'Same marks. Cheeks, breasts, lips. Found ten days ago in a wadi on the side road that leads up to Mevasseret. A nun from St. Louis, U.S.A. Staying at the Holyland Hotel. Doorman saw her get into a car, thinks it had Tel Aviv plates. No one else saw her after that.'
Rafi pushed across another folder containing another set of photos. The same marks, except this time they were on the face and body of a boy.
'…Halil Ghemaiem. Arab street kid. Drug user. Male hustler. Sometime transvestite prostitute. Worked the beach in Tel Aviv. Picked up about one A.M. last Tuesday by a well-dressed gentleman. Driven away in a foreign car. Found dumped up here five days ago behind the Augusta Victoria Hospital at a construction site.'
David heard a snap. Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds again. 'You see what we have here, David? Marred flesh, consistently marred flesh. We have a pattern crime and,' Rafi paused, 'perhaps our first Israeli serial murder case.'
Rafi accompanied him to the hall, stood with him as he fed coins into the coffee machine, getting half of them back, trying different ones from his pocket. The machine finally delivered scalding coffee with a hiss; it overflowed David's plastic cup.
'…kind of thing that happens in America. So maybe if we're lucky it'll turn out the killer's an American.' Rafi started banging on the machine; he hadn't gotten his coins back and hadn't gotten any coffee either. 'But suppose he's Israeli? Wouldn't surprise me much, the way things are going these days. A suburban housewife in Haifa feeds rat poison to her husband. A nice South African-born gentleman, technician at the Weizman Institute, injects his aging mother with kerosene. Beautiful kibbutz kids refuse to join the army. My younger brother, a tank commander, wants to move to New York and drive a taxi.'
Rafi stood back and gave the machine a tremendous kick. Coffee started gushing out. He often spoke to David like this, bitter, ironic, contemptuous of what he called 'the new mores,' which he blamed upon the present government.
'A government elected by pickle sellers, so what should we expect? Much as I hated the old light-unto-the- nations crap, it was a lot better than this meanness we exhibit now.' He sipped some coffee. 'Still, David, now that we've got ourselves a crazy American-style society, isn't it time we got an American-style murder case? Long overdue, but,' he shook his head, 'very very difficult to solve. Random victims, no prior connection-don't need to tell you how tough that's going to be. A great big mess.' He gazed at David. 'I'm handing it to you. Refuse if you like- I'll understand.'
'It's a pattern crime, Rafi. How can I refuse?'
'You can't.' Rafi slapped him gently on the back. 'Get the dossiers from Sarah. And give my best to Anna.' He shook his head. 'I like her, David-very much. What will she think of us when she hears about all of this?'
As he walked back to the Pattern Crimes offices, he turned over Rafi's phrase: 'Consistently marred flesh.' Of all the possible pattern crimes, he thought, consistently marred flesh was probably the worst. The PC Unit, of which he was commanding officer, was located on the second floor of Jerusalem District Police Headquarters in a complex of buildings known collectively as the Russian Compound, a hundred meters up from Bar Kokba Square.
The building was old, its ceilings twenty feet high, and its cavernous tiled corridors, lit by fluorescent lamps suspended from iron chains, echoed and re-echoed with the footsteps of cops, clerks, detectives, prisoners, informers, witnesses, and an occasional lost citizen looking for a place to lodge a complaint. The beaten-up pay telephones and recalcitrant soup, coffee, and candy machines in these corridors were notorious, the interlocking squad rooms a maze. Few outsiders could find their way around this rabbit warren carved out of what once had been the huge intimidating offices of police officials in the period of the British Mandate.
David Bar-Lev did not think anyone would be intimidated by his office, barely wide enough to contain his desk. Dossiers were crammed into bookcases. A bulletin board was crowded with overlapping notes. There were two heavily chipped black metal chairs, two telephones, and a carefully cropped photograph of his daughter, Hagith, with just the left hand of his ex-wife, Judith, showing beside her arm.
Although the walls here had been soundproofed and a false ceiling installed for privacy, David always left his door open to the room where the rest of the PC Unit worked. Here the partition walls were barely taller than a man so that raised voices and ringing phones from the squad rooms of adjoining units swirled together and merged. No single word was ever intelligible out of all this restless sound, but David felt there was an underlying harmony. 'Crime and Torment,' he called it, as if it were a piece of music, a piece he sometimes struggled to decode and at other times loathed so much he would make up any excuse no matter how absurd to escape it, fleeing the building, taking to the streets, even driving out into the Judean hills…and sometimes even then it would still ring in his ears.
'Shoshana!'
She appeared almost instantly in his doorway, a short young woman with eager black eyes, tight black curls, and olive skin. 'Where's Dov?'
'Working the Rehavia burglary case. A lady came in. Said she saw some of her silverware in East Jerusalem. He went out to check.'
'Micha…?'
'With Uri having coffee. My turn next unless things start picking up.'
'So you're bored, Shoshana?'
'Not really bored. It's just that here I never get a chance to fight.'
She'd been in a narcotics unit when David met her, an unhappy office mascot. She wasn't getting along with her boss and was angry at being assigned to cover the phones while the boys got to work the streets. She had the plump fresh cheeks and guileless smile of a high school girl, but there was cunning behind the facade. David liked her, and when he saw her perform at a police karate competition, all flashing black eyes and short black curls, he was so impressed by her self-assurance he arranged her transfer to Pattern Crimes.
'We don't fight. We investigate. If you like to fight so much, go back into the army.' She grinned. 'While you're considering it, go downstairs and see if you can find us a halfway decent car.'
'Where are we going?'
'We're going to check out a place where an American nun was dumped.'
He heard her footsteps as she ran out through the squad room; he was fascinated by her sudden entrances and exits. One moment she was there and the next was gone, yet he could never remember actually seeing her come or go.
He told her to drive, thought that might use up some of her restless energy. The car, a dilapidated white Subaru, had ripped seats and dented fenders. On their way up Jaffa Road, he told her what he wanted her to do.
'Get good photos. Then go with Uri to the Damascus Gate. He stands aside while you talk to the women, as nonthreatening and sympathetic as you can be. Find out who she is. Name, address, everything. Did anyone see her get picked up last night? Does she operate for a pimp? It may turn out the kid was wrong. Maybe she wasn't a prostitute. But talk to them anyway. See if they heard about any guys who like to cut. Tell them about the marks, but not about the breasts-we're going to keep that to ourselves…'
There was a traffic jam in front of the Mahane Yehuda market, trucks and cars stalled, blasting one another with horns. A woman lugging a market basket wove her way across the street. A group of schoolchildren, five- and six-year-olds, waited with perfect discipline at the curb.
'What the hell is this?' Shoshana wiped her forehead; it was eleven o'clock and getting hot. David thought of Anna practicing, her bow cutting across the strings, filling the apartment with dark rich sounds. Every so often she too would wipe her brow.
'I'll put on the siren.'
David shook his head. Something was happening in the market. People were pouring in but few were coming out. 'Meet me up there on the right,' he said. Then he stepped out of the car.
As he made his way down the dark arcade that was the market axis, he heard the shrill whistles of police. He pushed past stands piled with eggplants, onions, Jaffa oranges, past vendors and buyers, through the debris of fruit skins and discarded vegetable greens, then took a shortcut through one of the little cross alleys until he came up against an immobile human mass.
'What is it?' he asked a stooped old lady in black who was grasping her purchases to her chest.
She looked at him, lips tight. 'Katzer.' And then all around David heard the name. Some whispered it, others hissed it, a few yelled it out like a cheer: 'Katzer!' 'Katzer!'
