‘I always had a bad feeling about this case.’
He stopped and turned. A beat, then, as one:
‘Craptangle.’
He shook his head, threw open the door and pushed past a uniform out into the corridor.
L
UXOR
‘Are you trying to kill me, Khalifa? Are you? Because I’ve got the Valley of the Kings opening in twenty-four hours, the phone’s ringing off the hook, and now I find out you’ve been moonlighting for the fucking Israelis!’
Khalifa shuffled his feet, his hands clenched around the spine of Samuel Pinsker’s notebook. After a five-hour trudge through the desert, followed by hitched lifts with, respectively, a police pick-up, a Menatel phone van and – irony of ironies – a Zoser freight lorry loaded with concrete piping, he’d arrived back in Luxor forty minutes ago. He’d swung home, showered and changed, levelled things with Zenab. Then, anxious to speak to Ben-Roi, to waste no time in preparing a case to put to his superiors, he’d gone into the station.
Which was when Hassani had spotted him on the staircase and ordered him straight up to his office.
‘They called me at home!’ he ranted, his face glowing the colour of pickled beetroot. ‘Some pushy
yehoodi
from Israel Police headquarters! In the middle of the night. My private number!’
No tiptoeing around his subordinate this afternoon. No first-name terms or restrained language. This was the Hassani of old – hectoring, belligerent, volcanic.
‘He wanted to know if I knew where you were. I said, no offence, matey, but what the fuck is it to you where one of my officers is? He said you’d been helping a colleague of his with an investigation and there was a possibility you were in danger. What the hell’s going on, Khalifa? I demand to know what’s going on!’
Khalifa stared down at the notebook. He hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours and was shattered. At the same time, as if his body was inhabited by two separate people, he felt curiously energized. His boy – he was going to get justice for his boy!
‘I’ll be doing a report,’ he began.
‘Too damn right you’ll be doing a report!’ The room echoed as Hassani’s fist hammered down on the table. ‘And before that you’ll be
telling
me – here, now, face to face. What’s going on, Khalifa? Why am I getting calls from Jews on my private number?’
‘It’s to do with the well-poisonings, sir.’
‘What?’
‘The ones I told you about. In the Eastern Desert.’
‘Oh not the bloody Coptic waterholes again! I thought we’d agreed to put that one on the back burner.’
‘There’s a gold mine, sir. Out by the Gebel el-Shalul. An ancient—’ ‘There it is!’ cried Hassani. ‘There it is!
Ancient!
Funny, but I just knew that word was going to come into it somehow. God forbid you should ever work on a case that has any contemptuous relevance!’
Khalifa resisted the temptation to correct the adjective. When Hassani was in this sort of mood, playing smart-alec was never a good idea. Instead, slowly, carefully, he outlined the situation – Rivka Kleinberg, Barren Corporation, Zoser, mine, toxic dumping – going easy on the Israeli end of things, emphasizing the Egyptian connection. He would have liked to talk to Ben-Roi first, clarified the evidence, marshalled his thoughts, but if Hassani wanted to know now, he wasn’t going to hold back. Maybe it was for the best. The sooner his boss was in the loop, the sooner they could start moving against the culprits.
In front of him the chief listened, his expression stony, his fists clenched tight on the desktop as if he was some pharaonic statue. When Khalifa had finished, he levered himself to his feet, went over to the window and stared out at the rear of the Interior Ministry building ten metres away. Almost a minute passed before he turned back to the room.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘So,’ repeated Hassani, his tone unexpectedly light, as if Khalifa had just told him a cheery anecdote. Not at all the reaction he’d been anticipating. He sat forward.
‘So an American multinational, aided and abetted by one of our biggest companies, has been illegally dumping contaminated waste on Egyptian territory. Said waste leaching into the water system and causing widespread environmental damage.’
He tried to spell it out without sounding like he was patronizing Hassani. Again, the reaction was not what he was expecting, or hoping for. The chief merely gave an exaggerated shrug and held up his hands as if to say: ‘Is this supposed to mean anything to me?’ Khalifa could feel his temper rising.
