The Spoils of War. Gordon Kent
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entered the Masters program in Archaeology and Ancient Studies at the University of Michigan,” Hamal said. “Which means that he is, in fact, an archaeologist. I would like to hear you confirm that, Rashid.”
“Yes, he is an archaeologist.”
“He is conducting an illegal dig.”
“Are there legal digs here?” Rashid surprised himself. But he wasn’t as afraid as he had been.
The woman, Zahirah, raised her carefully plucked brows. The man smiled, grunted a laugh. “Digs are legal if we license them. Hmm? And if not—then we seize them.”
Rashid looked at the table in front of him, because he now knew who had taken and beaten Salem. His sweat turned to ice, his relaxation vanished.
“You—” he began. He started again. “Where is Salem? Have you arrested him?” And he thought Do they know I hit the man with a hammer?
Hamal took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled to the side, away from Zahirah. “We seized the dig at Tel-Sharm-Heir’at. We do not have your friend Salem. Do you know that Salem Qatib was abducted that night? After my men took the site?”
Rashid put his hands out, grabbed the table as if he might slide off his chair. “No.”
“He was taken by Israelis, Rashid. Do you know anything about that?”
“No! No!” Rashid’s head went back and forth between them.
“And they killed him.” Hamal’s voice was brutal.
Rashid sat in shock.
Tel Aviv
Alan Craik and a woman detective named Miriam Gurion were sitting in a cubicle in the homicide detectives’ “room,” really a space big enough to play basketball in. She was in her late forties, he thought, her face lined by sun and wind, her hair gray. She spoke English well but with an almost-swallowed “r” that sometimes disappeared into her throat.
“How do you know I was lied to?” he said. He watched her eyes, which met his honestly enough but flicked away to each side; she had the head movements, too, of the watcher who is always checking the periphery. The watchfulness of a cop in a place where bombs go off. Or of a detective of homicide who thought the walls had ears.
“The 27-14,” she said. “The 27-14 is a routine piece of paper, but it has to be signed when we say it’s a homicide—and that’s my name on it, and in fact I signed it.” She leaned toward him over her messy desk and lowered her voice. “Two years ago.”
Behind her, three cat photos and five people photos were stuck to the cubicle wall; the people, he had already figured out, were the same two, young and older, one also in a wedding dress—her daughters?
“Let’s go for coffee,” she said.
“Yeah, but I don’t—”
“I don’t say another word in here.” She was almost whispering. She led him out a side door of the building to a sidewalk café a block away, not mentioning Salem Qatib or the paper or what she had meant by “two years ago.”
He ordered coffee, she a soda. While they waited, she lit a cigarette and puffed and simply shook her head when he tried to talk. She blew out smoke and he unconsciously waved it away. “Oh, you’re one of those,” she said and turned sideways to him, holding the cigarette low on her street side. The waiter put the coffee and the soda down between them and hovered, and she made a shooing gesture. When he was gone, she said, “Tell me about this detective who gave you the papers.”
“What’s your interest?” he said.
She grunted. “My interest is my job.” She puffed, exhaled out of the street side of her lips. “My interest is in living in a good country, where the cops don’t tell lies. This detective you talked to told you lies.”
He told her about Berudh, described him, his office. She said, “Mossad.” When he looked skeptical, she said, “He has to be a Mossad liaison. We have to work with them, but they’re bastards. So they lied to you.” She got out another cigarette, played with a cheap lighter, said, “I didn’t want to say these things at Dizengoff Street. You understand. But faking a homicide file, that’s serious business.”
“You don’t know it’s faked.”
She sighed. She held out her hand. He didn’t get it. She moved the hand impatiently, then lit her new cigarette, put the hand out again. He gave her the blue folder with the papers Berudh had given him.
Miriam Gurion opened the papers on the café table and put her head low over them as if she were near-sighted. She smoked and turned pages, separating them into two stacks. “This is bullshit,” she said. “You believe in feelings? I get bad feelings.” She stubbed out the end of the cigarette and burrowed for another in her huge handbag. With her head, she indicated one of the piles she had made. “These papers, you see them? They’re authentic—I know, because they’re from a case I had two years ago. That’s what I meant, I signed the 27-14 two years ago—these are all from another case.” She touched the other pile. “These are new, mostly dreck. See, your Berudh or somebody dug out my old case, probably scanned the file into a computer, printed it out, blocked out the name and the date, typed in new ones, rescanned—and here we are! A nice case file on somebody named Qatib, Salem, to give to the nice American officer who only wants to get it over with so he can go home. Eh?”
She lit a new cigarette and leaned back, smoking, her eyes on the street, and then she said without looking at him, “I don’t believe this crap about your guy, what’s his name—Qatib—being taken to the West Bank for burial. The family is in the US, you said? So the burial story is bullshit. I think maybe so is the story about people calling him in missing; we’ll check this. Right now.” She got a cell phone from the overstuffed handbag. Alan figured there was a gun in there somewhere, too; could she ever find it if she needed it? She punched in numbers, said to him, “I think we need to work together.” Then she was barking Hebrew into the cell, touching new numbers, making another call.
When she was done, she threw the phone into the handbag’s open maw and stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “The file on my two-year-old case is checked out from storage. Okay? Also, there’s nothing in the missing persons log for any calls last night about Qatib, Salem.” She put a hand on one pile of paper. “All bullshit.”
“Okay. Why?”
“You tell me, darling.” She blew out smoke. “What a bloody mess! I’m going to have to open a file, new case, plus file a complaint against your Berudh, plus I got no body—” She sat back and puffed, then looked at the papers she had said were from her old case and said, “Maybe we go find a body.” Smiled.
“Qatib?”
Her open hand, turned upward, floated over the table. “Why do they pick my case to do their faking? Chance? No. Something against me? No. Then why? Very fast work, darling, doing all this between about midnight and this morning. So they pick my case because a lot of the work is done for them already, nu?” The hand closed into a fist. She laughed. “Two things: somebody knew my old case, remembered it, and maybe there was a connection. Like the same people found the body? Or turned it into a body? Mmm?” She ground the cigarette into her saucer. “Let’s take a ride to Jaffa.”
The coffee was terrible, and Alan didn’t mind leaving the café, but he didn’t get it. “What’s in Jaffa?”
She waved the waiter toward her and scrambled in her bag for money; Alan was late in reaching for his own. “Two years ago, a body was found in an old military barracks there. He was young, Palestinian. I got the case. Mossad waved me off when I seemed to be getting somewhere. Now that case file is being used for the body of another young Palestinian. And here is Mossad again.” She stood. “Maybe Qatib, Salem, ended up in Jaffa.”
He