A Possibility of Violence (14 page)

“Do you want me to call one of the doctors?” she asked, and he said no.

He wanted to be alone with her.

But it was difficult to see Chava Cohen in a room that was lit only by a small, weak light above the bed. Her face was bandaged and her body was covered with a blanket. The right side of her head, which wasn't bandaged, was shaven. Dark signs of the injuries stuck out on both her neck and the exposed parts of her face, on her right cheek and forehead. Her eyes were closed.

Avraham didn't see anything that he didn't already know after the phone call with the doctor who operated on her. Nevertheless he sat next to her for some time, as if he hoped that she would wake up while he was there. The doctor said on the phone that Chava Cohen might open her eyes at any moment, but was also likely to remain unconscious for many days. And there was no way of knowing in what condition she'd wake up because it was impossible to measure the severity of the damage.

When he left the room Avraham introduced himself to her brother as the commander of the investigation team. The son didn't wake up even though they spoke loudly next to him, and Avraham wondered if the son could ever forget the picture he had seen in surgery. He asked the brother a few routine questions, even though he wasn't interested in the answers. The brother didn't know a thing about the daycare his sister ran, or about Chaim Sara. He lived in Haifa and last saw Chava Cohen on Rosh Hashanah. Before he said good-bye to him, the brother asked, “You still don't know who did this?”

Avraham shook his head no because the contents of the investigation were confidential, but he was convinced he knew.

Only upon his return home did he find a message from Marianka.

It was after midnight, and Avraham took off his shirt and poured himself some cold water, and after this he opened his in-box and his eyes froze.

He had a feeling that she would write to him, because she hadn't called, but he hadn't imagined what she'd write. The lines were short, like a mourner's notice. Marianka wrote:

D
ON'T WAIT FOR ME
, A
VI
.

N
OT NOW
.

I
KNOW THAT THE TIMING ISN'T GOOD AND THAT YOU'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF AN INVESTIGATION
. T
RY TO CONCENTRATE ON IT AS MUCH AS YOU CAN AND DON'T THINK ABOUT ME
.

M
AYBE ONE DAY IT WILL BE DIFFERENT
.

I
WILL CALL TO EXPLAIN WHEN
I
CAN
.

Part Two

9

THAT NIGHT AUTUMN ARRIVED.

The heat stored over the summer in the narrow spaces inside and between the walls of the buildings didn't dissipate, but strangely dark clouds spread out in the sky and before morning cool drops of rain began falling on the protective nylon tarps that covered the scene of the assault.

Avraham couldn't sleep, though he tried.

When the night turned blue and he understood that sleep was beyond him, he rose from his bed and got dressed. He searched all over the city for an open café because he wanted to be among people, but he couldn't find one. For some time he continued driving with no specific destination, until finally he understood where he had to go.

The police radio that morning was mainly reports of traffic accidents. At five thirty a truck slid on an oil stain that the rain had loosened from the asphalt and struck a motorcyclist traveling in the opposite direction.

Avraham suggested to the policewoman sitting in front of Chava Cohen's room that she should go and take a break. She said, “Are you sure? Because if you're serious, I'm going home to wash up and see my kids. I live here, close by,” and he said that he could stay until eight thirty. A meeting of the investigation team had been set for nine at the Tel Aviv district headquarters.

After she left, he opened the door. Chava Cohen lay in her bed, unconscious. Her face looked more peaceful than it had the day before. Outside the room, on the bench in the dark corridor, her son still slept. Avraham didn't see her brother anywhere. He bought instant coffee from a machine and returned to his place across from the son. He didn't actually have any reason to be there. He no longer thought that she'd feel his presence and wake up. Suddenly it seemed to him that he came to the hospital to watch over not Chava Cohen but rather her son sleeping with his body folded up, alone, outside her room. And there, of all places, facing the sleeping son, his eyes slowly closed.

The corridor was silent and dark, and only at its far end, at the nurses' station, a light glowed.

He woke up when one of the nurses tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he would like something to eat. The bench the son had been lying on was empty, and he saw him coming out of the bathroom after washing his face.

 

IN CONFERENCE ROOM C AT THE
Tel Aviv district headquarters waited Sergeant Lior Zaytuni, the young detective whom he had met in Ilana's office. He had been the first to arrive at the investigating team's meeting, and the cuffs of his pants were soaking wet, as if he'd skipped through a puddle on the way to headquarters. His face was youthful and smooth, and to Avraham he looked too young to be a police detective—perhaps in his early twenties. During the meeting he barely opened his mouth, and when he spoke, a flustered quiver could be heard in his voice. He had difficulty connecting his laptop to the projector by himself and had to beg the assistance of Ilana, who arrived exactly at nine and asked, “Why the hell isn't Eliyahu here yet?”

