The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

by D. A. Mishani

  “Tell me who you are.”

  These sentences weren’t recorded and only Avraham could hear them in his mind.

  Saban called the district commander in order to let him know he could breathe easy.

  “Please give me the key so that I may leave. I am a police detective.”

  “What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

  This was the beginning of the struggle that the neighbor from the second floor heard above him.

  Buses passed by him, and at the construction site workers carried metal beams in an elevator up to the top floor, when Avraham went out to smoke. The gunshot echoed in his head and drowned out everything, and it was also impossible to erase the images. Mazal Bengtson’s distorted face in the interrogation room when she broke. The empty apartment that he wandered around in without looking for a thing. The sight of the street from the roof and the sense that Bengtson had stood there before him and noticed the police car and the trap they had set for him. And David Ezra crouched down on his knees in the widening puddle of blood.

  When Vahaba returned to the station from the hospital before morning, Avraham saw in her face not just the exhaustion but the sadness as well. When he returned to Saban’s office he found them watching the video of the suicide and of the interrogation that preceded it. Vahaba stroked Mazal Bengtson’s head on the screen as she said, You have to know him to understand. I simply didn’t want to go back to it. I didn’t want to tell him. I just wanted to forget it all.

  And he insisted?

  Avraham was unable to watch it. Ma’alul suggested that they stop the video, but Saban insisted that they continue watching.

  Why did he want to know, Mali?

  I don’t know.

  You didn’t ask him?

  It was hard for him not to have a job, and he couldn’t find anything. He was ashamed that he wasn’t supporting the family and that only I was working.

  But how are they connected to each other?

  Avraham got up from his seat, but before he left he heard Saban asking Vahaba if she understood what Bengtson was explaining to her, and Vahaba answered that she thought so.

  “Because I don’t understand,” Saban said, “Do you think that it turned him on? That that’s what it was about? That it turned him on sexually to talk to these women?” And Vahaba said no. She spent the night with Mazal Bengtson outside the operating room where the doctors fought for her husband’s life, and Mazal Bengtson insisted that if Kobi had found work he wouldn’t have done what he did. When her husband died she just repeated, “I murdered him,” and Vahaba tried to convince her that she had no way of knowing or preventing what had happened. Other than Vahaba there was only Bengtson’s twin sister who had arrived at the hospital in the evening and remained.

  When Avraham left the room, he heard Saban saying, “Her explanation seems like nonsense to me, Esty. I’m sure it was also a matter of sexual stimulation,” and his words blended with Mazal Bengtson’s voice when she said to Esty Vahaba, You don’t know Kobi; he wasn’t supposed to be like that. He wanted to be other things.

  He remained in the station until the afternoon, even though he had nothing to do there and despite the exhaustion. Leah Yeger’s picture lay on his desk before him, as if the case weren’t closed, and next to it materials from the investigation arranged in order and the paper with the questions he wrote by hand and planned to ask Bengtson. Can you tell me what happened when you arrived at Leah Yeger’s apartment last Monday? He had to move on to other cases, one of those that he had neglected since his first murder investigation was opened. After all, the killer had been caught and shot himself, and there were no more questions to ask. In the late morning hours an article was even published on the news sites about the fact that the criminal who shot himself the day before at the Holon police station was Leah Yeger’s killer. There were no names in the article because the court had only partially removed the gag order. And for some reason it was written that the killer’s cell phone was found in a search that the detective team conducted in the apartment where he resided, and that the voice file in which Yeger was recorded minutes before her death was successfully restored by the Advanced Computing Unit of the Israeli police, even though the killer had erased it from the device.

  When Avraham went to Jaffa he discovered that most of the streets in Holon’s city center were blocked off because of the Purim carnival and remembered the costume he saw on the couch in the living room of the empty apartment. He sat in a traffic jam for more than a quarter of an hour while the open trucks with clowns and princesses and soldiers passed by him on the main street. A boy, age five or six, wearing a black Batman outfit and a mask, stood by Avraham’s car window with his mother and little sister and didn’t stop crying. And when he reached Abu Kabir detention center they told him that Shrapstein had already released Leah Yeger’s son from custody, so there was no point in him coming.

