by Elik Katzav
I follow the road signs pointing left as the desert vegetation grows more distinct, with gray-brown bushes and trees right along the road itself, which is almost empty. A few minutes later, you can tell you’ve reached an inhabited place, as the vegetation becomes much greener, complete with well-manicured hedges and palm trees. It looks like a man-made oasis. Stone walls surround the homes on either side of the street. My GPS guides me along the path until I arrive at my destination. Lynn’s home address looks like something straight out of a low budget horror movie, full of the air of the promise of bad things to come.
Chapter 10
The heat in desert towns is different than in coastal cities. First off, it isn’t as humid as Tel Aviv, for instance. Nevertheless, I remain in the car for a few minutes longer.
From the outside, Lynn’s house doesn’t look any different from the others in this neighborhood, except that its orange-painted walls have faded, and the garden and the pavement inside are covered with dust, like a cloud of dust had come over the house but no one bothered to clean it.
Some of the windows are covered. Everything about this place seems to say, “get outta here, this is no place to visit.”
When I get out of the car, the smell of dust overwhelms me. It isn’t even ten AM yet, and it’s already hot. There’s no escape.
I look around. Whether it’s the time of day or the weather, there’s no one out in the street.
First thing I see is a ‘For Rent’ sign the owner has put up. No realtor mentioned.
I ring the bell on the gate and a few moments pass before I realize there’s no one there.
I look to the side. No one in and no one around. Treading lightly, I pass the small gate and reach the door in seconds, where I stop and listen in. Just as I thought—empty.
I check the top of the door and along with the dust, voila, there’s a key.
Breaking and entering has never been on my bucket list, but hanging around and twiddling my thumbs until someone comes along or something happens doesn’t suit me either. I hope Na’ama will testify on my behalf just in case I get arrested.
I’m in.. The sound of the hinges adds to the pause I’m taking as I formulate a plausible excuse in case I run into someone inside after all. Quiet. There really is no one home. Here I go.
The house certainly smells like no one has been here for quite a while. The corridor actually looks like these people still live here, though, complete with clothes hanging in their place and shoes laid out in a row under the bench by the door.
Nevertheless, when I enter the living room, I adjust my take on things.
Stale air everywhere. Whoever the occupants were, they left in a hurry, leaving their things behind.
The living room is very basic: a pair of brown couches, an old TV set, a few newspapers scattered all over the floor and on the coffee table—nothing that would suggest a cozy family home or an intimate surrounding. There aren’t even any paintings or pictures, nothing to shed light on the tenants.
I walk over to the kitchen. Dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter top. They didn’t believe in ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’…
The fridge has a few magnets. As I move it, I find a few papers on the floor underneath, including what I was after: a forgotten electric bill, one of those things that just fall off and make their way to the floor.
The bill is addressed to “Lgt. Immobilier.” Could this be the name of the owner? Why not the family that used to live here? Keeping the notice in the owner’s name is often a sign the occupants had plenty of debts so they can leave the owner with a pile of unpaid bills.
I go up to the second floor and find the master bedroom. It’s as shabby as downstairs.
Two brown boxes near an empty closet and a still-made twin bed right at the center of the room, complete with a summer blanket.
Another closet still contains a half-empty box of papers and books: At the Gates of Rome; God’s Devotees in the Middle East; The Lord has 99 Names; Arabs Without a God: Freedom of Worship in the Middle East—these are but a few titles of the books on philosophy and theology it contains. Hardly what I expected.
These books must have been taken out from some library. Ah yes, the Hebrew University. I guess they’ll never be returned.
I suppose Father Conroy might help me with a quick digest on each and every one of them, so I make a note of their titles in my notepad before moving on to the papers I see here in the box.
All photocopies of pages, some torn.
They seem to have been ripped out of some book in a language I do not recognize. They’re highlighted with a marker, in addition to notes in Arabic, written down in very small letters. I collect them all and carefully insert them into a plastic paper holder I find inside the box. Into my back pocket they go.
The second room on the second floor is very different from the rest of the house. It is a typical teenage girl’s room, complete with pale purple walls, a wide bed under the window—still covered by a duvet and a pair of matching pillowcases—a desk and a black chair under a poster of some boy band. This room also has a ceiling fan with multicolored threads that probably produce some effect when it’s on.
I move closer to the desk, which looks pretty clean and tidy from afar, but up close, someone must have drawn over it. It’s a pencil sketch of a girl’s face, partially covered by her long hair. The face in the drawing looks sad. She’s holding her head down and a tear is coming down her visible eye. The neck line has a signature in English dated July of this year.
There’s a small walk-in closet with a bead door at the far end of the room. The boxes there are filled with clothes that must have been Lynn’s. I rifle through these boxes and find a black shirt with the name of a band I don’t know, but I do recognize it from a picture featuring Idan wearing the same shirt. What are the chances…
I place the shirt on my shoulder and push the boxes back into the walk-in closet.
