The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

by D. A. Mishani

  That was the first time Avraham heard the name Bengtson.

  10

  The policewoman called Mali on Monday morning.

  She was in a meeting with a new client when a number she didn’t recognize appeared on the screen of her cell phone and she didn’t answer, but the second time she said, “Excuse me,” and stuck an earbud into her right ear. She inserted the other earbud when she heard the voice on the other end of the line. A woman asked to speak with Mazal Bengtson, and Mali said, “Speaking.” And she was sure that the policewoman got to her because of the phone call to the hospital’s emergency room a few days before. She got up from her seat without apologizing to the client and hid her mouth with her hand while she spoke. The policewoman asked if they could meet, and when Mali said she was at work, the policewoman asked her where she worked. She was sure that the policewoman already knew—just as she must now know who was responsible for the accident—since the phone call to the emergency room was made from the office, and therefore she said, “In Holon. On Shenkar Street.”

  “I can come to see you there,” the policewoman said. “And this won’t take more than five or ten minutes.”

  Mali asked Yana if she could take the client instead of her and immediately went to the women’s restroom. A cleaning lady was mopping the floor and Mali waited for her to leave before entering one of the stalls and calling Kobi.

  During those days, the two of them had so many opportunities to try and alter their fate, but they didn’t.

  She asked herself endless times what Kobi would have done had he been awake and answered the phone, and she would have told him that the policewoman was on her way to her in order to question her about the accident. Would he have told her the truth then?

  During the weekend the two of them had hoped that everything was behind them, or at least tried to hope, and maybe that’s why she was so unprepared for what happened. Kobi pretended he was in a good mood, but she saw him continuing to take deep inhalations, as if he were suffocating. The weather improved, and on Saturday he suggested they take the girls to the amusement park in Tel Aviv, like they promised them at the start of winter. Mali preferred that they stay home, but after Daniella and Noy heard about the plan, there was no chance that they’d relent. Kobi woke early and went up to the roof to work out. When she was making pancakes he came up to her from behind and wrapped his arms around her stomach and asked, “Are you coming with us or staying here?”

  She couldn’t tell him why she wasn’t going on the rides, but perhaps hinted at it when she said that she was nauseous and had a headache and was scared she would throw up. There weren’t lines at most of the rides and Kobi took Daniella and Noy on the Devil’s Tunnel ride, which disappointed them, and then on the roller coaster and the bumper cars, and went around with them again and again on the giant octopus whose metal arms spun around high above the treetops. Mali looked at them from below. At the outbursts of horror and laughter on the girls’ faces. How they held Kobi’s hands. She took pictures of them with her phone, because Kobi asked. And over the weekend she did think about the woman who he struck with his car. She was sorry about the phone call to the hospital and hoped they wouldn’t call her back as they had promised, though on the other hand she wanted them to call in order to say that the woman had been released. It didn’t occur to her even for a moment that he had lied.

  She would look at the pictures from that day at the park only much later, and then she would be unable to stop looking at them. Especially at a picture she took when the three of them were on the roller coaster: Daniella and Noy embraced in his arms in a green car climbing toward the end of the track, a moment before the drop.

  In the weeks to come Mali met the policewoman many times, but that morning she didn’t know that her name was Esty Vahaba. She was very short and younger than Mali, and smoked a cigarette during their conversation. She asked Mali for an identification card and then crossed her thick legs and placed a plastic clipboard on them and sat bent forward while she filled out the forms. Vadim, the bank’s security guard, watched them while they walked away from the bank and sat on a bench. The policewoman placed a paper cup on it and when she drank from it later, coffee spilled onto her fingertips.

  Mali watched the cars that passed by them, as if Kobi could have been in one, and recalled the policewoman who questioned her in Eilat. She was older than Esty Vahaba and good-looking, and stared at the computer screen while over and over she asked Mali questions about the wine she drank at the party and her relationship with Kobi and if she was 100 percent certain she hadn’t invited a man up to her room. When Vahaba asked, “You were assaulted a few years ago in Eilat, correct, Ms. Bengtson?” Mali didn’t understand why she was mentioning this and how it was connected to the hit-and-run accident. The policewoman’s cigarette disturbed her because of the pregnancy. But then Vahaba said, “I ask that you keep secret the things I’m going to tell you, because we’re talking about confidential information from an investigation in its earliest stages, and we’re not sure about anything, okay?” And only after Mali nodded she continued. “We suspect that there’s a policeman, or a criminal who dresses up like a policeman, who works in the area and harasses women who were victims of rape. What I want to check with you is, has a man like this contacted you or been with you?”

