‘Can we at least put a couple of uniforms on the Attia farm?’ he asked, pulling out his cigarettes and turning them over in his hand again. ‘Just to keep an eye on things.’
Hassani seemed surprised by this, as if he had been expecting his subordinate to put up more of a fight. He stared at Khalifa, waiting to see if he was going to ask for anything else. When no request was forthcoming, he gave a satisfied nod and stomped back to his desk.
‘Why not?’ he said, sitting down and clasping his hands, looking more relaxed than he had since the conversation had started. ‘I’ll tell you what, let’s call it three uniforms, just to be on the safe side.’
‘I think two’s probably enough.’
‘No, no,’ insisted Hassani, all cheery bonhomie now that it was clear he wasn’t actually going to have to do anything. ‘You have concerns, and I’m listening to those concerns. We’ll send three men out to the farm to keep a watching brief, and once this damned Valley of the Kings thing is out of the way, we’ll review the situation. If indeed there is a situation. And if you think it needs reviewing. OK?’
‘OK,’ mumbled Khalifa. ‘Thank you.’
‘On the contrary, thank
you
. You were quite right to bring this to my attention.’
He smiled, an expression that on his particular face looked wholly out of place, as if someone had drawn it on as a joke.
‘Anything else?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Right. Well, thanks for coming in. And keep up the good work.’
It was less a compliment than a dismissal. Khalifa stood and walked to the door, his footfall sounding unnaturally loud on the marble floor. As he stepped out into the corridor Hassani called after him.
‘Give my regards to Zubaidah.’
‘Zenab.’
‘Exactly. Tell her she’s in our thoughts.’
The chief held the smile a few seconds longer, then let it go and looked down at his desk.
Khalifa pulled the door to. As it clicked shut he heard Hassani muttering to himself. ‘Stupid fucking dreamer.’
Just like old times. Strangely, it didn’t make him feel any better.
T
EL
-A
VIV
The moment he got back to his car, Ben-Roi called the Hofesh Shelter, spoke with its director and arranged to come straight over to interview her. Petah Tikvah, the drab satellite town where the shelter was located, was only ten kilometres north-east of Tel-Aviv, and shouldn’t have been more than a fifteen-minute drive, double that with traffic. Today, the Tel-Aviv ring-road was bumper to bumper, and even with his police light slapped on to the roof it still took him the best part of an hour to get there.
Which at least gave him the chance to put in a call to Dov Zisky to see if there had been any progress on the bus ticket from Rivka Kleinberg’s flat.
There hadn’t.
‘I’ve sent her picture down to the station in Mitzpe Ramon,’ said Zisky. ‘They’re circulating it, but haven’t come up with anything yet. I’ve also been on to Egged on the off-chance one of their drivers might remember her. There are only four of them who run that route, but inevitably the one we need to speak to is away on leave. They’ve been trying to contact him, but he still hasn’t been in touch.’
‘Keep on it, will you?’ said Ben-Roi. ‘It’s important. Maybe very important.’
He filled Zisky in on his conversation with Mordechai Yaron. And, also, the articles Kleinberg had been reading in the library.
‘You want me to look into this Nemesis group?’ Zisky asked when Ben-Roi had finished. ‘My friend who works in cyber security, the one I mentioned this morning – he might know something.’
‘Why not? And while you’re about it, see if you can pull out some background on Barren Corporation. In particular, anything you can find about a gold mine they’re operating in Romania. I’ve got a contact on
Ha’aretz
, you can give him a call if you like. He covers some business stuff, might be able to give you a steer.’
He passed on Natan Tirat’s details, the barely audible whisper of pen on paper drifting down the line as Zisky scribbled a note.
‘Anything else happening?’ asked Ben-Roi.
‘Forensics came in an hour ago. They drew a blank on the hair from the victim’s clothes. They’re pretty certain it came from a woman because of its length, but there was no DNA match.’
Ben-Roi wasn’t surprised. It was by no means certain the hair even came from Kleinberg’s killer, and if it did, it was still a long shot they’d have a match on file. Their murderer, he sensed – had sensed from the outset – was not going to be someone who was already known to them. The fact that it was a woman’s hair was mildly interesting, but it didn’t take them anywhere and for the moment he simply filed it at the back of his mind and moved on.
