Pattern Crimes (21 page)

Yosef spotted him first. "David!" Her head snapped up. She saw him and then she smiled, and when she did he knew he was a very lucky man.

"We got fabulous reviews," Yosef said, as they started the drive up to Jerusalem. "Anna's gotten very strong. She doesn't play anymore like a talented kid. There's a new confidence. The audiences picked up on it and the better they liked her the better she played."

Yosef was sitting in back with the cello. Anna sat beside David, her fingers resting gently on his arm.

"So is this true?" David asked.

She grinned, then shrugged.

"Now she's ready for America," Yosef said. "Last time she impressed them. This time she'll knock them dead."

Later, when he began the climb into Judea, she and Yosef turned quiet. The hills glittered tan and gold. A lone hawk riding the thermals circled in the distance.

Finally Anna spoke. "Oh how I missed this place!"

"It's home," David said.

She nodded.

"And no one will ever take it away from us," Yosef said. "We won't let them. Ever."

Late that afternoon, after she had hung her clothes, and set up her music stand, and placed her cello in the corner and her pearl necklace on the little table beside the bed, she came to him and they made love. Afterward she slept against him, her head pressed to his shoulder, her body molded to his flank. At eight o'clock, they went out to East Jerusalem to eat.

At the Ummayyah she gazed around, taking in the boisterous atmosphere. As always the place was alive, waiters rushing about with skewers of meat, journalists huddled in booths with Palestinian politicians, Israeli tourist guides exchanging gossip with Roman Catholic archaeologists.

"Welcome back," he said, "to the Middle East."

She asked him about his case. He told her everything, and when he got to the part about the zoo, she reached across the table and grasped his hand.

"No footprints. Or rather too many. The ground there's a mess. We found plenty of shells too—theirs, Peretz's, and mine. A few slugs. They didn't match the ones in the lovers' heads."

"This is too dangerous, David."

He nodded. "Dangerous maybe, but not 'too dangerous'—not yet." He was tempted then to tell her about Stephanie's warning, but decided he had better not. He didn't want to explain why he'd gone to see her, or bring up Stephanie's speculations about Anna's past. But then Anna surprised him. Without prompting, she told him that just
before she'd called him from Paris, Titanov had phoned her at her hotel.

"From where?"

"Moscow. They won't let him travel. Not because they blame him for my defection, but to make an example of him, so that every musician understands he or she is responsible for the person he or she is sleeping with. But he didn't call to complain about that."

"Why did he call you?" David asked.

"To beg me to come back. For the good of the country, he said, but really, he said, because he still thought about me all the time." She shook her head. "I wasn't touched. I didn't believe a word of it. He's a selfish man. Still, he sounded desperate. I think he thinks that if he could persuade me to come back, they'd let him travel again."

"What did you tell him, Anna?"

"That I'm never coming back, that I never cared for him, and that I'm in love now with another man." She smiled. "He took it pretty well, said he knew all that but still he wanted me to come home. You see, he kept giving himself away. 'I
want
you, I
need
you,' never mind what I might want or need myself. He even asked me about you, seemed to know who you were. 'An Israeli cop,' he said, a little contemptuously, and then he asked how could I fall so low. 'You're not even Jewish,' he said. He was speechless when I told him I've been thinking I might convert."

"Is that true?"

"Could be." She gave him her best, most flashing smile. "One thing for sure—I'm going to start studying Hebrew seriously. Tomorrow I'm enrolling in a class."

"Susan Mills used a tourist photo shop, Samuelson's on King George next to that old German bookstore. They remember her well. She bought a hell of a lot of film." Micha spread out photocopies of the receipts on David's desk.

"They did her processing too," said Dov. "But when we add up the number of rolls she bought and the number she had developed, we come up twenty short. We found eight in her luggage and one in her camera. So there're still eleven unaccounted for."

"I doubt she came to Israel without film."

"Right. So
at least
eleven."

"Maybe she took them to another shop?"

"Doubt it. She was a creature of habit. Took the same bus from the Holyland every morning with a list of the places she wanted to see. Then she'd knock them off methodically, then she'd head downtown. She usually hit the photo shop at noon."

David nodded. "Okay—let's see what we've got. They know she has film on the accident, including shots of the guys in the van. They want that film. Their guy 'Hurwitz' has already quarreled with her about it. Now suppose someone new calls her up and apologizes, someone with a very sincere voice who speaks perfect English and claims he's Hurwitz's boss. She agrees—after all, she's a decent Christian lady only too glad to help out police when they're polite. This new guy drops by her hotel, picks her up, and takes her away to be tortured. But why torture her if she gave them what they wanted? No, that isn't how it went. They lured her out, she got suspicious, and when she figured out that they weren't cops, she didn't give them anything at all."

"So where's the film?"

"Maybe still at the shop?"

"It isn't. We checked."

"So maybe she
did
talk," Micha said.

"No. She didn't," Dov insisted.

David glanced at him, wondered if Dov's strong identification with Susan Mills was blinding him to real possibilities. David was all for the investigator immersing himself in the victim's life, so long as the immersion didn't prevent the investigator from facing unpleasant truths.

"Either way it doesn't matter," he finally said. "They took the film from her room, or, if it was still being developed, they found her receipt, took it back to the shop, and claimed the film as their own."

"They knew her at Samuelson's."

"Even
when there's a name on the ticket they just look at the
number. At least that's how they do it at the place I take my film."

"We'll go back there."

