After the meeting, when Avraham was left in his office with Ma’alul, he understood that maybe he had been mistaken, but when he returned from Leah Yeger’s apartment he didn’t have an organized plan for continuing the investigation, there were only preliminary thoughts about the next steps. He didn’t know enough about the policeman other than that he was the man Leah Yeger was waiting for. And he also hoped that the man wasn’t a real cop, but otherwise he wasn’t able to understand the fact that he had in his possession information about the women who had been assaulted, because even among police, access to rape files is limited to detectives who dealt with them directly.
Saban left the meeting room without saying a word and returned after speaking with someone on the phone. He said, “We aren’t publishing anything, Avi. No composite sketch. No photograph. We’ll continue checking this angle, but we’ll do it very, very discreetly, are you with me? And beyond that, we have another suspect that you actually released from custody. What do you intend to do with her son? From my perspective he’s the central suspect,” And Avraham planned to respond to him when Esty Vahaba interrupted. “Maybe it’s possible to do this without publishing photos,” she said. “We can speak to other rape victims and find out if they’ve encountered the policeman or if a policeman contacted them. It could be that he didn’t do this just twice.”
Saban opposed this suggestion as well because he didn’t want to provoke anxiety among rape victims and thought that if too many women were questioned that it was liable to leak to the media, but there wasn’t any other way, and Avraham insisted. He looked at Saban from his new place at the head of the table, the place where Ilana Lis had sat, and said quietly, “That’s a good idea, Esty. We’ll look for a photo of him in security cameras and even if we don’t find it, we can speak to the victims, with the composite sketch. And Erez Yeger won’t flee anywhere. We’ll see to that. In any case, we’ll question him again at the beginning of the week. But according to the findings, the assailant is not a relative and I’m telling you he’s not the murderer, and that our central lead from this moment is the policeman who went down the stairs and disappeared.”
He stayed in his office at the station until after midnight that day. Read the summary of Diana Goldin’s testimony again and again, and examined the photographs from the scene under the strong light given off by the desk lamp. The window was open but he felt no need for a cigarette, and he didn’t even put the unlit pipe in his mouth. Leah Yeger’s picture was lying before him on the table.
Marianka called him a few times during the day, but he answered her only at ten in the evening. She’d hoped that he’d return early, but when he was detained she prepared the apartment herself for her parents’ visit and reminded him that at four thirty in the morning they were supposed to be waiting for them at the airport, in the arrival hall where he hid from her a few months before. Afterward he stood for a long time by the window and watched the cars passing in the street. He thought that despite the confrontations with Shrapstein and Saban, he had led his first murder investigation in the right direction, and he wanted to call Ilana Lis despite the late hour; this wasn’t so she’d give him support so much as an opportunity to swap ideas about the policeman’s motives. When he had remained alone with Ma’alul before, Eliyahu said to him, “That was a hell of a meeting, Avi,” and Avraham said to him suddenly, “You were right about what you said to me, you know? That I was dealing in bullshit and that I had someone to rely on.”
Ma’alul no longer turned his gaze away, and there was a smile in his dark eyes. “Forget it; I have,” he said. And perhaps because they were close again and because Avraham couldn’t speak with Ilana, he said to Eliyahu, “I wasn’t stressed because of Saban but because I didn’t truly understand how to conduct a murder investigation. Until today.”
“Like any other investigation, Avi, no?”
“No. Not exactly.”
The findings from the lab helped, as did the testimonies gathered from those interrogated, but the main thing was to bring Leah Yeger back to life. For the last time that same day Avraham saw her in his imagination sitting next to the table in her kitchen, when the knock came from the door. If she had told her son or daughter that a policeman was supposed to question her in her apartment, Avraham would know now with certainty that he wasn’t mistaken, but her son had cut off his relations with her and apparently she wasn’t close enough to her daughter to tell her, either. She made arrangements for the meeting and tidied up the apartment because she didn’t have many visitors. And she wasn’t suspicious of the policeman until he made some kind of mistake. She planned on telling him how she was attacked and perhaps was even happy about the visit because she wanted to talk. When she heard the knock she got up from her chair and hurried to the door behind which stood the policeman, who in the meantime looked around in order to verify that no one saw him. What was he searching for with Diana Goldin and Leah Yeger? This, Avraham still didn’t understand and didn’t even have a guess, and he said to himself that he had to think more about him, and not just about her. Was he surprised when she opened the door for him and he saw her face? Or had he already looked at it before then in pictures from the investigation file?
Because he wanted to know everything. You understand? Every detail. From the beginning. That’s what Diana Goldin had said.
“Why, Leah, why didn’t you tell anyone he was coming?” Avraham whispered as if to himself, and then tried to concentrate again on the policeman who waited behind the door. A few hours later, while he was waiting with Marianka at the airport, this was the question still echoing inside him.
Part Two
The Killer
9
When they returned from the airport with Bojan and Anika Milanich, Avraham didn’t recognize his home. Throughout the apartment tablecloths that he didn’t know they had were spread out, on which were placed vases he had never before seen, with enormous flower bouquets. In the small office, which for three days would be transformed into her parents’ bedroom, Marianka had placed a small basket filled with grapefruits.
