Rafi nudged David. 'Your dad's terrific.'
Blow up frames from the videotapes, turn them into photographs, mount them in rows on the PC Unit bulletin board. One hundred seventy Israeli males attended the symposium. All of them were suspect. The first job was to give them names.
Some of the more agitated people were followed home. Meantime, David showed the tapes to cops in other units. Whom did they recognize? Whom did they know? More names. Run them through the computers, check out military records, identify professions, discover which men were qualified to drive. Marital status. Police and medical records. Identify, collect data, analyze, and set priorities. Likelies, possibles, unlikelies, impossibles. Refine the lists, then start to winnow, eliminating from the top.
Three days into this new phase of the investigation, David received an unexpected call. A man named Ephraim Cohen, a friend, from youth movement days, of Gideon Bar-Lev.
'I remember you, of course,' David said, though he wasn't positive he did.
'Saw you on TV in connection with the nastiness. Have something interesting you'd maybe like to hear.'
'Please. I'll listen to anything.'
'Well, this isn't something I can talk about on the phone.' Why's he being so careful? 'Want to meet? I'll come to you.' No response. 'What's the problem?'
'David, I'm with another service. This would just be something I'd pass on in a strictly informal sort of way.'
They arranged to meet at seven that evening at The Garden, a dairy restaurant near the YMCA on King David Street. David arrived first, found a quiet table on the terrace, ordered tea, and settled down to wait. He was forced to endure a lecture then, given by an American tourist, holding forth to his wife and bedazzled tablemates. The man was loud, his voice carried across the terrace, and he was very sure of himself, an instant expert. Listening to him explain the parameters of the current political situation, David was amazed at how every single 'fact' he recounted was wildly distorted or else completely false.
After ten minutes a well-dressed, well-groomed man appeared. David, guessing his age at thirty-one or two, recognized the fine edge of arrogance he associated with officers in the Mossad.
After a few seconds this stranger caught David's eye, smiled, strode over, extended his hand. 'Hello. Nice to see you. I'm Ephraim Cohen.'
'Yes,' David said, 'I do remember you.' And he did. Ephraim had been one of those beautiful boys Gideon always used to choose as friends: Nordic, blond, with carved cheeks, and sensitive eyes and lips.
'It's been a long time. I wrote your parents when Gideon died. How's your father?'
'Retired. He's become a Kabbalist.'
'Oh?' Cohen raised an eyebrow as if to say, 'That sounds a little batty, but who am I to judge?' David studied him, decided he didn't like him: Cohen was too good-looking and much too cautious. David glanced at his watch. 'Well, here we are. You were going to pass something on.'
'You understand this is strictly unofficial.'
'Yes, yes.' Why do they always have to say that a hundred times?
'Well…' Cohen hesitated. Watching him work himself up to speak, David was happy he had not chosen the intelligence service instead of the police. 'Seems one of our technicians, guy who worked your little job a few nights back, his name's not important-seems he recognized someone in that audience. Someone he served with once.' Cohen cleared his throat. 'Someone, he says, who used to like to cut.'
'Liked to cut?'
Yeah, that's what he says. He didn't mention anything to you about it at the time, because, after all, he works for us. But some of us talked it over this morning and we thought we ought to pass the information on. Maybe nothing to it. Maybe you know it already. But this case is very disturbing to everyone, and we thought the least we could do is try and help.'
How very good of you, you slimy bastards. ' So, who did he see who 'used to like to cut'?'
'Guy named Peretz.'
'That's a pretty common name.'
'This Peretz was a professional military officer, a major. Major Chaim Peretz. That ought to give you a start.'
David nodded. 'Would your guy be willing to come in and point him out on the tapes?'
'Afraid not. Policy is to stay out of police affairs.'
'What about unofficially, as a private citizen performing a civic duty?'
'Well, we rather feel he's done that already. Don't you, David? After all, here I am passing on the name.'
Rafi may have loathed the old buddy system, but it was a lot quicker than working one's way through the IDF bureaucracy. That evening David started making calls. By ten the following morning he found what he was looking for: a friend, Yehuda Merom, now a colonel, whom he'd served with in Sinai during the '67 war.
'Oh, sure, David, I know Chaim Peretz. Even had a feeling one day I'd get a call like this.'
'Why's that?'
'We'd better meet. Unofficially, of course.'
'Of course.'
'A drink after work?'
'This is pretty urgent.'
'Okay. Let's have coffee. You know the Pie House? Meet you there in fifteen minutes.'
On his way out the door David told Dov to drop what he was doing and find Peretz. 'Used to be a major. I want to know what he looks like and where he lives. Try doing it the easy way: Start with the phone book. If that doesn't work, then use the computer.'
It was a perfect Jerusalem spring day-deep blue sky, the smell of blooming shrubs and trees. Even the traffic on Jaffa Road was bearable. The old buses spewed out fumes but not enough to spoil the pure dry April air.
Yehuda embraced him, then they clapped each other's shoulders and punched lightly at each other's girths.
'David, we're middle-aged.'
'Listen, we're still alive.'
'So you're a big-shot detective now. Saw you on TV.' David shrugged. 'Seen any of the guys?'
'A few. Shai. Yig'al. I saw Zvi Shapira at the airport about a month ago. Making a fortune in computerized imaging. He was on his way to Japan.'
They spoke briefly of old comrades, and then of how they'd cheered that first morning when they'd seen the planes return. David remembered: the terrible heat, the blisters on his face, the dust and the wind, then the roar of the fighters just above their heads and how they'd jumped up and down upon the burning sand: all the Arab air forces destroyed on the ground. The great conquest had begun. Heroic days.
'It's not the same now, is it? Remember how we all adored Arik? Then Lebanon. I was there. It stunk. Bastard! We didn't know it then. '67! That's when everything started going wrong.'
'Tell me about Peretz.'
'In connection with the murders, right?'
David nodded. 'His name came up.'
'I'm not surprised.' Yehuda looked uneasy. David didn't say anything, just waited for him to talk.
'…a perfect commander for reprisal assaults, which I suppose is why he got the job. It was a covert unit. Strictly volunteer. But there was a level of brutality even the toughest types couldn't take. So then Peretz came up with this idea, a way to staff it out. Fill it out with criminals, guys in trouble, violent guys. They had these guys in stockades, and they didn't know what to do with them. 'Let me have them,' he said. 'It's a filthy job so give me filthy guys.' '
'So what exactly was this filthy job?'
'Counter-terror. They do bad things to us, we go do even worse to them.'
'Crossing frontiers?'
'Nothing new about that. We've been doing it for years.' Yehuda looked away. 'Of course this was different. Real nasty stuff. The justification was that it was aimed at the hard-core terrorists, the ones who sneak in, kill kids, and shoot up schools.'