"This time make sure you talk to
all
the clerks. If someone else picked up those rolls, he wouldn't know she usually came by at noon. He'd probably go in late, around closing time when the staff is tired and gearing up for the bus ride home...."

"So then what did Gati say?" Avraham's eyes gleamed as he gnawed on a piece of chicken.

David glanced over at Anna and winked. It had been her idea to invite his father for dinner. She had prepared a feast of chicken Tapaka, using her clothes iron to weigh down the chicken on the griddle.

He said he thought that if people understood Gutman's background he might never have to go to trial. When I suggested to him that this was maybe a little naive he didn't seem to understand. 'But don't you see? He's an atheist,' he said. 'Torahs mean nothing to him. Far as he was concerned he was just selling parchment. What's so bad about that?' "

Avraham threw both hands into the air. "This is our Great Military Genius?" David was pleased. The old man was enjoying himself, and, best of all, the two of them were getting along.

"You never told me you knew him, Father." David refilled his glass.

"
I've never been one to reminisce." Avraham toasted Anna. "Some of the good old days were better than others."

"What kind of man is he?" Anna asked.

"Not nice. Not nice at all. A warrior. The kind who thrives on war."

"Didn't he go into politics?"

Avraham waved his hand. "He tried, but he didn't have appeal. Gati was a soldier's soldier. Wouldn't kowtow. Didn't know how to play the game." He reached for the platter, took a second piece of chicken. He smiled at Anna. "This is very good, my dear."

"Not kosher, I'm afraid."

"I told you—don't worry about that. You're an excellent cook." He toasted her again, then turned back to his son. "So," his eyes were excited, "what did you say to him next?"

"Told him it wouldn't matter if Gutman had been brokering stolen newspapers. He'd been caught in possession and for that he'd have to go to trial."

"
You're right of course. A crime's a crime, a thief's a thief, and," he gave David a significant nod, "a detective, I suppose, is always a detective."

"What will happen to Gutman now?" Anna asked.

"Most likely he'll go to prison. I really can't see them letting him off. Unless, of course, there was something truly extenuating. I told Gati there's a classic method people use. They turn religious—put on a skullcap, grow a beard, and tell the judge about their new-found faith. But I told him that, unfortunately, due to the nature of Gutman's crime, I didn't see how this particular technique could possibly work."

Avraham roared with laughter. Then he wiped his mouth. "You did well, my boy. I only wish I'd been there—just to see Yigal Gati's stricken face."

The remainder of the dinner continued to be fun, Anna was pleased, and when Avraham thanked her and said good night the two of them embraced. In the car, as David started the drive back to Me'a Shearim, Avraham complimented him on having found such a fine companion.

"You should maybe consider marrying her?" he asked tentatively.

David was amused. "She isn't Jewish."

"So what? You can marry in Cyprus. Isn't that what people do?"

They drove the rest of the way in silence. When they arrived at Hevrat Shas and Avraham opened the car door, David saw an old religious man wandering up the street and then he thought he saw his father wince. "Those missing files I mentioned ..."

"Yes. I meant to ask—"

"Don't
bother yourself. Turns out I was wrong. Blumenthal's ga
rage was ransacked but nothing was taken. Whoever broke in was probably looking for valuables. When he didn't find any I think he just got mad and threw around my papers in a fit of spite."

After his father disappeared into his building, David chopped his hand against the steering wheel.

Damn! Why does he lie to me?
He pressed his bruised hand against his mouth.

There had been a temporary clerk who had worked at Samuelson's Photo Shop during the height of the April tourist season. A veteran of Lebanon, stoned half the time, according to Mr. Samuelson—nice, but not someone he'd wanted to keep on.

Dov found him working for a rug cleaning firm that serviced the finer homes in Rehavia. He showed him Susan's picture. Yes, the young veteran remembered her, she'd been in the shop, had bought lots of film and brought it back to be developed. But she'd returned to America earlier than expected—he remembered that because her nephew had come in with one of her claim tickets to pick up her final batch of prints.

"Nephew? Her
Israeli
nephew?"

"Yeah, an apologetic kind of kid. Said his aunt was concerned, didn't want to stick the shop, and had made him promise to pick up her film and pay off her account."

Dov ran out to his car for his IdentiKit, spent an hour with the veteran working up a composite of Susan's "nephew." When he brought the composite in David studied it. An ordinary looking young man, clean-cut and nondescript. "Nice Jewish boy," David said.

Yosef Barak had spoken of a new authority in Anna's playing, a new confidence. Yet now, when David watched her practice, he sensed something troubled in the way she played.

"Is anything the matter?" he asked her one morning.

She shook her head. "No. Why do you
think there is?"

"You seem ...I don't know, disturbed somehow. I just wondered if you were having trouble. After such a big success in Europe to come back here could bring you down."

"Oh,
David—this isn't a backwater. Jerusalem's my home." She frowned. You
know I set high goals for myself. Sometimes I think Yosef is too quick to praise."

"So there is something?"

"Just concentration. Don't worry, I'll get it back. All I have to do is," she smiled, "you know: 'practice, practice...' " She kissed him on his neck.

Avraham called. "Something I forgot to tell you. We laughed a lot about Gati the other night, but later, when I thought about it, the approach he made to you rang false. He and Gutman always hated each other and from what I've learned there's never been a reconciliation. So the question is: Why is he trying to get Gutman off? I don't know the answer, but it's something you might think about. Employ an old Kabbalistic principle: Look for the hidden cause because the surface is never real."