  Mali immediately said, “No,” and at first sensed only relief. The policewoman put out her cigarette on the end of the bench, as if she sensed that the smoke was bothering her. “Are you sure?” she asked, and Mali said to her, “Yes.”

  “Do you remember when was the last time you gave testimony?”

  It took her time to answer, because she didn’t remember. And while she was trying to remember she suddenly heard the words that were said before, A criminal who dresses up like a policeman.

  “I don’t remember exactly when. A while ago. Maybe a year.”

  “And no one from the police has contacted you since? Maybe in the last few weeks? Not even by phone?”

  “No.”

  “And are you perhaps in contact with other women who were assaulted who you know were recently reached out to in this way?”

  Did Mali already know then? In contrast to the woman who gathered testimony from her in Eilat, Esty Vahaba looked at her when she spoke. Her eyes were large and opened wide, as if unnaturally. On her forehead, above her left eye, was a scar. She paused before bending over again toward the clipboard and writing a few lines on the form. She remained sitting in her place when she said to Mali, “There is a gag order on this investigation in order not to create panic among women who’ve been attacked, so I’m asking you again to keep the details I’m providing you with secret, okay? And if a man who introduces himself as a detective from the police contacts you and asks to gather testimony, or if you remember that this indeed happened or hear about someone who this happened to, you’ll inform me immediately, right? We’re afraid that he did this to a few women and that he’ll do it again.”

  She accepted the policewoman’s card, putting it in her coat pocket without looking at it, and as she rose from the bench she felt something twisting and turning in the pit of her stomach. No one had contacted her. The things the policewoman said, about the panic among women who had been attacked and about the fact that the policeman had done this a few times, were what caused Mali to understand with certainty.

  “Do you know who this man is?” Mali shouldn’t have asked, but she did need to know.

  The policewoman still sat on the bench, as if it was hard for her to get up. She said, “We don’t know his name, but we have a good picture of him, and we’ll find him soon.” And Mali asked her to see it nevertheless.

  Vahaba stared at her with her big eyes and then removed the photograph from a gray folder that was resting on her knees. And Mali looked at the photograph momentarily, no more than a second, before everything went dark. She asked Vahaba, “When is the picture from?” since this was her final hope, but the policewoman said to her, “From last
week.”

  Daniella and Noy were at day care and school, and during the first few minutes Mali didn’t know what she would do with them after she picked them up. At eleven she had an additional meeting, and she sat across from the customer as if nothing had happened. She explained to him why the bank was refusing to provide him with the mortgage that he had requested, and he raised his voice. How much time passed before she understood that there had been no accident? She imagined herself suddenly in the delivery room, without Kobi and without anyone else next to her. The spasms in the pit of her stomach turned into nausea, and when she went to the bathroom and tried to vomit, they thought at the bank that the reason was her confrontation with the customer.

  For the second time in a few days she needed to explain everything from the beginning to herself: the job interview and what happened on the day of their anniversary, Kobi’s disappearance in the days after and the message he left for his father on the phone, and the car that wasn’t in the parking lot. Now there was also perhaps an explanation for the umbrella and for Kobi’s desperate searching for it. And perhaps also for watching the news and reading the newspapers. Kobi wasn’t lying when he said that the police were looking for him, but he lied with regards to the reasons. And she never lied to him. Never. Even though there had been no accident, the young woman he hit with his car was still lying bloody on the street and no one was coming to help her.

