The Labyrinth of Osiris (16 page)

Laying the flowers beside his wife, he circled his arms around her shoulders and kissed her head.

‘Everything OK?’

She reached up and touched his hand, but kept her eyes on the screen.

‘I’m off tomorrow. How about we spend some time with our boy?’

She squeezed his hand again, but still didn’t look up. He stood where he was a moment, breathing in the scent of her hair. Then, with a whispered ‘I love you’, he returned to the kitchen to help Batah with the dinner.

‘You don’t need to,’ she said as he pulled a knife from the drawer and took up position beside her.

‘Come on, you know how I love chopping. At least allow me that little pleasure.’

She gave him a playful nudge and got on with slicing potatoes. For a moment Khalifa’s gaze lingered on the fist-sized chunk of concrete sitting on the windowsill, its upper surface embedded with miniature tiles – a fragment of the fountain he’d built in the hallway of their old flat. A solitary souvenir of happier times. Then, refocusing, he began chopping onions. In the living room the
Mary Poppins
DVD played itself out, and then started over again.

J
ERUSALEM

Ben-Roi had lied to Leah Shalev. He wasn’t promised anywhere for Friday night dinner. Instead, the day finished, he got in his car and headed home alone. There were places he could have gone, plenty of them – although he’d never been especially
frumm
, it was unusual for him to miss
Shabbat
. Tonight he was tired and not in the mood for socializing. Do some reading, maybe watch
Eretz Nehederet
, get an early night. There was a lot of stuff churning round in his head and he didn’t feel like other people’s company. Or God’s, for that matter.

As he motored out of the station and down towards the Zion Gate – the only car on the streets at that time – he called Sarah on the hands-free.

‘Everything OK?’ he asked.

‘Pretty much as it was when we last spoke.’

‘Bubu?’

‘Hang on.’

In the background he heard whispering.

‘Great,’ she replied. ‘Just gearing up for some gymnastics.’

He chuckled. Things like that, the silly things – it was why he’d fallen in love with her in the first place. Head over heels in love.

‘Your folks well?’ he asked.

‘Fine. Yours?’

‘I’m about to call them.’

‘Give them my love. And don’t forget . . .’

‘About decorating tomorrow. Don’t worry, I’ve had it tattooed on my forehead. As soon as I shave in the morning I’ll be reminded.’

She laughed. An infectious, girlish laugh. The laugh of someone who is genuinely amused. It was a great sound.

‘
Shabbat Shalom
, Sarah.’

‘You too, Arieh.
Shabbat Shalom
. See you tomorrow.’

There was a silence, as if both were waiting for the other to say something else. Then, with a repeated
Shabbat Shalom
, they both rang off.

He reached the Zion Gate and manoeuvred his way through, appreciating the smoothness of the Toyota’s power-steering, the ease with which it negotiated the gate’s cramped dog-leg. He’d only had the car a couple of months, after his beloved BMW had finally given up the ghost, and he was still getting used to having a vehicle whose controls actually did what they were supposed to. The BMW, for all its character, had been a truculent bugger. Lovable, but truculent. How he liked to think of himself in many ways. And now he was driving a Toyota Corolla. There was a metaphor in there somewhere.

Outside the gate, he turned right on to Ma’ale Ha-Shalom and headed downhill round the side of Mount Zion, the roof and bell tower of the Dormition Abbey flitting in and out of sight through the cypress trees above him. He called his parents back home on the family farm to wish them
Gut Shabbas
, then his grandmother in the nursing home – ‘Are you eating, Arieh? Please God, tell me you’re eating?’ – and then his sister Chava, at whose flat he had first met Sarah, and who spent most of the conversation telling him what an idiot he was to have split up with her.

Finally, as he drove up Keren Ha-Yesod and turned into Rehavia, past the Women in Black protesters who always stood on the corner, he put in a call to Gilda Milan. His former mother-in-law.
Almost
mother-in-law. Her daughter Galia had been killed before she and Ben-Roi had made it underneath the
Huppah
.

‘So are you back with Sarah yet?’ she asked the moment she heard his voice.

‘
Shabbat Shalom
to you too, Gilda.’

‘Well, are you?’

‘Not when I last checked.’

‘Idiot.’

Ben-Roi smiled wearily. ‘That’s the second time I’ve been called that in the last five minutes.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth.’

