Haunted Blood

by Elik Katzav

  Many years later, she discovered her focal point and turned to yoga and the practice of healing through energies.

  The fact she never got caught for everything she had done helped her retire at twenty three. Six years on, she currently leads a life of meditation, pursuing the spiritual aspects of life.

  A great deal of tea flowed in her studio before I got to hear about her exploits as a young person, and not because she’s afraid the police might still be after her, not after all these years, but rather because she turned a whole new leaf, reincarnated as Rose Quartz.

  “How are you, David?” Rose sounds a bit sleepy when she picks up. Even so, her voice sends the most pleasant twinges down my spine.

  - I am fine...

  And we both complete my usual reply, “-given the alternative,” and she laughs.

  During the course of her daily life these past months, this line has become my fixed feature whenever a day would go by with me not seeing any people with yellow eyes watching me, or shadows moving around me, trying to wrap me up and smother me—this would go down as a good day.

  - I could use your help, if you can spare the time.

  “Do you need some guided imagery to go to sleep?”

  - No, I’ve got stuff I can take for that.

  Her twitching face comes clearly to me. Whenever I mention the fact that I self-medicate to deal with my situation, she takes it hard. According to Rose, the solution to my predicament lays within me. It’s there for me to find the strength to get over my fears.

  I retort that whatever strength I did have left me once I was faced with a real live demon attempting to kill me, rendering me unable to deal with the madness that’s trying to overpower me without the aid of chemistry.

  - I need to retrieve stuff from a PC that has probably undergone formatting.

  “Is it for work? Something to do with Uri?”

  - Yeah. I cannot guarantee payment for your trouble.

  At this point, I immediately add, in an apologetic voice:

  - You know Uri.

  “That’s ok,” she smiles on the other side of the line. “Anyway, I’d be happy to see you.”

  - Great. I’m stopping over at ho- at the upholstery shop. I’ll just get this stuff out of the way and come over with the PC. Is that ok?

  “No problem, I’m home.”

  Florentin by night has this kind of manic depression. One evening, this neighborhood in down town Tel Aviv has young folks out and about on the streets, with music and booze, and another evening, it looks deserted, not a soul out, one empty joint after another, nothing but bands of migrant workers sitting on benches drinking cheap beer.

  On second thought, these young refugees turned illegal alien workers are always around. When all the young Israelis are out partying, the foreigners blend in and become part of the general scenery, barely visible, like the benches. When the Israelis aren’t here, they stick out, they are no longer transparent.

  There are more of them tonight than Israelis, which makes it easier for me to walk down the street without the youngsters who normally paint the town red running in to me on the curve.

  I reach the office in a matter of a few minutes, lay the box on the floor and open the door. I don’t wanna linger, so I leave the TiVo and the newspapers over by the counter, reach for the PC and out I go again.

  It’s hot at night as well. I can feel myself sweating, but the heat is drier now, which keeps my shirt from completely sticking to my back.

  I turn right on the second junction. Like most buildings in Florentin, Rose’s apartment complex is old, so it’s got no elevator. Lucky for me, I prefer to take the stairs anyway.

  I hop up the stairs, arrive at the third floor and ring her doorbell, still carrying the crate with the PC with both arms. Beads rattling inside her apartment. The door opens, and Rose’s smiling face beam at me.

  “Hey.”

  Her long dark hair covers some of her face. She reaches for it absentmindedly and moves it aside, comes over to me and gives me a warm hug.

  Almost every person who treats other people in any capacity is a handsy kind of type. They love to touch. Some less so and some more. Physical contact is a way to transmit energy, and Rose’s touch is a lovely feeling even in the August heat.

  “A hug,” she once told me, “has healing properties, because a real, honest hug, comes from the heart, transferring real energy from one person to another. For the hug to make an impact, it needs to last for at least twenty seconds. When it reaches this duration exactly,” Rose says, “it calms the nervous system down, and for it to work, both parties need to embrace one another from the same source, from the heart. That’s why a hug affects them both.”

  Generally speaking, the hugs I have known prior to Rose were of the male variety, or as she puts it, ‘a hug with a pat on the shoulder’, so apart from reaffirming the friendship, it confers no energy.

  It’s not that I haven’t hugged anyone before, but even with other women or girls, it was a more practical sort of hug, not for the purpose of exchanging energies.

  Rose’s place used to be her nana’s, before she was moved to her nursing home. Rose sort of inherited it to keep the apartment in the family, as it were. She pays a reduced rent, which covers part of the costs of keeping grandma at the retirement community.

  She’s walking in front of me towards the living room. A bead door, a remnant of the ‘70’s, separates the hall from the living room. Thanks to the advent of vintage, bead doors have made a comeback, serving as a demarcation of sorts between the various sections of Rose’s apartment. The living room is the apartment’s primary space, the venue for the yoga and meditation classes. In addition, there are two more rooms. There’s her clinic, which is a small studio with a bed. Rose leases it out to other practitioners and uses it herself to administer acupuncture and shiatsu when her clients ask her to treat them.

