Dimiter (14 page)

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booming thunderbolt rattled the windowpanes of the Old City’s local police post, a hulking former Crusader castle stolidly crouched by the Jaffa Gate. The young lance corporal behind the reception desk lifted a sullen stare to the sound and then slowly let it settle back down to a ledger bristling with notations in black and red ink: black for a log of arrivals and departures and red for the recording of citizen complaints. The corporal’s gaze was on an item in red: the charge of a weeping, frail old man that his burly young son
had beaten him severely in a fury at the father’s habitual drunkenness. The corporal noticed something. Leaning over, he picked up the pen that was infused with red ink and very slowly and carefully corrected a misspelling, leaned back to review what he had done, and then set the pen down and looked through a window at the rough stone cobbles outside the post where a gust-driven rain spattered back and forth in hesitant, indecisive sweeps like a wispy gray soul just arrived on the empty streets of some afterworld, lost and forlorn. The sounds were muted by the station’s thick block walls so that except for the soft dull clacking of a typewriter floating down from an upper floor, the damp yellow-walled reception room was quiet. The corporal shifted his gaze to the portable police radio on his desk. It had suddenly emitted a feeble sputter, but when nothing more came, he looked up at a sign on the wall beside the entry to the jail, a reminder that guns were to be checked in and out. The corporal’s stare was one of quiet incredulity, for almost never was the ledger’s red ink spent on matters warranting the use of a gun.

With its district encompassing all of the Christian Quarter and its bustling bazaars, the Old City’s Kishla Police Post dealt largely with crimes that were commonplace, if not trivial: pick-pockets, children missing in the markets, family troubles, a knife fight late at night involving boys, or the need to detain and interrogate tourists who had bought either opium or hashish from the locals. There was also the problem of female tourists’ frequent complaints of “indecent touching” by shopkeepers fitting them with clothing, which was currently a widespread cause of neurosis among many of the merchants in the bazaars who had been encouraged in their practice of “touching” by the favorable reactions of some women who had liked it, thus creating the belief it would bring them more business. This
was the level of crime in the Old City precinct. Once in three years there was a murder.

His thoughts grown dreamy, the bored corporal was absently rubbing his arm below the single chevron on his sleeve when the blustery wind and rain turned his gaze to the station’s high front door. A tall and brooding yet commanding presence in a rain-slick poncho had entered the post. Quietly closing the door behind him, the stoic and strongly featured policeman somberly nodded at the corporal, his wide-set eyes resting fleetingly upon him with a faraway look of unutterable sadness and something very close to compassion, the unchanging expression that he gave to the world, before turning away and striding past with raindrops dripping from his glistening poncho onto the beige and orange tiles of the floor. The corporal nodded and smiled faintly. In the tall man’s presence he always felt comforted. And safe. He picked up the pen with black ink and inscribed into the ledger:

Sgt. Major Peter V. Meral.

The silvery metal Star of David at the front of the policeman’s black beret made a muted thudding sound on the soft pine wood of the desk where Meral had tossed it upon entering his office. A white-walled cubicle, its only furnishings were the desk, a desk lamp and chair and, up against the wall beneath a large round window looking out to the Station’s vehicle yard and its rows of blue and white police cars, a narrow cot with a dark gray blanket that was smooth and tightly tucked. Meral paused, staring out at the rain for a moment, then looked down at the heading on the cover of the folder he had just retrieved from the File Room:
REMLE INCIDENT
OF 14
J
ANUARY 1974
. Meral placed it on the desk, sat down and, frowning, once again reviewed his notes.

They baffled to the edge of a taunt. No evidence existed that a crime had been committed. Yet the facts of the case, like the dream of some darkness one cannot remember, vaguely hinted at some hidden and deep transgression. At approximately 3:25
A.M.
, the time that a call had come in to the Fire Department, a 1971 Land Rover fitted with a cowcatcher at its front and moving at extremely high speed crashed into the single-pump Paz gasoline station located on Remle Street where it intersected Jerusalem Brigade Road just below and outside the Jaffa Gate. An explosion and a fire followed. When police and firemen arrived at the scene, they found the burning and badly damaged Land Rover there, but not its driver or possible other occupants, nor any trace of the driver’s identity. The two witnesses, a husband and wife who lived in the modest two-story apartment just above the Paz station office, had given puzzling and conflicting accounts. The couple’s third floor bedroom looked out onto the street, and as the husband had a prosthetic leg, it was the wife who, after hearing the crash and the explosion, had looked down at the scene through a bedroom window and then raced to the opposite end of their apartment to dial 1-0-2 for the Fire Department, and then 1-0-0 to the Kishla Police Station situated just a few minutes away. The wife then returned to the bedroom window and, looking out once more, saw nothing but the burning Land Rover and gas pump. The vehicle was empty, she reported, and its driver was nowhere in sight. But the husband told a slightly different story.

