With its district encompassing all of the Christian Quarter and its bustling bazaars, the Old City’s Kishla Police Post dealt largely with crimes that were commonplace, if not trivial: pick-pockets, children missing in the markets, family troubles, a knife fight late at night involving boys, or the need to detain and interrogate tourists who had bought either opium or hashish from the locals. There was also the problem of female tourists’ frequent complaints of “indecent touching” by shopkeepers fitting them with clothing, which was currently a widespread cause of neurosis among many of the merchants in the bazaars who had been encouraged in their practice of “touching” by the favorable reactions of some women who had liked it, thus creating the belief it would bring them more business. This was the level of crime in the Old City precinct. Once in three years there was a murder.
His thoughts grown dreamy, the bored corporal was absently rubbing his arm below the single chevron on his sleeve when the blustery wind and rain turned his gaze to the station’s high front door. A tall and brooding yet commanding presence in a rain-slick poncho had entered the post. Quietly closing the door behind him, the stoic and strongly featured policeman somberly nodded at the corporal, his wide-set eyes resting fleetingly upon him with a faraway look of unutterable sadness and something very close to compassion, the unchanging expression that he gave to the world, before turning away and striding past with raindrops dripping from his glistening poncho onto the beige and orange tiles of the floor. The corporal nodded and smiled faintly. In the tall man’s presence he always felt comforted. And safe. He picked up the pen with black ink and inscribed into the ledger:
Sgt. Major Peter V. Meral.
The silvery metal Star of David at the front of the policeman’s black beret made a muted thudding sound on the soft pine wood of the desk where Meral had tossed it upon entering his office. A white-walled cubicle, its only furnishings were the desk, a desk lamp and chair and, up against the wall beneath a large round window looking out to the Station’s vehicle yard and its rows of blue and white police cars, a narrow cot with a dark gray blanket that was smooth and tightly tucked. Meral paused, staring out at the rain for a moment, then looked down at the heading on the cover of the folder he had just retrieved from the File Room: REMLE INCIDENT OF 14 JANUARY 1974. Meral placed it on the desk, sat down and, frowning, once again reviewed his notes.
They baffled to the edge of a taunt. No evidence existed that a crime had been committed. Yet the facts of the case, like the dream of some darkness one cannot remember, vaguely hinted at some hidden and deep transgression. At approximately 3:25 A.M., the time that a call had come in to the Fire Department, a 1971 Land Rover fitted with a cowcatcher at its front and moving at extremely high speed crashed into the single-pump Paz gasoline station located on Remle Street where it intersected Jerusalem Brigade Road just below and outside the Jaffa Gate. An explosion and a fire followed. When police and firemen arrived at the scene, they found the burning and badly damaged Land Rover there, but not its driver or possible other occupants, nor any trace of the driver’s identity. The two witnesses, a husband and wife who lived in the modest two-story apartment just above the Paz station office, had given puzzling and conflicting accounts. The couple’s third floor bedroom looked out onto the street, and as the husband had a prosthetic leg, it was the wife who, after hearing the crash and the explosion, had looked down at the scene through a bedroom window and then raced to the opposite end of their apartment to dial 1-0-2 for the Fire Department, and then 1-0-0 to the Kishla Police Station situated just a few minutes away. The wife then returned to the bedroom window and, looking out once more, saw nothing but the burning Land Rover and gas pump. The vehicle was empty, she reported, and its driver was nowhere in sight. But the husband told a slightly different story.
A. There was a second man.
Q. Are you sure?
A. Absolutely. I didn’t see him, understand. I never got out of bed. The leg. But I heard it.
Q. Heard what?
A. Oh, well, at first a car door opening, and then someone getting out of it and moving very quickly. After that another car door opened and I heard something heavy being dragged across the gravel.
Q. Something or someone?
A. I couldn’t tell. Then after that, small noises. I couldn’t really make them out. Then a car door closing again. It was a sound just like the first. But much softer. And then one more opening and closing sound, and then the sound of the car driving off.
Q. At great speed?
A. Not particularly. No. It was a very small car, by the way.
Q. How could you tell?
A. Oh, I see and hear them all. Thirty years. At night early when we’re closed I sometimes hear them pulling up to use the tire inflator. We also leave out cans of water for cars that might have overheated. Cans of gas. The taxi drivers, the ones down by the Damascus Gate: they all know that.
Q. That’s kind of you.
A. Only God is kind. It could have been a VW.
Q. What?
A. The second car. Or more likely a Topolino. It made that little puttering sound they always make.
Meral had just returned from re-examining the scene of the crash. He had also reinterviewed the husband and wife. This time he challenged the wife’s account by presenting her with that of the husband, but she remained insistent that neither had she seen nor heard a second vehicle or seen any “second man,” although she did at last admit that her first look out the window had been just “a quick glance;” and then she yielded even further, admitting that as she was somewhat in shock, her gaze riveted to the burning Land Rover and the gas pump, perhaps there was indeed another vehicle after all. She couldn’t be sure. As for the husband, this time around he recalled a detail that he said had slipped his mind. He said he had heard someone’s voice.