Avraham’s eyes were red because he hadn’t slept at night, but he saw Marianka’s excitement while they ate breakfast on the porch. His cell phone was sitting at his feet, on the floor, and he tried not to check too frequently if any new messages had been sent to him. Marianka told her parents that he was in the middle of a murder investigation, and her mother pretended to be interested in the case, but he couldn’t tell them much because he hadn’t revealed most of the details even to Marianka. And every time he looked away or went to the kitchen to help Marianka with the food, her parents whispered to each other in Slovenian.
And despite this, they did not succeed in hiding the point of the visit from him.
Bojan and Anika Milanich detested him, and he knew this well before then.
When they met during the summer that he spent with Marianka in Brussels they were still friendly, but when they heard about her plan to travel to him in Israel, the friendliness disappeared. She didn’t tell him everything they said, but Avraham felt their disgust with every look and every meeting. She spoke to them by phone once a week, usually on Sundays, and she told him that they had come to terms with her move, but he didn’t believe it. When he asked, “So how is it that they’re coming here suddenly?” she said, “In order to be with us—what do you mean? And also in order to get to know you.”
Why, if this was the case, were they sitting forlorn on the porch of his apartment and barely saying a word?
Anika Milanich didn’t touch the omelet that he and Marianka prepared and only drank coffee with milk. She was fifty-one years old and looked no more than forty. In Slovenia she was a teacher at a music academy, and in Brussels she gave private lessons on the piano. Her favorite composer was Chopin, and the pieces that she loved to play more than anything were the mazurkas. When Avraham was invited to their house for the first time, she asked him which mazurka was his favorite and he didn’t know what to say. She wa
s tall and smartly dressed, and when no one was watching her smile twisted up into a grimace of disgust. Marianka told him once that one of her students at the academy became a world-renowned pianist and that her mother tried to set them up, even though he was gay. Bojan Milanich, holder of a black belt in karate and an instructor at a theological seminary, sat next to Anika and looked at the skies of Holon. He was a solid man with a rock-hard potbelly and broad shoulders, and Avraham was certain that he was willing to kill every man who came near Marianka with a yoko geri kick, even if it was Glenn Gould. He was fifty-three years old, and even though everyone said that Marianka reminded people of him, Avraham insisted on seeing no resemblance.
After breakfast Avraham did the dishes in order to let the three of them be together. He hoped that after this the tension would dissipate. They rode in his car to Tel Aviv, and when they walked the length of Rothschild Boulevard, from the national theater to the old neighborhood of Neve Tzedek, the sky was blue. Marianka showed them Tel Aviv as if it were her home, pointing at the buildings she liked, talking about the restaurants and cafés and the sea, but Bojan walked quickly ahead of everyone with his gaze fixed on the ground, and Avraham saw how Marianka’s face fell. They returned to Holon early in order to have time to rest, and in the evening, when they walked from their apartment to his parents’, Marianka pointed out that this was the neighborhood where Avraham grew up. When Anika said, “You love this place if you returned to live here,” Avraham answered, “Yes,” and afterward, “No,” and then tried to say something else but was stopped because of the English. Holon wasn’t elegant like Brussels, or picturesque like Koper, the port city where Marianka was born and which for now he had seen only in photo albums, but it nevertheless was his home.
His mother tried so hard to make the dinner festive. She wore the clothes that she bought in autumn for his promotion ceremony and dressed his father in a white oxford shirt over his T-shirt, and the apartment was sparkling clean. The television was turned off for the first time in years, and all the lights were on, and even the wool blanket everyone sat on so the sofa wouldn’t get dirty was removed. At first she invited everyone into the living room but she was unable to bear the tension and urged them to move to the kitchen table because the chicken was ready. His father sat at the head of the table, his eyes staring at the empty plate and a bib wrapped around the collar of his shirt, but when Avraham looked at him he saw another man who wasn’t sitting there. Avraham touched his father’s shoulder, as he had begun doing in recent months, and then bent over and whispered in his ear, “We have guests. Marianka’s father and mother,” and a smile lit up his father’s eyes as he nodded his head.
Marianka told her parents in advance about the stroke his father had suffered and about the fact that his condition was deteriorating, but despite this it seemed to Avraham that Bojan and Anika were looking at his father the way they observed the streets and buildings they saw on their way, with contempt and pity. His mother said that his father no longer understands or feels a thing, but Avraham knew she was mistaken. Did his father not see how beautiful Marianka was in her black dress? And the fear in her eyes that dinner, too, like breakfast on the porch or the walk through Tel Aviv, would be a failure? And did he not hear how Marianka tried to start up a conversation every time silence descended over the table?
Avraham hoped his father didn’t see the nauseous expression that was strewn across the faces of Bojan and Anika while they ate. They answered the questions his mother asked in faltering English, about Slovenia and the move to Belgium and afterward about classical music and the principles of the Christian faith, the way one answers a child. In their home, dinners were entirely different, boisterous and with many guests, at the end of which Anika would sit at the piano and Bojan would force Marianka to dance at least one mazurka with him, and Avraham thought that the bitterness he felt toward them was also tied to the fact that they were younger than his parents and full of life.