‘Any joy with Kleinberg’s neighbours?’ he asked.
‘There’s still a couple we haven’t managed to speak to. None of the others saw or heard anything.’
A fractional pause, then: ‘One lady did mention a smell.’
‘Smell?’
‘Soap or perfume or something. “Musky” – I think that’s the word she used. Said she’d lived in the block for thirty years and she’d never smelt it before. Just the night of Kleinberg’s murder. Detective Pincas came in and told me about it. Said I might want to follow it up.’
Ben-Roi’s mouth tightened into an annoyed pucker. He knew exactly what Pincas had been implying, and was sure Zisky did too:
soap, perfume, job for the gayboy
. Forty-eight hours ago he’d been making the same quips himself. Now, having got to know the kid slightly better, he found the joke less amusing.
‘You tell Detective Pincas from me he’s a fat shit and can follow it up himself,’ he growled. ‘Got that?’
‘Got it.’
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he caught a hint of gratitude in
Zisky’s voice.
‘Anything else?’
There wasn’t, really. Both Pincas and Amos Namir were still waiting on their informants; Namir had turned up nothing in the old cases and cold cases.
‘Although I did find out something about Archbishop Petrossian.’
There were so many other disparate strands winding around inside his head Ben-Roi had completely forgotten about the archbishop.
‘Surprise me,’ he said.
‘It turns out his apartments have their own private street door. Opens on to St James’ Road. Which means he can get in and out of the compound—’
‘Without anyone seeing him.’ Ben-Roi finished the sentence. He draped an arm out of the window and drummed his fingers on the Toyota’s door. He knew for a fact there weren’t any police cameras on St James. And aside from around the Kotel, there were none in the Jewish Quarter, which was where St James ended up. (Palestinian joke: The Jews got the land, the water, the borders and the airspace, but at least we got the cameras.) So in theory Petrossian could get out of the compound, down through the Jewish Quarter and out of the Old City and no one would be any the wiser.
‘You say he doesn’t have an alibi for the night of the murder?’ he asked.
‘Not that we’ve been able to corroborate. He claims he was in his apartments all night, but we haven’t found anyone who can confirm that.’
Ben-Roi thought a moment, the Toyota’s metalwork echoing to the thud of his fingertips.
‘Do me a favour, take this to Leah Shalev,’ he said eventually. ‘It needs following up and you’ve already got enough on your plate. For the moment I want you to concentrate on the stuff we’ve already discussed: Mitzpe Ramon, Nemesis, Barren. I should be back late afternoon. See what you can dig up by then.’
He rang off, staring down the lines of stationary traffic towards the distant glittering towers of Ramat Gan. Thirty seconds passed, then, pulling out his mobile, he thumbed a text: ‘Gd wrk, Zisky.’
He hesitated, then changed Zisky to Dov, pressed send and banged on his police siren. Less because he thought it would get the traffic moving than to show the world he was still a tough cop and wasn’t going soft in his old age.
L
UXOR
After his meeting with Hassani, Khalifa tried to push the whole well-poisoning thing out of his mind. Maybe there was something going on, maybe there wasn’t – either way, there wasn’t a lot more he could do about it. He went back to his office and made arrangements for a couple of uniforms to be posted out to the Attia farm. Then, it now being his lunch break, he took himself over to the police shooting range for an hour of what Corporal Ahmed Mehti – the moustachioed, crew-cut giant who for as long as anyone could remember had run the range – euphemistically referred to as ‘bullet meditation’.
When he wanted to think about things, really think about them, Khalifa would head over to the West Bank and climb to his ‘thinking seat’ at the base of the Qurn. When he
didn’t
want to think about things, really didn’t want to think about them, he would go shooting. He’d been top marksman in his year at the Cairo police college and had always kept his hand in. Lately he’d been visiting the range more and more often, welcoming the focus it gave him, the chance to push all his problems aside and, if only for a few moments, narrow his world down to the thin slit of a Lee-Enfield .303 rifle sight.
