A Possibility of Violence (13 page)

He apologized and said he'd gotten confused, and she said, “The price is the same in any case. It's a standard family room with a couch that opens into a double bed and two small children's beds.” Also, when he paid her cash, in two-hundred-shekel notes that he removed from an envelope, she looked at him amazed.

 

ON HIS WAY BACK HOME, ON
foot, before evening, it seemed to Chaim that someone was following him. He lingered at a corner. Didn't cross the street even when the light for pedestrians changed to green. The woman who passed by him with a baby stroller was taller and thinner than Jenny. Maybe the fear rose up in him again because of the mistakes he'd made at the travel agency. At the clothing store he made no mistakes. He slowed down the pace of his walking. Tried to think different thoughts. The woman with the baby stroller continued walking until she disappeared from his sight.

He thought that in the past twenty-four hours he had spoken to more people than he spoke to in a normal week of his life. There was the good talk he had had with Chava Cohen at night, and the conversation with the young security guard at the entrance to the Tax Authority building, and the exchanges with the clerk at the Ministry of the Interior. In the afternoon he talked about their trip twice, to the Russian agent at the travel agency and to the saleswoman at the clothing store Bella Donna. He recalled what Jenny used to say to him: “People can only talk to you in your sleep.” But even when he spoke, she didn't listen. Sometimes he would turn to her in the evening and she would ignore him, focused on the glowing television, or rereading old letters from her sister. As if she hadn't forgiven him for having the children, as she hadn't forgiven them. And even on the day he came back from work and saw the welts on Shalom's face, he tried to convince her to speak with the teacher, but she wouldn't listen. He remembered that Ezer looked at him, and when he noticed his gaze, the boy took off, walked to the living room, as if he were ashamed of his defeated father. That was their last conversation. The saleswoman in the clothing store said to him, when she examined the picture of the children, “Such beautiful boys. And how much the two of them look like you,” as if Jenny's death intensified the resemblance between them and brought them closer to him. He had entered Bella Donna after going past all the clothing stores on Sokolov Street because only there did he see clothes that looked to him like the clothes Jenny wore. The saleswoman first scrutinized him with a reserved look, perhaps because men rarely visited the store and perhaps because he hesitated for a moment at the entrance, opposite the display window, before going inside. In the entrance to the store, on the right side, were thin colorful dresses, short tricot shirts, and buttoned shirts on hangers. Inside the store were evening dresses and suits.

Chaim told the saleswoman that he wanted to buy a gift for his wife and presented her with the picture Marisol took in Cyprus: Jenny in a white dress and he in a suit just moments before entering the mayor's office. “That's a picture from a few years ago, but she looks the same, in terms of sizes,” he explained, and the saleswoman said, “Terrific. I think size thirty-eight will do it,” and suddenly he didn't understand why he had brought a picture that he himself was in to the store, or a picture at all. Jenny wouldn't wear the clothes anyway.

“What does she usually like?” the saleswoman asked, and Chaim said, “She wears colorful clothes.”

“And is this a birthday present?”

“No. I'm traveling to go see her with the children. She's in the Philippines and we're flying to her on Friday for a vacation and then we're all coming back together. We'll surprise her with the gift.”

“How nice. So let's see, do you want something more for the evening or something for everyday?”

After thinking it over, he said, “Maybe we should get one of each.” He hadn't thought about it earlier, but it was an excellent idea. The presents will be from the children: one outfit will be from Ezer and the other from Shalom.

On the counter the saleswoman placed two dresses and two shirts and three pairs of pants. She put the dresses and the shirts against her body so he could see. She was younger than Jenny and thinner, but the difference between them wasn't great. She asked him how many years they'd been married and Chaim answered over eight, and she laughed and said, “And you still buy her presents! I should be so lucky.”

In the end he bought a purple silk shirt and white jeans and she wrapped them separately in festive wrapping paper.

When he went to place the black shopping bag in the suitcase in the bedroom it seemed to him that someone had opened it in his absence. The children's clothes weren't organized like he remembered organizing them, stacked on top of each other like the sandwiches in the crate. Also the door to the bedroom closet was open, and he couldn't remember if he had closed it the day before, after his search.

