Pattern Crimes (45 page)

"Why do you
think there's been so much tension, Rafi?"

"Strain of the job, I guess. Stress of the case."

"Do you remember that symposium back in May, the first one we held in Latsky's conference room?"

"With Sanders and your father? Sure."

"You told them I was the best detective in Israel. Do you remember saying that?" Rafi smiled. "But you didn't mean it, did you?"

Rafi squinted at him. "Why do you say such a thing?"

"You didn't think I'd see through your bullshit then."

Rafi's face turned stern. "What's on your mind, David?"

"You were 'Hurwitz.' I know that now. You were the driver of the van. You overheard everything, and you took down all the names so that later the witnesses could be killed. You played me for a fool, Rafi, with your 'our first Israeli serial murder case' and 'consistently marred flesh' and 'you're my best man so I'm giving this to you' and 'it's a pattern crime so you solve it because you're in charge of pattern crimes.' "

Rafi stared at him. "So that's why you came. You've come here to arrest me."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"You sound bitter."

"I trusted you. How should I sound?"

"I suppose I ought to say I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize to
me,
Rafi. Just tell me why did you do it?
Why?"

"You've heard me complain often enough. You know how I feel about things these days."

"I thought you hated the intolerance, the polarization. I thought you hated the way the fanatics have been gaining power."

"Yes, I hate all that. But you didn't listen carefully. If you had, you'd understand why I think Gati's right, that our only long-term hope is to become bigger and more powerful."

"And if—"

"Yes, if that means making alliances with pigs like Katzer or screwballs like Stone, that's okay too. When you need allies you take what you can get. Which is why Israel's allied now with South Africa."

"
A war
, Rafi?"

"A war might be the best solution."

"
Might be!
" David shook his head. "But, you see, I don't give a damn about your politics. I only want to know how you could bring yourself to set those people up?"

"Will you believe me, David, when I tell you that that wasn't what I was trying to do, that the thought that they might be killed never entered my head? When the accident happened and Stone got hurt, my first priority was to salvage our cause. It had taken months to set up that meeting. It was the crucial meeting where the final deal would be struck. So I started shouting and pretending I didn't speak English to draw attention to myself and give the three of them time to get away. Then that damn nun started snapping pictures. I tried to grab her camera, but she wouldn't give it up. Then other people crowded around. So to distract them I took down their names. It was only later, after Cohen's assholes killed the nun, that he decided to get rid of all the witnesses and bury the killings in a case I could control. None of it was directed at you personally. I never doubted you were a fine detective, maybe even the best in Israel. But best or not you're plenty good enough, otherwise I wouldn't have you on my staff."

They sat facing one another, two men who'd once been friends. Finally David spoke.

"I can forgive you for using me, but not for being party to the murders." He stood up. "I'll arrest you in the morning. That way you have tonight to explain things to Ruth and organize your affairs."

"I did what I did for love of Israel. You must believe that, David, if nothing else."

David looked at him and shook his head. "Oh, yes, Rafi—for love. For
love
..." He turned away.

The next morning when Rafi did not appear, David was not surprised. He called the house. Ruth told him that Rafi had been up the whole night working in his study, and then, just before dawn, had driven off without saying good-bye.

That afternoon, when an envelope addressed to David was hand-delivered to the guardhouse of the Russian Compound, he had an idea what had happened. Inside the envelope was a complete sworn and signed confession of Rafi's role as conspirator in the Ninth of Av affair.

Two days later an army patrol found Rafi's body in the Judean Hills. His police Beretta was still in his hand. There was a single bullet in his brain.

At the end of September, just three days before the Jewish New Year, the weather in Jerusalem changed. The sun, which for months had been baking the streets, suddenly became more temperate. The harsh white sky turned a deep fathomless blue, and the dry cutting winds gave way to a gentle breeze. Jerusalemites, welcoming these changes, congratulated themselves on their good fortune. It was such a privilege to live in a city imbued with so much radiance!

The following afternoon David left work early, then walked from the Russian Compound over to his father's room on Hevrat Shas. The ostensible purpose of this visit was to invite Avraham for Rosh Hashanah dinner. But David had other matters on his mind.

"Irina Targov is back," he told his father. "Remember how she insisted her husband and Sokolov had to be buried side by side? Now she wants a new inscription cut into the base of Targov's sculpture: 'Dedicated by Aleksandr Targov to His Oldest Friend Sergei Sokolov in Honor of His Lifelong Struggle on Behalf of Imprisoned Soviet Jews.' "

Avraham shook his head. "On some level she knows she ruined their lives. Now she wants to force them to forgive each other."

"But they never would have done that."

"No, of course not. But still I think Irina did a healthy thing. Now she should feel less guilt."

Hearing his father say that David couldn't help but wonder:
Does he now feel less guilt himself?

They talked for a while then about a conference Avraham was going to attend on Kabbalah and psychology.

"I think you're still interested in psychoanalysis, Father."

"On a theoretical level I am."

"But you won't go back to taking patients?"

Avraham shook his head. There was silence then between them, a silence David did not wish to break. He could feel there was something the old man wanted to say. He would wait until his father said it—the "tell-your-story method."

"You were right, you know?"

"About what?" David asked.

"Something you said to me last spring."

"What was that?"

"You said you felt that we were very much alike—that we both wanted to get to the bottom of things and neutralize the demons." Avraham paused. "I mocked you for saying it. Mocked you many times for the work you chose to do."