‘Sir, this is a major criminal scandal. We’re talking thousands, possibly tens of thousands of barrels of toxic waste. I’ve been down there. I’ve seen it.’
Recollections of the mine flashed through his mind: the darkness, the claustrophobia, the eerie stench of garlic, which he assumed must be something to do with the arsenic contamination. ‘These people have broken the law,’ he picked up, shaking the memory away. ‘We’ve got the evidence, we need to start moving—’
Hassani held up a finger, silencing him. A stiff, threatening finger, brandished at Khalifa like a cudgel.
‘Let me just spell out a few home truths, sonny boy,’ he said, each word seeming to quiver under the force of his suppressed anger. ‘We are the Luxor Police. The
Luxor
police. We have a patch, we deal with crimes committed on that patch. A Jew woman gets herself killed in Jerusalem – that is of no concern to us whatsoever, beyond the fact that any Zionist death is a cause for celebration. An abandoned mine out in the arse-end of nowhere – that is of no concern either, whatever may or may not be inside it. A poisoned well on the very edge of our beat – that
might
be of interest, and as I have already told you, we’ll give the matter more thought once the museum opening is out of the way. As for prossies in Rosetta, mines in Romania and all the other cock-and-bull malarkey, it is nothing, I repeat, nothing, to do with us.’
‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ murmured Khalifa, unbeknown to him echoing almost precisely what Ben-Roi was at that same moment saying to his boss 700 kilometres away in Jerusalem. Then, out loud:
‘Sir, I simply cannot allow—’
Hassani ignited. ‘What? Cannot allow what? Me explaining the basics of Egyptian policing to you!’
‘Barren and Zoser—’
‘Are, respectively, an American-based corporation over whom we have absolutely fuck-all jurisdiction, and one of the best-connected, most powerful companies in Egypt.’
‘Who just happen to have helped dump a hundred thousand barrels of contaminated dust—’
‘A minute ago it was a thousand barrels.’
‘A hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, it doesn’t matter – Zoser have broken the law!’
‘They can have broken the nose off the bloody Sphinx for all I care!’ Hassani’s fist slammed back against the window, the whole room seeming to vibrate to the force of the blow. ‘Neither of them have committed a crime on our patch, Khalifa, and if there’s been no crime, there’s no cause for us to get involved. God Almighty, next you’ll be asking me to open a case file because some kid had his bike stolen in Australia.’
Khalifa’s own fist had clenched into a flint-like ball as he struggled to hold back his fury. ‘So you’re just going to turn a blind eye?’
‘I’m not going to turn any sort of eye. It’s not our business. You understand? Not our patch, not our business!’
‘I’ll take it off our patch, then. I’ll go above you. To the Director of Police.’
He braced himself for another explosion. Instead Hassani let out a guffaw of laughter.
‘You be my guest,’ he cried. ‘Hell, I’ll even give you the director’s private number. In fact, why stop there? Why not go all the way to the top? To the Interior Minister himself. That being the same Interior Minister whose brother is chairman of Zoser, and who tomorrow night is going to be here in the Valley of the Kings glad-handing the head of Barren Corporation. The
same
Barren Corporation who are currently pumping tens of millions of dollars into the local economy. So you go right ahead and call him, Khalifa. But don’t come crying to me when
you
get kicked off the force and your family get kicked out of their new apartment.’
Khalifa launched to his feet, all control lost.
‘Is that a threat?’ he shouted, again echoing almost verbatim the confrontation between Ben-Roi and Leah Shalev. ‘Are you threatening me?’
Hassani came forward a couple of steps, his shoulders tense, his arms cocked at the elbows, like a boxer about to launch at an opponent. There was a pause as the two men fronted up to each other. Then, suddenly, the fight seemed to drain out of the chief. His arms dropped and he stomped back to his desk.
