‘Go on.’
‘Have you heard of Deir el-Zeitun?’
Khalifa hadn’t.
‘It’s a monastery, tiny place, way out in the middle of the Eastern Desert. There’s hardly anything there, just a couple of buildings, an artesian well and an old olive grove, which is where the monastery gets its name from. St Pachomius himself was supposed to have planted it, which is probably wishful thinking, given that Pachomius lived in the fourth century. The trees were certainly old, though, a good few hundred years at least. Anyway, about three or four years ago they all suddenly died. Every one of them. The monastery vegetable garden too. Just shrivelled up and withered away.’
There was a loud crunching on the other side of the room as Ibrahim Fathi helped himself to a handful of
torshi
from the bag he always seemed to have on his desk. Khalifa turned round further, trying to block out the sound.
‘The grove was irrigated with water from the well?’ he asked.
She gave an affirmative ‘un-huh’.
‘The garden too,’ she said. ‘The monks’ drinking water comes in by tanker so they weren’t affected. Just the trees and the vegetables.’
Khalifa pondered. Then, drilling out his cigarette, he stood and walked over to the large map on the wall behind Ibrahim Fathi’s desk. The Eastern Desert showed as a blank expanse of pale yellow sandwiched between the Red Sea and the slim green bow of the Nile Valley. Highways crossed from west to east like the rungs of a ladder, but otherwise there was nothing. Just sand, rock and mountains.
‘This monastery is where, exactly?’ he asked.
‘About midway between Luxor and Abu Dahab on the coast. A little west of Gebel el-Shalul.’
Khalifa traced a finger across the paper, locating the
gebel
. The monastery wasn’t marked, but if it were small it wouldn’t be. He moved his finger further west, locating Bir Hashfa, the village near the Attia farm. It was almost forty kilometres away, which on the face of it looked too far for there to be any obvious link between the incidents. And yet, and yet . . .
‘Are the monks still there?’ he asked.
‘They moved out. Apparently there’s some legend the monastery would only survive as long as its olive trees. When the grove died, they packed up and abandoned the place. There were only a handful of them anyway.’
‘Had they had any trouble before that?’
Not so far as she was aware.
‘Been threatened in any way?’
‘It’s the middle of nowhere. Hardly anyone even knew they were there. It might as well be the moon.’
‘And you’ve not heard of anything else in the area?’
‘I don’t think there
is
anything else in the area. Like I say, it’s the middle of nowhere.’
There was a sound of whispering in the background.
‘I’m sorry, Yusuf, the service is about to start, I’m going to have to go.’
‘Of course. Thanks for letting me know. If you hear anything else . . .’
She rang off. Khalifa stared at the map, scanning the rectangle of desert between Highways 29 and 212, then returned to his desk. The Attia well, Mr Attia’s cousin, and now Deir el-Zeitun. Three poisoned water sources, all of them Coptic. One could be bad luck, two even, but three – even with so much distance between them, that suggested a pattern. He lit another cigarette and gazed at his computer screen. Abdul-hassan43, another chat-room regular, had posted a series of verses from the Holy Koran. And also a poem about how there was no shame in crying. He read half of it, then closed the site, lifted his landline and dialled Chief Hassani’s extension.
On the far side of the room there was a loud crunching as Ibrahim Fathi helped himself to another fistful of
torshi
.
R
OAD TO
T
EL
-A
VIV
When they had talked the previous morning, Mordechai Yaron had offered to come up to Jerusalem to speak to Ben-Roi, save him the trouble of an hour’s drive down to Tel-Aviv. Ben-Roi had told him it was no trouble at all. Like an overbearing mother, Jerusalem could get to you sometimes. Sometimes you needed to escape for a while. Clear your head.
Which was what he was doing this morning, driving out of the city along the meandering sweep of Route 1, down through the Judaean Hills towards the coastal plain, the sky a dome of pristine blue above, the warm air buffeting his arm through the open window. Not so long ago the city suburbs had come to an abrupt halt just beyond Romema. Now they seemed to go on and on, creeping inexorably out across the landscape like some ever-expanding algae, smothering the world in concrete. Building, always so much building. If they carried on at this rate there wouldn’t be any land left.