At meals in their house bottles of wine were opened and gulped down one after the other, whereas his mother brought to the table one bottle, white and bland, which had been opened a few months ago at a meal in honor of Avraham’s birthday and kept in the refrigerator. When he was helping to clear the plates for the entrée, his mother said to him in the kitchen, “They don’t like the food,” and Avraham said to her, “What are you talking about? They said that everything is delicious.” Bojan and Anika brought her a gift of a green tablecloth and a pair of candlesticks, and she asked him in a whisper, “Do you think that they expect me to put them on the table?”
On that same Friday, Avraham felt that if he didn’t find the policeman within a few days, he would never be caught. And that soon no one other than him would care who murdered Leah Yeger.
In the papers there wasn’t a single item about the murder that had taken place only four days earlier, nor was there anything about the storm, which had been forgotten as if it never was, and most of them dealt only with the coming elections. Like almost every Friday since the start of winter, stones were thrown in the Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and district policemen reinforced the Jerusalem police in order to prevent disturbances after the prayers at the mosques. In the station’s log no unusual incidents were recorded that day other than a report on a stabbing at a club in Bat Yam, and when Eliyahu Ma’alul and Esty Vahaba went to watch footage from security cameras and traffic police cameras in the area where the murder occurred, they were almost alone at the station. Avraham called them at every available moment in order to find out anything new, even during the dinner at his parents’, from the room that was once his room, but they didn’t have anything to tell him, and Ma’alul asked that he stop calling. Ma’alul brought sandwiches and a thermos with black coffee with him from home, and he and Vahaba watched the footage late into the night, but the policeman who went down the stairs and disappeared wasn’t to be seen in any of it. Diana Goldin arrived at the station on Friday afternoon and with Vahaba went over photos of the district policemen, but didn’t identify anyone.
And on Saturday as well, until the afternoon hours, nothing happened. Avraham hoped that in the morning, while drinking his first coffee, he could go over his notes and continue thinking about the policeman, but Bojan and Anika got up before him, and since Marianka was still sleeping, he prepared coffee for the two of them as well and they drank it together in silence on the porch. Despite the disturbances, they insisted on traveling to Jerusalem to visit the holy sites. Ma’alul announced in advance that he would remain home on Saturday, and Esty Vahaba arrived at the station near ten in order to continue watching footage. Avraham called her twice, and they concluded that if she didn’t find a picture of the policeman she would begin, once Shabbat ended, reaching out to rape victims in the district with the computerized facial composite, but at noon Vahaba called.
They were standing in the square in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when Avraham heard the ring from his coat pocket and then saw the phone number and asked them to go in without him.
And even though at that point it wasn’t yet a positive identification, because the picture still needed to be sent to Diana Goldin and presented to the neighbor, Vahaba was convinced. At 2:28, a short time after the murder, a policeman could be seen passing by the cameras of a Bank Hapoalim on Sokolov Street, not far from the scene. Avraham held the cell phone close to his ear because a tour guide was speaking in the square before a group of pilgrims from Poland. Three policemen secured the entrance to the church but none of them recognized Avraham.
The policeman was cautious and didn’t stop at the kiosk or supermarket in order to buy a pack of cigarettes or to hide from the rain, as they had hoped. But for an instant he passed in front of the bank’s external security camera facing the street and was recorded by it. And to his misfortune, not long before then, the bank underwent a renovation, and sophisticated, up-to-date cameras were installed that recorded his face in profile, but clearly, and Diana Goldin immediately confirmed
that it was him.
A brown leather jacket covered his light blue shirt such that it was impossible to see if there was a rank on it. Avraham asked Vahaba to send the picture immediately to all department heads in the district so that they could try to identify the policeman walking quickly down Sokolov Street without looking to the side. He also asked her to show the picture to the neighbor from the second floor, but he didn’t answer. Then he called Ma’alul in order to inform him that the picture was found and that it was of excellent quality. Ma’alul promised that he’d join Vahaba in the evening and asked him, “Are you coming in, too?” And Avraham answered without hesitation that he would.
His fingers shook when he tried to enlarge the pictures that were sent to his cell phone and look at the sharp face.
The policeman was short and stocky, as Diana Goldin had described. In his right hand he held a small bag. Avraham searched for his gaze in the picture, as if he’d find answers in it, but the policeman wasn’t looking at the camera lens. He didn’t know how long Marianka and her parents had been delayed in the church, but when they came out Marianka asked him, “Why didn’t you come in?” and then she realized that something had happened.
When he said to her that they’d need to return early to Holon she asked him, “Now?”
His cell phone was back in his coat pocket, and he didn’t take it out. And anyway, it was impossible to do more with the pictures than what he had done. If he had received permission from Saban to do it, he would post it that same day on the police Facebook page or ask that it be broadcast on the television news in order to receive the public’s help in the search. For a moment the thought occurred to him to post the picture without permission. After all, they only needed one person to recognize him.
The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything Page 12