Ma'alul arrived a bit late, as was his habit, owing to the traffic the sudden rain created. Avraham asked Ilana to add him to the team, even though for now the file didn't contain interrogations of children or teenagers, and Ilana agreed when the Juvenile Division responded that Ma'alul wasn't involved in any pressing investigations. He put a brown leather carryall on the table and asked for their permission to eat during the meeting, since he hadn't had any breakfast at home. Ilana's secretary served everyone weak coffee in paper cups.

Before setting out an egg salad sandwich wrapped in tinfoil and a peeled cucumber on the table, Ma'alul polished the area of the table in front of him with a white handkerchief that he removed from his bag. When he saw Avraham waiting for him in order to open the meeting he said, “Start, Avi, start. Don't wait for me. I eat through one ear and hear with the other,” and Avraham looked at him with searching eyes, though Ma'alul couldn't have known why.

It was the sentence that Marianka wrote to him.

Don't wait
.

Ilana laughed out loud, and Ma'alul apparently noticed something being crushed in Avraham's eyes and whispered voicelessly to him, just moving his lips, “You okay?”

A slideshow of images from the night of the assault was projected onto the screen. Chava Cohen in the ditch under the bridge among empty plastic bottles and rags. She had been left lying facedown, and the forensics investigators who analyzed the scene determined that she had sustained the final blows to her head while laid out like this, motionless. She had looked so sure of herself when she got out of the red Justy in the parking lot, about an hour before she was found in the ditch, and Avraham thought about the difference between the before and the after. How a person's life can change in a moment. Ilana said to him, “Come on, Avi, let's move it along, we're running late. Go ahead and explain to us what happened.”

He was still trying to understand.

 

THAT NIGHT, IMMEDIATELY AFTER READING THE
message, he had called Marianka, even though she asked him not to do this. The telephone in the small apartment in Alfred Bouvier Square in Brussels rang but she didn't answer. If he could have walked on foot or driven to her in a car, he would have. Knocked on the door and demanded an explanation despite her request. In the end he wrote her an e-mail, just one line: W
HY AREN'T YOU ANSWERING ME
?

For a moment he thought that perhaps he hadn't communicated with her enough in recent days, because of the investigation, but he knew that wasn't the problem. He had felt her disappearing on him, and even asked her if something had happened, but she avoided answering. She was in his apartment for just one week back in June, more than three months earlier, but he felt her there in every corner: on the porch, which was his and Marianka's porch, in the living room, whose walls were supposed to be painted white and light blue, in the bedroom, where the closet was half empty and the old wooden shelves were awaiting her clothes. Before morning, prior to going out to the hospital, he again checked his in-box. No answer to the e-mail he had sent her.

Ma'alul patiently chewed his sandwich and covered his mouth with his hand, and Avraham said, “Chava Cohen, a forty-two-year-old resident of Holon, a teacher by profession, was assaulted at night between Sunday and Monday near the beach in Tel Aviv. As is visible from the pictures, it was a brutal attack and was carried out with a rock found at the scene. Threats preceded it, apparently as well as a fake bomb that was placed next to the daycare that the victim runs on Lavon Street. The scene is messy, and it looks like we will have numerous findings from the forensics lab. There will be fingerprints as well as shoe prints. So when we arrest a suspect in the assault we'll have something to work with.”

Ma'alul put his roll on the table and wiped the tips of his fingers with his handkerchief. He said, “Excuse me for interrupting you, but what does this mean that the assault was apparently preceded by threats and a fake bomb?” and Avraham said, “There
was
a fake bomb, not apparently, and there was also a threatening call to the daycare. We haven't located the person or persons who placed the bomb or made the phone call, but we're certain there's a connection between the crimes, even though the victim concealed the threat from us and claimed she had no information about the identity of whoever placed the bomb.”

This time Ilana stopped him. She said, “I would like to emphasize that this is Avi's assumption, not ours. And even if it seems reasonable to me as a working hypothesis, I don't want the connection between the bomb and the assault to become indisputable fact in the framework of the investigation. Rather, I think we should also explore other avenues,” and Ma'alul asked, “For instance?”

Despite his age, Ma'alul looked to Avraham like a schoolboy during lunch break, with the half-eaten sandwich lying on the crumpled tinfoil in front of him.

“For instance, a random assault. Or a mugging. Her phone was stolen along with her wallet. We know for certain there was no rape, but it's impossible to rule out the possibility that there was an attempted rape, or maybe a sexual assault that got complicated.”

Avraham waited for Ilana to finish, then continued without responding to what she'd said. His head was heavy from exhaustion despite his brief nap across the hall from Chava Cohen's son at the hospital. “Our primary suspect is Chaim Sara, a fifty-seven-year-old resident of Holon,” he said. “He has a motive I can elaborate on in what follows. He has no prior criminal record. His son attends the daycare run by the victim, and apparently he came to suspect that she had harmed his son. It's also possible that the motive was expressed in the manner of the assault. The victim was struck in the head, and the suspect said in questioning that his son returned from the daycare with injuries to the head, so perhaps there is a parallel here that needs to be taken into consideration. The main evidence gathered against him is circumstantial but strong. On the night of the assault he called the victim and held a conversation with her before she left her home. The day after the assault he bought plane tickets for himself and his children. He plans to flee Israel on Friday morning.”

