Pattern Crimes (8 page)

David, Dov, and Shoshana Nahon were waiting in an unmarked police Subaru in front of Jacob Gutman's home.

"It would not be wonderful if we got spotted here." Dov had been opposed to the foray. It would not do for the commander of an important SIT to be observed staking out a man suspected of brokering stolen Torah scrolls.

But Shoshana had been adamant. She'd been watching Gutman for a week. Now the case belonged to her, her first real case, and she was certain Gutman was behind the thefts. She didn't want to share the arrest with an undercover officer, and if David wouldn't let her have this chance then she might as well go back into the army—at least there a young person could prove what she could do.

So now they were waiting, Shoshana coiled with tension, chain-smoking in the back seat while Dov munched potato chips in front. He and David passed the time tossing around ideas about Schneiderman and how he could be made to fit the pattern of their case.

"Suppose Yaakov had knowledge," Dov said. "He'd seen something, suspected who the killer was. He tried to blackmail him and the killer said okay. Then, when they met to make the deal, the killer sandbagged him and did him up like another victim in the series."

"You're nuts!" Shoshana was puffing furiously.
"
Gutman's in there. He's a pushover. Why the hell are we sitting around?"

"Don't get impatient, sweetie. It's not too smart to go into apartments until you're sure how many people are inside." Suddenly Dov turned around and grabbed her cigarette out of her mouth.

"David!"

"Okay. Enough. Let's get this over with." Tired of their bickering he was relieved to get out of the car.

Silence on the street. No one around. A single window lit in the first floor apartment. Jacob Gutman lived there, and it was there, Shoshana was convinced, that he kept his store of stolen goods.

She'd done a thorough job, talked to his neighbors, identified him as a private dealer in rare Judaica. An old man, German born, Gutman had immigrated to Palestine in the thirties. He'd joined the Jewish Brigade, later served in the Palmach. Distinguished himself in the '48 war, lost his wife in 1960 and his only daughter in an automobile accident in 1972.

Shoshana had photographed him surreptitiously, showed her pictures to Aziz Mansour, gotten a positive ID that this was the man who'd sold him the Torah crowns. She'd tracked him through the city, found no evidence he had an outside stash. Assumption: The stolen scrolls were stored in his apartment. Based on proof which she had submitted that several of the crowns had come off of stolen scrolls, a judge had issued her a warrant for a search.

In the entrance hall of the subdivided house David read the tenant roster: Rosenfeld, M.; Rosenfeld, E.; Cohen, L.; Levi, L.; Gutman, J. A purely German building. He looked at Shoshana and nodded toward Gutman's buzzer. "Your bust," he told her. "Your case. You ring."

She nodded, rang, then rang again. No answer, but half a minute later an elderly man in a frayed gray bathrobe came to the glass door and peered out.

Shoshana held her ID against the glass. "Police." Gutman cupped his ear. He was bald on top with tufts of unkempt hair protruding from the sides of his head.
"Police."
The second time she shouted. The old man's eyes darted as he took in the three of them, then he brought his finger to his lips, opened the door, and stepped into the hall.

"What? What?"

Shoshana showed her warrant. David watched Gutman carefully. He was pale, poorly shaven, and he looked scared. But there was also in his manner a subtle hint of relief. David had seen this before: the reaction of a man who, having engaged in illegal activity for years, is finally relieved to be rid of his fear of being caught.

"So, in Israel now the police come in the middle of the night?" Gutman's eyes gleamed with righteous anger. "To humiliate an elderly person before his neighbors? Are these the approved tactics of officials in our Jewish State?" Suddenly he presented his wrists. "You have manacles of course? And instruments of torment? No! But you must extract my confession. You will use pain as a lever. Yes? Am I right? Oh, the pain!
Oh! Oh!"

He muttered something about "storm troopers" as he led them back into his apartment. But when they ignored him and Shoshana began her search, he seemed to realize the game was up. "I'm a Jew like the three of you. I fought in the War of Independence. Why pick on me? Why don't you go after bad guys? Child-murdering Arab terrorists?"