‘No, I’m not threatening you,’ he said, dropping into his seat. ‘I’m reminding you how things are in this country. And how they are is that, revolution or no revolution, there are people you don’t touch. If the Israelis want to put in an official governmental request for cooperation, then maybe some wheels will turn. Although given what we all think of the Israelis, even that probably won’t have much effect unless it’s backed up by the Americans. So why don’t you trot off and have a chat with your little Jew-boy buddy? And if the order comes down to investigate, we investigate. Until that point I’m not touching it with a fucking bargepole. And if you know what’s good for you, you won’t either. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got things to attend to. And make sure you shut the door behind you.’
He snatched up the phone and swivelled, turning his back on Khalifa. For a moment the detective stood where he was, fighting the urge to run up and hammer his fists on Hassani’s outsized buffalo shoulders, screaming: ‘They killed my son! They killed my son!’ He knew it wouldn’t do any good. Gathering himself, he stalked from the room, making the point of slamming the door in his wake. If Hassani wanted an official request from the Israelis, that’s exactly what he’d get. Ben-Roi would know what to do. Ben-Roi wasn’t just a good detective – a bloody good detective – he was a friend. A bloody good friend. Together they’d crack it. Make sure justice was done. The A-Team. Just like old times.
He headed down to his office, taking the stairs two at a time.
J
ERUSALEM
The thing that Ben-Roi found most troubling was not that he’d been offered an official bribe to drop a murder case, but that as he made his way back to the Kishle detectives’ suite, he found himself giving the offer serious consideration.
He should have dismissed it out of hand. It went against every moral he possessed, everything he’d ever stood for and fought against. OK, maybe he didn’t always play things by the book, was a bit too free with his fists and a bit too loose in his interpretation of what was strictly permissible in the name of law enforcement. He knew right from wrong, though; knew that even if you bent the line at times – as he had last night with Genady Kremenko – there still
was
a line. A clear demarcation between the good guys and the bad guys. And for all his faults, he’d always been on the right side of that line, had never stepped across it. Had always battled to ensure that justice was done.
And now he was being asked to take an eraser and scrub the line. Pretend it didn’t exist. Turn his back on everything he’d ever believed in.
He should have told them to go fuck themselves. Passed everything over to Natan Tirat and let him splash it across the front of
Ha’aretz
.
And yet, and yet . . .
He reached the detectives’ suite, went through to his office. There was no one there. The whole place felt unnaturally quiet and still. He made himself a coffee, turned off his mobile, flopped into his chair.
He wasn’t afraid. It wasn’t that. He was a tough guy, was more than capable of standing up for himself. Barren didn’t scare him and neither did the politicians.
He wasn’t an idiot either, though. Barren carried clout. Serious clout. And going up against them was going to cause trouble. Serious trouble. Not just for him, but potentially for Sarah as well. And the baby. They’d already killed one person. Maybe a whole lot more.
You step out of the box on this and they will go for you like jackals round a fucking carcass.
This wasn’t just about him. There were wider considerations here.
He slurped at his cup, tapped the cell phone on his thigh.
Say he did go public, what would it achieve? He’d be screwing his career, putting himself and the people he loved in the firing line, and for what? Sure they had Barren for toxic dumping, but there was no direct link between the company and Rivka Kleinberg’s murder, just circumstantial evidence. And with the sort of lawyers Barren would throw at it, circumstantial evidence was as good as no evidence. Hell, they might even twist it in such a way as to pin the dumping charge on a third party, or dodge it altogether. At best it would be a fine and a hit to their reputation. Maybe the loss of their Egyptian gas field tender. Irritating, but hardly catastrophic – not to a company as large as Barren Corporation. For him, on the other hand . . . He was perched on a set of scales and they weren’t balancing. Far from it, things were tipping very much against him.
It’s checkmate here. You might as well try to salvage something.
He blew on his coffee, took another sip, gazed distractedly across the office at the map on the opposite wall.
It was a good offer, no question. Bribe, pay-off, whatever you wanted to call it. A bloody good offer if you could deal with the moral downside. Life-changing. Double-money, less work, low-rent house, early retirement. And with Sarah’s play scheme closing, it meant she was no longer tied to Jerusalem. They could move up north to Kiryat Ata where the academy was based, maybe get a place near the sea, start over. Give their kid – kids, perhaps – a better life than they would ever have in the warping pressure cooker of the Holy City. They’d be nearer their families as well – his just north of Hadera on the Sharon Plain, hers over near Galilee . . . the more he thought about it, the more attractive it seemed.