Gilda Milan was nothing if not direct. Nothing if not courageous either. Not only had she lost her only child in a terrorist bombing, but four years back her husband Yehuda had died in the same manner while speaking at a peace rally outside the Damascus Gate. Lesser people would have been sunk by just one of those tragedies. Gilda Milan had sat
shivah
for the two people she loved most in the world, and yet remained defiantly buoyant. With Yasmina Marsoudi, wife of the Palestinian politician who had been killed alongside Yehuda, she now travelled the world promoting the cause of peace. Outside Israel and the Territories the two women were feted. Here, their voices fell on deaf ears. These days people were more concerned about paying the rent and getting food on the table than they were with the Palestinian situation. The days of hope, it seemed, were past. These were the days of resignation. Yet still Gilda Milan refused to be bowed. She was, Ben-Roi thought, everything that was good about his country. Even if she did give him a hard time about Sarah.

They chatted until he pulled up in front of his apartment block, whereupon they wished each other
Gut Shabbas
and rang off. He locked the car and headed inside.

After he’d split with Sarah he’d slept for a month on a friend’s sofa over in Givat Sha’ul. It hadn’t been a happy arrangement. Partly because the sofa was a foot too short for his sizeable frame, mainly because Shmuel and his girlfriend had been frequent and extremely noisy love-makers. After four weeks of nightly grunting and shrieking, by which point both the friendship and Ben-Roi’s sanity had been stretched to snapping point, he’d packed his bag and moved into a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a block on Ha-Ramban. It was a shoebox of a place and the rent gouged a chunk out of his 12,000-shekel monthly police wage, but at least he could get a proper night’s sleep. More important, it was just down the road from Sarah’s place on Ibn Ezra and directly opposite the kiddies’ playground where she’d be walking their baby once he or she arrived. Which offered some small consolation for the fact that he wouldn’t actually be living with them.

Once inside, he took a shower, pulled on some clean clothes and opened the sliding doors on to the thin rectangle of dusty concrete that masqueraded as a balcony. In the twenty minutes since he had left the station the rain had stopped and the clouds had broken up, leaving a deep azure sky blushed with hints of pink and green. A beautiful Jerusalem evening. The sort of evening that made you forget all the other shit that happened in the city. He fetched a Goldstar from the fridge – he didn’t drink much any more, but what the hell, it had been a long day – shunted an armchair over to the doorway and propped his feet on the balcony rails. For a while he just sat there listening to the silence, breathing in the smells of jasmine and wet leaves, gazing out towards the sails of the Rehavia windmill. Then, reaching down, he picked up the book that was lying on the carpet just inside the sliding doors.
Shalom, Baby: 101 Tips on How to Be a Good Dad
.

He opened it and started to read, swigging from the bottle. His mind was elsewhere, however, and after only a couple of minutes, he put the book down.

Garrotted corpse. Flight to Egypt. Missing notebooks.
Vosgi
. Thoughts of impending fatherhood receded as the case once again filled his mind.

* * *

The family comes first. Always. That’s what we were raised to believe. You serve the family. Whatever is required, wherever, whenever. No questions asked. No doubts entertained. It supports you, you support it. The family is everything.

I’ve done my duty over the years. Here, there and everywhere. A lot of travelling, a lot of mess cleansed. That’s how I think of it – cleansing mess. I’ve always been a neat sort of person.

The family has other resources, of course. Abundant resources. But some messes require particular attention. Personal attention. Someone who belongs to the family. Who is
of
the family, has the family’s well-being at heart. Someone, above all, who can be trusted.

It’s a big responsibility, trust. A heavy weight. Normally I wear it lightly, don’t give it a second thought. I’ve grown up with it, after all. Have had it drummed into me from my earliest years. I do what I’m told to do and that’s the end of the matter.

Only in this instance I do feel the weight. Safe in my routine, life back to normal, everything tidy and ordered and in its place, I can’t stop thinking about the cathedral. Did I act too quickly? Did I leave loose ends? Should I have waited?

It ought to have been neat, like all the others. Go to her flat, find out what she knows, cleanse her, cleanse the evidence, leave. Simple. Like all the others.

Except that when I arrive at the flat she’s coming out of the front door. With her travel bag. People everywhere. Eyes, witnesses. So I have no choice but to follow. On to the bus. Off the bus. Through the Old City. Into the cathedral. And all the time I’m thinking about the travel bag. Thinking if I should do it sooner than planned, while I’ve got the opportunity. Trying to make the decision.

Now I fear I made the wrong decision. The mess is gone, that’s for sure. So are the laptop and the notebooks. Others are dealing with the technical issues. But there are loose ends. Too many loose ends. The photo, for instance. Should I have taken that? Should I have just fired the whole flat? Should I have kept following her? Should I, should I, should I?

