He heard the hint in what she was saying, even if she hid it in different words.
“You think I locked into the story because it suits me?”
“That’s not what I said, Avi. I said that—”
“But that’s what you think?”
“I told you that I think you’ve got the right angle. But that it wouldn’t hurt to check other angles at the same time.”
“Why do you think this story suits me?”
Ilana was silent. And she put out the cigarette, even though she had just started smoking it. Only when he asked her again did she suddenly say to him angrily, “Maybe because you resemble this cop a little, no?”
He thought she was kidding, but in Ilana’s eyes there was something else, which he didn’t recognize, when she continued speaking. “Don’t get insulted, please. I mean that cops will do anything in order to catch people who break the law and put them in jail. That’s our goal; do you agree with me? Something else is guiding you, just like with this cop. He’s not questioning the women in order to catch their assailants, right or not? He does it for other reasons. For his own reasons. And you’re like that, too. I’m not sure I understand what’s guiding you, Avi, what you’re looking for exactly, and the truth is that I always thought this is what prevents you from being the exceptional detective you could have been. But maybe it’s still not too late for you to change.”
When Avraham was on his way back to the station and heard again and again in his head the things Ilana said to him, he understood that she didn’t mean to hurt him and had simply hurled at him the rage that had built up in her for weeks at the disease that had spread throughout her body and about the fact that she had to resign from her position that she loved so much and that she wouldn’t dare to admit, even to herself, that she wouldn’t be returning to. And he also remembered what Marianka said to her parents, about the fact that he’s a policeman because he needs to be close to pain. But when he heard Ilana’s words for the first time he froze and didn’t respond, and then he rose and put the investigation materials in the file. Ilana said, “So you are insulted? But you wanted to hear the truth,” and Avraham said quietly, “That’s not the reason the story suits me, Ilana. The story suits me because it’s the only possible story according to the evidence and because all the other stories aren’t reasonable. But thanks for the help.” He didn’t wait for her to walk him out, and as he walked toward the door he heard her call out from behind him, “Did you come so I’d say amen to everything you said, Avi?” And he tried to smile when he turned around and said to her, “I didn’t come for that, Ilana. I came in order to see how you were doing.”
He had no more questions for Mazal Bengtson, and he waited for Esty Vahaba to finish questioning her as well so that he could return home. Vahaba bent over toward the glass table and said to Bengtson almost in a whisper, perhaps so her daughter wouldn’t hear, “I want to be completely honest with you, Mazal. There’s a reason we came after you already gave me testimony this morning. I felt after our conversation this morning that perhaps you’re scared to say that you did meet with this man. That perhaps it’s unpleasant for you to admit this. And I wanted to tell you that you have nothing to be ashamed of and that you have nothing to fear if that happened. You’re not the only one who fell into his trap and agreed to give him testimony. There’s no way to know that he’s not an on-duty policeman if that’s how he presented himself. But if you know something, then you have a way to help us in preventing him from harming other women.”
Bengtson listened and then again said that she hadn’t met the policeman, and that if she had met with him she wouldn’t hesitate to say so. And Esty Vahaba sighed and said, “But if you remember something, we’re here.”
This was the last moment, and were it not for the phone call from Eliyahu Ma’alul Avraham apparently wouldn’t have seen a thing. His phone rang and he got up and walked away from them in the direction of the entrance and listened to Ma’alul, who said to him, “Avi, I have some good news for you. I was with the neighbor and I showed him the policeman’s photograph, and he says that’s for sure the man he saw. He’s certain it’s not Erez Yeger but rather the man in the photograph. Do you hear me?” And Avraham didn’t respond to him because while he was listening he saw the picture through the open door.
For a moment he considered going in immediately, but he didn’t do so.
From the place where he stood he saw only part of the naked body along with her face, for a moment. He said to Ma’alul, “Excellent, Eliyahu, but I’m here in the middle of something. I’ll call you in a bit,” and then he approached Bengtson and Vahaba, who got up from their seats, and asked where the bathroom was. Afterward, when Avraham tried to explain to himself why he did it, he thought that what drew his attention was the contrast between the woman he spoke with in the living room and the one he saw in the picture. Mazal Bengtson pointed toward the white door at the beginning of the hallway and Avraham waited in the bathroom with the light on until he heard her walking away and then he silently opened the door and exited.
The next room over was dark, and he passed by it on his way to the bedroom, which was lit, even though no one was in it. If she had noticed him Avraham would have explained that he was looking for a towel in order to dry his hands. The picture that he saw earlier from the hallway was hanging over a double bed, and at first he saw in it only the woman who sat before him and didn’t manage to attract his attention. But then he saw as well the man whose arms were wrapped around her breasts.
12
The thought to turn him in crossed Mali’s mind immediately after the police left.