"I remember..."
Was the old man really going to apologize?

"Now I know that you were right. Not only about our being alike, although I believe your observation there is most acute. I also think you were right for making the choice you did. Your work is immensely valuable, David. You
do
render the demons harmless."

David was speechless. His father could have given him no greater gift than this: acknowledgment that he, the surviving son, had been passed the torch, and now was carrying it well.

His eyes strayed to the photographs of his mother and Gideon. Avraham must have noticed because he suddenly began to speak of them.

"She and I destroyed him," he said. "Instead of loving each other, as we did when you were young, we focused all our love on him. We struggled over him, and, in the end, I think we tore him apart."

"Maybe it's time, father, for you to forgive yourself. All this tortured thinking—it can't do you any good."

Avraham did not answer, but David thought he saw a subtle nod.

To divert him David told him the latest news on the case: Ephraim Cohen's attempt, through his attorney, to have the videotaped confessions ruled inadmissible.

"He wants a political trial so he can claim the role of victim. He'll depict me as his persecutor."

"What will happen?"

"He doesn't have a chance. Rafi's confession nails him and even Levin's disowned him now. There's a big shake-up going on inside Shin Bet. Lots of fancy talk about abuses of trust and power."

"The others?"

"Stone can't come back. He's
persona non grata.
No way to touch him—basically all he did was write a check. Gati's still away in France. I think it'll be a long time before we see him again. And Katzer is still raving and holding rallies. He predicts he'll be prime minister in six or seven years."

"Unfortunately, a lot of people would like to see that happen. Katzer is our collective sickness, the dark side of everything we built. When people like him and Gati talk about Israel, they always end up discussing territory. They don't understand what Israel is. The territory here." Avraham pointed to his head.

"There was a public brawl in Tel Aviv the other night. Katzer zealots battling Peace Now sympathizers. They smashed up a café on Dizengoff, toppled tables and broke a lot of mirrors."

Avraham thought about that for a while, and then finally he nodded. "Perhaps instead of breaking the mirrors," he said, "they should look more closely at their reflected faces."

Later, outside on narrow Hevrat Shas, David found himself surrounded by youngsters. They were pouring out of the yeshivas, young men and boys garbed in black, and they pressed against him as they passed. But strangely he found he was not annoyed. For the first time
in
memory he did not recoil, nor wish to break loose from contact with these people, nor did he see, as he looked into their faces, suspicion or contempt, nor feel, on his own part, any of his usual distaste.

A man his age, a rabbi, with milky skin and heavy spectacles and a thick black beard, nodded as he approached. David nodded back. Their eyes met, they smiled, and then David felt something pass between them, some fine, rare form of acknowledgment.

He thought about it as he walked away, asked himself what it was. Recognition, he decided, recognition that although each had chosen a different path, an opposite way to live, still they were connected. And that although this meeting of their eyes would be broken off in a moment, still they were both men and Jews and thus tolerance and even love were possible.

As he stood on the edge of Me'a Shearim, looking across the rubble-strewn lot that separated the ultra-orthodox quarter from the Christian churches and hospices and nunneries to the east, he was struck suddenly by an extraordinary change in the quality of the light. The western sky had luminesced, was now a soft dark violet. The sun, covered a few moments before by thick ribbons of clouds, had slipped and found a window; now a thin band of it, a bar of fire, burned out of the darker sky like a spotlight.

Perhaps two or three times in his life David had seen light like this, slanting in from the west, flowing down upon Jerusalem. It was a hard strong focused light that hit the stones, then seemed to penetrate them, then etched long velvet shadows on the ground.

The effect was magical. As David walked toward the Old City he stopped several times and stared. He saw other pedestrians doing the same, and drivers stopping their cars, then getting out so that they too might feel the radiance. Jerusalem was being transformed. Its beauty was being multiplied. And as each moment passed, and the sun slipped a little lower and its color deepened, all the stones of the city seemed to come alive. The shadows lengthened, and the lines and angles of buildings grew sharper and the curves of domes softer, and
towers seemed to stand straighter and walls to enclose more warmly and steps to invite and arches to protect and doorways to beckon, and
he thought:
This is special. I must not forget this; I must remember this
afternoon for the rest of my life.

He decided to walk home. He entered the Old City by the Damascus Gate. There were mobs of people in the little square but very little noise. He was surprised. Where were the dissonance, cruel clash of languages, wails, usual sounds of torment and abuse? Instead a oneness of sound, almost mellifluous. He recognized it as harmony.

Through the Moslem Quarter, across the Via Dolorosa, down El Wad, then through the long vaulted tunnel that led to the Western Wall. The palpable anger he usually sensed when he crossed these unmarked frontiers between the Quarters was not apparent to him tonight.

The sky was darker now, deep purple like wine, but the sun, nearly red, still burned through hard and strong. The floodlights had not yet been turned on, but the glowing Wall beckoned to him. He gazed at it, then drawn by some instinct he did not understand, approached, picked up a cardboard yarmulke at the barrier, set it on his head, and strode closer, paused, then moved directly to the stones.

Religious men stood around him; the air vibrated with their prayers. And the rough surface of the rocks vibrated too, dancing before the dying sun. The crevices, crowded with petitions, crushed one upon the other, seemed to devour the light. Just in front of him was darkness; he reached forward, touched the place, placed his palm against it. It was his own shadow he was touching and the stone that held it felt warm. Another connection, he thought. It was as if, finally, he had touched the city's heart.