  On the way home, from the car, he called Erez Yeger. He apologized for the fact that he had been arrested during the investigation but he actually wanted to say something else to him, perhaps that his mother was a brave woman, and that he, too, would carry these days inside himself for a long time, like a fracture that sometimes, with the passing of the seasons, aches faintly. He spoke with almost no one that day, until everything burst from him in the evening with Marianka, but the conversation with Erez Yeger he actually tried to prolong, even though the son, too, like him, mainly kept quiet. Before they hung up Avraham asked him, without planning to, “Are you still not ready to tell me why you hid from us that you were adopted and the call with your mother? That could have spared you the days in custody.” Erez Yeger didn’t answer.

  There was no reason to continue asking, because the investigation was over. Yeger was in his car on the way to the north and Avraham, too, needed to return to his apartment, to take off the clothes he hadn’t removed since yesterday and shower, and then sink into sleep and not think anymore.

  “You’re also not ready to explain why you weren’t in touch with her ever since she was assaulted?” he nevertheless asked and wasn’t hoping for an answer, and then of all times he heard Erez Yeger say, “Because she had relations with him before.”

  “With whom?”

  “With David Danon, the so-called rapist.”

  Avraham stopped his car on the side of the road because he was stunned by the answer. He turned off the engine.

  “He didn’t rape her. They had an affair even before my father died.”

  But this wasn’t true! And the police investigation proved it. This was the rapist and his relatives’ line of the defense, and her son believed them and not her. And even if it were true, on the day he came to her to talk about the taxi, David Danon raped Leah Yeger.

  Avraham was silent and Yeger was as well, and only then Avraham understood. He felt the beating of his heart quicken and removed the pack of cigarettes from his pants pocket and lit a cigarette in the car and added, “She called in order to ask you to come to her, right?” This is what Yeger hid and wasn’t ready to say in the interrogation room even at the price of being arrested. He didn’t hide from them that he was in her apartment on the day when the murder occurred, as Shrapstein had thought, but rather that he could have been there because his mother asked him to come and he didn’t. Had she wanted her son to be present at the meeting she set up with the policeman so he’d believe her? He asked him again, “She asked you to come to her, Erez?” And Yeger immediately said, “That’s not correct,” and then added, “She didn’t say anything to me about a meeting with a policeman, I swear to you,” but Avraham didn’t believe him. And he didn’t say to Yeger the things he planned to tell him about his mother’s bravery.

  Only in the evening, in a conversation with Marianka, everything that he hadn’t yet said to anyone and that had seethed in him since the shot was heard, burst forth.

  Marianka wasn’t in the apartment when he returned, and this relieved him. He took off his pants and blue swe
ater and put them in the full laundry basket. He stood a long time under the flow of hot water. When he woke up from his sleep, there was darkness in the window and Marianka was home, but she didn’t ask him a thing, and when Avraham suggested that they go eat out, she got dressed and waited in the living room until he finished drinking coffee. They went to Tel Aviv, but there were girls and boys dressed up in the streets, and the restaurants were decorated with colorful lights for Purim dinners, and since they hadn’t reserved a place, there wasn’t an available table for them anywhere and that was just as well. So they returned to Holon and sat in a café in Weitzman Square. The pasta with cream sauce was the first thing Avraham had put in his mouth since yesterday, and he ate it quickly.

  “Can you tell me what happened finally?” Marianka asked him when he finished, and he answered, “Tell you what?”

  “Why you feel so bad. So guilty. You caught the killer, no?”