  The last room is Rose’s own private space. Whereas the rest of the apartment has people coming and going for classes, treatments and so on, this is her private sanctuary, where she does not let work in. It’s her exclusive realm. No one enters without her permission.

  Rose’s living room is painted mauve and blue, in a kind of wavy pattern across the wall, in addition to oriental fabrics hanging over them and a large painting of a woman in lotus pose. Her dining room is decorated with artifacts from her trips to Africa and India, exactly what you might expect, ceremonial masks, an African bow and even a heavy staff she swears an African Shaman cast a protective spell over and gave to her.

  The floor is covered by fine multicolored rugs and a pile of yoga mats on the other side. Across the opposite wall, there are three Futons and a small coffee table with a teapot, compete with a tea leaf mix and a jar of vegan cookies. I know that in the course of a regular day, Rose also makes sure to offer fresh leaves for the tea and a jug of cold water with bits of orange or lemon. In my recollection, at the end of each yoga class, they all have herbal tea, either cold or warm, depending on each student’s preference.

  There’s a faint scent of incense in the air. It’s more the lingering sense of some substance that has burnt a few hours ago.

  I sit at her dining table and set down the PC, as Rose, who has just been to the kitchen, comes back carrying two mugs and hands me one.

  “Here. It’s a soothing infusion. I hope it will help you sleep without all that poison you’ve been stuffing yourself with.”

  I nod. This poison is the one thing that helps me sleep at night and keeps me sane.

  She attaches Idan’s PC to her own and clicks on a few keys.

  “Someone did format it. You never told me who’s PC this is.”

  I tell her about Idan’s case file. She listens and nods.

  “If the police received the PC already formatted, I suppose they didn’t bother to have its memory restored.” She pushes
a few more buttons.

  “Whoever did format this PC didn’t do a very good job of it. Some parts are still intact, but it will take a long time to reconstruct the files,” she looks closely at the screen.

  - Is it possible to pull up a few more recent files?

  “Let’s see what we can find,” she hunches over the keyboard. “In the meantime,” she turns to me and I am nearly overcome by the smell of her flower-scented shampoo, “How are you coming along with the exercises I gave you? Do you find the time to meditate?”

  - I have tried a few times. But I have to confess it doesn’t really work for me when I am by myself.

  This ‘close your eyes and imagine you’re someplace safe’ always leads me to a black, yellow-eyed figure spreading its nebulous wings to engulf me until it comes in through my nostrils and smothers me. Yeah, meditating isn’t working for me all that well.

  I manage a faint smile as I recall my last experience meditating.

  - But I am making an effort.

  “You are always welcome here, you know. You have a free pass to all my lessons,” she smiles. Unlike my grin, her smile is genuine and sincere.

  A few minutes pass, and her computer beeps. Rose turns away from me to look at the screen.

  “You are in luck,” she smiles. “The first scan retrieved a few files I managed to reconstruct. It’s recreating them now.”

  I look closely at the screen. A new file is forming, consisting of several image files.

  Rose opens the images.

  “These are images from an instant messaging app.,” she says right up front. “They are smaller than the original ones, so that the whole thing will take less time.”

  The images show a girl with earphones smiling at the camera. It seems she was chatting online when she took these images. She’s watching the camera, smiling and even blowing a kiss at it.

  “Who is she?”

  - I do not have a clue. His parents said he wasn’t involved with anyone and that they do not know of any girl he might have met. Can you print one of the pictures for me? I’ll ask them.

  Rose continues to rifle through the files.

  “This is one big bin. I do not have the option of selecting what’s relevant and what it not. It’s a very time consuming process,” she sulks.

  “Actually,” she says after a short while, “The same words keep repeating, a network search for a ‘Noga Ophir’. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

  - No, but if that’s a name Idan was searching, we’d better be searching for it too, right?

  Rose nods as she initiates the search in a new tab.

  “I knew the name ‘Noga Ophir’ sounded familiar!” she jumps. “Noga Ophir is a journalist. I read about her. She’s this new girl on the block, a reporter who doesn’t cut anyone any slack and always goes on assignment under cover.”

  The search tab shows several results, including a few stories this Noga person published.

  - Journalists are always after information. See if there are any details about her somewhere?

  Another search, and Rose pulls up Noga’s email.

  - If this is someone Idan was looking for information on, perhaps that might be a lead.

  I smile at Rose.

  - Can you keep working on the PC? Please keep me updated if you find anything else.

  Rose nods at me and turns back to examine her screen. She’s already on it. She’ll of course deny it, but she’s getting all fired up now, with the thrill of the hunt, a new assignment. She’s highly alert. Her body undergoes a change from calm to firm as she takes the form of an alley cat instead of her usual serene demeanor. Woe betide the mouse that crosses her line of vision.

