A Possibility of Violence (17 page)

Suddenly an idea popped into in his head: the house they'd go to from the airport where Jenny was supposedly staying—which they'd stand in front of, making pointless phone calls—wouldn't have to be a random house in Manila. They could go to the house where Jenny grew up. He remembered that she said once, at dinner with his mother and sister and her husband, that she grew up in a poor quarter of Manila that made Holon look like New York City by comparison. Chaim was pretty sure that the name of the quarter was Tondu, because she mentioned it another time as well. The building she lived in with her family was close to the train station where her father was a steward. Her mother worked in a laundry. And he also remembered that a few times she said the name Tutuban—maybe this was the name of the street she lived on as a child. Maybe he could find the address in one of her documents, he thought. He imagined the three of them standing in front of the train station and saying good-bye to Jenny without her being there. A shudder passed through him, because he understood that they were traveling to Manila in order to perform a funeral of sorts for her, and again he realized just how fitting his plan was. Jenny hadn't had a funeral, and never would. He buried her at night, by himself, in great haste, and did everything he could not to look at the body. Even his mother wasn't next to him. If he could succeed in finding the train station and the street she grew up on, and if they went there to say farewell to her, that would be a sort of reburial. He thought how something had changed in their lives even before they went—ever since he conceived the plan and began to execute it. The police inspector hadn't contacted him, and Ezer drew closer to him and trusted him and put his head on his shoulder, as if all the insults the child heard Jenny hurl at him, because of which his image had been so diminished in his eyes, had been erased. He burrowed into the drawer, searching for Jenny's Philippine identity card but couldn't recall if he ever saw it. Afterward he opened the rest of the drawers and got distracted, because for a moment it seemed to him that Ezer's passport was missing. His and Shalom's passports were in the documents drawer but Ezer's passport wasn't there, and he tried to remember if he had removed it in order to check if it was still valid or if he'd taken it to the travel agency. That was the only thing that bothered him throughout the afternoon, but he didn't say anything to the children because he was convinced he hadn't lost the passport, and indeed, after they woke up he discovered it on the sofa in the living room, hidden under the blue pillow, of all places.

The afternoon hours were peaceful as well, even though the boys fought and Shalom cried because he changed his mind and wanted to give Jenny the jeans and have Ezer give her the shirt. In the end, Ezer agreed and they attached the drawings they made and the letters to the presents' packaging with pins, and put the paper bag into the suitcase and closed it. In the carryall they'd take with them onto the plane they put two bags of chips and coloring books and moist wipes and a change of clothes. Chaim said he spoke with Jenny at noon, when they were sleeping, and that she'd be waiting for them at the airport. Shalom asked to speak with her in order to tell her what he drew and he said that in the country where she is it's late and she's sleeping, but despite this he tried calling. They ate an early dinner and showered, and afterward together chose the clothes that they'd wear tomorrow and arranged them on the chair in their room. At seven in the evening the two of them were already in bed and Chaim explained that tomorrow he'd wake them up even before the sun was out because the cab that was going to take them to the airport would be waiting outside their place at five. A long time passed before they fell asleep. He sat next to their beds in silence and waited for them to close their eyes, and recalled that only a few days earlier he was scared that they'd ask him why Mom didn't put them to sleep like always. Now they no longer asked why only he helped them to fall asleep each night, and he was certain that when they returned they'd never ask him again.

 

WHEN HE WAS CLEANING THE KITCHEN
for the last time the phone rang. The time was a little after 8:00 p.m.

He had no doubt it was his mother, but he thought she was only calling to say good-bye. She said, “Are you watching the news?” And when he answered that he wasn't she said, “Turn on channel 2.”

His hands were wet and he wiped them on a kitchen towel before turning on the television, and immediately turned down the volume—and was astounded.

There was no longer any investigation that he needed to flee from.

On the screen he saw a man and a woman, their hands bound in handcuffs, getting out of a police car, and policemen in civilian clothes leading them into the courthouse. He didn't see their faces because the woman lowered her hood-covered head and the man had lifted his shirt and stretched it up over his face. Because he missed the beginning of the story he didn't hear the names of those arrested but understood that the two of them were caught that afternoon in Eilat after a chase, and that they were suspected of the assault and attempted murder of Chava Cohen. The assault, which was only made public that same evening, had occurred in Tel Aviv late Sunday night, and Chava Cohen was still hospitalized at Wolfson Hospital, in critical condition, but her injuries were no longer life-threatening. “The teacher's brutal assault was preceded by the placing of a fake bomb, threats, and efforts at extortion,” said the news announcer over images from the courthouse, “apparently as a result of the firing of the woman, whose spouse is a criminal known to the police.”