I haven’t spoken of these doubts. The family don’t ask, I don’t tell. But they’re there. Gnawing at me. Distracting me. None of the other missions distract me. I don’t even think about them. But Jerusalem, the cathedral . . .

I fear I may have let the family down. Not done what I was supposed to do. That there’s trouble coming, and that I have brought it. Please God, don’t let me have brought trouble on the family. The family is everything to me. Without the family I am nothing.

And so I hope. And wait. And get on with my duties as best I can.

One curious thing: her hair smelt of almonds. Just like my mother’s.

J
ERUSALEM

When his cell phone rang mid-morning, Ben-Roi was still fast asleep, sprawled face-down on his bed like some oversized starfish.

He’d eventually turned in at 2 a.m., having spent most of the evening surfing the net looking for stuff on Rivka Kleinberg. There was plenty to be found, all of it confirming what Natan Tirat had already told him. Kleinberg had been widely admired, particularly early in her career when she had received a succession of awards for her investigative work, including two Journalist of the Year gongs, one for an article on Israeli destruction of Palestinian olive groves, the other for a piece on the politicization of water resources in the West Bank.

Widely admired, but even more widely reviled. Tirat had mentioned a few of the groups she’d upset over the years, and the web threw up a whole load more: feminists, farmers, Mossad, Hamas, the Israel Police, the Palestinian Police, big industry – the list went on and on. Everyone, it seemed, had a gripe against Rivka Kleinberg. When he’d eventually flopped into bed his head had been buzzing and he’d fallen into a restless, troubled sleep, dreaming of a baby being mauled by cats in a cobweb-filled cathedral and, for some reason, a body washing up on a shore.

He lay now with his face jammed into the pillow, groggy and grumpy, his mobile blaring out its ‘Hava Nagila’ ringtone from the bedside table. He was tempted to let it go to voicemail, but then the thought struck him it might be Sarah, perhaps there was something wrong. Groaning, he reached over and grabbed the handset. It wasn’t Sarah’s number on the display. He hesitated, again tempted to leave it. Then, accepting he wasn’t going to get back to sleep and so might as well talk to whoever wanted to talk to him, he rolled on to his back and answered the call.

‘
Shalom
.’

‘Detective Ben-Roi?’

‘
Ken
.’

‘Mordechai Yaron.’

For a moment he couldn’t place the name. Then it came to him. Rivka Kleinberg’s editor. He swung himself on to the side of the bed, his mind rapidly clearing. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I’m out of town. I only just picked up your messages.’

The voice was low and gruff. Educated. Difficult to guess his age. Sixty, maybe.

‘I’m up in Haifa,’ he added. ‘Our daughter just had a baby. We’re up here for the
Bris
.’

‘
Mazel tov
,’ said Ben-Roi.

He gave it a couple of beats, feeling a curious need to separate the news of a birth from that of a murder, then explained what had happened. Yaron interjected the odd ‘
Elohim adirim
’ and ‘
Zikhrona livrakha
’ but otherwise listened in silence.

‘I’ll get the first train down,’ he said when Ben-Roi had finished. ‘We were due home tomorrow anyway, but I can cut the trip short.’

Ben-Roi told him not to bother. ‘Tomorrow’s fine. I’m tied up today anyway. What time are you back?’

‘Mid-morning.’

They arranged to meet at the
Matzpun ha-Am
office at twelve.

‘One quick question while I’ve got you on the line,’ said Ben-Roi, standing and padding through into the kitchen. ‘Can you tell me what Mrs Kleinberg was working on?’

‘Most recently, a piece on sex-trafficking,’ replied Yaron. ‘You know, girls smuggled into Israel, forced to work as prostitutes. Slavery, basically. Very distressing. She’d been on it for over a month.’

Ben-Roi recalled the desk in Rivka Kleinberg’s flat, all the cuttings on prostitution and the sex industry. That would explain it. He reached down a jar of Elite coffee from the overhead cupboard and switched on the kettle.

‘Before that?’ he asked.

‘She did a big piece on the collapse of the Israeli Left and something on American funding of extremist settlers. Before
that
. . . let me think . . . oh yes, an exposé on domestic violence in the Palestinian Territories. She spent two months on that one. Rivka certainly never stinted on her research.’