He didn't even bother to turn when Shoshana announced her find. "Scrolls. A closet full of them. Other stuff too. Menorahs, pointers, candlesticks."

"So," Dov asked, "are you the broker or the thief?"

"The menorahs are all legal. I have proof!"

"Sure. They'd be recognized. But scrolls all look alike. Did you organize the robberies or do you just fence the loot? Come on, talk!" Gutman stared at the floor. "You'll talk, old man. In time."

Shoshana glowed. Her first bust and she'd hit gold. This case would make the papers: Stolen Torahs were much better than diamonds and furs.

But then a strange thing happened. For the first time since they'd come into the apartment Jacob Gutman turned to David and stared into his face. "I know who you are," he said. "You're David, aren't you?" He smiled, then slowly began to nod. "Sure, you're David. That's who you are. You're David. David Bar-Lev...."

"He kept staring at me, all the way back to the Compound. I asked him several times how he knew me but he wouldn't say. He just kept smiling and nodding as if I were someone he'd run into unexpectedly, someone meaningful in his past whom he hadn't seen in years."

"No idea who he is?" David, naked, was lying on his back. Anna, wearing just a T-shirt, sat astride him, knees gripping his flanks, sensuously massaging around his neck.

"Just this old crook, that's all I know. Claims to be religious, but then he brokers stolen Torahs."

"Maybe you arrested him once."

"I'd remember." He groaned with pleasure. She had powerful Russian hands and an instinctive ability to locate knots of tension and smooth them away.

"Maybe you knew him in another context. Now he's older, looks different, and you can't remember because he doesn't fit."

"This is a man I'd remember. I'd remember his eyes."

"So how does he know you?"

He blinked. "Can't figure it out."

He twisted beneath her pressure. She bent down to kiss his chest. "Well," she said, "maybe he knew you as a child."

Yes, that could fit with his smile. Gutman had smiled at him the way one smiles at someone one hasn't seen since he was small.

"He could have known my parents." David shook his head. "What a strange thing. I'm glad I didn't know before."

He reached up, slipped his hands beneath her shirt, ran his fingers along her sides. She was a lean girl; he could feel her ribs, ripples beneath her flesh. When he grazed her breasts she trembled slightly, rose, then sat down again directly on his sex.

After they made love, they lay together beneath the covers, clothes scattered where they'd tossed them. Jerusalem hung like a backdrop framed by the window, illuminated towers, domes, and walls dark amber against a deep black velvet sky.

"…Gideon was always the handsome one. Golden youth, golden man. He had beautiful features. Not like mine. Beside him I looked rough."

Anna, running her fingers lightly over his face, protested with her lips.

"No, it's true. People always said I had a good Israeli face, whatever that's supposed to mean. But Gideon had my mother's eyes and her beautiful fine carved lips. Artist friends of my parents were always asking to draw him. People who visited from overseas would take our picture together and then a separate one of him. As he grew older I began to notice that people stared at him, men and women both. He had that special kind of face people can't tear their eyes away from. But there was something wrong with him—I think I always knew there was. It was as if he was somehow too perfect—perfect student, perfect son. And something bad was going on in the family. I still don't know what it was. Some kind of complicity between my parents—whispered conferences behind closed doors, my mother emerging with tears in her eyes, my father with his unhappy worried face. And then those quicksilver alliances between the three of them...."

He paused, trying to recapture an old feeling of separateness, of being part of his family and apart from it too. She was watching him, her eyes large, her compassion written on her face.

"I think that's why you became a detective," she said. "To figure out your family's mystery."

She was right and he loved her for understanding him so well. Also for the quickness of her mind, the direct way she spoke, and, too, for her sensuality, the uninhibited joy she took in making love.

