She never called. The radio had interrupted its program for a bulletin. A bomb had exploded at the Beit Lid junction. Twenty-one soldiers, three of them girls, had been killed, dozens more had been wounded. His daughter had been identified from her dog tags. At the funeral the next day Baruch’s wife had collapsed when a personal message from the Prime Minister had been read aloud. “Jews have died for Israel in the past,” he wrote, “they will die for Israel in the future. I have no consolation to offer, only an unshakable conviction to hang on to: this land, this people, would not exist if it weren’t for the girls and boys, our daughters and our sons, whom we bury today.” As for Baruch, his hair had started to turn white the morning of the funeral; within three weeks it was the color of chalk.
Baruch set the silver frame down on the desk and glanced again at the photograph of Rabbi Apfulbaum, snapped in the Jewish kibbutz of Yad Mordechai hours before he was kidnapped. Picking up a magnifying glass, he took a closer look at his face. Was it his imagination or could he actually see the Rabbi’s eyes burning with biblical zeal? Baruch didn’t know whom he feared most or liked less, the crazy Jews or the crazy Muslims, each armed with fundamentalist versions of ancient myths that took every biblical or Koranic injunction literally; each flaunting an arrogance that came from having a hot-line to God; each confusing his subjective world view for an objective orthodoxy. Shaking his head, Baruch began reading the official account of the conversation between a Jerusalem police brigade commander and Attorney Nabil Abad al-Chir, the father of the prisoner Maali.
Q. You are positive there is no trace of her in the Jewish hospitals?
A. Nothing. I can say for sure that she was not in an accident.
Q. And your jails? The Jewish jails—
A. I had a search made when you phoned me yesterday. There is no Maali al-Chir Abu Saleh in Israeli hands.
Q. What about the Italian scooter?
A. There is nothing on the scooter either. Look, it’s no secret your daughter is married to the Abu Saleh who is high on our most wanted list. So if he couldn’t come to her, maybe she went to him.
Q. She would have left a note—
A. Girls. I have two myself. When it comes to chasing after boys, they sometimes forget they have parents. I’ll call you if we hear anything …
Baruch flipped to the next page and started reading the transcript of the interrogation of the wife of Yussuf Abu Saleh. He had conducted enough interrogations in his career to read between the lines. The prisoner Maali would have been brought into a room with padded walls and no heating, and seated on a stool whose front legs were slightly shorter than its rear legs to be sure she was uncomfortable. All four legs of the stool would be bolted to the floorboards. Strong spotlights would be trained on her; saturated in light, angling her head to escape it, shielding her eyes with a forearm, she would look like a deer caught in the headlights of a car: frightened, confused, ready to bolt at the sound of a twig snapping if there had been some place to bolt to. From the darkness beyond the lights, the toneless voice of the interrogator would pitch questions at her.
Q: When was the last time you saw your husband?
A: I answered that yesterday. I answered it this morning.
Q: Answer it again.
A: I have not set eyes on Yussuf since the night of my wedding, six months ago.
Q: Then why were you waving to him at the Damascus Gate?
A: I wasn’t [unintelligible].
Q: If you weren’t waving to Yussuf, whom were you waving to?
A: I don’t remember waving to anyone.
Q: You were seen waving to someone. You uncovered your face and waved. Which means you were waving to your father or one of your brothers or your husband, Yussuf.
A: Maybe it was my younger brother, Sami. Yes. I [unintelligible]. It must have been [unintelligible].
Q: Speak louder. It was seven thirty in the morning. Sami was sound asleep in the home of your father in Abu Tor.
Baruch skimmed the transcript to the end, then reread the last page.
A: I haven’t been permitted to sleep since you arrested me. I must sleep.
Q: You haven’t been arrested. You have been detained for questioning. You will be permitted to sleep when you have told us what we want to know. Whom were you waving to at the Damascus Gate?
A: I want to see my mother.
Q: Whom were you waving to?
A: [unintelligible].
Q: Whom were you waving to?