As I inspect the white nightstand, I find a few additional personal effects, like her nail polish and hairpins. No way a teenage girl just upped and went on her own accord without taking them.
Coming back down to the living room, I look around. Just as I thought. There’s another door next to the bathroom. It leads to the basement. As I expected, it has a padlock. Someone wanted to make real sure no one goes down there. The keys are nowhere to be found, of course, so I have to pick it with my carry-on set. It takes a few minutes of coaxing the locks, but eventually, the stench of sweat fills the staircase leading down as I open the door to the basement.
The door itself is padded with some sort of noise insulation material. The kind used for makeshift recording joints to keep the sound from coming out.
“A real mess” is one way of describing what I find. It’s a spacious basement that resembles a loft, completely separate from the floors above. It also reeks of cigarettes. There are six bunk beds with mattresses and ruffled blankets, a kitchenette, and a door that leads to a bathroom complete with a small shower. Takes me back to my army days. The center of the room is dominated by a long table with disposable cups still containing leftover coffee and piles of newspapers in both Hebrew and Arabic on one side. There are various chairs scattered all over the place, six of them around the table.
I examine the bunk beds more closely. They’ve made holes in the bedposts.
I lay down on the floor to look under the beds, only to find cut cable ties, red in the edges, under the nearest bunk. Someone was tied to the bed in such a way that the zip ties cut into their skin, making them bleed.
But that’s not all. I find the remains of other cables under more beds. Whoever cut them didn’t bother picking up after themselves.
So how many people did they tie up here? Where’d they go?
I cannot tell just by the number of beds, but according to the number of torn cable ties, three, possibly four individuals
used to be tied up down here.
I rise from the floor. Don’t touch anything. If and when the police get a hot tip on this place, the last thing I want is for them to tie me to these premises. But why should I even drop them a line? Update them after what they did to me?! They’ll probably pin this on me too… I can see the headlines, “Deranged former cop jails and kills people in basement at Omer.”
Well, this isn’t the way to go about it… Also, they might be able find a few more details I don’t have the equipment to glean. Perhaps I will help them. Na’ama will share the info with me. Let’s finish up here before I text her.
On to the rest of the basement, the kitchenette area. The sink is full of dirty dishes and the bin is overflowing with cigarette ashes and empty cups of coffee. The window over the sink is also covered by the same sound-absorbing foam.
I’m standing at the far end of the basement, looking around, when its walls suddenly begin to close in on me. The beds begin to fold and crack under the pressure. The table is swallowed up by the floor. A cloud of black-and-purple gas begins to come out of the hole where the table just stood.
I, I cannot stay here! I cover my mouth and run up towards the exit. The stairs begin to liquefy right under my feet, as though they were made of molten butter. My legs begin to sink in as I attempt to climb up, step by step, pulling myself upwards. The door at the top of the staircase is closed shut, guarding the secrets of the cellar. I pound as hard as I can, trying to force my way out, and see a yellow eye looking back at me through the keyhole.
I close my eyes and attempt to adjust my breathing. When I open them again, the door is open and there’s no trace of what I just saw right under my feet.
I slam the door and take the trouble of wiping it down, along with the lock and the knob. Fingerprints can be such a drag.
Hmm. Rational thought. I focus on the surroundings and feel my heart returning to its normal rhythm. I breathe once more and focus on my breathing. This attack is over, I nod to myself. Gotta get outta here.
I text Na’ama from outside the house.
- I’ve got a lead on my missing child case. I arrived at this house where they seemed to have kept people against their will.
No response. Na’ama dials back within a minute. “Where are you? What are you talking about?”
- Omer, at this house belonging to the family of a girl I tracked down as part of my investigation.
“Omer? Whatcha doin’ down there? What have you found?”
- Beds in an insulated room complete with cable ties that appear to have blood on them.
“Stay put. I’ll send a car.”
I give her the exact address.
One quarter of an hour later, a police car enters the street slowly and pulls up next to me. A policeman rolls his window down. He reads my name out from his pad.
“Are you David Maharani?”
- Yes.
He looks me over. “What happened to your face?”
- I slipped and fell on my face. This here is the house I reported. You’ll take it from here, so I’m excused, right?
“Hold on.” He climbs out of the car slowly. His partner comes out the passenger door. “Is this your house? How did you get here? I have to fill out my report.”
- I am a private investigator. I got here following up on a case I am working, a missing boy. This is where his girlfriend is supposed to live.
“And she ain’t here?”
- No, the house is empty.
“So how did you get in?”
That’s a trick question. Careful: set up.
- When I got to the front door, it was already open. I called inside and no one answered. I heard some noise of falling stuff coming from within so I ran inside to see if no one was hurt.