He described for her again Gideon's death, that strange last self-destructive flight, how, on a training mission, fully loaded with bombs, he had suddenly broken formation, flown out over the water, then turned his Phantom to the sky and begun a steep ascent.

"Heading higher, higher, until finally he went too high, blacked out, and lost control. The plane flipped over, then dove straight down into the sea. The news seemed to break my father. Afterward he was never the same. As if somehow it was
his
fault,
his
failure, as if he was responsible for Gideon's self-destructive streak. Gideon always had it, of course. He was forever fracturing a wrist in soccer practice or breaking a leg on a camping trip. It's a wonder they didn't catch on to him in the Air Force—they're supposed to watch the pilots so carefully. Anyway, a month after that my mother was diagnosed as having cancer. Three months later she was dead. Father stopped taking new patients, phased the old ones out. So now he sits in his little room gazing at Gideon's photograph. And then I drop by, a mere detective, mere captain in the police, and I can see the disappointment in his face."

Anna's dark brown eyes were staring straight into his. She held her palm against his forehead. "Why go on like this, David? Why torment yourself?"

He shrugged. "Sometimes it helps to talk. Now I wonder how Gutman fits in. I'll ask father, of course. But he may not tell me. He's like that lately. He hears the question but half the time he doesn't bother to reply..."

The conference room of Jerusalem District Police HQ, between Superintendent Latsky's suite and Rafi Shahar's CID. It was late in the day, shadows were long; fading sunlight reflected off the top of the conference table adding luster to the old worn wood.

Rafi sat in the head chair, pipe and tobacco set out in front of him, his sad watery eyes scanning the others as they spoke. David sat to his right. Sarah Dorfman perched behind vigorously taking notes.

Dr. Sanders and Professor Haftel had done most of the talking, but the five other specialists had contributed too. Including, David was pleased to note, Dr. Avraham Bar-Lev, who had spoken not with his usual lethargic delivery but with his former clarity and force.

And yet what did it all come to? David wondered as Rafi tried to reconcile and then summarize their views. So much that was obvious, so little that was new: that the killer was almost certainly an Israeli male between twenty and fifty years old; that he had almost certainly served in a military unit where signs of psychological disturbance may have brought him to the attention of a staff psychologist. Possible criminal record, suggested by his expertise in stealing cars, though that was far from clear. The killer knew Jerusalem well, so he either lived here or had done so in the past. A strong possibility that he also knew Tel Aviv.

Such were the objective parameters that could be fed into various computerized data banks, the basic one that held the Israeli national identity list as well as those of the police and the IDF (Israel Defense Force). But as Rafi had pointed out very quietly at the beginning of the conference, he expected such a search would produce between one and two hundred thousand names.

Which left the psychological criteria, not entered into any computer system and thus not useful as a means to screen the citizenry.

"We are dealing here with an entire country of suspects," Dr. Sanders announced. "There're at least a million and a half adult Israeli males. We can give you a feeling of what this man may be like, but we cannot tell you where to find him, or even where to begin to look."

A loner, they all agreed, perhaps even a brooder, but socially adept too, able to inspire confidence, get people to go off with him, lure them to a lonely place. With Ora Goshen and Halil Ghemaiem he had been a man in search of sex, but with Susan Mills and Yaakov Schneiderman he had assumed a more subtle identity which these victims had believed.

Once he killed he owned his victims' bodies, believing he had full permission to "sign" their flesh. Autopsies revealed Susan Mills had been tortured before she'd been killed, but that the others had only been mutilated after death. This change in method struck Dr. Bar-Lev as an important, perhaps even vital clue:

"She was his first victim, so he may have learned from his experience with her that he couldn't bear to hear human screams. Then he decided that in the future he would work only on bodies that were dead. You see, really he's a butcher. The live person doesn't interest him at all. He's less a sadist than a man detached from life. He could be a worker in a slaughterhouse or a mortuary, or an actual butcher in a meat market, or a hunter who likes to skin and cut up game."