He went from room to room and listened.

The window in the children's room was open and he closed it. Did he open it himself before going out? It was also possible that he had gotten up during his afternoon nap and done this. And yet he felt that someone was in the house, or had been until a few minutes earlier. He tried to recall if the key turned once or twice in the lock before the door opened. Afterward he looked at the street and didn't see a woman who looked like her. Like this morning, Jenny penetrated his thoughts, and he removed her from there. And maybe it was natural that she hadn't disappeared entirely, and wouldn't disappear until they went. On Friday they'd get on the plane to Manila with a stopover in Seoul. For Ezer and Shalom this would be their first time on a plane. They'd sleep another night in the room he grew up in at his mother's house before he got them. And only on Thursday would he tell them about the trip and include them in the preparations.

He saw in his mind's eye the smile spreading over and lighting up Ezer's dark face when he told them that Mom would be waiting for them at the airport.

 

AVRAHAM HUNG UP THE PHONE AND
paced back and forth inside the small room. When he returned and sat down, he gazed at the lists he had prepared since that morning with a black pen. The time was nine thirty and he was still at his office.

A moment before the border police called, it seemed to him that the points were connected and the picture was getting clearer, but now one detail didn't sit well with the rest. Jennifer Salazar left Israel on September 12 and still hadn't returned. The exit registry in the computers of the border police confirmed that she left Israel a few days before the suitcase with the fake bomb was placed on Lavon Street and before the warning call was received at the daycare. And she hadn't returned since.

Avraham removed the black pen from his shirt pocket and drew three black points on a clean piece of paper, like the corners of a triangle without sides. Next to one point he wrote
Holon
, next to the second
Tel Aviv
, and next to the third, a bit farther away from the other two, he wrote
Philippines
. He continued gazing at the sheet of paper for a while and after this took his notepad and went out to smoke on the stairs of the station house.

 

IT WAS A LONG DAY THAT
began early with the report about the previous investigation and the phone calls from Ilana that he didn't want to take. Afterward, Benny Saban had burst into his office and informed him of the assault and he rushed to the scene, and from there went to his meeting with Ilana. He wanted to arrest Sara and interrogate him immediately when they received the list of Chava Cohen's conversations and it turned out that Sara called her multiple times and briefly spoke with her before she left for the meeting in which she was cruelly attacked. But Ilana refused on the grounds that it was necessary to first collect additional evidence against Sara. Which, in the meantime, was piling up more and more.

Even though a team of division detectives observed Sara's every move from the moment he returned to his home from work in the afternoon, Avraham followed him as well, at some distance, on his way from Aharonovitch Street to the city center. He saw him when he entered the Magic Tours travel agency in Weitzman Square. Maybe he shouldn't have done it; he wasn't an experienced detective, and Sara knew his face, but if he couldn't interrogate him he at least wanted to observe him. And perhaps he wanted to make sure himself that Sara didn't flee. He waited a few minutes in the empty square after Sara continued on his way, then entered the travel agency. This was a mistake as well. At any moment Sara was liable to retrace his steps.

The travel agent hesitated before giving Avraham the flight details. First she called the manager of the office, who had already gone home.

Sara purchased three tickets for flight KE 958 from Tel Aviv to Seoul and for connecting flight KE 623 from Seoul to Manila. His flight would take off from Ben-Gurion Airport on the eve of Yom Kippur, Friday, at 8:30 a.m. This was the first flight on which she'd found seats, and Sara wanted to fly as soon as possible. On the return flight to Tel Aviv, his wife would be joining him and their two sons. The travel agent said that Sara's wife was waiting for him and the boys in the Philippines, but she didn't know when she flew because she seemed to have purchased her plane ticket somewhere else. Avraham asked her to inform him if Sara contacted her, even though it was reasonable to assume he'd know about this regardless, because they'd already received the court's approval to tap Sara's phones. Upon leaving the travel agency Avraham called Ilana and told her that Sara was planning to flee and that airline tickets to Manila were in his possession. She weighed the possibilities before instructing him to nevertheless refrain from making an arrest. “That means we have until Friday morning to gather as much direct evidence against him as possible and bring him in for questioning, right? So let's wait a bit more,” she said.

