‘I should be getting back to work,’ said Omar, draining the last of his Sprite and clambering to his feet. ‘I’ve still got some samples to take and I don’t think they’d appreciate me splashing around during the Sound and Light show.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Khalifa, also standing, ‘They might think you were part of the display. Amun parading on his
manjet
barque.’
‘In overalls and a beanie hat? Interesting interpretation.’
They laughed. Or at least Omar did. Khalifa just smiled.
‘I’ll try and get out to the wells in the next few days,’ said Omar. ‘Can you send me details?’
‘I’ll e-mail them as soon as I’m back in the office.’
‘I’ll tell the lab it’s urgent, so should have something for you by the end of the week.’
Khalifa thanked him. ‘One other thing. I’m pretty certain the farm at Bir Hashfa’s piping its drinking water illegally. They’re poor people – do me a favour and keep it to yourself.’
‘Our little secret,’ said Omar, giving his nose a conspiratorial tap.
He embraced Khalifa, pulled away, laid his hands on the detective’s shoulders. ‘You OK?’
‘Never better.’
Omar’s hands tightened. ‘You OK?’ he repeated.
This time Khalifa hesitated before answering.
‘I’ll live,’ he said eventually.
‘You do that, my friend. You live long and healthy. And the same for Zenab and the kids.’
He held Khalifa’s gaze, then gave his hair an affectionate ruffle, pulled on his woollen hat and returned to his boat.
‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got the results,’ he called, clambering on board and untying the tether rope. ‘I’ll be interested to see them myself. Don’t be a stranger.’
He pushed off, sat, and heaved on the oars, propelling the dinghy back out across the water. Khalifa watched him for a moment, then looked out past the Tenth Pylon again to where his old apartment block used to be. Up and down the tectonic split of the avenue you’d find people looking in exactly the same way, gazing forlornly into space as if willing their old home to miraculously reappear. Like mourners beside a grave. Half of Luxor, it seemed to Khalifa, was in mourning for the way things had been. He shook his head, picked up the two drinks cans and made for the exit. Sometimes it was just so hard to let go.
T
EL
-A
VIV
Outside the Hofesh Shelter, Ben-Roi crossed the road to have words with the pimp standing on the opposite pavement. The man saw him coming and legged it. Ben-Roi chased him for half a block, then gave up. He’d almost certainly be back, as Hillel had said, but at least he’d given him something to think about. Then again, maybe not. Guys like him didn’t really think. Just did what they did without awareness of meaning or consequences. Certainly no emotional connection. He’d hide round the corner, wait for Ben-Roi to leave, then resume his vigil untroubled, like a fox returning to a dustbin. Feral, basically. And nothing Ben-Roi did or said was going to change that. The eternal dance of law-keepers and law-breakers. Not for the first time he wondered why the hell he bothered.
He hung around for a few minutes, making his presence felt. Then, with a bellowed, ‘I’ll be seeing you, loser!’ returned to his car. He dropped the photos Hillel had printed off for him on the passenger seat, called Zisky, filled him in on what he’d found out.
‘You think that’s why Kleinberg was visiting the Armenian compound?’ Zisky asked when he’d finished. ‘Because she was looking for this girl?’
‘Or meeting her,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘Either way, it’s the best lead we’ve got. The shelter’s e-mailing pictures across now. Do me a favour and get some uniforms to circulate them around the compound, see if anyone recognizes her. I’m going to take a spin back to Neve Sha’anan on the off-chance someone’s seen the girl down there. Any joy with the Nemesis thing?’
‘I’ve spoken to my friend and he’s given me some background,’ said Zisky. ‘I’ve also dug up some stuff on Barren Corporation that might be relevant. You want to hook up this evening?’
‘Why not. You drink?’
‘Only champagne.’
Ben-Roi was wising up to Zisky’s humour and let out a rumbling chuckle.
‘The tab’s on you then. There’s a bar at the Old City end of Jaffa Street. Putin’s.’
‘Know it.’
‘Meet you there at nine?’
‘It’s a date.’
