The Labyrinth of Osiris (17 page)

There was a picture of a man he’d never heard of called Jack Grubman, and a half-page advert for – appropriately – a collection of crime fiction audio books. Only three articles. One on the Indian economy, one about an investor dispute at some banking conglomerate and one about gold-mining.

Gold.
Vosgi
.

He leant forward and started to read.

Romania gives Barren gold green-light

Bucharest – US minerals and petrochemicals giant Barren Corporation has been granted a 30-year licence to develop the Drăgeş gold mine in the western Apuseni Mountains. Barbados-registered Barren Corp. will hold a 95% stake in the mine, with the remaining 5% held by state-owned Minvest Deva.

Known since Roman times, the Drăgeş deposit is still estimated to hold 30–40 million ounces of refractory gold, at a uniquely high concentration of 35 grams per tonne.

In a ground-breaking industry move, the licence was granted only after Barren offered legally binding guarantees concerning pollution management and environmental protection. The process of extracting gold from ore results in significant levels of toxic waste, and the Romanian government are anxious to avoid a repeat of the 2000 Baia Mare disaster when a tailings lake burst its dam and polluted much of the upper Danube basin. While the terms of the Drăgeş concession permit fast-decomposing toxic material to be disposed of locally, Barren have undertaken to transfer all non-degradable residue to processing facilities in the US for immobilization and landfill.

‘We take our environmental responsibilities extremely seriously,’ commented Barren CEO Mark Roberts. ‘At Drăgeş we are delighted to usher in a new era of cooperation between the mining industry and green interests.’

When fully operational the mine is expected to produce 1.5 million ounces of gold annually. Gold is currently priced at $525 per ounce.

Ben-Roi reached the end and sat back, puzzled. There was no question this was what Kleinberg had been looking at. Not just because of the gold/
vosgi
connection, but because among the confusion of papers on the desk in her apartment there had, he seemed to remember, been several things on gold smelting, and also an atlas bookmarked at a map of Romania.
Why
she had been looking at it was a different matter. According to her editor, Kleinberg had been working on an article about sex-trafficking at the time of her death. How that linked with a gold-mining operation in Europe Ben-Roi couldn’t begin to imagine, although the name Barren did seem to ring a vague bell. He scratched his head, trying to remember where he’d heard it before. He couldn’t pin it down and after scribbling a couple of notes he decided to move on.

Next up – already loaded and ready to go – was
The Jerusalem Post
. Friday, 22 October 2010 edition. Front page mostly taken up with articles on
ha-matzav
, the current political situation, with a small picture piece on chess and, in the bottom right-hand corner, an advert praising Rabbi Meir Kahane – ‘the truest, most noble Jewish leader of our generation’. He shook his head, torn between black amusement at the sheer stupidity of it, and annoyance that a dickhead like that should get front-page coverage in a major national. Then, dismissing it, he pressed the forward button and started working his way through the paper.

It took him less than a minute to make a link. Page 4. News In Brief. Barren again.

Tel-Aviv office break-in

The Ramat Hachayal offices of US multinational Barren Corporation were broken into on Wednesday night. An anti-capitalist group styling itself The Nemesis Agenda held security guards at gunpoint, removed paperwork and hacked into company computer systems. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Israel Police on (03) 555-2211.

He remembered now where he’d come across the name Barren. Yesterday, when he’d been stuck in traffic inside the Jaffa Gate. There’d been a hoarding with an artist’s impression of what the area would look like once all the roadworks were finished. Its strapline had read: ‘Barren Corporation: Proud to be sponsoring Jerusalem’s future history.’

Why Rivka Kleinberg should have been interested in the company or a break-in at their offices he had no idea – as with the gold-mining article, there was no obvious cross-over with the story she had apparently been working on. He quickly went through the rest of the paper to see if anything else struck a chord. It didn’t, and having again scribbled a few notes, he shifted to the next machine along.
The Times
, 17 May 1972. Front-page photo of a man in hand-cuffs, accompanied by the headline: ‘Mr Wallace, now off critical list, heading for big victory in the Maryland primary.’

