Chapter 30
“I need the police report.”
Benny looked up at Rania from whatever he had been working on. His eyes bulged only as much as they usually did, not the extra bulging they did when he was surprised. The over-made-up policewoman at the front desk must have called to warn him she was on her way up.
“Why don’t they stop you at the gate?” he asked. “Do you want some tea?”
“They know how much you want to see me. No, I am in a hurry, and I do not like your tea. Make me a copy of the report, and I’ll let you get back to your work.”
“You’re so kind.” He arched an eyebrow at her.
After spending so much time with him last year, she had practiced that one-eyed arch in the mirror. It was very effective at communicating sardonic disdain. She’d never been able to get it down.
“Well?” He made no move to look through the masses of folders covering every square inch of his office. “What have you found out?”
“Did I or did I not tell you I do not work for you?”
“Do you or do you not want to go back to prison?” That eyebrow ticked up again.
Her throat tightened in spite of her assuring herself he was just trying to get her goat. She removed a stack of folders from a chair and plopped down into it. She had meant to get the report out of him before showing him the picture of the soldiers. But he had not-so-subtly reminded her whose weapons were more powerful. She pulled the photocopied drawing out of her purse.
“These are the soldiers who were in the village that day,” she said, tossing the picture onto his desk. He pulled it closer and moved his eyeglasses from the top of his head to the bridge of his nose.
“Who drew this?” he asked.
She wondered if there was any reason not to tell him. She didn’t want to get Chloe in trouble. But the fact that an Israeli had drawn it, even one with a longer prison record than hers, might make him take it more seriously.
“Chloe’s friend, Avi.”
“Avi Levav?”
“I don’t know his last name.” Of course she did. But he knew too. If he had some reason for asking questions he knew the answers to, she must have some reason not to answer them.
He rolled his eyes at her. “Did anyone say which one hit him?”
She didn’t know he had heard the hitting story, too. She shook her head. “They say this one shot at the boys,” indicating the short one. “But Daoud yelled to this one, ‘Ron, stop shooting.’”
“How do you know this is Ron? Surely the children couldn’t tell which one he was yelling at.”
“Chloe talked to them yesterday at Mas’ha Gate. She said this one knew Daoud.”
“That’s not much to go on.”
“It is more than you have. Can you get me the police report now, please?”
He looked like he wanted to argue some more, but he got up and rifled through the folders on his desk. After looking through the top, bottom, and middle of every pile, he took the top folder from the pile next to his right hand and pulled out several stapled sheets. Could he really have not known that the file was right there? If it was right on top, he must have just been looking at it. She wondered why.
“Baruch!” he called out. His dark-skinned minion appeared and took the paper out of his hand. “One copy,” he said in Hebrew.
“How is it being out of prison?” he asked when Baruch had left the room.
The folder he had taken the report out of was pretty thick, she thought. “It is fine. How else would it be? I hope I will never go back there in my life. What else is in that file?”
He chuckled. “You think I am going to share all my secrets with you? Witness statements, mostly.”
She stood up and moved to take the folder off his desk. He grabbed it and tossed it into a drawer. That confirmed what she thought: it contained either information about her or about his informants in the village. Or both.
Baruch returned and handed the original and the copy to Benny. Benny handed her the copy and put the original in the drawer.
“Thanks,” she said and made her exit. As soon as she was outside the station, she looked at the paper she held. Only then did it occur to her that she wouldn’t be able to read it, because it was all in Hebrew.
Ten years ago, the trip from Ariel to Salfit would have taken ten minutes through the fields. Now, she had to walk all the way down the hill out of the settlement, half an hour’s walk, and wait for a servees which took the settler road to Yasuf. Almost forty-five minutes passed before she was at the police station in Salfit. When she got there, the young woman at the desk told her Captain Mustafa had gone for lunch with Abu Ziyad, the DCL.
She could likely find them at Abu Salaam’s shawarma shop, but she tried to avoid Abu Ziyad as much as humanly possible. It wasn’t easy, because he was close with her boss and probably the most powerful Palestinian official in the district, but it helped that he didn’t like her either. Her boss had always defended her, but Abu Ziyad was his oldest friend. They had fought together, back in the old days, when Arafat was in Tunis. One of the captain’s gifts was the ability to keep everyone happy.
As far as she knew, Captain Mustafa was the only person in the Salfit police who could read Hebrew. She looked around the little station. Her former coworkers were on the phone or conversing with one another or reading reports. One was reading Al Hayat. Some of them had let Khaled play under their desks while she worked, before he was old enough for school. But, now, they seemed to fear that the suspicion which attached to her might be contagious. A few had politely offered “Hamdullila assalaam,” when she appeared, but none of them seemed at all interested in finding out what she was doing there. Except Abdelhakim.
“Um Khaled, welcome,” he said with a broad smile that managed to seem more like a smirk.
“Abdelhakim.” Last she had heard, he had transferred to Abu Ziyad’s office, across the street. Now, he was sitting at her desk.