Emotion was evident in Zaytuni's face and voice as he asked, quietly, “Have we taken out a stay order to prevent him from leaving Israel? If not, maybe it's a good idea to contact the courts.” Only he looked and behaved as if this investigation into Chava Cohen's assault was the investigation of his life. For Ilana, of course, it was one investigation among many for which she was responsible, and for Ma'alul a break from his work routine in the Juvenile Division. And Avraham had to prove something to himself and to Ilana, but it seemed to him that the closer he tried to get to the investigation the more it retreated from him, and the letter from Marianka only distanced him from it further. Ilana answered Zaytuni instead of him. “If we need to, we'll take out a stay order on Thursday,” she said. “We have two days until then, and I hope that we'll have results from the lab and that we'll be able to bring the suspect in for interrogation and take finger- and shoe prints from him and confront him with the findings from the scene. And, more than that, I hope that the victim will wake up and be in a condition to tell us who assaulted her, or provide a description of him. If she saw him, of course.”

Zaytuni hurried to write something on the notepad lying in front of him. Ma'alul, having finished his breakfast, smoothed out the tinfoil that the sandwich had been wrapped in with the palm of his hand, folded it into a neat square, and put it back in his bag. Avraham said, “There is another issue with the suspect that I've been trying to clarify since yesterday. Our assumption—or mine, as Ilana said—is that a man and a woman were involved in the placement of the bomb and the assault. The warning call to the daycare was made by a woman, and it seems to us that Chava Cohen would not have arrived at the place of the assault in order to meet a man who had threatened her, but perhaps she would have come to a meeting she arranged with a woman. According to the records of the border police, the wife of the suspect, a Filipino citizen by the name of Jennifer Salazar, who holds a temporary ID card, left Israel on September twelfth and has not returned, but something is fishy here. I checked with most of the airlines departing to the Philippines and there was no passenger by the name of Jennifer Salazar on any flights. Not on that date or any other. I will try to reach the Philippine police in order to clarify whether or not she entered the country and if she has a criminal history.”

Ilana looked at him curiously. He hadn't managed to tell her about the calls to the airlines before the meeting.

Did her skepticism concerning Avraham's story stem only from her way of working? Maybe it was somehow connected to a loss of faith in him because of the mistakes in the previous investigation? In fact, the idea to call the airlines occurred to him when he recalled things she had said to him during the search for Ofer Sharabi. More than a week after the search began, in a moment of frustration, Avraham suggested to her the possibility that nothing at all had happened to Ofer. Maybe he got on a plane to Rio de Janeiro and is lying on a beach there? Ilana said to him then, “You know that he's not in Rio de Janeiro, or at least you certainly could know. You can verify with the border police if he left Israel or not. And if he did, you can check with the airlines that fly to Brazil and see if he was on one of the flights that departed to Rio or to destinations along the way. He didn't get on a plane with a fake passport, right? He's not a Mossad agent, he's just a high school kid.”

Now Ilana asked him, “And what if she traveled to some other place?” and Avraham answered, “The suspect stated in questioning that his wife traveled to the Philippines to take care of her sick father, and this is also what he told the travel agent from whom he bought the tickets for himself and his children. But maybe you're right. In any case, if he lied about the travel, it'll be additional evidence of his involvement in the assault and the placing of the suitcase, no? Otherwise why would he lie?”

 

HE DIDN'T THINK ABOUT MARIANKA UNTIL
the end of the meeting, and only twice checked his cell phone under the table to see if he'd received any new messages. Ilana kept on insisting that Sara should not be the only direction of the investigation, and Avraham didn't bother to object. He and Ilana drank another cup of coffee and at ten thirty divided the tasks among the team. Ilana instructed Zaytuni to continue investigating the assault as if it were a robbery. He'd explore links to incidents of assault that occurred in the area in recent months, go back and question the Sudanese men who found Chava Cohen in the ditch, and regularly monitor whether her credit cards were being used or if the stolen phone was turned on or sold. Ma'alul was put in charge of investigating the parents at the daycare. He was supposed to confirm the suspicion that Chava Cohen hit the children and verify whether or not any other parents had a motive for assaulting the teacher. Avraham would continue conducting surveillance from afar, as well as his silent investigation into Sara and his wife. Since the previous evening, after he bought the airplane tickets, Sara hadn't left his apartment and hadn't made a phone call. “And, most of all, let's cross our fingers that the victim will wake up and make our lives easier,” Ilana summed up. “If it doesn't happen by then, we'll meet here Thursday morning and decide how we want to bring Sara in for questioning before the flight.”