  He looked at her, surprised, because he hadn’t told her he felt that. From time to time the explosions of firecrackers could be heard in the square, and revelers in costume on their way to parties passed by the window. And he told her everything. How he behaved harshly with Mazal Bengtson in the interrogation room and how he hid the real news about her husband from her. He didn’t say a word to her even when she offered to phone and invite him to the station, and in fact used her in order to lay a trap for her husband. And even though he tried since to blur his guilt in his thinking, it deepened like the stain on the blue sweater. He reminded himself over and over that Mazal Bengtson told Vahaba in her questioning that her husband wanted to be caught because he couldn’t suffer anymore and that he didn’t even erase the incriminating file from his cell phone. Yaakov Bengtson watched the squad car parked in front of his building from the roof of his apartment, of this Avraham was almost certain, and nevertheless he decided to go to the police station. And since he watched Mazal Bengtson’s interrogation another time this morning, Avraham hadn’t stopped thinking about something else: the fact that the man who raped Mazal Bengtson put his hand on her neck and then placed the knife up against it and cut her—and that Yaakov Bengtson had shot his neck as well.

  Marianka interrupted him. “So what are you guilty of, Avi?” she asked. “He alone decided to shoot himself, no? Apparently because he preferred not to deal with the consequences of what he did. And you just did your job. You’re a cop.”

  Did she not understand that it wasn’t supposed to end like this?

  This was his first murder investigation, and it ended with a man shooting himself in the entrance to the station and dying in the hospital while his wife was certain that it’s her fault he died. He only wanted to sit across from Bengtson in the interrogation room on the second floor of the station and try to understand.

  Marianka didn’t touch the salad that the waitress set down before her. And didn’t drink the wine.

  “But you’re taking responsibility for things that you didn’t do,” she said. “You caught him, you didn’t—” But Avraham didn’t allow her to finish the sentence, because the things she said were so wrong. Other than them there was only an older couple and two waitresses in the café, one of whom looked at Avraham when he raised his voice. “If I had revealed to her that her husband was suspected of murder, she wouldn’t have turned him in, Marianka,” he said. “Or she wouldn’t have brought him to the station. Don’t you understand? Do you not understand why he shot himself? He was sure that his wife turned him in, that he was betrayed by her, that he was left with nobody else in the world to trust, but she didn’t turn him in because she didn’t know what he was suspected of. And even if he had committed suicide regardless, when he understood he was caught, at least it wouldn’t have been because of her. Do you know what she said? That she killed him. That it was her fault he died.”

  This was the thing that hadn’t let go of Avraham since yesterday and that bothered no one other than him. Not the district commander and not Benny Saban and not even Eliyahu Ma’alul. And Marianka wasn’t convinced, either. She asked, “Why are you certain that she didn’t know what her husband really did?” And Avraham looked at her without understanding and said, “What do you mean why? Because we didn’t reveal it to her. Because I didn’t reveal to her that he was suspected of murder.”

  “And it can’t be that she understood this, even though you didn’t reveal it to her? And that she turned him in precisely because of this?”

  Avraham shook his head, and Marianka insisted, and only afterward he understood why. She was actually talking about herself and about him. And only when she told him this explicitly, did he think that perhaps she was right and feel that he had to question Mazal Bengtson immediately and try to clarify what she truly understood about what her husband had done when she entered the station to turn him in. But he didn’t do this. In the weeks to come, after he heard from Vahaba that Mazal Bengtson left her parents’ home and returned to her apartment, he traveled to her street a few times and waited in front of the building in his car, with the window closed. Maybe if she had noticed him and approached, maybe he would have asked her, even though Marianka and Esty Vahaba pleaded with him not to.

