To be fair, there had been
some
progress. Dov Zisky, who seemed to be more indispensable as each day went by, had turned up a couple of very interesting little nuggets.
One concerned Rivka Kleinberg’s planned trip to Egypt. Not only had she been booked on to a flight to Alexandria on the night of her murder, but, it transpired, she also had a reservation at a budget hotel in Rosetta, a small town sixty kilometres down the coast from Alexandria. What she intended doing there remained a mystery, but whatever it was, she clearly wasn’t expecting it to take long. The reservation was only for a single night, after which she was booked on a return flight to Tel-Aviv.
The other nugget involved the ubiquitous Barren Corporation. Zisky had done some more background digging and managed to turn up an Armenian connection, albeit an old one. Back in the 1980s, through a subsidiary named YGE – Yerevan Gold Exploration – Barren had held a controlling stake in a large open-pit gold mine in the east of the country, on the border with Azerbaijan. Licensing disputes with the Armenian government had caused Barren to offload the company in 1991, but it was still an intriguing and potentially important link.
There had been a couple of other developments, including – and again, this had come courtesy of Zisky, who’d spotted it on the net – another Nemesis Agenda targeting of Barren, this one a hacking attack on the company’s computer network.
By far the most promising new lead, however, was one Ben-Roi himself had turned up – somewhat to his relief, since Zisky seemed to have been making most of the running over the last few days.
During his meeting with Maya Hillel at the Hofesh Shelter, she’d mentioned a pimp named Genady Kremenko. A Ukrainian-born immigrant, Kremenko – along with his wife and two sons – had run one of the biggest prostitution rings in Tel-Aviv, using girls trafficked in from Egypt through the Sinai. According to Hillel, Rivka Kleinberg had shown a particular interest in that route, and since Kremenko had by all accounts exercised a virtual monopoly on it, Ben-Roi had decided to take a closer look at him.
Kremenko had been arrested a couple of months back and was currently on remand in Abu Kabir, a detention facility just round the corner from the National Centre for Forensic Medicine in south Tel-Aviv. Ben-Roi had been on to the anti-trafficking unit of Organized Crime and they’d forwarded him copies of everything they had on the man, which was a fair bit. He’d been pimping almost a hundred girls apparently, Eastern Europeans for the most part, although lately he’d been moving increasingly into Orientals and Africans. He had them working in twos or threes out of apartments scattered around the city – including several in Neve Sha’anan – their services advertised via the internet and business cards left in call boxes and on car windscreens, their every move watched over by a network of minders, maids and sub-pimps. Such was the level of fear he inspired that despite the numbers involved, and guarantees of protection, Organized Crime had been unable to find a single girl willing to testify against Kremenko, which was why, even with a mass of circumstantial evidence, the Attorney General’s office had decided the best hope of securing a conviction lay with tax-evasion and money-laundering charges rather than trafficking and living off immoral earnings.
On Kremenko’s Sinai operation, which was what Ben-Roi was really interested in, the files contained almost nothing. The girls had been recruited in their native countries, sent to Egypt, moved across the border by Bedouin. Pretty much what Hillel had already told him.
It had looked like a dead end. Then, however, one of those strokes of luck on which an entire case can turn. Ben-Roi had a contact in Abu Kabir, a warder who’d been at police college with him before transferring over into the prison service. Warders always had their ear to the ground, and, just on the off-chance, Ben-Roi had got in touch, filled the man in, asked if he knew anything that might be useful.
And lo and behold he did.
Eighteen days ago, it turned out, Genady Kremenko had had a visitor. A female visitor. Her name was Rivka Kleinberg.
So that’s where he was going now. Down to Abu Kabir for a chat with the man they called the Schoolmaster on account of the age of some of the girls he was pimping. Throwing a quick glance at the pile of Toys R Us bags on the passenger seat, Ben-Roi swung out to overtake another tank transporter and pushed the speedometer up past 120km per hour. He only had an hour with Kremenko and didn’t want to be late.
Q
ENA
, E
GYPT
Unlike Luxor, sixty kilometres to the south, the town of Qena – perched on the bend in the Nile to which it gave its name – made few concessions to foreign visitors. There were no upmarket hotels, no restaurants serving fish and chips and full English breakfasts, all the signs were in Arabic. This was a town that received few tourists, and those that did come – usually to visit the Hathor Temple across the Nile at Dendera – were closely policed. Back in the 1990s, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya had launched a number of attacks in the area, and no one was taking any chances.