“Can I help you?” As if she were any citizen who came to report the theft of a goat. Trust him to emphasize that she no longer worked here.
“Do you read Hebrew by any chance?”
“Yes.” She had asked the question being sure the answer would be no. He was too young to have been in prison during the First Intifada, and she knew he had not been arrested in the Second. She was also pretty sure he had never worked in a settlement.
“My father spoke it,” he said, reading her thoughts. “He thought it was important that I learn it.”
“And, you see, he was right. Can you translate this for me?” She handed over the police report. He scanned it, and his delicate brow furrowed.
“Where did you get this?”
She hesitated. Um Bassam had said it was Abdelhakim who told everyone Benny visited her in prison. She didn’t want to give him more ammunition to spread rumors about her trustworthiness. But if she didn’t answer, it would look like she had something to hide.
“From Benny Lazar.”
“The Israeli policeman.”
“Yes.” If she were an informer, would she come here and show him information she had gotten from the Israeli police? The captain and Abu Ziyad were friendlier with Benny than she was. Were they informers? She had a whole dialog with him while he merely glanced coolly at her and looked down at the paper.
“This is about Daoud,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why are you looking into his death?”
“The captain asked me to,” she said. She was pretty sure if he asked, her old boss would not deny it. “The family wants to sue the army. Surely you had heard that, from Hanan.” There, let him feel that he was out of the loop. It seemed to work. He looked back at the report.
“He was found facedown,” he said. “No sign of a struggle. It was hard to tell because the night was windy, but it did not appear that the body was dragged or moved postmortem. Injuries consistent with a high-velocity weapon, like an M-16, fired at close range.”
“Like an M-16?
It does not say for sure?”
“It says similar to an M-16.”
“Similar to or like?”
“Who can tell? It’s Hebrew. Such an imprecise language.” They bonded momentarily over their distaste for Hebrew. “No shells or bullets were recovered. Witnesses reported hearing two gunshots at approximately half past eight in the evening. No one reported hearing a vehicle or footsteps running away.”
“Is that all?” It was barely more than she already knew.
“More or less.”
“I don’t want more or less. I want to know what it says. Exactly.” He looked back at the report, and his lips moved slightly.
“There was a gash on his head,” he read, “that could have come from striking his head on the rocks. Or it could have been inflicted prior to the shooting.”
“I thought you said there was no sign of a struggle.”
“That’s what it says.” She thought about that. Did that mean the Israeli police had a different definition of what a struggle was than she did, or was someone making a determination about which explanation of the gash was more likely? She wished she could have seen the body.
“Can I see that?” she said. He handed the report back to her. She flipped to the last page. There was a grainy photo, but, in the photocopying process, it had become virtually useless. She barely made out the jagged line on his forehead that would have been referred to as the gash. Offhand, she had to guess that he hit his head on the rocks, since he was found facedown. Otherwise, someone would have had to fight with Daoud face-to-face, then somehow shoot him in the back. Unless they fought and Daoud turned to walk or run away, and the person shot him in the back. Or…she thought about the story that the girl named Heba had told her, of Daoud’s confrontation with the soldiers earlier. Heba had said that the soldier punched Daoud in the face with his fist. A balled-up fist could not have made a gash like the one she saw in the picture.
“Does it say anything about whether there was pooling blood from the cut on his head?” she asked, shoving the report in front of Abdelhakim once more.
He glanced through it and shook his head.
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“No.”
“Thank you very much,” she said. She hated having to be indebted to him. Maybe she could use this time of unemployment to study Hebrew. She still had the textbook she had gotten from Tali Ta’ali, but she doubted she would be able to motivate herself.
“Um Khaled,” Abdelhakim said as she started to get up.
“Yes?”
“Have you thought any more about Abu Ziyad’s request to train the women’s police force?”
“No,” she said.
“Please do,” he said.
She bristled. He had no right to order her around. Of course, he had said please, but he didn’t mean it.
“Abu Ziyad is going to want an answer in the next few days.”
“Then I will discuss it with Abu Ziyad,” she said. “Thank you again.”
Chapter 31
The servees dropped Rania at the entrance to Kufr Yunus and rumbled off toward Hares. She waited for the one other disembarking passenger to amble into the village, loaded down with packages from a shopping spree. She was thankful to see no one nearby as she walked to Um Mahmoud’s house and took out Avi’s drawing. She did not want a group of children following her around asking, “What are you doing?” as she made her investigation. Nor did she need nosy adults asking, “Are you back working for the police?”
She held the drawing in front of her so she could look at it and still see where she was going and paced off thirty feet between the house and the trees. Avi had drawn it very accurately. The huge, lopsided fig tree on the left listed under the weight of unripe figs like a dancer doing a backbend. To the right was a clump of small olive trees, with tufts of scrubby grass and protruding rocks in-between. Just beyond, she could see the spindly almond orchard, branches pointing into the air like the arms of whirling dancers. Straight ahead was the spreading fig tree where Daoud had lain facedown, according to Benny’s report.