If he could deal with the moral downside. With the fact that he would be letting a killer off the hook.
Except that, would he be? Shelving a case, after all, wasn’t the same as binning it. Like Leah Shalev had said, circumstances change. Barren’s influence might wane – maybe it was simply a matter of delaying justice rather than forgoing it. To extend the hook analogy, some fish you reeled in the moment you felt them bite, others you allowed a bit of line, let it run for a while before landing them. The end result was the same. You still had trout for dinner. It was just about timing.
Or perhaps he was just kidding himself. Trying to sweeten the fact that he was contemplating doing a Faustus and selling his soul to the Devil.
He didn’t know, he just didn’t know. He turned it round, exploring the angles, weighing things up. And all the while he could hear Sarah’s voice at the back of his head, something she’d said to him the day they split:
Something has to give, Arieh
. Never had that assessment seemed more true. Something fundamental was going to have to give here, some essential part of him be let go. It was the dilemma of the last four years reduced to the starkest of binary equations: prioritize the ones he loved, or the demands of his conscience. Black or white. Heads or tails. No alternative options. A straight flip of the coin.
Still he couldn’t decide, still he felt tugged in different directions, leaning first this way, then that, unable to give himself up fully to one side or the other. Until eventually, as if tired of his dithering, his hand took the initiative. Seemingly of its own volition, it lifted the cell phone and switched it back on. There were messages, but rather than activating voicemail, his fingers instead tapped in a number. The phone came up to Ben-Roi’s ear and rang. Answerphone. Sarah’s voice. His eyebrows lifted, as if he was somehow surprised, had been handed the phone unexpectedly.
‘Sarah,’ he said after the beeps had gone. ‘Hi. It’s me. I . . . um . . . um . . . I’m sorry about last night . . . I wanted to . . . um . . .’
He bumbled on a while, apologizing again, saying how much he’d enjoyed dinner, how beautiful she’d looked. Until suddenly something clicked and the logjam broke.
‘Listen, Sarah, I need to talk. Not on the phone, face to face. There’s something I want to run by you. A job I’ve been offered. A good job. A really good job. Up in Haifa. It would get me off the front line, mean a new start for us. All three of us. I think I’m going to take it. I want to be with you, Sarah. More than anything in the world. With you and Bubu. A proper family. Nothing else matters to me. Nothing. Can I come round later?’
He hesitated, then added, ‘I love you so much,’ and rang off.
It was the right thing to do. He knew it now. Part of him would always feel bad, but that was the pay-off. Boil it all down and Sarah and the baby were what mattered. He’d just have to deal with the guilt. Hopefully they’d get Barren one day. Just not today. Like Leah Shalev had said:
We’re drones, we take orders. And this is the order.
When all was said and done, he was just doing what he was told.
He sat back, feeling curiously calm, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Almost immediately he sat forward as his phone went off. Assuming it was Sarah, he answered without even looking at the display. It wasn’t Sarah.
‘Ben-Roi, it’s me. I’ve been trying to get hold of you. We need to talk.’
Suddenly the weight descended again. Right at the moment, this was a conversation he could do without.
L
UXOR
Khalifa was sitting perched on the edge of his desk, a dynamo of nervous energy.
‘So that’s the situation at this end,’ he explained, tamping out one Cleopatra and immediately firing up another. ‘If we’re going to move against these companies, you’re going to have to put in a formal request for cooperation. If you can get the American authorities involved, so much the better.’
At the other end of the line Ben-Roi was silent.
‘I know it’s crazy,’ continued Khalifa, misinterpreting the Israeli’s lack of response, ‘but that’s just the way things work in this country. Barren, Zoser – they’ve got a lot of connections. We need to . . . how do you say . . . attack with two prongs. So: any idea how long it will take to get the request?’