It's true, you stupid kike bastard. He's not yours-he's Schwann's!
(Silence.)
He's Schwann's, you asshole. Don't you see the resemblance?
What the hell are you talking about?
Ah, now he's upset, now he wants to kill me. Get away from me-I'll scream.
I said, what are you talking about, Christina?
The summer Schwann stayed with us, he had me every day is what I'm talking about. We did it in the house, on the beach, in the pool!
(Silence.)
Take a good look at him. Remember Schwann's face. Strong resemblance, isn't it, Charles?
Absurd.
You were absurd, Charles. Playing hotshot doctor, giving Schwann your pompous speeches about surgery and its place in society, thinking he was looking up to you and thought you were so hot, calling you Herr Doktor Professor, and all the time it was me he was after. I was the reason he kept kissing up to you, telling you how goddamned wonderful you were. The moment you walked out the door and left him here with your books, I was Johnny-on-the-spot and we were climbing all over each other and loving it and he gave me a beautiful baby with no filthy kike blood in it, SO STAY AWAY FROM HIM, YOU BASTARD, DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH HIM, HE'S NOT YOURS!
(Silence. Heavy footsteps.)
Ah! Now he's quiet, walking off with his tail tucked between his legs. Now he's got nothing snotty to say!
The shithead will be proud of you,' said Shmeltzer as he entered the conference room. 'Is this communication going to be horizontal or vertical?'
'Diagonal,' said Daniel. He was tacking a map of Jerusa-lem and its exurbs onto the wall next to the blackboard. The spots where both victims had been dumped were circled in red crayon. as was the cave.
Shmeltzer took his place at the table. He nodded at the Chinaman and Daoud while reaching for the coffeepot. Jt was eight in the morning, twenty hours after the discovery of the bloody rock. The room was on the ground floor of Head-quarters, white-walled and refrigerated by an overexuberant air conditioner.
Daniel finished hanging the map and picked up a pointer, Shmeltzer passed him the coffeepot and he filled his cup. The Chinaman and Daoud lit up. The cold air filled quickly with smoke and tension.
'Where Cohen?' Daniel asked the Chinaman. 'Don't know. He was supposed to meet me at seven, do a walk-through of the Armenian Quarter. I haven't seen him or heard from him.'
'Ah, the vagaries of youth,' said Shmeltzer. He filled his cup, took a long swallow.
'We can't afford vagaries,' said Daniel. He picked up the phone. left a message with the switchboard for Samal Cohen to call in immediately, then hung up, irritated. Just when he'd thought the kid was shaping up. So much for flexibility.
'Let's begin,' he said, tapping the pointer to the map.
Last night he'd called each of them, informed them about the cave. Now he went over the basics, gave them time to take notes before returning to his seat and picking up the Forensics report.
'We owe Meir Steinfeld a dinner at Cow on the Roof. He worked all night and came up with more than we could have hoped for. There were two classes of animal blood in the cave-rodent and canine-and one human sample, type O, Rh positive. Both Fatma and Juliet were O-positive, but they differed on the haptoglobin test. Juliet was type two, the commonest, but Fatma was type one, which shows up in only about fifteen percent of the population. All Steinfeld found was type one, so it looks as if Juliet wasn't killed in the cave.'
'That's no proof Fatma was,' said Shmeltzer. 'Fifteen percent isn't that rare.'
'No proof,' said Daniel, 'but strong indications. Steinfeld estimates the volume of blood loss as monumental. Dr. Levi confirms it would have had to be fatal. The anthropometric analysis of the outline on the rock indicates a slender female of Fatma's height. A copious amount of dried blood was found in the dirt at the head of the rock, suggesting a deep. draining head or neck wound. The blood flow over the sides indicates smaller, multiple wounds on the trunk. Know of any other victims who fit that description?'
'For the sake of argument,' said Shmeltzer, 'here's another scenario: The Bedouins cut up one of their own women on that rock. Executed her for fucking the wrong guy or talking out of turn, then buried her somewhere in the desert.'
'The time frame doesn't work,' said Daniel. 'Steinfeld estimates the age of the blood at three to six weeks- nothing he'll swear to, but it's definitely older than eight days, which is howJong the Bedouin have been grazing in that part of the desert. Border Patrol's had a good fix on them for some time -since the end of the rainy season they've been up north, nowhere near the cave. And the shred of cloth fits the descrip- tion of the shift Fatma was last seen wearing.' He paused. 'It's not ironclad, but it's well worth pursuing.'
Shmeltzer nodded and drank more coffee. 'All right,' he said, 'two killing grounds. Why?'
'I don't know,' said Daniel. 'And neither body was washed in that cave-there's been no water down there for four months and both bodies were washed thoroughly.'
'You could bring water into the desert in bottles,' said the Chinaman. 'Last summer we spent a couple of weeks at my wife's kibbutz. They put me to work at the carp ponds, schlepping bottles of distilled back and forth in order to backflush the filters. Big plastic ones-they hold eight liters each, weigh about thirty kilos. Two would be enough to wash a body, don't you think?'
Shmeltzer got up and took a close look at the map. 'We're talking a four-kilometer climb, Yossi. Down a mountainside in the dark. Know anyone who could pull that off while hauling sixty kilos of water, maybe a forty-kilo corpse as well?' The Chinaman grinned and flexed a huge bicep. 'Is that a confession, Goliath?' Shmeltzer shook