A: The light stings my eyes.
Q: Where did you get this ring?
A: What ring? Oh, that ring. I bought it from a Bedouin who sells jewelry in the souk.
Q: What is the name of the Bedouin? What street is his shop on?
A: I don’t remember.
Q: How long ago did you buy it?
A: A month, maybe [unintelligible].
Q: Take her back to the cell.
A: I vomited on my dress. I [unintelligible] the smell. You must give me another dress—
This was the first time Baruch had seen a ring mentioned in the Maali interrogation. He wondered why the interrogator had bothered raising the subject. Had something caught his eye? Baruch flipped through the dossier to the official interrogation center description of the detainee’s possessions, with Maali’s almost illegible signature on the bottom of the page.
One leather wallet containing forty-five shekels and twenty agora in notes and coins, along with an Israeli identity card and a motor scooter registration card.
One key, believed to be the front door key of her father’s villa in Abu Tor.
One 14-carat gold chain and locket containing a lock of hair and a black-and-white photograph of a man we’ve identified as Yussuf Abu Saleh.
One pair of silver clover-leaf earrings.
One 14-carat gold engagement ring with a slightly scratched garnet stone.
One 18-carat gold wedding band.
One gold-colored ring with an unidentified crest on an unidentified stone and a man’s name, “Erasmus Hall,” and the date 1998 engraved on the inside.
“Who is Erasmus Hall?” Baruch asked aloud. He swiveled in his chair and gazed through the window at Jewish Jerusalem, stretching to the horizon and turning mauve in the musky twilight. Baruch, a namesake of the scribe who recorded the doomsday declarations of the prophet Jeremiah six hundred years before Jesus, had been a cop here for all of his professional life. Jerusalem, for him, was a city of sediments, a dozen Jerusalems piled one on top of the ruins of the other. If you strip-mined it, brushing away layer after layer, you just might one day reach something that looked suspiciously like bedrock: King David’s Jerusalem. He wondered if there had been cops in David’s capital. There surely had been crime and where there was crime, there were cops.
“Erasmus Hall,” he repeated—and he began working through the sediments of this particular crime. Swiveling back to the desk, he lit off the computer and punched in his personal code, then typed in the word “Apfulbaum” and drummed his fingers on the desk as he waited for the menu to appear on the screen. He keyed the computer down to “Ancillary Dossiers” and ran a search for the name “Hall, Erasmus.” The computer drew a blank. Mystified, he started to read through the biographies of the secretary, Efrayim, and the three bodyguards who had been killed in the kidnapping and the one who had died later on the operating table. One of the bodyguards was named Ronni Goldman. Scrolling through the dead boy’s background, he came across a reference to the date 1998.
Moments later Baruch was dialing the Goldmans’ home number in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. He got the dead boy’s father on the line. “My name is Baruch,” he said. “I’m calling from Jerusalem. I’m trying to catch the people who murdered your son. I’m sorry to open wounds but there’s something I need to know.”
“What time is it in Israel?” the father asked.
“Almost six.”
“What’s the weather like?”
“It’s cold and crystal clear. The sun is di
sappearing behind a hill. Jerusalem is bathed in a golden light.”
Goldman’s voice crackled over the international line. “When Ronni wrote home, he always talked about Jerusalem the golden.”
“According to our records, your son graduated from a Brooklyn high school in nineteen ninety-eight.”
“That’s right. It was in June of ninety-eight. We wanted him to go to college and study medicine. He wanted to go to Israel and study Torah.”
“What was the name of the high school?”
“Erasmus, on the corner of Flatbush and Church.”
“Is Erasmus the full name of the school?”
The father hesitated. “I think the full name is Erasmus Hall High School. Something like that.”
“Did Ronni own a high school graduation ring?”
Baruch could hear the dead boy’s father blowing his nose. After a moment Goldman came back on the line. “Thirty-five dollars he spent on the ring,” he said, his voice faltering. “What’s so important, you ask now about a ring?”