  When Kobi woke up he tried to call her because he saw that she had called him many times, but she didn’t answer because she still didn’t know what to say. He sent her a text message, Everything okay? and she answered him, Yes, in a meeting. Maybe that first lie gave her the idea? The policewoman’s card was in her pocket, and Mali thought about calling her and she also could have called her sister, Gila, to set up a meeting with her, but when she picked up Daniella and Noy from day care and school, she had already decided to return home and also that she wouldn’t say a thing to Kobi for now. The girls sat in the back, and Mali looked at them in the mirror while driving and asked Daniella why she was quiet. Noy rehearsed the song they were preparing in class for the Purim party. When she saw Kobi’s car in the parking lot she immediately remembered last Monday. This was the day on which he was discovered, apparently. The car wasn’t there then when they returned home, but she smelled his aftershave in the elevator and discovered that the door to the apartment wasn’t locked, and when they went inside she heard that he was showering. His clothes were thrown onto the bedroom floor, but she didn’t see the policeman’s uniform.

  The table was set for lunch when they came inside, and ravioli was cooking on the stove. When Kobi opened the door for them he said to her immediately, “Why didn’t you answer me after the meeting? I tried you a few times.” Mali answered that she had back-to-back meetings and that she called in the morning because she was worried that she wouldn’t manage to get the girls, but in the end it worked out. Her eyes avoided his eyes, but in a strange way she wasn’t as frightened as she had been before the meeting with the policewoman, only confused. And she didn’t touch the meal. Noy told Kobi about the preparations for the Purim party at school, and Daniella remained quiet and, like Mali, didn’t eat a thing. Mali felt that something inside her was also growing stronger or hardening, perhaps out of anger. After Eilat it was as if she had left her body, and even when she returned to it this was a partial return, and during those hours at home, after the conversation with the policewoman, it was also as if the parts that had been broken had joined together again.

  Kobi asked her, “How was work?” and Mali said to him, “Good.” And before then she wouldn’t have been able to lie to him like this. When she went to the bathroom and kneeled before the toilet she managed to throw up. Kobi hurried after her and waited beside the door, and when she came out he asked her, “Are you throwing up?” She said that she ate something spoiled rotten at work and that she feels better. Because she didn’t want to remain alone with him, she didn’t go into the bedroom. She did homework with Noy and let Daniella watch television, and when Daniella fell asleep on the couch Mali sat down next to her and stroked her hair. At five Kobi asked her if she was feeling okay and if he could go work out, and she said yes. Maybe all she had to do was ask him, “Why’d you go back to it,” and he would have told her? Only when she saw his car leaving the parking lot and driving off did she hurry to the bedroom and start looking. She looked for the uniform among his winter clothes and in the underwear drawer, and afterward up above among his summer clothes and in the box of costumes, but they weren’t in the bedroom nor in the utility room on the roof, not even in his drawers, which she opened for the first time.

  The nausea disappeared, and she didn’t stop looking, even though she didn’t know what she would do with the policeman’s uniform if she found it.

  The first time that she saw Kobi wearing it, Mali was lying in their bed, trying to fall asleep.

  Kobi came into the bedroom then and turned on the main light and his eyes were red, as if he were crying. She asked him, “What is that?” and Kobi sat down on the edge of the bed in silence and she asked him again, “Kobi, why are you wearing those clothes? You’re scaring me.”

  This happened a few weeks after Eilat.

  The cut on her neck hadn’t closed up all the way, or at least that’s how she felt, even though no one other than her noticed it anymore, and her wrists also hurt sometimes like they did the morning after. In the mirror she was still the other woman then. And Kobi was the person who, thanks only to him, would sometimes remember who she was. He didn’t explain why he was wearing the uniform and began speaking only after she stopped crying. But when he spoke she again burst into tears, and he hugged her and she stopped.

  Everything hurt then as though her flesh were peeled off and she tried to tell herself that he was bleeding as well, and if she would only place her hand on his wound it would pass. When he asked her to come with him to the kitchen and sit across from him by the table, she agreed, because she had no other choices. On the table were his cell phone and a pad of yellow paper and a pen, as if it were an investigation room.