Chaim closed the door to the children's room.

Sunday night was the night he spoke to Chava Cohen. He called her numerous times, and she answered him a little before midnight, at least that's what he remembered. A short time after that she was attacked.

Even though he was supposed to feel relief, the images of the man and woman whose faces were hidden gave him chills.

He could have been in their place.

The thought he had at the sight of those first images returned to him: There's no more investigation. Had the daycare been closed since Monday? He didn't really know. He hadn't been summoned for additional questioning, apparently because the identity of Chava Cohen's assailants had soon become clear, and it must also have become clear that they had placed the suitcase next to the daycare. He didn't see the detective who brought him in for questioning at the station among the police surrounding the arrested couple. The telephone rang again and he knew what his mother would say. “Did you see?” she asked him, and he only said, “Yes.” Nevertheless, he didn't for a moment think about canceling the trip. On the contrary, he was sorry that they weren't at the airport yet. The two of them were quiet before his mother asked, “Do you know them?” and he said, “How would I know them?” He was tense and waited for her to suggest that he give up on the trip, because they had nothing to flee from, and he stopped her right away when she said it. “Enough. I explained to you that we're going for them to have a farewell,” he said for the last time.

“But what farewell? And I'm scared about you traveling on Yom Kippur. It's bad luck. It's forbidden to travel on Yom Kippur, Chaim, at least wait a few more days. Nothing will happen if you wait.”

He didn't respond to these words. He finished the conversation and returned to the kitchen in order to continue cleaning. Packed toiletries up in a black cloth bag and remembered to take some towels. At eleven thirty, less than ten hours before their flight, he called Golden Cabs and ordered a cab to Ben-Gurion Airport for five in the morning. Afterward he opened the door to the boys' room and made sure that the two of them were sleeping.

The nights were already cooler, and Ezer slept shirtless and held the thin blanket close to his body. Once they returned, he'd switch their summer blankets for warmer blankets, he thought.

He made sure for the last time that the passports and plane tickets were in the right place, next to his wallet, and turned off all the lights in the apartment.

11

THE QUICK ARREST OF AMOS UZAN
and Ilanit Hadad was the result of the combined efforts of the Tel Aviv district's detectives under the leadership of the head of the Investigations and Intelligence Units, Commander Ilana Lis, and the Eilat Regional Police.

Immediately after questioning Chava Cohen in her room at the hospital, Ilana convened a meeting of the investigation team in an office provided for them in the Trauma Unit. Eliyahu Ma'alul and Lior Zaytuni were called in from their homes. At this stage all they had were two names, written in pencil by an injured hand with the help of the head of the Trauma Unit:
Amos Uzan
, the name that Chava Cohen wrote first, and
Ilanit Hadad
, which she added after the questions that Ilana presented her with at Avraham's request. He felt that someone had struck him forcefully in the chest when he saw the name Amos Uzan, the suspect who had been released at the start of the investigation, on the sheet of paper lying before Chava Cohen, but he still believed that Chaim Sara was involved in the attack and wanted Ilana to ask the injured woman directly about this. Ilana refused but asked Chava Cohen if additional people were involved in the assault, and after repeating the question a few times she wrote the second name.

Avraham was forced to say yes again. He was familiar with the second name as well.

And the second name told an entirely different story of the assault than the one Avraham had told himself. Yes, he was correct when he assumed that a man and a woman were involved in the assault, and also correct in the assumption that the teacher knew her assailants. But Sara was apparently not the man who placed the suitcase with the fake bomb next to the daycare, nor the man who waited for Chava Cohen near a parking lot in south Tel Aviv and struck her in the head. Ilana asked Chava Cohen twice if she could say why she was attacked and she moved her head from side to side on the pillow. The weak crying stopped and her eyes closed, and the chief of the Trauma Unit said, “You got what you wanted. Please turn off the cameras and the lights and let her rest.”

Upon leaving the room, Ilana said to him, “So tell me who those two are,” and Avraham told her.

Ilana stopped in the corridor and turned to him, and he stopped opposite her.

So in fact you're telling me that he was in your custody before the assault and was released? And that you didn't question her at all even though you knew that Chava Cohen fired her?
These were the words he read in her eyes, but she didn't say a thing. She continued walking. He explained that he had no choice but to release Uzan from custody. He presented Chava Cohen with his picture and she claimed that she'd never seen him. And Avraham didn't know about the connection between Uzan and the assistant who had been fired from her job a week before the start of the year. He tried to call the assistant in for questioning but was told that she was out of town.