She knelt in the soft dirt and felt around for any shells or other objects that Chloe and Um Mahmoud might have missed. She did not expect to find any, and she didn’t. She brushed away the dirt from the rocks under her fingers, and saw the reddish-brown stains that Chloe had told her about. There was quite a lot of blood, so likely it came from the wound in his chest, where the bullet went through his back, exiting via the heart and nicking the lung for good measure. She saw that not only the rocks but the dirt as well was stained a different brown than the normal shade of the soil. She traced the spatter pattern with her hands. It was right for that kind of wound. So, the boy must have lain like this—she looked around once more to make sure no one was watching and lay on her stomach, carefully bunching her jilbab under the legs to keep it from flying up in a sudden wind. He was much taller than she, so his head would have been about…here. She reached a foot over her head and made a broad circle in the dirt with her finger. Then she clambered up and walked forward to the area she had marked.
She sifted through dirt and cleared off rocks for half an hour, but found no trace of blood in that area. That meant that the gash on Daoud’s forehead could not have come from striking his head on the rocks when he fell. She thought about her conversation with Heba, and the one Chloe had reported with all the children. No one had said anything about Daoud having a cut on his head before the confrontation with the soldiers. Of course, no one had asked them, and then too, they might not have noticed. But it seemed likely that the cut was sustained that afternoon—either during that confrontation with the soldiers or sometime between then and when he was killed that night.
She didn’t know if it mattered, but she took out her notebook and wrote it down. She took a small tape measure from her bag and carefully noted the distance between the base of the tree and the rocks where the blood stains were. She measured the distance between Um Mahmoud’s front door and the fig tree and between the fig and the olives, just as she would have if she were really heading a murder investigation. She doubted her work would ever be useful for anything, but she didn’t want to wish she had done it later. If she ended up training the women’s police unit, this is what she would tell them, to always take every precaution.
Her phone played the Palestinian folk tune she had chosen when she got her first mobile phone. She looked at the screen. Benny.
“Yes?” she said in English.
“His name is Ron Binyamin,” Benny said without preamble. “The other guy is Yonatan Silberman. They’re an odd pair. Yonatan is a right-winger, used to go to settler rallies and pick fights with Arabs. Ron is a peacenik. In high school, he went to a camp with Palestinian kids in Germany.”
“Abraham’s Garden?” Rania asked.
“That’s right. How’d you know?”
“Daoud went there too,” Rania said. Benny must have learned that as well. If he could get this much information so fast from a drawing and a possible first name, certainly he had the complete dossier on Daoud al-Khader by now.
“No kidding,” Benny said. “Quite a coincidence, eh?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “They must have known each other.”
“You’re suggesting he was killed because of something that happened at a dialogue camp years ago?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. I have no idea why he was killed. Does your information say anything about if Ron was…is…” She stopped. She couldn’t tell the Israeli police that Daoud was gay. It would give them too much ammunition to make this an honor killing or a religious cleansing.
“If he is what?” Benny sounded impatient. Well, he had called her with this information, so he could wait another minute while she tried to think about the significance.
“Is he married?” she asked. She knew that Israeli youth mostly did not marry until after the army, but she thought the more religious ones married younger.
�
�No,” Benny said. “No wife. No girlfriend either that I know of.”
“Okay, thank you,” she said. She hung up. Just because he had no known girlfriend didn’t mean that Ron was gay. None of this meant anything. But it was interesting. She wandered out to the road to find transportation back to Biddya. She decided to pick up Khaled from school and take him shopping in Nablus for the afternoon. They needed some private time together.
While she waited for a car, she thought about what Benny had told her. If the soldier who shot Daoud had known him from the peace camp, what possible motivation could that have given him to commit murder? She had no idea what went on at such places. Perhaps they talked about their family histories, things that could rekindle old conflicts. She thought about her conversation with Tali in the prison. They had both been so passionate about the histories they had been taught. Two narratives, two old wounds that felt as fresh as the ones Tali’s colleagues had inflicted on her the previous evening. Knowing that Tali’s grandfather could have been one of those who destroyed her family home did not make her want to kill the other woman. But she couldn’t say whether the reverse was true or not.
Idly, she took out the photo of Daoud with Ahmed and the Israeli boy from the camp. The Israeli’s pimpled face looked harmless enough. It was hard to see him as a killer, but he would be much older now and probably carried a gun and decided who could go through the checkpoint and who could not. She peered at it more closely. The young Israeli’s face—could it be? Maybe she was imagining it. She took out the picture Avi had drawn. She tried to see the tall soldier’s face without the beard and sunglasses. It was hard to be sure. The beaky nose was the same, but a lot of Jews had that nose. The cheekbones were similar, but the beard made a difference. Besides, one was a photo and one a drawing. She couldn’t be sure. But it didn’t really matter. If he was not the one in the photo, it didn’t mean he didn’t know Daoud from the camp, and, if he did, it didn’t mean that was why he killed him. It was all a big jumble.
Her phone rang just as a servees showed up.
Murder Under the Fig Tree Page 24