WIlliam Bayer: Pattern crimes

The building was old, its ceilings twenty feet high, and its cavernous tiled corridors, lit by fluorescent lamps suspended from iron chains, echoed and re-echoed with the footsteps of cops, clerks, detectives, prisoners, informers, witnesses, and an occasional lost citizen looking for a place to lodge a complaint. The beaten-up pay telephones and recalcitrant soup, coffee, and candy machines in these corridors were notorious, the interlocking squad rooms a maze. Few outsiders could find their way around this rabbit warren carved out of what once had been the huge intimidating offices of police officials in the period of the British Mandate.

David Bar-Lev did not think anyone would be intimidated by his office, barely wide enough to contain his desk. Dossiers were crammed into bookcases. A bulletin board was crowded with overlapping notes. There were two heavily chipped black metal chairs, two telephones, and a carefully cropped photograph of his daughter, Hagith, with just the left hand of his ex-wife, Judith, showing beside her arm.

Although the walls here had been soundproofed and a false ceiling installed for privacy, David always left his door open to the room where the rest of the PC Unit worked. Here the partition walls were barely taller than a man so that raised voices and ringing phones from the squad rooms of adjoining units swirled together and merged. No single word was ever intelligible out of all this restless sound, but David felt there was an underlying harmony. "Crime and Torment," he called it, as if it were a piece of music, a piece he sometimes struggled to decode and at other times loathed so much he would make up any excuse no matter how absurd to escape it, fleeing the building, taking to the streets, even driving out into the Judean hills…and sometimes even then it would still ring in his ears.

"Shoshana!"

She appeared almost instantly in his doorway, a short young woman with eager black eyes, tight black curls, and olive skin. "Where's Dov?"

"Working the Rehavia burglary case. A lady came in. Said she saw some of her silverware in East Jerusalem. He went out to check."

"Micha…?"

"With Uri having coffee. My turn next unless things start picking up."

"So you're bored, Shoshana?"

"Not really bored. It's just that here I never get a chance to fight."

She'd been in a narcotics unit when David met her, an unhappy office mascot. She wasn't getting along with her boss and was angry at being assigned to cover the phones while the boys got to work the streets. She had the plump fresh cheeks and guileless smile of a high school girl, but there was cunning behind the facade. David liked her, and when he saw her perform at a police karate competition, all flashing black eyes and short black curls, he was so impressed by her self-assurance he arranged her transfer to Pattern Crimes.

"We don't fight. We investigate. If you like to fight so much, go back into the army." She grinned. "While you're considering it, go downstairs and see if you can find us a halfway decent car."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to check out a place where an American nun was dumped."

He heard her footsteps as she ran out through the squad room; he was fascinated by her sudden entrances and exits. One moment she was there and the next was gone, yet he could never remember actually seeing her come or go.

He told her to drive, thought that might use up some of her restless energy. The car, a dilapidated white Subaru, had ripped seats and dented fenders. On their way up Jaffa Road, he told her what he wanted her to do.

"Get good photos. Then go with Uri to the Damascus Gate. He stands aside while you talk to the women, as nonthreatening and sympathetic as you can be. Find out who she is. Name, address, everything. Did anyone see her get picked up last night? Does she operate for a pimp? It may turn out the kid was wrong. Maybe she wasn't a prostitute. But talk to them anyway. See if they heard about any guys who like to cut. Tell them about the marks, but not about the breasts-we're going to keep that to ourselves…"

There was a traffic jam in front of the Mahane Yehuda market, trucks and cars stalled, blasting one another with horns. A woman lugging a market basket wove her way across the street. A group of schoolchildren, five- and six-year-olds, waited with perfect discipline at the curb.

"What the hell is this?" Shoshana wiped her forehead; it was eleven o'clock and getting hot. David thought of Anna practicing, her bow cutting across the strings, filling the apartment with dark rich sounds. Every so often she too would wipe her brow.

"I'll put on the siren."

David shook his head. Something was happening in the market. People were pouring in but few were coming out. "Meet me up there on the right," he said. Then he stepped out of the car.

As he made his way down the dark arcade that was the market axis, he heard the shrill whistles of police. He pushed past stands piled with eggplants, onions, Jaffa oranges, past vendors and buyers, through the debris of fruit skins and discarded vegetable greens, then took a shortcut through one of the little cross alleys until he came up against an immobile human mass.

"What is it?" he asked a stooped old lady in black who was grasping her purchases to her chest.

She looked at him, lips tight. "Katzer." And then all around David heard the name. Some whispered it, others hissed it, a few yelled it out like a cheer: "Katzer!" "Katzer!"

Suddenly David caught a glimpse of him, escorted by police, bobbing along behind a phalanx of his supporters, sullen young males in knitted skullcaps bullying their way through the crowd. There was something thug-like, dull and stupid, about this vanguard, but the rabbi's small hard eyes gleamed with calculation.

David watched, fascinated, as Katzer embraced a seller of olives, a seller of fish, an old man with a cane who sewed buttons and hems.

David was surprised at how short he was; although he knew his face well from TV, this was the first time he had seen him in the flesh. Now he was struck by his animal magnetism and rabid quality too: moist eyes, sweaty beard, mouth that twisted as he spoke. Nothing otherworldly about him, nothing pious or Talmudic. This was a politician who thrived on touching faces, patting shoulders, grasping extended hands. His supporters needed him, wanted to feel his power, and Katzer eagerly obliged. But then David noticed something else. The rabbi's eyes squirreled up at the sound of a passing airplane, and then again at the pop of a beer can being opened up. A glimmer of fear: He was political meat and knew the passions he unleashed could also put a bullet in his chest.

The cops blew their whistles, the thugs marched past, and Katzer was swallowed by the mob. Making his way back past the butcher's stalls to find Shoshana and the car, David felt his shirt sticking to his back.

I t was a drainage ditch, dusty, overgrown with brambles, separated by bushes from the narrow access road that led up to Mevasseret. Police stakes tipped with orange fluorescent paint marked the place where the body had been found. David circled the site, careful not to walk upon it, then leaned against the car. There was a constant roar of traffic from the highway, a harsh whirling sound of speeding cars and trucks. Just the sort of spot, he thought, you might pull up to if you were starting down to Tel Aviv and then decided to stop and take a piss.

"She was seen getting into a Tel Aviv car," Shoshana said. "Looks like whoever killed her pulled off at the exit, threw her out, then continued on his way."

The sun was beating down full force. David looked up at the white villas glittering on the barren heights. The people who lived up there were wealthy, the kind who owned two cars. They'd drive past where he was standing several times a day. Someone would notice the body pretty quick.