“And that's it? She was out of town? So nothing could be done?” This sentence Ilana said quietly, as if in despair.

But what could have been done? The detective team trailed Uzan for a few days and afterward the detectives were needed on other assignments. And after the assault, Sara obviously became the primary suspect and drew most of his attention. He didn't mention Sara during their short conversation even though he couldn't get him out of his mind, because it wasn't the right moment. For a few minutes he followed Ilana through the corridors of the hospital while she looked for an available room, and afterward, even while she spoke on the phone, until she asked him, “Avi, please give me a few minutes,” and disappeared into the office provided to them.

Avraham left the hospital to smoke.

It was seven in the evening and darkness had fallen, and he knew that tonight would be another night without sleep. From a distance he saw Ma'alul step off a bus and walk toward the hospital, wearing the gray windbreaker he wore at the start of the previous summer, during the investigation into the disappearance of Ofer Sharabi. What took place inside him was strange and inexplicable: he certainly understood that he had made a mistake in this investigation as well, but nevertheless he wasn't weakened. He felt some embarrassment over Uzan's early release, but also an inner certainty that precisely because the assault case was close to being solved he would be able to concentrate on the real case, the case that no one besides him had yet identified. Less than thirty-six hours remained to arrest Chaim Sara before he'd get on a plane and escape to Manila with his children, but now he no longer had a reason to arrest him.

And something again burned inside him, exactly like before.

 

EVEN THOUGH SHE DIDN'T ANNOUNCE IT
explicitly, from that moment on, Ilana managed the investigation herself. She updated Ma'alul and Zaytuni about the results of the questioning that was held in the hospital and determined the sequence of pressing investigative activities that the three of them would carry out. Even though the chance was slim that Uzan was waiting at home for the police to come, Zaytuni was sent there with officers from a Special Operations Unit and would be left there to perform a thorough search of the empty apartment. The model and license-plate number of Uzan's car were broadcast to all mobile units and traffic police throughout Israel. Ma'alul was sent to question Uzan's mother, who was hospitalized three floors away, in the hospital's Oncology Department. She didn't know where her son was and only said that on Sunday, the evening of the attack, he had informed her that he wouldn't be visiting her for a few days because of issues with work. The week before he came to visit her almost every day with his girlfriend. This, then, was their meeting place, and the reason that the investigation team hadn't discovered the tie between Uzan and Ilanit Hadad. They met at the hospital, in the mother's room, where they arrived separately, and which they left separately. Avraham was thrown the task of investigating the family of the fired assistant, and he left in his car for their house without informing them of his visit in advance. The parents were surprised by his visit but cooperated, because he minimized the importance of their daughter's involvement in the assault and focused on Uzan.

The first time that he mentioned Uzan's name Avraham already understood that this was a sensitive subject.

The parents lived in one of the towers that were built crowded together in Kiryat Ben-Gurion. The elevator didn't work, and he walked up to the sixth floor. They were eating dinner when he arrived and invited him to sit by the table located between the kitchen and the living room, on which were a loaf of bread and a bowl of salad and a cup filled with sour cream. Ilanit Hadad's sister, with whom he had spoken over the phone a few days earlier, wasn't there, and the father, in his early fifties, though he looked much older, went into the bedroom and got dressed.

He came to question them in regards to the assault of a person whose name he was not able to reveal at this time, he said.

Amos Uzan was suspected of involvement in the assault, and, according to information that had reached the police, there was a romantic tie between him and their daughter. He wanted to know when was the last time they saw Uzan or heard from their daughter of his whereabouts, because according to suspicions Uzan had fled and the police were hoping to arrest him for questioning.

The mother broke out crying even before he finished speaking.

She was also in her fifties, but looked much younger than the father. She wore black tights and a white sports shirt and sneakers, and Avraham assumed she had just returned from a health club or a Pilates lesson. She said, “Ever since the day she met him she hasn't been the same girl. You don't know how much we tried to convince her to break it off with him. Ilanit's a good girl, she's not involved in anything, but since they met I lost my girl.” The father's participation in the conversation was minimal. He placed his hand on his wife's shoulder while she spoke.