Only when he was out past Mevaseret Zion, ten kilometres from the centre, did the houses and apartment blocks finally relent and the hills revert to their natural state. Rocky, tree-scattered slopes leapt and rolled as if breathing a sigh of relief. Ben-Roi breathed easier too. He increased his speed and switched on
Kol Ha-Derekh
, Voice of the Road. Alicia Keys pumped out of the speakers. ‘Empire State of Mind’. He smiled. One of Sarah’s favourite songs.
They were just about back on an even keel after his late show the previous day, although it had taken a lot of work to claw his way back into her good books – or at least out of her bad ones. He’d ended up staying at her flat till past midnight decorating the baby room, and had returned this morning to finish the job off. The upshot was that the room looked great, she’d made him
blintzes
for breakfast – a sure sign a thaw was under way – and he had done nothing whatsoever to follow up the newspaper articles he’d found in the library.
Which was annoying, because the more he’d thought about it – and eleven hours of sandpapering, painting and putting up shelves had given him plenty of time to think – the stronger the feeling had become that, for reasons he couldn’t yet fathom, the stories the articles were telling were central to understanding the story of Rivka Kleinberg’s murder. Gold, Egypt, mining, Barren Corporation. The elements had kept turning over in his head, rolling around like the tumblers of a safe. Get the sequence right and the combination would click and the case suddenly open up. Fail to do so and it would remain resolutely closed, however hard you hammered at it.
There had been one interesting development. Very interesting. Back in Jerusalem, kicking his heels in the traffic jam that always seemed to stack up behind the lights on Sderot Ben Tsvi, he’d taken a call from Dov Zisky. Kleinberg’s landline, mobile and e-mail providers had all got back to him first thing. All, apparently, with the same story. They were unable to provide a breakdown of the victim’s calls and mails for the last two quarters because her records were blank. Before that, everything was logged and itemized as normal. From the start of the year, however, all her communication details appeared to have been wiped. They were looking into it, but at this stage the only explanations they could offer were either a computer error at their end – which seemed an impossible coincidence, three separate systems malfunctioning and Rivka Kleinberg the only customer affected – or, more likely, that someone had hacked into their networks and tampered with her account.
‘I’ve spoken to a friend of mine,’ Zisky had said, ‘works in cyber security. He says that communications companies are normally pretty on the ball when it comes to network protection. They’re not that easy to hack. This is someone who knew what they were doing.’
Which threw up two immediate possibilities. Computer crime in Israel, like just about every other area of organized crime, was dominated by the
Russkaya Mafiya
. The same
Russkaya Mafiya
who had, according to his journalist friend Natan Tirat, issued a specific death threat against Kleinberg a few years back. And the anti-capitalist group in the
Jerusalem Post
article he’d read yesterday, the Nemesis Agenda, they too had apparently engaged in a bit of hacking. Coincidence? Connection?
There was digging to do. A lot more digging. It would have to wait, though. This morning he wanted to focus on Kleinberg’s journalism. The investigation was only a couple of days old and already he felt himself floundering in a soup of disconnected information. Now it was time to get down to specifics. To start isolating individual strands. He pushed the speedometer up past 120km/hour as ‘Empire State of Mind’ gave way to the more insistent, driveable beat of the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. One of
his
favourite songs. Jerusalem dropped away behind him, the flat green sheet of the coastal plain opened up in front. It felt good to be heading west.
The old Palestinian port of Jaffa –
Urs al-Bahr
, the Bride of the Sea – occupies a promontory that swells like a comma from the southern end of the Tel-Aviv coastline. Once a city in its own right, it was long ago swallowed up by the larger conurbation to the north, its Arab population pushed out into the suburbs of Ajami and Jabaliya, its decaying Ottoman and Mandate-era buildings taken over by new Israeli owners.
The office of
Matzpun ha-Am
was in one such building: a shabby two-storey affair on Rehov Olei Tsyon, bang in the middle of the Shuk ha-Pishpeshim flea market.
Arriving shortly before midday, Ben-Roi parked round the corner and slapped on his red police number plates to stop the Toyota being ticketed. He then made his way through the colourful crush of antique, textile, bric-a-brac and
falafel
stalls and up to the building’s entrance. Mordechai Yaron buzzed him in.
‘You found it OK?’ he called from the first-floor landing as Ben-Roi climbed the staircase.
‘No problem. I used to live in Tel-Aviv. Came down this way quite a lot. It hasn’t changed.’