  Toward evening Mali looked for the police uniform among the dirty clothes at the bottom of the laundry basket and even in the girls’ rooms, although by now it was clear to her that she wouldn’t find it. When she returned to the bedroom in order to search the box of sheets under the bed, she saw their picture on the wall and wanted to shatter the glass and tear up the photograph. Nothing that she was about to do had yet occurred to her during those hours, but she did imagine herself again in the delivery room, without him, without knowing where he was, and afterward there also appeared in her thoughts a picture of the four of them together in her car: she was driving and Daniella and Noy were sitting in the backseat and next to them the baby in his special car seat, and the passenger seat was empty.

  At six thirty, when knocking could be heard at the door, she was on the roof. She thought that Kobi was early and forgot to take a key with him, and because she didn’t want to see him she didn’t go down right away, but Daniella called from downstairs, “Mom, it’s for you,” and when Mali came down the stairs she saw the policewoman who questioned her in the morning and felt how her knees weakened.

  Behind Esty Vahaba stood another policeman who Mali didn’t know then.

  11

  Only at the end of questioning Mazal Bengtson, truly at the last moment, did Avraham bring control of the investigation back into his own hands. Before then, for a few hours, he sensed that he was again being hesitant as he had been on the first day of the investigation. He watched Shrapstein lead Erez Yeger into the interrogation room, and he didn’t intervene when Shrapstein tried to get Yeger to admit that he murdered his mother. And he listened to the things Ilana Lis hurled at him without responding. Until almost the last moment, he also sat in Mazal Bengtson’s empty living room barely involved in the conversation. Bengtson again said that no policeman had contacted her, and Esty Vahaba’s feeling, that Bengtson hadn’
t told her everything during the first questioning, seemed so unconvincing to him.

  ***

  The apartment was on the seventh floor of an old residential building: 8 Uri Zvi Greenberg Street.

  The door was open when they entered the building before six thirty in the evening, and the stairwell remained dark even after they turned on the light. The narrow elevator gave off an odor of cigarette smoke and animals, cats perhaps. And Avraham was forced to stand too close to Esty Vahaba. On the mirror were two stickers, one with the telephone number of a plumber and the second of an exterminator, and Avraham read them in order not to look at himself in the mirror and see what Ilana Lis saw.

  Vahaba knocked on the door twice before ringing the bell. A four- or five-year-old girl, with light hair and blue eyes, opened the door for them and then immediately called for her mother, who looked entirely different. Mazal Bengtson was tall and dark complected, and her hair was black. Perhaps thirty-five years old. She wore a gray fleece and slippers, and to Avraham it seemed that they had interrupted her while cleaning. She didn’t ask them why they had come, and this should have grabbed his attention, but during those moments his thoughts were still in Ilana’s apartment.

  The girl who opened the door for them remained standing in the doorway to her room and looked at them from there throughout the conversation, as if to watch over the mother. Mazal Bengtson led them to the living room, offered them coffee or tea, and went to the kitchen to boil water, as those being questioned sometimes do when policemen show up at their homes with no notice, in order to relax. At night, when he recalled the conversation with her, Avraham thought how much Mazal Bengtson didn’t resemble her daughters. Like Erez Yeger and the woman who wasn’t his mother. He looked at the apartment while they waited for her. The blinds in the window facing the street were closed, and the feeling in the almost empty living room was claustrophobic. In its center were two black leather couches and a small glass table, and a flat-screen television hung on the wall opposite them. The rest of the walls were bare, except for one small photo that was hanging on one of the walls, as if by accident. The two of them sat on one of the couches, and Mazal Bengtson set their mugs of coffee on the glass table and sat down across from them on a stool. Throughout most of the conversation Avraham gazed at the photograph of the deer skipping through dense forest, fleeing from the hunters’ rifles or the camera. Under the photograph was a small bookshelf and in it were two rows of books, mostly in English, and this, too, should have attracted his attention, but at that time he didn’t remember the English accent of the policeman who questioned Diana Goldin, and even if he had remembered, it’s reasonable to assume he wouldn’t have made a connection between them. On the couch a woven blanket was spread out, like at his parents’ apartment, and something about it and the bare walls caused him to think that they hadn’t been living in this apartment for a long time or that it was a temporary refuge of sorts that they planned on leaving.