Q. When?
A. Just before I heard the dragging.
Q. Right after hearing the second car door being opened?
A. Yes, that’s right. A man’s voice. It was low. Very angry. I’d say horrified.
Q. Horrified?
A. Yes. That I’m sure of. And pleading.
Q. And what was being said? Do you recall?
A. He said, “Anyone but you! No, not you!”
Q. Nothing more?
A. No, no more talking. Just the dragging and the footsteps.
The husband was unable to explain how he could have forgotten this when first questioned. He’d looked down, his eyes vague, and said simply, “I don’t know.” He seemed troubled about it. Afterward Meral reinterviewed the two other witnesses in the case. No paperwork, no clues of any kind that would identify the driver had been found in the charred and battered hulk of the vehicle. However, the license plate had survived and led Meral to the Eldan car rental agency clerk who had processed the rental to a man who had paid in cash and presented an international driver’s license in the name of Joseph Temescu, while a supplier of farm equipment in the area was found to have a recent invoice of a sale to him of a cowcatcher, and it was this, Meral thought, that not only pointed most strongly to a crime but to one carried out by a professional killer, for if the driver’s intention was homicide, he would want to assure himself that his vehicle still would be drivable after the hit.
While the salesman who had sold the device to Temescu could not remember the transaction very clearly, the mechanic at the firm did remember affixing it onto Temescu’s car. But as for a description of Temescu, though the Eldan clerk had made a copy of his driver’s license, Temescu had apparently moved as his photo for the license was being taken so that the focus was blurred and indistinct, and neither the mechanic nor the car rental agent were able to provide very much that was helpful: “in his forties” with a “soldierly bearing” and a “very strong face.” That was all. Both also reported that Temescu spoke English, but that it was clear it was not his native tongue inasmuch as he spoke with a heavy accent that was neither Israeli nor Arab. “Maybe Eastern European,” the cler
k had ventured. But even here was uncertain. There had been one tantalizing lead. Meral had gone to the Arab Government Hospital to ask if they had any record of a serious burn case admitted on 14 January. And as it happened, there was. It was a male about fifty years of age with third degree burns, in particular on his face and both his hands. He was accompanied by another man of indeterminate age who said the burned man’s name was Thomas Hulda, while his own was Martin Kerr. Fluids were given to Hulda intravenously and antibiotic creams applied. Kerr insisted on staying in the burned man’s hospital room for the six days that he was there. According to a hospital nurse in attendance, he would sit on the floor near the bed with his back against the wall and his hands clasped around his knees, never speaking, just staring at the man in the bed and his thickly bandaged hands. On the seventh day he helped the burned man into a taxicab. It drove away with Kerr following after. Kerr had given the hospital the same address for both of them, an apartment in the Jewish Quarter, but when Meral had gone there to question them he found that no such persons were living, or ever had lived, at that address.
Meral took a long look at Temescu’s driver’s license. There was something about it. While the photo generally agreed with the description by the car rental salesman and the mechanic, it was so blurry and indistinct that if one were to stare at it long enough it would seem to somehow change. Meral checked the time, put the driver’s license back into the case folder, closed it, returned it to its place in the File Room, then went out again into the hall where he walked past a kitchen and the station’s Sleep Room with its multiple cots for weary patrolmen, and then turned in his Webley-Smith revolver at the Gun Room for it now was the end of his duty day. On his way to check out at reception and leave, as he passed the open door to the office of Ari Zev, the fortyish but white-haired Station Commander, Zev called out to him loudly, “Meral!”
The Arab policeman stopped and took a step inside a blue-walled office where Zev was at his desk. Behind him on the wall was a large detailed map of the Old City’s quarters, plus a trophy case containing, among other things, an arm patch of the Maplewood, New Jersey police force, the gift of a visiting American policeman in Israel to study Israeli methods. Zev had been writing on a notepad and still gripped a sharpened yellow pencil in his hand.
“Couple of things,” he began. “The Albanians keep calling about that chap of theirs who’s gone missing. Next time I’m putting them straight through to you. They’re a pain. Any news on this guy?”
“No, none at all. We need a photo. I’ve now asked for one three times. When it comes perhaps we’ll have some better luck.”
“If it comes.”
“Yes, ‘if.’ ”
Zev’s eyebrows rose.
“And Remle Street, Meral?”
“Nothing new.”
“As I pretty much expected. So I’m thinking that maybe you should drop it. It could be nothing but a whole lot of smoke.”
“No, something’s there. I feel sure of it.”
Zev turned to look thoughtfully out a window for a moment, the point of the pencil still in his hand lightly tapping on the desktop in desultory spurts.
He turned back to Meral.
“Okay, Sergeant, keep on it. Your instincts have always been terrific.”
Meral nodded, turned and exited the office. As he walked down the hall Zev watched him through the open door. “Poor bastard,” he murmured. Then he grasped the pencil firmly and returned to his work, making summarizing notes of the inconclusive coroner’s report on Yusef Tamal, a Yemeni immigrant who lived in Beit Sahour and was suspected of various criminal activities. He was the man found dead with a broken neck at the bottom of the Russian Church Tower.
