WIlliam Bayer: Pattern crimes

"Without a piano-impossible."

"It doesn't matter. Your birthday gift to me. Play it alone, just the adagio. Please."

She paused, considering, then went to the platform, picked up her cello and began to tune it.

That ridiculous sweat shirt-it has to come off."

"Really!"

"Off!" he demanded.

She pulled it over her head.

"And the bra too. You look silly in it. The jeans are fine, but I want you bare above your waist."

She shrugged, unhooked her bra, threw it at him. He caught it, grinned, gazed back. He loved her leanness, the way her ribs showed taut beneath her pale skin, and above them her breasts, so firm and sassy, the nipples hard and arrogant.

He poured himself another vodka, then switched on the spotlights creating a kind of stage. When everything was finally ready, the cello tuned, the lighting perfect, he sat back upon the couch. Now you may begin."

She played the Schubert marvelously, and despite the sentimentality of the piece, he was moved by its dark feeling, so moved that, as she launched into the long melodic line, he lost himself in fantasy. He saw himself, a leonine old man, making love to this proud and beautiful cellist. And then, as she played on, bowed the last long dark passage, he shut his eyes and recalled the bitter cold of a windy winter afternoon fifteen years before, and then his rage as he had entered the living room of his Moscow flat and found Sergei Sokolov screwing Irina on the couch.

JERUSALEM. ONE YEAR LATER…

It snowed that winter in Jerusalem. Deep drifts piled up against the walls. Roofs were blanketed and icicles hung from battlements. Men walked stooped before the gently falling flakes.

When the snow stopped, the city dazzled, a maze of white cubes sparkling in the sun. One night in January, David Bar-Lev sat before the large window of his apartment in the residential district of Abu Tor and gazed in wonder as the snow-covered capital glowed a strange blue-silver beneath the moon.

For a long while he stared, across the Hinnom Valley, through encrusted olive trees and cypresses toward Mount Zion, the Mount of Olives, the Dome of the Rock brooding upon the Temple Mount. Beyond the chilled glass, Jerusalem was silent; the only sound he heard was Anna breathing lightly in her sleep.

He looked toward her. Her cello stood in the corner like a sentinel. Her comb and face cream and pearl necklace lay entangled on the little table beside the bed. The planes of her face glowed like the moonlit roofs. Her thick black hair was glossy as a cat's.

He reached for the gray silk dress in which she'd performed that evening, from which a quarter hour before he'd watched her step so carefully. It lay just where she'd left it, across the back of the couch. It was still damp from her concert, and he remembered the droplets he'd wiped from her forehead in the dressing room and again in the car before they'd driven home.

He held the silk to his lips as he tried to match his breathing to the slow even rising of her chest. He loved her and he wondered then whether he could only love a mystery-women who were puzzles, crimes that were difficult to solve, designs he sensed but could not read, this city in which he'd been born and raised but whose pattern he had never grasped.

The first killings came with the spring.

The snow melted quickly; the runoff was huge. By late March the Judean hills were coated with desert grass, almond blossoms, and budding poppies. Before dawn, the smoke from fires in Bedouin camps drifted in to perfume the city. The sky above Jerusalem was a deep dark blue and the winds brought air so cold and pure it seemed to cut one's lungs.

When the telephone rang, David was sipping coffee. Anna wore a white terry cloth robe and her hair was still wet from her shower. Her eyes followed him as he carried the phone to the window and peered out into the dawn. He was looking for something a thousand meters across the valley. He nodded when he found it-a tiny whirling light.

"I can see your flasher, Rafi."

"So you could have been a witness. Want to come over here? It's cold."

"Are you calling because I live across the way?"

"David, David-what a question!" David pulled the receiver from his ear; the patch-in with the patrol car was bad. "…have to leave, have a meeting. Want you to take a look before things get disarranged. No need to take charge. There's a sergeant here already. So-is there a pattern? Maybe. We'll talk about it later in the morning. But it's really cold. You have gloves? If you don't, maybe Anna does. But don't bring her, David. I don't think she'd like it. See you later…" Rafi's voice drifted off and then the connection was cut.

The body, discovered before sunrise by an Arab boy riding his horse along the walls, lay amidst stones and other debris between the Dung and Zion gates. The limbs protruded at terrible angles no living creature could simulate. Crumpled, David thought. She was killed somewhere else, then brought here and dumped. Thrown out of a car like trash.

Liederman was in command. David knew him slightly, a small graying middle-aged man with thick glasses and a wizened Polish face. An old-style Ashkenazi policeman recruited in the 1950s, before the force was flooded with immigrants and cops were classified with garbage men.

"Rafi says wait for you." Liederman's voice was hoarse, his fingers stained from smoking. He wore a beaten-up leather commando jacket. "Says I should tell you everything."

"So go ahead. Tell me."

Liederman shrugged as he danced from foot to foot to fight off the morning chill. "She's young, maybe eighteen, twenty. Throat cut. Beaten and mutilated. Found naked under that old army blanket there. No ID. No idea who she is."

An empty tourist bus rounded the corner, stopped, and blocked the road. The driver peered at them and then at the body.

"Hey! Get him out of here," Liederman yelled at one of his men. "Keep traffic moving. I told you that."

"Jewish?" David asked.

"How the hell should I know?"

Use your instinct."

"I don't have any instinct. I'm just an old cop. This year, thank God, I retire."

"Ask him." David gestured at the Arab boy who was sitting on the ground; his horse was grazing the sparse plants that grew along the base of the wall. Liederman grinned and fumbled with his Polaroid. David walked closer to the body, shivered, and stared down.

The girl's face was puffed. Her skin was already turning blue. Her cheeks were marked, two shallow vertical slashes across each, cut quickly, David thought, like a pair of bars drawn across a check.

There were similar pairs of marks, harsh, ugly, brutal, cut into her lips and breasts and a neat slit across her throat. Very little blood. No expression on her face, no frozen look of agony or fear. She was very young. Her eyes were closed and there was a residue of kohl around them. Attractive, perhaps even pretty. He could hardly bear to look at her. He turned away.

Liederman called to him. He was standing with the Arab boy. "He thinks she's Jewish," he said.

David walked over. "You've seen her?" he asked the boy in Arabic.

The boy nodded. "She stands by the Damascus Gate."

"A prostitute?"

The boy nodded again. He was wearing two brown sweaters, the outer one old and torn.

"A Jewish prostitute?"

"I think so."

"Did you ever go with her?"

The boy shook his head.

"You ride down here every morning?"

He explained that he exercised the horse, which belonged to his uncle who lived beyond Ramat Rahel on the road to Bethlehem.

"So why ride this way?"

"I ride her to Shiloah. Besides I find it beautiful."

David looked around. "Yes, you're right. It is beautiful here. Especially just at dawn."

The boy stared deeply at David, then patted the neck of his horse. He had the very gentle sort of Arab-Christian face that always filled David with guilt. No angry PLO kid from Hebron University but a sweet thin Jerusalem boy with large sad injured eyes.