Yalom looked around at the adjoining tables, moved closer and lowered his voice.
'How the hell was I supposed to know she was going to get carved up?' he said. Avi saw that there were tears in his eyes, the tough-guy posture all gone. 'I just got married a couple of months ago, Samal Cohen. It's my wife I'm more worried about than the army.'
'Then why don't you just tell me the truth and I'll do my best to keep your name out of the papers.'
'All right, all right. What I told you about picking her up out of sympathy is right-I was trying to be human. Look where it got me-when we let the Arabs massacre each other we're fucked and when we try to be human, the same damned thing. No way to win.'
'You picked her up out of sympathy,' said Avi, prompting. 'But?'
'But a bunch of us had her, okay? She offered it for free, she was cute-looking, and we'd just been through two months of hell-the snipers, two of my best drivers were blown up by mines? For God's sake, you know what it was like.'
Avi thought of his own tour in Lebanon. Hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Beirut, routing the PLO, putting his own ass on the line in order not to shoot the women and children-the human shields those bastards used habitually. Then, a month of guard duty at Ansar Prison, feeling out of control as he stood watch over sulking hordes of PLO captives wearing the blue jogging suits the army issued them. Unable to stop the tough guys from bullying the weaker ones, unable to prevent them from building homemade spears and daggers. Hugging his Uzi like a lover as he watched the tough ones circle the flock, picking off the effeminate ones. Choosing the softest boys to be brides at mock weddings. Dressing them up like girls, painting their faces and plucking their eyebrows and beating them when they cried.
Gang-fucks when the lights went out. Avi and the other soldiers trying to shut out the screams that rose, like bloody clouds, above the grunts and heavy breathing. The 'brides' who survived were treated the next morning for shock and torn anuses.
'I know,' said Avi, meaning it. 'I know.'
'Three fucking years,' said Yalom, 'and for what? We've replaced the PLO with Sh?tes and now they're shooting Katyushas at us. You going to blame us for having a free taste? We didn't know if we were going to get out of there alive, so we had her, had a few giggles-it was temporary relief. I'd do it all over again-' He stopped himself. 'Maybe I wouldn't. I don't know.'
'What else did she say about her clients?' asked Avi, following the outline the Yemenite had suggested to him.
'They went in for rough stuff,' said Yalom. 'The brothel was designed to accommodate that type. Professors, educated types, you'd be surprised at the things that turned them on. I asked her how she could stand it. She said it was okay, pain was okay.'
'As if she liked it?'
Yalom shook his head. 'As if she didn't care. I know it sounds strange, but she was strange-kind of dull, half asleep.'
'Like a defective?'
'Just dull, as if she'd been knocked around so much nothing mattered to her anymore.'
'When she begged you to take her with you it mattered.'
Yalom's face registered self-disgust. 'She conned me. I'm a fool, okay?'
'You saw the needle marks on her arms, right?'
Yalom sighed. 'Yes.'
'She mention any friends or suppliers?'
'No.'
'Anything about her past that could connect her to anyone? Maybe one of the educated ones?'
'No. We were in back of the halftrack, riding south in the dark. There wasn't much conversation.'
'Nothing about the seizures?'
'No, that took me by surprise. All of a sudden she's all rigid, moving back and forth, teeth chattering, frothing at the mouth-I thought she was dying. You ever see that kind of thing?'
Avi remembered the epileptic kids in the Special Class. Retards and spastics, shaking and drooling. He'd felt like a freak being with them, cried hysterically until his mother had pulled him out.
'Never,' he said. 'What was she doing when it started to happen?'
'Sleeping.'
'Lucky, huh?'
Yalom looked at the detective, puzzled.
'Lucky,' said Avi, smiling, 'that she wasn't going down on you when she started to shake. Hell of a way to pick up a war wound.'
There was no record of Juliet's whereabouts during the four months following her release by Northern District. No pimp or whore or drug dealer admitted to knowing her; no substation had booked her. She hadn't applied for welfare or any other kind of public assistance, nor had she worked in a legitimate job and gotten on the tax rolls.
It was as if she'd gone underground, thought Daniel, like some kind of burrowing animal, surfacing only to be torn apart by a waiting predator.
She could have plied her profession independently, he knew, pulling tricks on side streets in out-of-the-way