When the police were at their place, Mali couldn’t say a thing because the girls were there, but especially because Kobi was liable to enter the apartment at any moment. Daniella waited by the door to her room, even though Mali asked her to wait in her room, and Mali watched her daughter and the door because she was actually scared that Kobi would return and see the police and that they, too, would see and recognize him. This is what gave rise to her fear and not their questions, maybe because she felt that she would be answering them soon enough. She didn’t believe them that they came because something in the previous conversation caused Vahaba to be suspicious that she hadn’t revealed everything, and she was sure they knew more about Kobi than what they told her. And the strange thing was that in the meantime she continued lying. She had already lied to Kobi that day when she hid the policewoman’s visit to the bank from him, and she continued to lie in the evening when she didn’t tell him that the police had been in their home. And that night she lied to Gila just as she had lied to the two police officers who had presented to her Kobi’s picture in uniform. She had been such a bad liar since they were girls, and all of Gila’s efforts to teach her how to lie without blushing or without bursting into tears had failed, and now she suddenly didn’t collapse, and despite the lies she felt for the first time in a long while that she was doing what she needed to do. As if the lies were necessary in order for it finally to be possible to speak the truth.
It was easiest for her to lie to the detective who came with Vahaba to their apartment. He didn’t look at her while she spoke and didn’t listen to her answers but instead looked at the photo Kobi took during a hunt he organized with his father, as if he could see something in it that others didn’t see. Mali thought the detective’s face was familiar, maybe because he went to school with her or served with her in the army, but she was unable to recall where they had met.
He was the one who spoke at the beginning of the conversation. He asked again when was the last time she had been questioned and if anyone had tried to contact her since, but his questions were asked indifferently, as if he wasn’t waiting for the answer, and Mali managed to answer without her voice shaking. She attributed his indifference to the fact that they knew everything about Kobi and she didn’t understand why they didn’t ask her directly: Is your husband the man who dressed up as an officer? What would she have s
aid had they asked her this?
Afterward the detective was silent and looked like someone who had lost interest in her, and the one who addressed her was mainly Esty Vahaba. In her of all people, even though she wasn’t high ranking like the detective, there was something calming and trustworthy, and Mali felt an inexplicable intimacy with her, which grew in strength in the weeks that came afterward. And the sentence Vahaba said at the end of their conversation played an important part in the decision Mali made. “You have a way to help us in preventing him from harming other women,” Vahaba said to her before they went, and this thought remained with Mali.
That evening she felt that she was doing it mainly for Kobi’s sake. In order to save him. And also for their sake, for the sake of Daniella and Noy and the baby, whose presence she felt during the conversation with the police as if it heard her trying to calm her from inside. But the thought about the women who Kobi sat across from and forced to talk to him also pursued her in the coming hours. She remembered the woman whom she saw in her imagination lying injured in the street, and then again the night on which Kobi came back to their apartment wearing the uniform.
Mali asked him then, “Can you explain to me why you’re wearing that uniform?” and Kobi sat down on their bed with his back to her and hid his head in his hands. Afterward he said, “I can’t take it anymore,” and she asked, “But where were you?” Then he told her.
Neither of them went to sleep that night.
She told him everything he wanted, just so that he would stop and not do it again to any more women. His cell phone rested on the dining room table, and Kobi spread out the stack of papers next to him and she sat down across from him and refused to stop, even when he suggested that she give up because she was sobbing. Daniella woke up once during that night and came to them in the kitchen, because of Mali’s crying, and Mali took her back to bed, stayed next to her until she fell asleep, and continued to cry without a sound. Kobi promised her then that he would never do that again if she told him everything.
He returned home a few minutes after the police left, and since he didn’t ask a thing about them she thought she had been lucky, and it hadn’t occurred to her that perhaps he saw the squad car parked in front of the building and waited for the police to go away. The mugs of coffee that she made for them had been forgotten on the table in the living room, but Kobi didn’t notice them, and Mali thought that she had managed to get rid of them without his paying attention. His face was damp and the stubble on his cheeks hurt when he kissed her on her cheek. And when he discovered that the girls hadn’t eaten dinner, he offered to shower and then make something for them. He placed the bag with the sweat-drenched workout clothes on the floor in the corner of the bedroom, and it remained there like that, soaking in the smell of his sweat, until she opened it three days later. Mali took advantage of him being in the shower to get dressed, and when he came out she was by the door and said that she’d try not to return too late. Kobi looked surprised when he asked where she was going, and she answered him while looking for the keys in her purse so that their gazes wouldn’t meet. That evening she didn’t look at him, simply because she was scared he’d see. Daniella and Noy waited for dinner in the kitchen and Mali kissed them before leaving, and suddenly she thought they were liable to tell him that the police had been in their home. But she couldn’t tell them a thing in his presence. When she looked in the mirror while going down in the elevator, she thought she should approach the police already that evening. The face she saw in the mirror was again her face, as if it had been brought back from a faraway time, and she looked at it until she felt in the soles of her feet the thud of the elevator stopping. And while she was still on the way she decided not to tell Gila everything but rather tell her about the hit-and-run accident as if it had truly happened.