Ibrahim Sadeq lived in a river-front block five minutes from the town centre. The interview hadn’t been easy to arrange – the former police chief guarded his privacy, didn’t welcome visitors. He had seemed intrigued by Khalifa’s request to discuss the Pinsker case, however, and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing had relented and granted him an audience, on condition it was kept short. Khalifa phoned ahead the moment he got off the train, and was buzzed into the block within seconds of pressing its intercom. Sadeq was waiting for him outside the door of his apartment – a tall, thin Saidee with close-cropped grey hair, cold eyes and bad teeth. The two men shook hands, exchanged the usual pleasantries and went inside.
Sadeq had been before Khalifa’s time. He’d met him twice, briefly, at official functions, but had never really spoken to him. He knew him through reputation, though. Sadeq was a hard man. Not hard like Chief Hassani and Ehab Ali Mahfouz, Hassani’s immediate predecessor. Their hardness was all physical, in their fists. Sadeq was more of a thinker: a schemer and a manipulator. Where Hassani and Mahfouz would think nothing of rolling up their sleeves and wading into a suspect, Sadeq had preferred to lurk in the shadows, tweaking the strings while others got their hands dirty. Everyone had feared him, police and civilians alike. Under Sadeq, so the rumours went, the state torturers had never been so busy.
He led Khalifa through into the living room – spartan, neat, functional – where they were served tea by a well-dressed woman Khalifa assumed must be Sadeq’s wife. Once she was gone, the former chief settled back in his chair and crossed his legs, balancing his tea glass on his knee. The room hummed with the low whisper of air-conditioning; from the kitchen came the intermittent crackle of an electric fly-killer. Khalifa found the sound disconcerting. Electricity, he’d heard, had been one of Sadeq’s favoured methods of interrogation.
‘So, Inspector, you’ve come about the man with no face.’
No small talk, straight to the point, the faintest hint of emphasis on the ‘Inspector’, just to remind Khalifa of his correct place in the hierarchy. He was going to have to tread carefully. Even in retirement, Sadeq wasn’t someone you wanted to cross.
‘You were in charge of the investigation,’ Khalifa began, pulling out the later of the two police files from the plastic bag at his feet. ‘I just wanted to clarify a couple of things.’
‘Forty years after the event?’
‘A friend mentioned the case. I thought I’d take a look. Just personal interest.’
He thought it best to keep Ben-Roi out of it. Sadeq’s brother, he’d heard, had been taken prisoner by the Israelis during the 1973 Ramadan War and he couldn’t see him being particularly well disposed towards assisting in one of their investigations, even indirectly. The Saidee stared at him, something faintly reptilian about his gaze, the way his eyes didn’t seem to blink. For a moment it looked as if he was going to push for more details. To Khalifa’s relief, he laid aside his tea and extended a hand.
‘Show.’
Khalifa leant forward and passed the file across. Sadeq slipped on a pair of glasses and opened the folder.
‘Been a while since I saw these,’ he murmured, leafing through the file’s contents. ‘My first case after I made senior inspector. Memorable introduction.’
He pulled out a photo and held it up to the light. Pinsker’s body was sitting propped in the rear corner of the tomb chamber, mummified in the dry desert heat, the head thrown back, the skin dry and unnaturally taut, as if his skeleton had been bound in dirty white wrapping paper. In one hand he held a leather mask with straps and buckles attached to it; where his face should have been, there was just a sort of blank space, smooth save for two small eye-holes, a lipless slit of a mouth and, in the middle, a slight creasing that hinted at a nose.
‘Handsome chap,’ grunted Sadeq, returning the image to the folder. ‘I’ve seen some bad deaths in my time, but this one . . . I take it you looked at the autopsy report.’