. . . fractured skull and neck, as well as numerous lacerations, abrasions, and contusions; shearing of platysma, splenius, trapezius, and various smaller muscles of the neck, with fracture of the spine and of the vertebrae . . .
Broken in the fall, Zev wrote, or before? Then he added, “Inconclusive.”
Outside the station Meral stood with his back to its creamy beige dolomite walls. The gusting wind and drizzling rain had stopped and he stared at its glisten on the cobbles of the street with his thoughts still entangled in the Remle Street case: the sound of something heavy being dragged. What was it? Who was Joseph Temescu? And then the strangest thing of all: discovered in the Land Rover after the crash were the charred remains of a large black owl and that of another much smaller bird that could not be identified, perhaps a finch or a common house sparrow, both the favorite prey of the Southern Little Owl that frequented the city and hunted at night. Meral couldn’t fathom it. He shook his head and moved his thoughts to a matter more prosaic. The Walk. Every Kishla policeman was required by the Commandant to make walks through the Christian Quarter for five after-duty hours each week for the purpose of “keeping in touch,” as Zev had explained, “to bond with the people and hear their complaints.” Three more hours, Meral mused, would fill his quota for the week and still put him at the Casa Nova, the ninety-room hostel where he lived, just in time for the communal evening meal that would be served by Italian Franciscan nuns.
Now decided, he adjusted the tilt of his black beret and stepped into the street, the Orthodox Armenian Patriarch Road, on which he took a quick left and then later a right on David Street to its teeming covered bazaars drenched in sights and sounds that always made Meral feel that he had just left the flatness of a colorless dream and awakened into real and vivid life, into a place where he was jostled by slender old porters bent by enormous loads on their backs, and by pedestrians in every conceivable dress—Arab workmen on donkeys and tourists with shopping bags; Kurdish women with trays on their heads filled with freshly baked sesame crusted bagels, pita bread, and cooked spotted breakfast eggs; ultra-orthodox Jews with long beards and curled side locks wearing black caftans and black fur hats; Muslim women and dignified Christian prelates—all bustling past souvenir stalls and shops, past huge wheels of baklava moist with honey and stood up on end in metal pans, past spice bins brimming with khaki-colored cumin, almonds, walnuts and powdered red pepper, dried apricot paste and figs, shredded coconut and bright yellow-orange lentils; past the younger male shopkeepers hawking their wares with loud voices and cajolements while their fathers, wearing tasseled fezzes or keffiyehs, sat in chairs mutely watching with placid faces while the Arabic music blaring out from their shops shouted up to the vaulted roof of the bazaar where it mingled in a strange and haunting counterpoint with the Angelus bells from Gethsemane and a muezzin’s call to prayer.
Everywhere Meral was greeted warmly, very often with affection and always with trust, so that at times he was asked for personal advice. On this walk it was an eighteen-year-old girl who approached him complaining of a marriage arranged by her parents with a man whom she neither loved nor even liked, and then later, on The Street of the Chain where the air was thick with the smell of new leather and of stagnant water, coffee, and smoke, and beneath the baleful watch of a goat staring down through the black iron bars of a window in a second-floor apartment, Meral’s counsel was sought by an elderly unofficial mayor, a mukhtar, expressing worry about the raucous behavior and “repugnant” blue-jean attire of the longhaired teenaged Arab “Teddy Boys” copying the latest British fad. Farther along, on the Via Dolorosa, Meral stopped and gave a coin to a beggar, a middle-aged, stubble-bearded man who was crouched against a wall with a transistor radio pressed to his ear raptly listening to the latest pop tunes of Greece underneath a Station of the Cross. Meral looked up at a plaque on the wall that marked it.
JESUS FALLS FOR THE SECOND TIME.
Abruptly the music stopped for an announcement. Meral guessed it was the weather and time. He glanced at his watch. Yes, time to head back, he decided. On his way an aging nun on a motorized bicycle, a wraith in white garments that flapped up behind her, like a withered old Valkyrie late for the battle, came suddenly varooming out of an aqabat narrowly missing him as she passed. Behind her chug
ged a dusty and battered blue Fiat that was hauling a flatcar with a donkey aboard, sitting up on its haunches and facing backward, in its eyes a look of mild incomprehension.
Even at this Meral could not smile.
As he strode toward the Casa Nova and his dinner, Meral paused for a moment as he rounded a corner of the Via Dolorosa and entered the street called Khan el Zeit. He had seen something odd. A youngish, blond-haired and fair-complected woman wearing oversized sunglasses and a colorful “Souvenir of Jericho” babushka was standing in the doorway of a seedy hostel called The Shalom in what seemed a heated argument with a tall and stocky Franciscan priest, when suddenly the woman turned her head and looked at Meral, said something to the priest, who also quickly turned and looked. The woman then clutched the Franciscan’s arm and pulled him quickly out of sight and into the hotel. For some moments before moving on Meral stared at the hostel door as he sifted for the meaning of the strange vignette. How very curious, he thought.