“What I really want to know,” Baruch said softly, “is what finger he wore it on.” He caught his breath so he wouldn’t miss the answer.
Goldman suddenly understood why Baruch was phoning from Jerusalem to raise the painful subject of his son’s mutilation. “They sold him a ring a size smaller—.” The dead boy’s father held his hand over the phone and collected himself and started again. “A size smaller than he asked for. Rather than return it, he wore it on the finger the newspapers say the terrorists cut off. The pinky finger.”
THIRTEEN
THE DIRECTOR OF THE MILITARY AFFAIRS COMMITTEE, ZALMAN Cohen, a baby-faced prodigy whom the press had dubbed the Prime Minister’s Alter Ego, ambled into the conference room. In his very early thirties, he was dressed in rumpled black trousers and a white open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his fat elbows. Baruch and the katsa, seated at the end of a long rectangular table, climbed to their feet. An arid smile worked its way onto Cohen’s beefy face as he offered a pudgy palm in a politician’s handshake—a fleeting feather-weight touching of fingers—and walked over to a sideboard to pour some mineral water into a glass. He plucked two enormous pills from a vial, threw them into the back of his mouth, tilted his head back and gulped them down with a muscular throbbing of his Adam’s apple. “If you’re not taking vitamins, you ought to,” he grunted, flopping into a chair at the far end of the conference table, a soccer field away from his visitors. “You probably know that Zachary Sawyer has been burning up the phone lines to the Prime Minister—four Jews have been murdered, two others have been kidnapped, but as usual the White House expects us to be the ones to show restraint, maturity, moderation and discretion.”
“The Americans are worried sick this will spiral out of control and scuttle the Mt. Washington peace treaty,” the katsa remarked.
“No reason for that to happen if we all keep our eyes on the prize,” Cohen said.
“And what is the prize?” Baruch inquired, blinking innocently.
“The prize is peace in our time,” Cohen declared. He snickered as he came up with the line Chamberlain had used to explain Britain’s 1938 abandonment of the Sudetenland to appease Hitler. It was widely known that Cohen considered any concessions to the Palestinians to be appeasement; that he would have preferred a military solution to the Palestinian question over a political one; that he, like his Prime Minister, would go to Washington and sign the treaty to get the Americans off their back and buy time. In six or eight months, when the White House was distracted by another crisis, the government would test the temperature of the water. If the public outcry from the “Peace Now” crowd could be somehow muted, they would allow themselves to be “provoked” into occupying strategic arteries and areas of the West Bank. “It goes without saying,” Cohen continued, “that the Palestinians must get the lion’s share of the blame if we fail to achieve peace in our time.”
“Neither Baruch nor I are consulted on policy matters,” the katsa commented. “We are nuts and bolts people who deal with the situation on the ground.”
“That’s why you’ve been brought here,” Cohen said. “So I can spell out the government’s position with respect to the situation on the ground. Just so we’re playing from the same music, the bottom line is what it’s always been. We will never bow to terrorism. We will never release terrorists or pay money to free hostages. There will be no deal now or ever with the mechabel.”
Baruch eyed Cohen across the table; he had the impression that all those vitamins were transforming his skin into the sallow parchment of a Dead Sea scroll. “You’re not responding to the written question we submitted to the Prime Minister.”
“The formal answer to your formal question is, yes, you can nibble at the edge of any deal you care to invent in order to buy time. I am authorized to release appropriately vague pronouncements in the Prime Minister’s name. When the press asks if we are willing to negotiate, we will say we’re not ruling anything out. We will say that all options are being explored, with the emphasis on the word all.”
“The Working Group appreciates the Prime Minister’s willing-ness to play along with our efforts to buy time,” Elihu informed the director. The katsa’s eyes narrowed, his voice turned cautious. “Given the circumstances, we didn’t want to climb out on a limb and have it cut off behind us.”