So far things had moved along reasonably swiftly. Now they slowed to a crawl. Although only twenty-eight pages long, the paper was crammed from one end to the other with a dense thicket of text: news stories, features, op-eds, letters, reviews, births, marriages, obituaries, classified ads, all in a type so small it made his eyes swim and his head ache. For a moment he thought he’d found what he wanted on page 7 where there was a big piece on the opening of a new hydro-electric dam in Romania. It had an Israeli angle as well: a couple of paragraphs at the end described how Romanian President Ceauşescu had recently held a meeting with Golda Meir to discuss the Palestinian situation. Romania and Israel. Clear links. Something, however, some gut instinct, told him that they were only coincidental and it was not this that Rivka Kleinberg had been looking at. He read the article through a couple of times, then moved on.

In the end he spent the best part of an hour on the paper, laboriously ploughing through articles on everything from the assassination attempt on Alabama Governor George Wallace to the Vietnam War, from industrial unrest in the UK to the population boom in Japan, from a woman who had given birth to eight pairs of twins in Iran to another woman who had fallen down a hole in Egypt. Naomi Adler and Asher Blum wandered around the room returning books to shelves, then went out to get some lunch, then came back and still Ben-Roi sat there, oblivious to them, oblivious to the time, oblivious to everything except the text in front of him. Jerusalem, he had once heard, had the highest per capita concentration of eye problems in the world due to all the
yeshiva
students who did nothing but pore from dawn to dusk over the fine print of Jewish holy texts. The more he read, the more Ben-Roi suspected it was a statistic to which he’d soon be adding. And still he could find nothing that might explain why Rivka Kleinberg should have been interested in that particular publication.

Eventually he reached the end of the paper and, defeated, gave up the search, accepting that whatever Kleinberg had been looking at, he wasn’t going to find it. He changed chairs yet again and focused on the last of the papers on Kleinberg’s list:
The Times
– 16 September 1931.

To his dismay, the articles here were even more crammed, and the text even smaller than the 1972 edition. The first three pages didn’t even carry articles, just eye-wateringly minute lists of births, marriages, deaths and classified adverts. Rather than go through it all with a fine-tooth comb, as he had the previous paper, he decided to skim, skating from page to page in the hope that something would leap out at him.

And it did. Finally. On page 12. Imperial and Foreign News. A short three-line story wedged between pieces about floods in China and a hurricane in Belize. It was so brief he had already looked over it and moved on when something suddenly clicked and he went back.

Englishman missing

(From our own correspondent)

Cairo, September 15

Mr Samuel Pinsker, a mining engineer of Salford, Manchester, is reported missing from the town of Luxor. The search continues.

He was tired and had a headache and it took a moment for him to remember where he’d seen the name before. Then it came to him. Standing, he went back to the previous reading machine and the previous
Times
, 17 May 1972. The last page of the paper was still displayed. He rewound the reel. Back to page 2, then forward, searching. He went through pages 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, then doubled back, eventually cornering his quarry in the bottom right-hand corner of page 5. The story about the woman falling down a hole in Egypt. He hunched forward, reading:

A lucky escape

Luxor, Egypt, May 16 – A British woman enjoyed a lucky escape after falling into a remote shaft tomb during a honeymoon stay in Luxor. The accident happened while Alexandra Bowers was walking with her husband in the hills around the Valley of the Kings. Despite falling 20 feet, Mrs Bowers suffered nothing more serious than a fractured wrist and bruising. Someone else had not been so lucky. While at the bottom of the shaft, Mrs. Bowers discovered the body of a man, perfectly preserved in the dry desert conditions. Although a formal identification has yet to be made, the body is believed that of Samuel Pinsker, a British engineer who went missing over forty years ago and is believed to have fallen into the shaft while exploring the Theban Hills. Mr. and Mrs. Bowers have now returned to the United Kingdom.

