'No.'
'Anyone on donkey or horseback?'
'No.'
'What about from the campus?'
'The campus was locked-at that hour it's dead.'
'Pedestrians?'
'Not a one. Before I found it? her, I heard something from over there, on the desert side.' He swiveled and indicated the eastern ridge. 'Scurrying, a rustle of leaves. Lizards, maybe. Or rodents. I ran my light over it. Several times. There was nothing.'
'How long before you found her did this occur?'
'Just a few minutes. Then I crossed over. But there was no one there, I assure you.'
Daniel lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and looked out at the wilderness: jagged golden heights striped rust and green by ancient terraces, dropping without warning to the bone-white table of the Jordanian Rift; at vision's end, the shadow-like ellipse that was the Dead Sea. A leaden wedge of fog hovered over the water, dissolving the horizon.
He made a note to have some uniforms go over the slope on foot.
'Nothing there,' repeated Schlesinger. 'No doubt they came from the city side. Sheikh Jarrah or the wadi.'
'They?'
'Arabs. This is obviously their dirty work.'
'Why do you say that?'
'She was cut up, wasn't she? The Arab loves a blade.'
'You said Arabs,' said Daniel. 'In the plural. Any reason for that?'
'Just being logical,' said Schlesinger. 'It's their style, the mob mentality. Gang up on someone defenseless, mutilate them. It was a common thing, before your time-Hebron, Kfar Etzion, the Jaffa Gate riots. Women and children slaughtered like sheep. The goddamned British used to stand by and let it happen. I remember one time- end of '47-they arrested four of our boys and handed them over to a mob at the Damascus Gate. The Arabs ripped them apart. Like jackals. Nothing left to bury.'
Schlesinger's face had grown hawklike, the eyes com-rressed to slashes, the mouth under the mustache thin-lipped and grim.
'You want to solve this, son? Knock on doors in East Jerusalem.'
Daniel closed the pad. 'One more thing, adoni.'
'Yes?'
'You said you live on French Hill.'
'That's correct. Just up the road.'
'That's within walking distance of your patrol route.'
'Correct.'
'And by your own account, you're a strong walker. Yet you drive your car and park it on Sderot Churchill.'
Schlesinger gave him a stony look.
'Sometimes when I finish,' he said, 'I'm not ready to go ne. I take a drive.'
'Anywhere in particular?'
'Here and there. Anything wrong with that, Pakad?' The old man's gutturals were harsh with indignation.
'Nothing at all,' said Daniel, but to himself he thought: Ben adam afor, Carmellah Gadish had gasped, when they'd found her. A gray man. Three barely audible words bubbling from between bloody lips. Then, the loss of consciousness, descent into coma. Death.
Ben adam afor. A feeble bit of information, perhaps nothing more than delirium. But it was the closest thing they had to evidence and, as such, had taken on an aura of significance. Gray man. They'd spent days on it. An alias or some kind of underworld code? The color of the slasher's clothing? A sickly complexion? Something characterological?
Or advanced age?
He looked at Schlesinger, smiled reassuringly. White hair and mustache. Sky-blue eyes, bordered by a ring of gray. White, light-blue. At night it could all look the same. Gray. It seemed crazy, almost heretical, to think of an old Palmahi doing something like that. And he himself had pointed out to Laufer the discrepancies between this death and the other five. But one never knew. Schlesinger had begun patrolling Scopus shortly after the last Gray Man murder. Thirteen years in one neighborhood, then a sudden move. Perhaps there was some connection, something oblique that he had yet to grasp. He resolved to look into the old man's background.
'I fought for this city,' Schlesinger was saying, testily. 'Broke my ass. You'd think I'd deserve better than being treated like a suspect.'
Daniel wondered if his thoughts were that transparent, looked at Schlesinger and decided the old man was being touchy.