Gila had no hesitations. Mali knew that this is how it would be, and perhaps that’s why she decided to ask her for advice.
In the text she sent her, Mali wrote only: I have to meet you this evening. Even if you’re not free, and when she sat down across from her in the café Gila immediately asked her, “What happened to you? You scared me like crazy,” and Mali said that a few days earlier Kobi had hit a pedestrian with his car and fled and asked her to help him hide the accident from the police, but today policemen came to their place and suspect Kobi. When Gila spoke, Mali felt just how far apart they were from each other and how what had happened in recent years had separated them. Gila was full of life that evening, more so than usual, and perhaps there was some schadenfreude in her as well. Even externally they no longer resembled each other. Gila ordered another cappuccino and afterward asked Mali to step out to smoke a cigarette, and said aloud, even although there were people in the street, “It’s clear you have to tell them, I don’t see any question here. And if you want I’ll do it instead. Do you understand that if you keep cooperating with him they could accuse you of obstruction of justice? And what would you do with the girls then? Ask Mom to take care of them?”
She was oblivious of that until then, and the thought of Daniella and Noy in the house of her mother and father frightened her. Suddenly Mali again saw herself alone in the delivery room, the baby was almost out, and she was shrieking, but no one else was there other than them, and she understood that even if she wasn’t accused of a thing, she would remain alone, at least for a few months, the period of the pregnancy and the time following the birth, and this was the only time that day when she couldn’t choke back the anger that rose up in her. She didn’t answer when Gila asked, “You told him that he has to confess and he said that he wasn’t ready?” nor when she said, “I don’t understand you, Mali, how much do you think you have to suffer because of him? Do you want Dad to say something to him? Or should I speak to him?”
A sharp pain shot out from her abdomen, as if someone were stabbing her through it again and again. She tried to erase the picture of the birth using the other picture that had appeared that morning, in which she was driving a car and the girls sat in back with the baby, and the seat next to her was empty. “Do you know what happened to the woman he hit?” Gila asked, and it took Mali some time to understand who she meant.
“Was she killed? Was she seriously injured?”
“Of course not,” Mali said, panic-stricken. Then she lowered her voice and added, “I don’t know what happened to her. I searched but didn’t find anything.”
“So make him go, and tell him that if doesn’t do it you’ll go instead. And explain to him that if he turns himself in that’ll help him afterward, don’t the two of you get that?”
But Mali didn’t go to the station that night.
The time was late, and she didn’t want Kobi to get suspicious. And despite this she waited around in the car under their building because she was hoping that Kobi would be asleep when she got back, until a neighbor passed by there and saw her. Was this what she thought that night? That if she presented herself to the police and explained to Esty Vahaba what happened, then they would understand them and be lenient with the punishment? Kobi would never enter the police station and willingly confess. When she would return home in the evening hours in a few weeks, or even in a few months if they’re not lucky and the punishment is severe, Kobi wouldn’t be there, and she would always enter a dark apartment and grope with her hand for the switch in order to turn on the light. She would lock the door alone and would need to get used to sleeping alone at night, despite the heavy hand. The bed she would get into would be empty, and in it she wouldn’t find the familiar body that had hardened but preserved the memory of the soft body that Kobi had when they met.
He wasn’t sleeping when Mali opened the door.
All the lights in the apartment were on, and she heard Kobi get up from the bed. His eyes were soft when he said to her, “You came back late,” and she tried to smile when she answered, “That’s how it always is with Gila, you know.” All this was so hard, harder even than speaking the truth and recognizing it, but what she
had started was already impossible to stop. Kobi asked, “Do you want me to warm you up something?” and Mali said that she ate. And when he tried to hug her she said that she had a headache, and he asked her, “Is everything okay? Did something happen at work?” And Mali shook her head. The apartment was silent, Daniella and Noy were sleeping, and this was another opportunity, almost the last, to tell him about the baby and the police and to beg for him to go to the police station himself. They didn’t speak much in bed, other than about Harry. She remembered that Kobi said that tomorrow everyone would need to say good-bye to him because there was no point in waiting.
She forcefully closed her eyes and felt Kobi continuing to look at her in the weak light given off by the reading lamp. And despite her efforts, like every time she forcefully closed her eyes, she felt the hand coming from out of the darkness and trying to crush her throat, and for a moment she had trouble breathing, but this time she succeeded in fighting against it. Is this what it would be like every night until Kobi was released and came back? He placed a hand on her hair and caressed her, and she said, “Not now,” and even though she lay with her back to him she felt his eyes still touching her.
The next day, while the three of them ate breakfast in the kitchen, Daniella suddenly asked them, “Mommy, why did they come to us yesterday? The people from the police?” But Kobi was still sleeping and didn’t hear.
Noy asked, “What people?” and Daniella said, “The man and the woman who talked with Mom yesterday,” and Mali didn’t even remember what she explained to them that morning and how they switched to talking about the costume that she’d buy Noy for Purim.
The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything Page 16