The PM’s Alter Ego rolled his head from side to side as if he was trying to work out a stiff neck; for Cohen, cutting off limbs was indoor sport. “The Prime Minister and his cabinet appreciate your tactfulness in putting the question,” he said in a patronizing tone, and Baruch was reminded, once again, of why he loathed Zalman Cohen. He was one of those wily political creatures who thought that peace was a continuation of war by other means; that the manipulation of the peace in preparation for the next war was too important to be left to people who hadn’t mastered Machiavelli.
Cohen absently wound the stem of the oversized watch on his soft wrist. “If you find out where Apfulbaum is being held, organize a raid—I’m told you do that sort of thing nicely. If you get him out alive, we’ll take the credit. If not …” The director flaunted his mirthless smile, which had been caricatured in a thousand newspaper cartoons. “We all understand that raids of this nature imply risks. Rest assured that no one will second guess you if the Rabbi is murdered before you can liberate him.”
Baruch avoided looking at Elihu. “Why are you afraid of Apfulbaum?” he inquired, his eyes fixed on Cohen. “In terms of numbers, in terms of political influence, Islamic fundamentalists are a cloud of locusts. Ours are an occasional horsefly.”
Cohen’s smile evaporated, leaving behind the faint trace of a tired smirk. “You swat horseflies,” he said quietly. “If we had a choice, we’d naturally prefer the autopsy to show the shot that killed this particular horsefly came from Abu Bakr’s .22-caliber handgun.”
“Are you telling us you prefer Apfulbaum dead?” Elihu asked blandly.
A trumpet-call bleated through Cohen’s soft lips; Baruch realized the Prime Minister’s flunky was sounding retreat. “I most certainly am not telling you we prefer him dead, for God’s sake. I am telling you we prefer him alive. But we will understand if he becomes an unavoidable casualty. We will rend our clothing and mourn publicly, we will send the minister of public cesspools to attend the funeral of this Jewish shit.”
Baruch glanced at the katsa. Like Elihu, he knew how to read between the lines, and he didn’t like what he found there. “Moments before my father died he asked me to pinch his skin,” he told Cohen. “Harder, he said. Pain is what makes you know you’re alive, he said.” Baruch cocked his thumb and forefinger as if they were a pistol and sighted on the Prime Minister’s Alter Ego. “Meeting people like you reminds me that I’m alive.”
Elihu scraped back his chair. “We appreciate your sharing the Prime Minister’s views with us,” he informed the director of the military affairs committee. A scowl stole over the katsa’s face as he added in
absolutely the same conversational tone, “If it is possible to get Apfulbaum out alive, we will. And you can go to hell.”
Elihu was striding toward the door before the baby-faced director could utter a word. Baruch was hard on his heels. Neither of them looked back.
FOURTEEN
THE FREE CLINIC, FINANCED BY SEVERAL MUSLIM NEIGHBORHOOD associations and staffed by Doctor al-Shaath and a handful of volunteers, was running late. First two taxi drivers had carried in an epileptic man who, when he recovered consciousness, ranted on until the Doctor calmed him with an injection. “Jerusalem is the virgin promised to the Arabs,” the patient cried, clinging to one of the male nurses, “but you permitted the thief to enter her room during the night. You listened behind the door to the cries of her defloration.” Then two clerics had caused a commotion when they brought in a young man with a superficial knife wound in his groin; he needed to be treated without going to a hospital, where he would attract the attention of the Isra’ili police. Angling the surgical lamp so that it bathed the boy’s groin in light, bending close to the raw wound, squinting through a low-power magnifying lens positioned over the wound, Doctor al-Shaath cleaned the puncture, stitched it closed and covered it with a bandage. By the time the Doctor reached the last patient in the waiting room, a woman suffering from an ear ache, the muezzins were already announcing evening prayers. A nurse fitted the otoscope into the woman’s ear. Looking through it, she described to the nearly blind Doctor what she saw so that he could make the diagnosis. “There is a slight reddish swelling of the exostoses obstructing the external ear canal,” she reported, “but no sign of fluid in the eustachian tube.”
“Are you diabetic?” the Doctor asked the patient.
The woman shook her head.