Avraham asked the mother in a soft voice, “Where is Ilanit now?” and she said to him, “I swear to you I don't know. She hasn't been home for four days and hasn't called. She said she's going away with him to see some friends but didn't want to tell me where.” She took her cell phone with her but it was turned off and they hadn't managed to reach her, and she hadn't responded to their text messages. Avraham sought to deepen her fear for her daughter's fate when he said, “You are correct that Uzan is a dangerous person, and this is an additional reason why we want to locate him and Ilanit as soon as possible,” at which she broke down and explained to him that after Ilanit visited them at their home and told them about the trip, she discovered that one of her credit cards was missing. She suspected that Ilanit had taken it out of her wallet, and when she checked with the credit-card company they informed her that it had been used at a supermarket in Eilat. She hadn't canceled the card.

Avraham still had not revealed to her that the victim of the assault was Chava Cohen. He asked her to tell him about Ilanit.

She was twenty-three years old, born February 1990, and before she met Uzan, the previous winter, she still lived at home. Since then she had slept at his place, sometimes for weeks straight, and returned home only when they fought or when Uzan was out of the apartment. She hadn't been accepted for active service in the army because she had a birth defect in her leg, a slight disability, but she volunteered and served in the Education Force as a teacher. After she was released she started studying early-childhood education and worked at daycares, but then suddenly quit her studies, under Uzan's influence, and only informed her parents of this after the fact. She hadn't kept in contact with most of her friends from high school or the army, and she didn't speak about her relationship with Uzan. She met him at a club, and he was her first serious boyfriend. They didn't know who her friends were now, and hoped that she wasn't using drugs. And mainly feared that Uzan would get her pregnant. Avraham didn't hold back and asked, “And where does Ilanit work now?” And the mother said to him, “She's not working. They fired her from a daycare just before the start of the year.”

He asked her why her daughter was fired and she didn't know.

Before leaving, he asked to see her room, and the mother led him down a short hallway and turned on the light in an almost empty room.

Avraham entered the room but didn't know what to look for.

There were no sheets on the bed, and the writing desk was devoid of papers and books. Apart from these things there was only a television, hanging off a metal arm, and a wardrobe, and the mother said, “We kept the room for her, but she took almost all her things.” Afterward he asked for a photograph of Ilanit and the mother took a picture off of the refrigerator in which Ilanit was in uniform holding an M16 rifle. It was taken during basic training, she said. He felt an uneasiness, because he hadn't revealed to them that their daughter was also a suspect in the assault and that she would be arrested as soon as she was found, but he couldn't have acted otherwise. The mother promised to inform him if Ilanit contacted them, and wrote down on his notepad the number of the credit card that had been stolen.

Upon leaving the neighborhood Avraham stopped his car and called Ilana.

“They're in Eilat,” he said to her, and she asked, “How do you know?”

He told her briefly about the conversation. Ilana said that she herself would update the Southern District, and he added, “We need to inform the terminal in Taba so that they won't cross the border into the Sinai.”

“And do you understand better now what happened there?”

“No. Her parents have no idea why she was fired and they don't know anything about the assault.”

She asked him what he planned on doing and he said that he would return to the station in order to scan the picture and pass it on to the Eilat police, and would wait for updates. He carried out all the urgent investigative activities, and even succeeded in tracking down the suspects, but the feeling that he was wasting time on the wrong case wouldn't let go of him. Uzan and his girlfriend hadn't been caught yet, but the case was as good as closed and he hadn't dealt with the burning investigation, though time was running out. At 10:00 p.m., from his office, he called the detective overseeing the surveillance of Chaim Sara and heard that the suspect had driven to his mother's that afternoon and brought his children back home. But he was no longer a suspect, and Avraham should have ordered the tracking to be taken off of him. He did not do this.

Did Sara's children know where their mother was?

Sara told him during questioning that his wife had flown to the Philippines in order to take care of her father, but she wasn't in the Philippines, and her father died years ago. And if he wasn't involved in the placing of the bomb or the attack, why had he lied? And why was he traveling with his children to the place where he said his wife was even though she wasn't there?

He didn't know anything about Sara's children, just that one of them was seven years old and the other was three and went to Chava Cohen's daycare on Lavon Street. He didn't even know their names. Did they know where they were flying to on Friday morning? He wanted to see them, and it seemed to him that if he looked at them, he'd understand something he hadn't understood until now. He could simply knock on Sara's door and ask, “Why did you lie about your wife and her whereabouts?” He also could have called Ilana and asked for permission to continue the investigation, but he decided it was better to wait.

In the meantime he opened the e-mail that he received from Anselmo Garbo and read that Jennifer Salazar was born in Manila in September 1970.

At the top of the brief report, the logo of the Philippine police was displayed: a sun of sorts inside of which was a man with a club in his hand.