Ben-Roi spooned coffee into a mug and glanced at his watch. Ten o’clock. He’d said he’d be at Sarah’s at eleven to start the decorating and didn’t want to be late. He’d got everything he needed for the moment and so thanked Yaron, confirmed their meeting and rang off. He ate a swift breakfast, shaved, dressed and headed out of the flat, leaving all thoughts of the case behind. This was a no-work day. A day for Sarah and the baby.

Outside, yesterday’s rain was a distant memory: the sky was clear, the sun out, the atmosphere warm and sultry. He stood a moment breathing in the air, then set off on the five-minute walk to Sarah’s, whistling tunelessly. He felt good. He was going to be early. First time ever. Let the trumpets sound!

‘Hava Nagila’ blasted out again.

‘
Shalom
.’

‘Detective Ben-Roi?’

‘
Ken
.’

‘Sorry to disturb you on
Shabbat
. It’s Asher Blum.’

For the second time that morning the name sounded familiar, and for the second time that morning it took Ben-Roi a moment to place it. Then he remembered. The librarian from the National Library, the one who’d ID’d Rivka Kleinberg.

They’d found something, Blum told him. Something that might be important. Could he come over?

Ben-Roi stood a moment, eyes flicking up the road to the junction with Ibn-Ezra, where Sarah lived, and down the road to his Toyota.

‘I’ll be right there,’ he said, and jogged back towards his car.

The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem is headed by a quartet of archbishops. One of the four serves as supreme patriarch, the other three each have their own separate spheres of duty.

Archbishop Armen Petrossian was responsible for Church administration, a position that – with His Beatitude the Patriarch in failing health – placed Petrossian in de facto control of the entire community. Or, as he preferred to think of it, in de facto control of the family.

The family was not as extensive as it had once been. In its heyday it numbered upwards of 25,000 people. Now, what with the Arab–Israeli wars and the economic situation, the number had dwindled to just a few thousand. Australia, America, Europe – this was where the young people saw their future, not Israel.

Even a diminished flock brought with it duties, however, and His Eminence was nothing if not dutiful. They were his children, all of them, and if the vow of celibacy had precluded him from siring his own offspring, he still looked on himself as a father. To succour and shield, to nurture and protect – these were the responsibilities of fatherhood. And it was with these responsibilities in mind that he left the compound this morning and, throwing frequent glances over his shoulder to ensure he wasn’t being followed, made his way down into the Old City.

Although the compound formed the bulk of the Armenian Quarter, around its walls were spun a filigree of narrow streets and alleys that formed the quarter’s outer strands, dividing it from the Jewish sector to the east. The archbishop navigated this maze at something just short of a trot, stopping every fifty metres and swinging round before hurrying on his way. High walls rose to either side, echoing canyons of pale Jerusalem stone, with every now and then a grey steel door, each one accompanied by a plaque bearing the name of the family who resided within: Hacopian, Nalbandian, Belian, Bedevian, Sandrouni. There were Armenian flags, and posters commemorating the genocide of 1915 – the Jews, they reminded anyone who bothered to stop and read, did not have a monopoly on suffering. There were no people about, however. Of all the Old City quarters, the Armenian was by far the quietest.

He continued down to the bottom end of Ararat Street, where, with a final look back, he slipped into a narrow alley. At the far end was a door with above it a plaque carrying the name Saharkian. He pressed the video intercom. There was a pause, then the sound of bolts being drawn. Many bolts. The door opened. A man was standing inside with a pistol in his hand. Behind him were two more men, both holding shotguns. The archbishop gave a satisfied nod.

‘Secure?’

‘Secure,’ the men replied in unison.

Petrossian raised a hand in blessing, turned and hurried back along the alley. From behind came the slam of a door and the clack of bolts sliding into place.

A rectangular, modernist affair set in the grounds of the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus, the National Library of Israel looked like a large concrete sandwich.

Asher Blum, head of Reader Services, looked like a caricature. Beanpole thin, with thick spectacles, pudding-bowl haircut and jeans that were at least an inch too short for him, he ticked every librarian stereotype you could think of.

‘We’re closed on
Shabbat
,’ he explained as he let Ben-Roi into the building. ‘We only came in today to catch up on some book-stacking. I told Naomi what had happened and she mentioned the notes. She wasn’t in yesterday which is why I haven’t contacted you sooner.’

He waved Ben-Roi through the glass doors, locked them and led the way upstairs to a large open-plan mezzanine area. Reading rooms opened off to either side; a stained-glass window – a triptych of windows – took up the entire wall at the head of the stairs. Its coloured panels seemed to burn in the morning sunlight, casting pools of red, green and blue across the carpeted floor.