‘Trust me, the rents have. What Irgun did to the Arabs, the landlords are doing to us tenants. Another rise and we’ll all be driven out.’
Ben-Roi reached the landing and the two men shook hands. Squat and balding, with jug ears and a high-domed forehead framed by tufts of white hair, the editor bore a striking resemblance to David Ben-Gurion. Or would have done were it not for his clothes: sandals, baggy shorts and a Gush Shalom T-shirt. Aged hippy rather than founding father.
‘You want coffee?’ he asked, ushering Ben-Roi through a door into the office. ‘Or something stronger?’
‘Coffee’s fine.’
Yaron waved him into an armchair and busied himself with a kettle. The room smelt of stale pipe smoke, and was cramped and cluttered: bare wooden floor, desk, bookcases, ancient photocopier in one corner. The open windows looked north towards the Bloomfield Football Stadium and skyscrapers of central Tel-Aviv; the walls were hung with framed posters publicizing, among other things, a Hadash rally, a vigil for Mordechai Vanunu and a per formance of Shmuel Hasfari’s play
Hametz
.
‘She’s been in all the papers,’ chattered Yaron as he spooned coffee into a mug, his back to Ben-Roi. ‘Inside pages. You’d think the murder of one of this country’s finest journalists would make the headlines, but apparently the Mayor of Jerusalem’s sex life’s more important.’
Ben-Roi hadn’t looked at the press. It seemed their fears of a media feeding frenzy had proved unfounded. For the moment at least.
‘
Ha’aretz
gave her a nice obituary,’ added the old man. ‘Which was the least they could do, given the number of exclusives she broke for them. Poor Rivka. Terrible business. I still can’t believe it.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘She was a good woman. Hard work, but a good woman. And a bloody good journalist.
Zikhrona livrakha
.’
The kettle came to the boil – it must already have been hot because it had been on for less than a minute – and Yaron filled the mug.
‘Afraid I haven’t got any milk.’
‘Sugar?’
‘That I can do.’
‘Two, please.’
Yaron ladled in a couple of spoonfuls and handed the coffee to Ben-Roi along with a copy of
Matzpun ha-Am
.
‘This month’s edition,’ he said. ‘Just to give you an idea of what we’re about. There’s a piece by Rivka on the collapse of the Israeli Left. You won’t read a better analysis of why this country’s politically fucked.’
He went over to the desk and sat down. Ben-Roi stared at the magazine’s front cover. It carried an outline of the map of Israel, drawn in such a way that the country resembled a funnel, with an opening at its southernmost point. A jumble of words – Labor, Meretz, Peace Now, Pluralism, Tolerance, Democracy, Sanity – were sliding through the funnel and out the bottom into a large trash can. The headline read: ‘Hope Goes South’.
‘Good graphic, don’t you think? Designed it myself.’
‘It’s certainly . . . provocative.’
‘You interested in politics?’
Ben-Roi shrugged. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t. Not today, certainly. The editor read his expression and didn’t pursue the matter.
‘The Left’s dead,’ was all he said. ‘Has been since we invited a million bloody Russians to make
aliya
. They’ve pulled this country so far right even Ze’ev Jabotinsky must be turning in his grave.’
He tutted, picked up a pipe and started cramming it with tobacco from a creased leather pouch.
‘Anyway, that’s by the by. Please, tell me how I can help.’
Ben-Roi sipped his coffee, which tasted like sweetened washing-up water, and shuffled his chair around so he was facing Yaron directly.
‘I want to talk about Mrs Kleinberg’s journalism,’ he began, laying the magazine on the floor and flipping open his notebook. ‘When we spoke yesterday you said she was writing a piece on prostitution.’
‘
Forced
prostitution,’ Yaron corrected. ‘Sex-trafficking. There’s a difference. Although I know plenty of people who’d argue all prostitution is coercion, certainly from an economic standpoint.’
‘Do you know any details?’ asked Ben-Roi. ‘What exactly she was writing?’
‘Well, the original idea was to use trafficking as a way into a broader polemical piece,’ said Yaron, pressing more tobacco into the pipe’s bowl and tamping it down with his thumb. ‘State-of-the-nation thing, sex-slavery as a metaphor for the moral disintegration of Israeli society. But Rivka being Rivka, that soon went by the wayside.’