And she kept her cell phone turned off.

  There was something similar between Kobi and Gila, and perhaps this is why they didn’t get along, she suddenly thought. Like Gila, Kobi, too, once had confidence that he could get everything he wanted from life. Mali and Kobi were officially a couple again when they returned from Australia, and he started the course at Mossad and returned from there full of stories. She never saw him as happy as he was during that period. He talked about tracing exercises and bursting into houses and simulated assassinations of random women and men in the street, and he was certain that he’d finish it with distinction and be accepted to the job thanks to his English and his Australian passport. When he stopped talking about the course, almost at once, she thought it was because he wasn’t allowed to talk about it; only a few weeks after this did she learn, almost accidentally, that he was thrown out. He hid this from her for around two months and pretended that he was heading out to the course each morning, but when he started working as a security guard at the mall he was forced to reveal it to her because he was worried that someone would see him and tell. This was temporary work, and when they got married, almost a year later, he prepared her for the fact that they’d need to travel because he was trying to get work as a security officer at the embassies, but that never happened, either.

  Gila was already divorced then, not yet twenty-five and already with a three-year-old son, and swearing that she’d never ever marry again. She thought that Kobi was closing up Mali in the house and distancing her from friends, but in a weird way the conversations with her sister actually brought Mali closer to him, because it seemed to her that the main problem Gila had with Kobi was that he didn’t earn enough money and wasn’t successful like the men she went out with.

  And after Eilat even her sister was forced to agree that Kobi took care of her like no one else would have.

  When Mali came down from the roof the three of them were on the sofa in the living room, and this was the last time she saw them together like that. Daniella sat next to him and Noy lay on his other side, her head on his knees. He asked if he should make dinner for everyone, and the girls asked for hot chocolate. Harry lay at their feet, his head leaning forward on his front paws, and even though he didn’t move, it looked as if even he had another chance.

  After the girls went to bed Mali checked that the door was locked and that the lights were on and got into bed early despite the afternoon nap. Kobi got into bed a short time after her, closed the door and turned off the small lamp. When he lowered the straps of her nightgown and caressed her neck, she closed her eyes, but his fingers were unable to wake and excite her as they sometimes could. She felt and didn’t feel his hands on her arms and on her thighs when they had sex. And despite the darkness suddenly there was no fear in her, just sadness. Was it only because of the woman who lay in the street in the rain and waited for help? Or did she already understand some of what was likely to happen? She turned on the small lamp and tried to fall asleep when Kobi asked, “What are you thinking about?” and Mali said to him with eyes closed, “Her.”

  “Who?”

  She even thought about going to the store where she bought him the umbrella in order to verify that the woman who lay in the street wasn’t the girl with the black hair. Did cars stop next to her after Kobi fled, and did drivers get out in order to help her? Maybe she managed to call an ambulance herself, or did one of the passersby phone for her instead?

  And there were two other things Mali thought about without telling Kobi. When she asked him in the morning where the accident was, Kobi hesitated before answering, and she didn’t understand why. If he had told her the name of the street, it would have been easier to search for news about the accident and to know what happened to the woman. The second thing was the umbrella he was looking for. The accident provided an explanation for what happened on their anniversary and for watching the news and reading the newspapers and the message for Harry. But it didn’t explain the umbrella.

  Kobi said to her, “If you’re worried about the police, you can relax,” and she asked him, “How can you be so sure?” Even though she wasn’t thinking about this. She wasn’t looking at him when he said, “Because three days have passed. If they haven’t arrived by now, they won’t. And I did everything that needed to be done.”

  When she fell asleep she still didn’t know she would do this, but the next morning, from the phone at the bank, she called Wolfson Medical Center and checked if on Monday a young woman had arrived at the emergency room who had been injured in a car accident in Holon.

  The nurse who answered transferred her to the emergency room reception desk and when she was asked who she was, she said without planning to in advance, “I saw the accident and wanted to know how she was.” The clerk asked Mali to wait a moment before she said to her, “Look, I’m not finding anything here, but can you leave me a name and phone number and we’ll get back to you if we find anything?” And Mali almost hung up and then said for some reason, “My name is Michal Ben-Asher,” but gave the clerk her real telephone number. From that moment on, she waited for them to call her from the hospital, but eventually it was somebody else who had called.

  8

  Only at the end of the third day of the investigation was the team updated on the testimony of Diana Goldin about the policeman who had visited her apartment. Until then Avraham kept this new lead to himself and breached a few more standards of police protocol, guided by an inner certainty that grew stronger as the day progressed. In the evening, af
ter a second visit to the scene, he summoned the members of the team for an urgent meeting and announced to them that he had in his possession the end of a thread leading to the killer.

  ***

  The night before this he stayed awake until almost two. He drank black coffee on his porch, ate too many dry cookies, and thought only about the policeman who went down the stairs and disappeared. The main thing he was unable to understand was why the policeman questioned Diana Goldin and recorded their conversation. And why he didn’t try to attack her, even though they were alone. Diana told him that the policeman requested that she tell him everything, As if I were telling it for the first time, and that was probably the key. Despite the growing certainty that the policeman questioned her on his own, the first thing Avraham asked of Lital Levy when he arrived to the office in the morning was to check again with all district department heads if a policeman was sent to Diana Goldin with the task of completing an investigation.

  Shrapstein didn’t understand why Avraham asked to be present at the questioning of Erez Yeger in the early morning, but in retrospect this was the right decision. Three days had passed since the murder, and he decided that he wouldn’t continue observing the investigation from the window of his office on the third floor. The weekend was approaching and after it was the short vacation he requested because of Marianka’s parents’ visit, and he had to update the team about the new lead that day, so that they would be able to continue working on it in his absence. All the other leads in the investigation led them nowhere: Ma’alul and Esty Vahaba exhausted the investigation of the rapist’s family and were convinced that no one among them was involved in the murder. And the worker who Shrapstein detained for twenty-four hours, Adnan Gon, had an alibi. He didn’t come to work on the day of the murder because of the storm. And even though the day before, Avraham had pictured Leah Yeger’s son at the entrance to his mother’s apartment, now he was certain that Erez Yeger wasn’t the person who had attacked her, and not only because of the DNA tests, which determined that Leah Yeger’s assailant wasn’t a relative.