“A noise you say, something falling, eh? So you just happened to get here and it was open? So how did you find the blood?”
- Down in the basement. I was looking for where the noise was coming from and found the zip ties on with the blood.
“Looks like you’d better stick around. We’re gonna be needing you for questioning. Right now, you are the only person to have been inside.
Just what I need, another investigation with my name all over it.
- Listen, I used to be an officer just like you and your partner here. I know the drill, and besides, I was the one who called it in. It was me who reported this place as the possible location of a crime scene. It was my own choice, I didn’t have to report this and I am all for cooperating, but I am in the middle of a very delicate investigation and I have to move on, otherwise I will lose the boy I am following. Do me a favor, will you? You have my details and you also have Na’ama’s details. She must have called you guys. She’ll back me up if need be. I cannot be held up here any further. I will be back if it’s called for, but right now, I need to push on.
They look at each other. The policeman who addressed me turns to me once more in a gesture suggesting he’ll let me go.
“Listen, it’s just because you were one of us, so don’t let this get to your head. I know what ‘it was already open’ means,” he motions with his fingers, “so if you have the tiniest connection with what went down here, you are gonna end up at one of our cells, I don’t care who you know.”
- Great. I’ll be here. If you need me, just call.
I turn and get into my car.
So, there are still decent cops around after all. There is hope still.
Chapter 11
It’s hopeless. I have been looking for parking for half an hour now, since I got back from the south. The way back was quiet, but Tel Aviv is always so busy, no matter the time.
Eventually I manage to find parking and head to the internet café near the upholstery shop, where I settle down and pull the pile of torn pages from my pocket. I had picked up at the room belonging to Lynn’s dad back in the abandoned house. I patiently place these pages one next to the other until, twenty minutes later, the fruits of my labor amount to three successive pages that were all torn out of the same book. The print looks like a lot like Arabic, but it consists of chevrons more than actual letters. I draw one and look for something similar online., but come up zilch.
Maybe backwards? I type a sequence of letters in the search field in Hebrew in an attempt to have a translation in other languages. Hmmm, looks similar but it isn’t quite it. This is neither Arabic nor any African language. It’s probably not something I can find through a standard web search. Better contact a linguist.
I capture each page meticulously and email them to Father Conroy, along with a few simple lines about these texts to accompany my request that he see if he could translate them for me.
I’d kept in touch with him all through my rehabilitation. He was there for me. Apart from the fact I had saved his life, he felt obliged to help me out, saying, “Any person without faith who had gone through what you did is sure to lose themselves, for they will not be able to come to terms with the true understanding of the magnitude of His creation,” to which I replied:
- I need to wrestle with my own demons by myself.
“Demons;” however horrific, it’s as true a description of the situation as it is terrible.
Father Conroy is the only person I know who can make sense out of those pages. After all, it’s all Greek to me...
I find my own note with the titles of the books and an idea occurs to me. I log on to the Hebrew University’s library and find the number for the Theology Section. A few dial attempts and automated recordings later, a woman’s voice finally answers.
- Hi, I am looking for certain books on theology I might take out. How can I know whether they’re available?
“You log on to our website, you enter your details and create an account, after which you can check,” the librarian answers in a weary tone.
- Oh, I have no access to a com
puter right now. Any chance you might be able to assist, please?
“Is it a lot of books? I’ve got my hands full at the moment.”
- No.
I produce my list and begin asking her about each book.
“The first three are available for lending. Looks like there’s more than one copy for each. But the fourth book appears to be out.”
- Any chance you can give me the name of the person who has the book., please? I shall try to see if this person could return it to you so that I may borrow it myself.
The line goes dead for a moment.
“Yes. An Adam Hacohen took it out.” Then a pause, until she adds, “Well, good luck tracking him down. If you do, ask him to return this book, along with the others he hasn’t returned in nearly six years. Hey, these books he took are all the ones you just read out to me-”
- Thanks very much, miss.
I hang up as quickly as I can.
Adam Hacohen. Isn’t that Lynn’s dad? Only one way to find out.
I type in Adam Hacohen. Half a million search results. Big fat donut for results. Gotta narrow it down. What would Rose do?
Got it! I type his name again, along with ‘theology.’ That narrows it down quite a lot: a few academic essays on theology dated over a decade ago. He is mentioned as the research assistant. His name also appears in replies to several questions on university forums. Based on my rapid scan, he seems to have specialized in ancient religions in the Land of Israel.
Let’s see what else I might find when I type Adam Hacohen together with Lynn Shmueli. Why does she go by a different last name?
A few dozen articles, but the name Shmueli does not come up along with Lynn, but rather with her mom. There’s a story from 2003 about this car accident in which a Ronit Shmueli was killed. Her husband, Adam Hacohen, was injured and their six-year-old daughter Lynn suffered a serious head injury. A five line story about an entire family almost gone.