A.
There was a second man.

Q.
Are you sure?

A.
Absolutely. I didn’t see him, understand. I never got out of bed. The leg. But I heard it.

Q.
Heard what?

A.
Oh, well, at first a car door opening, and then someone getting out of it and moving very quickly. After that another car door opened and I heard something heavy being dragged across the gravel.

Q.
Some
thing
or some
one
?

A.
I couldn’t tell. Then after that, small noises. I couldn’t really make them out. Then a car door closing again. It was a sound just like the first. But much softer. And then one more opening and closing sound, and then the sound of the car driving off.

Q.
At great speed?

A.
Not particularly. No. It was a very small car, by the way.

Q.
How could you tell?

A.
Oh, I see and hear them all. Thirty years. At night early when we’re closed I sometimes hear them pulling up to use the tire inflator. We also leave out cans of water for cars that might have overheated. Cans of gas. The taxi drivers, the ones down by the Damascus Gate: they all know that.

Q.
That’s kind of you.

A.
Only God is kind. It could have been a VW.

Q.
What?

A.
The second car. Or more likely a Topolino. It made that little puttering sound they always make.

M
eral had just returned from re-examining the scene of the crash. He had also reinterviewed the husband and wife. This time he challenged the wife’s account by presenting
her with that of the husband, but she remained insistent that neither had she seen nor heard a second vehicle or seen any “second man,” although she did at last admit that her first look out the window had been just “a quick glance;” and then she yielded even further, admitting that as she was somewhat in shock, her gaze riveted to the burning Land Rover and the gas pump, perhaps there was indeed another vehicle after all. She couldn’t be sure. As for the husband, this time around he recalled a detail that he said had slipped his mind. He said he had heard someone’s voice.

Q.
When?

A.
Just before I heard the dragging.

Q.
Right after hearing the second car door being opened?

A.
Yes, that’s right. A man’s voice. It was low. Very angry. I’d say horrified.

Q.
Horrified?

A.
Yes. That I’m sure of. And pleading.

Q.
And what was being said? Do you recall?

A.
He said, “Anyone but you! No, not you!”

Q.
Nothing more?

A.
No, no more talking. Just the dragging and the footsteps.

T
he husband was unable to explain how he could have forgotten this when first questioned. He’d looked down, his eyes vague, and said simply, “I don’t know.” He seemed troubled about it. Afterward Meral reinterviewed the two other witnesses in the case. No paperwork, no clues of any kind that would identify the driver had been found in the charred and
battered hulk of the vehicle. However, the license plate had survived and led Meral to the Eldan car rental agency clerk who had processed the rental to a man who had paid in cash and presented an international driver’s license in the name of Joseph Temescu, while a supplier of farm equipment in the area was found to have a recent invoice of a sale to him of a cowcatcher, and it was this, Meral thought, that not only pointed most strongly to a crime but to one carried out by a professional killer, for if the driver’s intention was homicide, he would want to assure himself that his vehicle still would be drivable after the hit.

While the salesman who had sold the device to Temescu could not remember the transaction very clearly, the mechanic at the firm did remember affixing it onto Temescu’s car. But as for a description of Temescu, though the Eldan clerk had made a copy of his driver’s license, Temescu had apparently moved as his photo for the license was being taken so that the focus was blurred and indistinct, and neither the mechanic nor the car rental agent were able to provide very much that was helpful: “in his forties” with a “soldierly bearing” and a “very strong face.” That was all. Both also reported that Temescu spoke English, but that it was clear it was not his native tongue inasmuch as he spoke with a heavy accent that was neither Israeli nor Arab. “Maybe Eastern European,” the clerk had ventured. But even here was uncertain. There had been one tantalizing lead. Meral had gone to the Arab Government Hospital to ask if they had any record of a serious burn case admitted on 14 January. And as it happened, there was. It was a male about fifty years of age with third degree burns, in particular on his face and both his hands. He was accompanied by another man of indeterminate age who said the burned man’s
name was Thomas Hulda, while his own was Martin Kerr. Fluids were given to Hulda intravenously and antibiotic creams applied. Kerr insisted on staying in the burned man’s hospital room for the six days that he was there. According to a hospital nurse in attendance, he would sit on the floor near the bed with his back against the wall and his hands clasped around his knees, never speaking, just staring at the man in the bed and his thickly bandaged hands. On the seventh day he helped the burned man into a taxicab. It drove away with Kerr following after. Kerr had given the hospital the same address for both of them, an apartment in the Jewish Quarter, but when Meral had gone there to question them he found that no such persons were living, or ever had lived, at that address.