Ben-Roi ended the call, made a second one. To Sarah this time. Back in the shelter, gazing out of the window at the sad collection of toys down in the yard, he’d experienced an uncharacteristic rush of emotion, a sudden, urgent desire to tell her how much he still loved her. He
did
love her – desperately, if he was honest with himself – but the inclination to open up about it had gone. Instead, when she came on the line, he kept the conversation chatty and brief, asking after the baby, suggesting they meet for lunch the following day, side-stepping her questions about what he was doing in Tel-Aviv. Not because he thought she couldn’t deal with it – she was a tough cookie, strong – but because there were some parts of his life he wanted to keep fenced off from other parts. Rape, violence, abuse – those weren’t the sort of things he wished to share with the mother of his child. They talked for a couple of minutes, agreed a time and place for lunch the next day, rang off.
Once she was gone Ben-Roi sat a moment, then picked up one of the photos from the passenger seat, the headshot. He held it against the steering wheel. The girl’s huge, almond-shaped eyes stared up at him, empty and yet at the same time strangely forceful, their irises so brown they were almost black. She wasn’t conventionally beautiful – her nose was a little too flat, her eyebrows too heavy – but there was definitely something about her that drew you, something in the interplay of vulnerability and toughness, damage and strength. It was almost as if two different faces with two different expressions had been superimposed on each other – one that of a victim, the other a survivor’s.
She was the key to the case. He’d felt it the moment he’d first seen her. The point around which everything else revolved. The thread that bound it all together.
He gazed at her for almost a minute. Then, laying the photo aside, he started the engine and headed back into the Tel-Aviv haystack in search of a needle called Maria.
If Israel was the Promised Land, Neve Sha’anan was the place where the promise got broken. A seedy, grubby, run-down wedge of Tel-Aviv sandwiched between the city’s old and new bus stations, the district had long been a magnet for immigrants, drunks, drug-addicts and sex-workers. Some people called it colourful. A melting pot. To Ben-Roi it just looked like a shit-hole.
It was gone six when he arrived and parked up on Saloman Street, beside the abandoned, weed-covered expanse of the old garage. He sat a moment staring across the road at a group of
schwartzes
hanging around in a bar doorway. Then, grabbing the headshot photo, he locked the car, pulled on his jacket and went walkabout.
The area was starting to come to life, its pulse seeming to quicken. On Neve Sha’anan itself, the pedestrianized drag of soiled, decaying tenements that formed the district’s backbone, discordant blasts of noise filled the evening air: music; television sets; the clang and bleep of gaming arcades; the Babel-chatter of Oriental women as they crowded around the fruit and vegetable stalls. There were rubbish-jammed alleyways, and neon-lit bars, and swirls of graffiti demanding an end to immigration and a return to the Torah and death to Islamic scum. Drunks and heroin-shooters lurked in doorways like creatures in their lairs; there was a lingering odour of trash and fish, and fast food. And, also, something more intangible: poverty, hardship, violence waiting to happen. Tourist-brochure material it most certainly wasn’t. This was the underbelly. Israel’s foetid basement, where all the junk got dumped.
Ben-Roi walked the length of the drag, past the liquor stores and laundromats and stalls selling fake designer watches, showing the photo to passers-by, hoping against hope someone might have sighted the girl. A couple of street-hawkers thought they vaguely recognized her, but couldn’t remember from where or when or indeed if it was actually the same person; an elderly woman in a brightly lit shop selling Christian paraphernalia – crosses and plastic Jesuses and bottled water from the River Jordan – was more definite that she’d seen her. It had been a long time ago, though, certainly not recently. One man said he’d
like
to see her, show her a good time; another, a
meshugganah
Haredi
with wild eyes and crusty, dreadlock-like
pe’ot
hanging almost to the level of his chest, was adamant that the girl was an evil spirit sent by
Ha-Satan
to tempt the faithful. Given that he was barefoot and had a cardboard sign round his neck proclaiming they were all going to
Gehinnom
, Ben-Roi didn’t take him too seriously. No one could offer any concrete information.