The range was an indoor one – a sweltering concrete bunker out on the desert margins beyond the eastern edge of town. He’d called ahead to say he was coming and Corporal Mehti had everything set up – ear-protectors, paper target in the shape of a charging soldier, box of five-round stripper clips, even a glass of tea. Khalifa was the only person there at that time, which was how he liked it, and having signed for his Enfield he went out on to the range and got down to business. His first shot nudged fractionally wide, the second was too high, but after that everything else was spot on, the room echoing to the rhythmic crunch of the rifle bolt and the sharp crack of exploding cordite as he punched round after round into the target’s face and torso, each hit taking him a little further away from himself. A couple of times he had to shake his head to dispel the image of Zenab lying slumped and dead-eyed in the hospital emergency unit; and, once, the sound of Mr Attia’s voice back on his farm in the Eastern Desert:
I’ll fight if I have to. To protect my family, my children. It is a man’s greatest duty
.
Other than that, his mind was mercifully blank. When he left forty minutes later he had emptied twelve ten-round magazines, reduced five targets to tatters and felt a whole lot calmer. Bullet meditation indeed.
P
ETAH
T
IKVAH
Maya Hillel, the director of the Hofesh Shelter for Trafficked Women, was disconcertingly attractive. Late twenties, slim, with huge grey eyes and an unruly tumble of black hair that cascaded across her shoulders like a rush of dark water, she looked more like a model than a social worker. Given the nature of the job she was doing, Ben-Roi knew it was perverse of him to be viewing her in those terms, but he couldn’t help it. He was a man, and that’s how men thought. Attractive was attractive. End of.
She met him outside the shelter – an innocuous whitewashed building in a street of dusty
shikunim
five minutes from the town centre – and led him through a heavy steel gate into a paved forecourt.
‘We have to be careful,’ she explained, indicating the gate, the uniformed guard manning it, the security fence surrounding the building. ‘We get a lot of pimps coming down here trying to lure the girls away. There’s one across the street now.’
Ben-Roi glanced over his shoulder, but the gate had already swung shut.
‘You want me to have a word?’
‘Not worth it. He’ll just clear off and come back again as soon as you’ve gone. The way he sees it, we’ve got his property and he wants it returned. Thanks for the offer, though.’
She waved him round the side of the building and through an open door into a tiled foyer area. An empty kitchen opened off to the left; on the walls were a selection of trafficking awareness posters, including one depicting a dozen naked women curled up and packaged on a polystyrene tray like a row chicken drumsticks. ‘Fresh Meat’ read the label. Ben-Roi stared at it, then fell in behind Hillel as she started up a staircase.
‘How many girls have you got here?’ he asked as they climbed, trying to keep his eyes off her backside.
‘Fourteen,’ she replied. ‘Most of them are out at work at the moment, which is why it’s quiet. We arrange jobs for them – waitressing, cleaning, that sort of thing. We’ve actually got space for thirty-five, but referrals have gone down the last couple of years. When we opened in 2004 we had over a hundred girls coming through the doors. This year there’s only been twenty.’
‘Glad to hear things are improving.’
‘That’s one way of reading it, I suppose. Personally I’d argue it’s because the police are no longer prioritizing the problem and fewer girls are being rescued.’
She reached the first-floor landing and looked round at him, holding his eyes a moment before continuing upwards.
‘Things
are
better than they were a decade ago, I’ll give you that,’ she went on. ‘Back in the nineties we were getting two, three thousand girls a year being trafficked into the country. Now it’s into the hundreds. It’s still a problem, though. And you guys aren’t allocating the sort of resources you were a few years ago. Mainly, to be fair, because the politicians aren’t allocating the resources. The Interior Ministry doesn’t give a shit. Saving
goy
prostitutes isn’t exactly a vote winner.’
They reached the second-floor landing. Corridors ran off to left and right lined with closed doors. In a room directly in front of them a girl in a baggy velour tracksuit was standing on a set of scales while a plump, middle-aged woman noted her weight on a clipboard. The woman nodded a greeting; the girl stared blank-faced. Painfully thin, with hollow cheeks, lank hair and a faintly yellowish tinge to her skin, she looked like a death camp survivor.
‘Everything OK, Anja?’ Hillel called over to her.
The girl gave a limp shrug.
‘She’s doing brilliantly,’ chipped in the woman cheerfully. ‘Up half a pound.’