  I take advantage of the opportunity to use Rose’s Wi-Fi and send an email to Noga. This famous reporter must be getting hundreds of emails a day. Gotta make sure mine stands out, something she would like to reply to. Make it short and to the point.

  My name is David and I have information regarding the story you’re working on.

  I leave my contact details in the body of the email. I have no idea what she’s working on, but I hope that’s enough for her to bite and contact me to ask what I might have in store for her.

  Chapter 4

  The morning starts early. I have to make myself scarce before the upholstery shop fills with employees.

  The best place for me to gather material on Noga Ophir is at the neighborhood internet café. For under ten sheqels, I can not only get coffee, but also charge my mobile and surf the net, unlimited, or at least until paying customers begin to arrive, which is when the waitress asks me nicely to either order something or leave, so I leave.

  The stuff I find online about Noga amounts to mostly stories she herself has run in the past two years. She tends to permeate some female society, like in an all-women prison, an ultra orthodox neighborhood and so on, and publish her insights from those closed circles. By way of lending further authenticity to her story, she publishes a picture of herself that matches the theme. Here, she’s wearing the woman prisoners’ orange uniform and boasts a shiner on her eye, both of which she got during her exposé on the prison. Here, she’s dressed like an ultra orthodox Jewish woman from Me’a She’arim.

  She has the same piercing look about her eyes in each of these pictures, no matter what she looks like or where it was taken. Oh, this look. I’d recognize it, its power, through any mask she might be hiding under, as though she’s testing me even now, through the computer screen.

  In one of the latest interviews she has given, she is talking about wanting to join some cult in the Negev, a group that seldom makes contact with civilization, in her bid to verify a few stories that have been floating around about the cult’s leader.

  It’s nearly nine AM when I call the newspaper where Noga had been a staff member. No answer. Seeing as I have what I came to the internet café for, I decide to head back to the upholstery shop.

  After a few attempts during my walk back from the café, I reach her voicemail and leave her yet another message to call me back.

  A few minutes later, I reach the door of the upholstery shop just as I receive a call from a blocked number.

  - Morning.

  “David? David Maharani?” A woman’s voice.

  - Yes, that’s me. How may I help you?

  “David Maharani, are you looking for Noga Ophir? Are you a private investigator?”

  - Yes. Who is this?

  “Why are you looking for Noga Ophir? What for?”

  - I’m in the middle of an investigation and her name has come up. Is that you, Noga?

  Muffled voices behind her.

  “Noga isn’t here. She’s on assignment and cannot be contacted at the moment.”

  - Who are you? Are you working with her?

  “I, I am. Where do you know Noga from?”

  - I do not know her. I came across her name during a case I am following, and I would like to verify a number of details with her. How can I get in touch with her, miss? What’s your name, anyway?

  She lays the receiver down while she is obviously speaking with someone else who’s there.

  “Did you ever meet her? Is it related to the story she’s currently following up on? Because if you give me the details, I can pass them on to her.”

  - You just said she cannot be reached, but now you say you can pass her my details? That doesn’t make sense.

  Again voices in the background as she holds the phone. “Well yeah, if it’s about her exposé, then yes, I can get those details to her. What was it you wanted to say to her?”

  I get the distinct feeling of a rookie salesperson taking orders from her superior to just keep the conversation going. Only this is no sales pitch.

  - I want you to let me speak with whoever that is behind you who’s whispering what to say to you.

 
“Behind me? There’s no one here, I am by myself.”

  I hang up the phone.

  Another call, also from a blocked number.

  “Looks like we got cut off-”

  - No, we were not, I hung up. Now, pass me on to whoever is sitting next to you or I shall hang up again.

  “I told you, I am all alo-”

  I disconnect. At the same time I hear the clicking sound of the call ending, I also hear tires breaking hard on the street. With so many people out, Florentin is no place to be driving fast only to be screeching to halt.

  A police car rushes right in front of my window. ‘Hot pursuit, probably after some public enemy…’

  The police car then breaks hard as another pulls up right behind. Four officers leave both vehicles and look in every direction. One of them is on the radio. They turn towards the upholstery shop.

  ‘This does not look good.’ They’re knocking on the door, looking directly at me.

  “Open up, please.”

  - Fine, fine, just don’t break it down, or else I’ll have to pay for it.

  I reach the door and open it. The first policeman pushes himself inside and passes me.

  “Are you David Maharani?”

  - Yes, and who are you?

  The officer ignores my question.

  “You’re gonna have to come along with us. We’ve got a few questions for you.”

  When he says ‘we’ he doesn’t mean “we the police,” because when the boys in blue come to pick a suspect up, it’s usually to bring him in to an investigation they are not a part of.

  - What exactly are you arresting me for?

  “You are a person of interest in an ongoing investigation.”

  - Excellent. I still didn’t get your name. You’re supposed to identify yourself when I ask you to. It’s the law, I know that for a fact.