‘The Mordechai Ardon windows,’ explained Blum. ‘Our pride and joy.’

Ben-Roi gave what he hoped was an appreciative nod and checked his watch. 10.56. He was going to be a bit late, but then Sarah would expect that. He still had some leeway.

They crossed the landing and pushed through a door marked General Reading Room. It gave into a high-ceilinged, softly lit space with desks, book stacks and grimy, aluminium-framed windows looking out on to a drab internal courtyard. Just inside the door was an L-shaped wooden counter, with behind it a second librarian, this one far from stereotypical: brunette, attractive, with a stud in her nose and wearing a slightly-too-tight Kings of Leon T-shirt.

‘Naomi Adler,’ said Blum, introducing her. ‘She was duty librarian the last time Mrs Kleinberg was here.’

Ben-Roi shook her hand, trying to keep his eyes off the girl’s chest.

‘Apparently you’ve found something?’ he said.

The girl nodded and, reaching beneath the counter, produced a crumpled sheet of A4.

‘Mrs Kleinberg left it beside the microfilm readers,’ she explained, handing the sheet across. ‘I knew it was hers because I recognized the writing. She was always leaving stuff lying around.’

‘This was when?’

‘Last Friday. In the morning.’

A week before Kleinberg’s murder.

‘You asked what she’d been looking at on the readers,’ put in Asher Blum. ‘We thought it might be important.’

Ben-Roi examined the sheet. There were, in his experience, pieces of evidence that leapt right out at you, screamed: ‘Look at me! I’ll solve the crime!’ And there were pieces of evidence that didn’t. This fell squarely in the latter camp.

It was a list. Of newspapers. Four of them. Just the title and date of publication. One was the
Jerusalem Post
for 22 October 2010; the other three were
The Times
– 9 December 2005; 17 May 1972; 16 September 1931.

‘She was looking at these?’ asked Ben-Roi.

The girl nodded.

‘Do you know
what
she was looking at, exactly?’

‘She was definitely reading something on the business pages of
The Times
. I was helping someone set up on the machine beside hers and could see over her shoulder. I think it was that one.’

She touched a finger to the 9 December 2005 listing.

‘She was making notes,’ she added. ‘A lot of notes.’

‘The other three papers?’

The girl shook her head.

He looked back down at the list, then at his watch. 11.02. He really ought to be going, could follow this up another time. Then again, a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference. He hesitated, professional interest wrestling with personal obligation. Professional interest won out.

‘Can we take a look?’

‘Sure.’

The librarian came out from behind the counter and led him over to a row of metal cabinets ranged along the wall at one end of the room. Asher Blum left them to it, busying himself stacking books on to a trolley.

The cabinets were labelled with the names of half a dozen newspapers, some English, some Hebrew:
Ha’aretz, Ma’ariv
,
Yedioth
Ahronoth
,
The Jerusalem Post
,
The Times
,
The New York Times
. Taking the list from Ben-Roi, the girl ran her eyes up and down, then started opening drawers. Each was filled with neatly arranged rows of cardboard boxes, each box labelled with the publication dates covered by the microfilm inside. She picked out the relevant ones, carried them over to the nearby reading machines and sat down. Ben-Roi took up position behind her.

‘Where do you want to start?’ she asked.

‘I guess with the paper you saw her looking at. Do you remember the page?’

‘Not off the top of my head. I probably would if I saw it again.’

She switched the machine on. Opening one of the boxes, she removed its roll of film, loaded it on to the runners and wound it on to bring up the first page image. She made sure the image was centred and focused, then fast-forwarded, pages flying by across the projection plate in an indecipherable blur of grey type, the room echoing to the puttering rush of spooling tape. She located the right edition – Friday, 9 December 2005 – then slowed the reel right down, winding through the pages one by one in search of the section she’d seen Rivka Kleinberg reading. Headlines and parts of headlines rolled past – ‘Hospitals may ban treatment for smokers and drinkers’, ‘Blair attempts to isolate . . .’ ‘. . . lost her legs to walk down the aisle’, ‘. . . dies peacefully at 113’ – before she eventually stopped on page 66. She gazed down a moment, then nodded.

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘I recognize the photo. How’s your English?’

‘Good.’

‘In that case I’ll leave you to it and set up the other reels. Save a bit of time.’

She pointed out the forward and rewind buttons, then moved to the adjacent machine and started loading up the next film. Ben-Roi sat down and stared at the page in front of him.