He worked his way to the bottom of the street and stopped at the grim, garbage-filled throat of the Levinsky underpass. Although the tunnel was gated off, he could see shadowy figures down there, indeterminate hummocks of humanity looming in the darkness: crack-heads, piss-heads, booby-cases. If someone was desperate, really desperate, needed shelter for the night, it was the sort of place they might take refuge. In the light of day he might have considered hopping the gate and going down, passing the photo around, asking if anyone recognized it. He sure as hell wasn’t going to do it now, not in the dark and with his Jericho locked up in the secure box underneath his car seat. He was foolhardy, but not that foolhardy. It would be a waste of time anyway – most of them were too spaced to even register they were being shown a photo, let alone remember if they had seen the person in it. Instead, after staring down for a while, his nostrils recoiling at the odour of rubbish and sour piss, he gave Neve Sha’anan a second pass, then branched out into the parallel streets: Hagdud Haivri, Yesod Hamaala, Fin, Saloman.
When he’d been stationed in Tel-Aviv a decade ago there had been wall-to-wall hookers along these streets. They’d cleaned it up a bit since then, but it was still palpably a red-light district: sex shops, ‘Pip’ shows, boarded shop fronts with micro-skirted women standing in their doorways, louch and jaded. Pimps as well. Leaning against lampposts, hanging around on corners, they stuck out a mile with their watchful faces and beady, calculating eyes. Lowlifes, every one of them. Scumbags. Although when all was said and done they were only feeding a demand. The punters were as much a part of the equation. And while it was easy to despise the pimps and the traffickers, the clients didn’t pigeonhole quite so comfortably. Half of his friends had been with a prostitute at one time or another. All of his work colleagues probably, excepting Leah Shalev. Himself too, once, years ago, when he’d been doing his national service up on the Lebanese border. He and Natan Tirat had got hammered one night on cheap whisky, gone to a brothel in Metulla, got themselves a blowjob from a surly, large-breasted woman called . . . he couldn’t even remember what she was called. It had been a laugh at the time, a sort of rite of passage, and if subsequently he’d felt a bit embarrassed about it, and had certainly never said anything to Sarah, it had never caused him any particular angst.
Tonight, wandering around, he was more troubled by the memory. He was fairly certain the woman hadn’t been trafficked, or at least not from abroad, but all the same, he couldn’t imagine her life had been a particularly happy one. And a pair of drunken conscripts waiting in line to stick their cocks in her mouth couldn’t have done much to improve it. He glanced at the photo in his hand, wondering what sort of things the girl had been forced to do –
knowing
what sort of things – and feeling sickened by it. Culpable as well, in an abstract sort of way. He’d paid money into the industry, after all. Availed himself of its services. Fed the beast. If it wasn’t for users like him there wouldn’t be an industry, just as there’d be no sweat shops were it not for the fashionistas wanting to wear cheap designer clothes, and no drugs wars without the otherwise oh-so-respectable weekend coke-snorters. They were all exploiters in their own way, all users and abusers, and if the pimps and traffickers were the obvious face of exploitation, the circle of responsibility spread a lot wider than that. He didn’t dwell on the thought. Metulla had been a long time ago, a one-off that he had no intention of ever repeating. Right now he just needed to find the girl and solve a murder. Reflections on the ethics of supply and demand in the sex industry were for another day.
He turned on to Hagdud Haivri, past the anomalously named Kingdom of Pork butcher on the corner and along to a couple of hookers standing post a few doors down. One, a peroxide blonde in jeans and boob-tube, had the washed-out complexion and bruised, striated arms of a long-time smack-addict; the other was older, middle-aged, brunette, wearing a tight black dress and stilettos. Healthier looking, although that wasn’t saying much. Both Israeli, by the look of it. He flashed his badge and held out the photo.
‘You know this girl?’ he said, not bothering with preliminaries.
‘Used to work around here?’
The blonde shook her head.
‘Try looking at the picture.’
Her eyes rolled down, then up again. ‘No.’
‘Sure?’
‘If you’re hunting young meat I know where you can find it, but it’ll cost you. Real young, if you’re interested.’
Ben-Roi ignored the comment, angled the photo to the other woman.
‘How about you? Recognize her?’
The woman reached out and took the picture, dragging on the Marlboro she was holding. Although she was carrying weight around her middle, and was wearing too much mascara, you could see she had been attractive once. Still was, in a weary, fractured sort of way. No obvious signs of drug use, which made him wonder how she’d ended up down here. Maybe debt, maybe an abusive relationship, maybe one of a hundred reasons. Hell, maybe she even enjoyed it, although that was the least likely scenario. They all had their different stories. Their own private staircase down into the underworld.