  Marianka said, “You really think that you, who didn’t know him, who never once spoke to him, you knew that he’s a murderer, and that his wife, who lived with him and who definitely saw him on the day he carried out the murder and the next day, and who went through with him what she told you she went through, it didn’t even occur to her? She didn’t see what he was going through and didn’t see his gun or know that he would kill himself?” It was as if that gunshot could be heard again in his office. Marianka’s eyes burned as she spoke, and Avraham was no longer convinced, even though he said, “I’m sure you’re wrong. Why would she bring him to the station for us, if it was like that? If she knew that she was pinning a murder on him. She thought he carried out a misdemeanor and that he would be questioned and released within a few hours. And that they’d return home together. She told us this explicitly.”

  “You’re truly asking why?” Marianka asked.

  “Yes. Why would she do this?”

  “Maybe because she wanted it to be over. For the nightmare of their lives together to be over.”

  When they returned home Avraham called Esty Vahaba and it seemed to him that he woke her from her sleep. He asked her if she knows where Mazal Bengtson is, and she said to him that she’s with her parents. He still wasn’t sure that Marianka was right and understood that her words appealed to him, since if they were right it would be easier for him to clean the stain that clung to the blue sweater, but this wasn’t the only reason he believed that perhaps Marianka wasn’t wrong.

  The man who assaulted Mazal Bengtson wasn’t caught, he thought, and perhaps she couldn’t bear the possibility that another assailant would escape without punishment. That another woman would be, like her, a victim of an assailant who would never be found. For a moment he thought to himself that the case wasn’t closed and that he had more to understand, and later that week he wanted to go to the shiva held at Mazal Bengtson’s parents’ home or to the funeral that took place at the civil cemetery in Herzliya, because Bengtson refused to have her husband buried in the plot reserved for people who had killed themselves. Vahaba told him that at the funeral there were no more than twenty people, and that Bengtson’s father didn’t come from Australia because of his health condition. The girls Avraham saw in the apartment weren’t brought to the cemetery, either, and Vahaba didn’t know what Mazal Bengtson had told them.

  When the waitress approached their table and informed them that the café was closing, Avraham took out his wallet, but Marianka asked, “Can you sit for another moment?” and he set it down on the table.

  “I want to tell you something about us,” she said and he listened, even though at the beginning of what she said he thought only about Bengtson. “I know that you were busy and that you were stressed and that my parents’ visit was hard for you, but you’re doing exactly the
same thing with me. Exactly the same thing.”

  He didn’t understand what she meant and waited.

  “Like what you’re doing with the woman you questioned, Avi. You take responsibility for my decisions as if I’m a girl, and blame yourself and don’t believe that I understand very well what I’m doing and that I’m making decisions for myself.”

  He looked at her as if he hadn’t seen her for a long time. And tried to place his hand on her hand but she wouldn’t let him.

  “From the moment I came here you feel guilty that I’m here, as if I didn’t decide to come to you. And then you close yourself off and withdraw and hide from me everything tied to your work, because you’re guilty of the fact that I left everything and came to you and you have a job and I don’t yet know what to do with myself.”

  He said that wasn’t right, and Marianka continued anyway.

  “But I’m here because I want to be here for now. This was my decision. This is a chapter in my life, Avi, not just in yours. And you didn’t force me to do anything. I know how to decide for myself what’s good for me, do you understand?”

  The things that Ilana Lis said to him at their meeting rose up in his memory, and he tried to forget them.

  “I brought myself here, Avi, and if it won’t be good for me, I won’t stay. And maybe that’s what’s hard for you to accept and that’s what you try to cover up when it seems to you that everything is your fault and your responsibility.”

  When he asked, “So it’s not hard for you here?” he felt how much he had wanted to ask her this before then, on each day that had passed since she came, not only since the investigation opened. She said to him, “Yes it’s hard for me. Clearly it’s hard for me. It’s hard because I’m a stranger here and don’t know the language and because I miss things, but it’s mainly hard with you. It’s hard for me that you’re quiet and hide what you’re going through from me. And that you need to close the door and hide from me in order to eat. And that you started smoking again and didn’t tell me. I didn’t come here in order to live alone, but instead in order to try to live together with you.”