Avraham didn't want to wait.

And he had no doubt he could break Sara in a brief interrogation.

Sara had a motive. He had a violent disagreement with Chava Cohen at the daycare and suspected—justly, it seems—that she was harming his son. He resided two hundred meters from the daycare next to which the suitcase was placed. And when he was questioned, signs of anxiety were evident. He called Chava Cohen and conversed with her before she went out at night to a meeting where she was attacked. And even before this he made it known that his son would not be coming to the daycare the following day. After the assault he ordered plane tickets for himself and his two children in order to flee Israel. Avraham had no doubt that he was the man with the suitcase—and the one who waited at night for Chava Cohen outside the range of the cameras in the parking lot next to the beach and then beat her in the head with a rock and left her unconscious in a ditch.

He had observed him from a considerable distance when he entered the Magic Tours travel agency that afternoon.

Just like during the interrogation at the station, Sara's clothes looked old to him. He wore the same brown pants, fastened with the same brown belt. Before entering the travel agency Sara sat on a bench in the square for a few minutes and scattered some dry pieces of bread he found for the pigeons. Was the urgency Avraham felt related only to the report about the previous investigation he'd read that same morning? From the need to prove to himself, and to Ilana, that he had learned from his mistakes and could head a team investigating a serious crime and solve the mystery within a few hours? During their discussion Ilana said to him, “When we solve this case no one will mention Ofer to you. But you have to put him behind you and focus on the new case.”

But the problem wasn't only Ofer Sharabi.

Chava Cohen had been lying in a recovery room in a hospital since noon, still unconscious. And he hadn't visited her room yet. In the days before the assault he cast doubt on everything she had said and sensed his disgust intensifying each time he heard her name. He still thought that she had lied to him and that she knew who placed the suitcase, and who the assailant was—but now he also felt a sense of duty toward her, almost a desire to apologize. She was a victim of an assault. And she had a son who hadn't even known that his mother was leaving in the middle of the night, not to return. The day had been so packed with events that Avraham almost hadn't thought about the report from this morning, but now he recalled the urgent calls from Ilana, who wanted to inform him of the assault. Like a child, he had sat at his office desk and refused to answer.

And Marianka hadn't called, even though she had promised.

Suddenly Avraham felt the pen continue on the sheet paper in front of him as if on its own and connect the black point next to the word
Philippines
to
Holon
and
Tel Aviv
with a continuous line. Even if Sara's wife was abroad, that didn't mean he was mistaken. His and Ilana's working hypothesis was that they were looking for a man and a woman. The man placed the suitcase on Lavon Street and the woman called to make the threat. The woman arranged the meeting with Chava Cohen and the man showed up in her place. But the first phone call, at least—which they knew with certainty was made by a woman—could have been made from anywhere. They hadn't succeeded in locating its source, but it was certainly possible to ascertain if it was made from Israel or abroad. He thought about calling Ilana to share the idea with her but knew that she wouldn't change her mind with regard to the arrest and the interrogation. And, anyway, they were supposed to meet in her office tomorrow morning.

 

A YOUNG PATROLWOMAN IN UNIFORM SAT
by the door of Chava Cohen's room in the Trauma Unit.

On a bench in the corridor outside the room sat a stocky man in an undershirt, his arms tattooed, and next to him slept a tall, thin youth. His head was resting on the man's shoulder and his body, folded up below, was covered with a blanket. Avraham thought that the man was Chava Cohen's ex-husband, and only later on did it turn out that he was her brother. The sleeping youth was her son. The son who was called into the operating room and looked at his mother over the shoulders of the surgeons in order to confirm her identity for the police. He hadn't gone home since. Avraham presented his ID and the cop opened the door to the room for him.