He read through it three times, went over and reread the earlier story, then sat back, rubbing his eyes. A mining engineer disappears in Egypt, an American multinational opens a gold mine in Romania, their offices are broken into in Israel, Rivka Kleinberg is interested in all these things, Rivka Kleinberg gets garrotted. There were threads here. Threads and connections, a whole spider’s web’s worth. It all linked somehow, formed a pattern. Work out the links, understand the pattern, and you solved the crime. Simple. Like doing a jigsaw. Except that this particular puzzle seemed to have a thousand different pieces and no clue as to what the overall picture actually looked like. It was, to use Leah Shalev’s phrase, a craptangle. The mother of all craptangles. And the more he thought about it, the more confusing it seemed and the more his head hurt.

He groaned and stretched out his legs, staring distractedly at a wall clock on the far side of the reading room. 1.20.

A moment later Asher Blum and Naomi Adler looked up, startled, as a cry of ‘Oh shit!’ shattered the silence.

When Ben-Roi ran out into the campus car park, he was in such a hurry to get into his Toyota and over to Sarah’s place that he didn’t notice the university athletics track 200 metres away, let alone bother looking at it. Had he looked, he would have seen a lone figure jogging around the track’s perimeter. And had he waited until that figure reached the nearest point on its circuit he would have recognized it as his fellow detective Dov Zisky.

Zisky often came down here after Saturday morning
shul
. There were rabbis who said you shouldn’t run on
Shabbat
, that it was a day of rest and exercising was contrary to the law, but Zisky had always had his own take on the faith. Had his own take on most things. He was dutiful, but not to the point of slavishness. And anyway, the
Tanach
enjoined
oleg Shabbat
– the pleasure of the Sabbath – and keeping fit gave him pleasure. Ergo it was OK.
Ha-Shem
, he imagined, probably had bigger things on His mind.

He speeded up and sprinted for a hundred metres, then slowed and threw out some punches, loosening his arms. He knew what people saw when they looked at him, what they thought. That he was weak. Effete. A pushover. Appearances can be deceptive. He didn’t make a big thing of it, always tried to side-step confrontation, but when the situation arose, he could more than take care of himself. People had learnt that over the years. People like Gershmann at the Police Academy. Normally Zisky shrugged off the gayboy taunts – he’d been getting them for long enough – but sometimes he could be pushed too far and would launch in. Apparently Gershmann had used to do a bit of modelling in his spare time. Not any more. Now he’d have a crooked nose for the rest of his life.

He broke into a sprint again, then dropped to the grass at the side of the track and started doing press-ups, really pumping them out, enjoying the pull on the muscles of his arm and chest. As he jacked up and down, a silver
Magen David
flopped out of the top of his sweatshirt and he was forced to stop in order to tuck it back in. It had belonged to his mother and he didn’t want it getting damaged. He ensured it was safely stowed, finished the press-ups, rolled on to his back for a round of sit-ups and hit the track again.

She’d died a couple of years ago, his mum, although it still only seemed like yesterday. Cancer. Lymph, lungs and stomach. Everything, basically. A week before the end, emaciated, all her beautiful golden hair lost from the chemotherapy, she’d insisted on leaving hospital to attend his police graduation. Her brother had been a policeman, had died in the line of duty, and now her son had got his badge as well. She’d wept with pride. And Zisky had wept too. Not in front of her, but later, back in the academy building. That’s when Gershmann had found him and started in with the gayboy stuff. Six foot two and 90 kilos, but Zisky had taken him to pieces. Ignorant shit.

He increased his speed, holding it at just short of a sprint, his trainers beating out a rhythmic thud on the track surface, the cold pendulum of his mother’s
Magen David
sliding back and forth across his sweat-drenched sternum.

He thought about his mother a lot. A cliché, he knew, the gay man who loves his mum, but that’s how it was. She’d been a good woman. Strong. Had kept the family together through some tough times. At the end he’d sat holding her hand and stroking her bald head and she’d made him promise to be a good son and brother to his father and siblings. And, also, to be a good policeman. To always try to do the right thing and bring the wrongdoers to justice.

Which was why, after he’d showered and had a bite to eat, he would be heading over to Rivka Kleinberg’s apartment for a poke around. Because he wanted to do the right thing. Bring the wrongdoers to justice. The faithful weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath, any more than they were supposed to jog or do sit-ups or practise Krav Maga moves. But then Dov Zisky had never been one to stick slavishly to the rules. He had his own take on things.