Khalifa had indeed. It had made gruesome reading. As well as breaking both legs, right arm and three ribs in his fall down the shaft, Pinsker had also sustained a ruptured spleen and severe lacerations to the rear of his skull. Despite his injuries he had somehow survived the drop, as evidenced by the fact that he had dragged himself into the chamber and fashioned rough splints for his shattered limbs and a compress for his head. Although the age and desiccated state of the body had made definitive assessment impossible, the pathologist estimated the Englishman had lived for at least two to three days before eventually succumbing to a combination of dehydration, blood loss and internal trauma. A painless end it most certainly hadn’t been.
Sadeq closed the file and removed his glasses.
‘So what is it you wish to clarify?’
‘It was mainly to do with the woman’s statement,’ replied Khalifa, reaching across and taking the folder back. ‘The
ingileezaya
, Mrs –’ he flipped through the notes to find the name – ‘Bowers. There was something that didn’t make sense to me.’
Sadeq picked up his tea glass, sipped, motioned for Khalifa to continue.
‘Well, according to her account, she was walking in the hills with her husband, stopped to –’ he consulted the notes again, looking for the precise wording – ‘“do what a lady has to do”, which I presume means—’
‘Take a piss.’
‘Exactly. She lost her footing, slipped, rolled backwards down a slope and into the shaft.’ He looked up at Sadeq, who gave a slight tilt of the head to indicate the chronology was correct. ‘She also said that she hadn’t noticed the shaft before because it was covered with branches.’
This time Sadeq didn’t nod, just stared at Khalifa, the faintest hint of a smile lifting the corners of his lips.
‘It was you who took her statement, right? The day of the accident, after she’d been helicoptered over to Luxor General.’
‘That is my recollection.’
‘I know it was a long time ago, but you don’t remember how she was, do you? Did she seem concussed, confused . . . ?’
‘She was a
hawaga
. In my experience they’re all confused.’
Khalifa smiled at the joke. ‘What I’m getting at—’
‘I know exactly what you’re getting at.’ Sadeq’s lips lifted a couple of notches further, the smile becoming more pronounced, as if he understood where Khalifa was going with this and was enjoying the ride. ‘And no, the woman didn’t seem at all confused. On the contrary, given that she’d only recently fallen down a twenty-foot hole and found a dead man at the bottom, she was remarkably lucid.’
‘And she was definite about the branches? That they were covering the shaft.’
‘Oh very definite.
Extremely
definite.’
‘That’s what I don’t understand. If the branches were at the top of the shaft—’
He got no further. Sadeq’s hand came up, motioning him to be silent. The former chief was smiling broadly now, although his eyes were steely, an unnerving disconnect, as if part of him was humouring Khalifa, another part warning him. From the kitchen came a muffled crackle as another fly immolated itself. There was a pause, then:
‘They said you were sharp.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Hassani, Mahfouz. Others I’ve spoken to. One of the sharpest on the force, apparently. See things other people don’t.’
He laid aside his tea glass and placed his hands on the arms of the chair, curling his fingers round the wooden arm-ends which were fashioned into the shape of scarab beetles. His thumbnails, Khalifa noticed, were much longer than those of his other fingers, as though he was deliberately growing them.
‘Insubordinate as well, I’m told. Not something you’d have got away with in my day. In my day
no one
was insubordinate.’
His smile tightened, his eyes grew colder. Khalifa shifted in his seat, not sure where this was leading, wondering if perhaps he had made a mistake coming here. Things might be changing in Egypt, but you still had to watch yourself, particularly around scorpions like Sadeq. There was another uncomfortable silence. Then, to his surprise, the former chief lifted his hands and slowly clapped them, as if applauding.
‘Well spotted, Inspector. Even the professor who did the study of the tomb didn’t clock the problem with the branches. But I did. And now you have too. Very sharp.’
He replaced his hands on the chair arms, his left index finger tapping up and down. From the entrance hall came a muted click as the front door opened and then closed, presumably as his wife went out.
‘As soon as the
ingileezaya
told me about the branches I knew there was something wrong. My first thought, as yours seems to have been, was that she was confused, hadn’t remembered correctly. But she was adamant about it. The branches had been covering the shaft. Which meant that they’d got there
after
Pinsker had fallen in, otherwise he would have dislodged them. And since there are no trees within ten kilometres of the site, someone must have deliberately carried them up and put them there. There were possible explanations, but the obvious one was that someone didn’t want either the tomb or Pinsker to be found. And the obvious explanation for
that
was that . . .’