Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

It was lucky that the policemen took me to Almaz’s station, and luckier still that Almaz saw me there. Duchi picked me up. She took me home and helped me undress and shower. I couldn’t speak; I couldn’t even tell her I’d been planning to cook her a meal. She nursed me quietly, with eyes newly red or still red from the night before. Then she talked on the phone and I understood that it was Voovi she was talking to, and that her father had left his third wife and moved into his son’s place.

We sat down in front of the television. Here’s something that’ll ease my mind, I thought. I was wrong. Noah’s Ark had been cancelled. Instead they showed a laughable programme with the laughable Max Caspi about last night’s half-arsed attack. Why? Because Caspi had been in the steakhouse at the time of the attack. He was a regular there. ‘What a clown,’ I said. ‘What a pathetic clown! There’s an attack on his favourite restaurant so he suddenly discovers we’re at war and it’s time to make a TV show about it?’

‘Come on. There were two people killed,’ Duchi said.

‘In Jerusalem there were nineteen killed. But they shot his fucking steak and now he’s had a revelation!’

‘Don’t shout,’ she said in a low voice.

‘I will shout! It’s a disgrace. What about Afula, Netanya, Hadera? Nahariya? Haifa? Nothing. Jerusalem? Nothing. You want some ice cream?’

I looked for the Häagen-Dazs, but of course it had never made it home, and all the freezer held was a strange grey icy residue of something or other. Max Caspi was sitting in his stupid steakhouse talking about getting on with our everyday lives and beating the terror. ‘Fuck that!’ I howled. ‘What everyday fucking life? We’ve already lost! We lost a long time ago. There isn’t anyone left in this place apart from security guards!’

‘Croc, can you calm down?’

I sat back on the sofa. Max Caspi threatened the terrorists, his wig shaking. ‘I’m sure they’re quaking in their fucking boots,’ I said. ‘They’re watching Max Caspi and saying, “Allah preserve us, we’d better stop with the bombs now that Mad Max Caspi’s on to us.”’

‘I called the Warshawski in Tel Mond,’ said Bar. We were outside the falafel stall. Bar’s black baseball cap hung loosely on his bald head. The straw from his juice waggled in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. ‘He claimed he hadn’t stepped on Tel Aviv soil for thirty-one years, and never would until the day he died. Though you should remember that he might have been lying.’

‘And what about the Tel Aviv Warshawskis?’

‘One’s a professor of “nuclear medicine” at Ichilov. He lives with his wife in the King David Tower. The second one lives in Ramat Aviv. Retired from the university. Published a book about Churchill.’

‘Churchill?’

‘Yes, don’t know why. He’s a widower, lives on his own.’

‘So what’s the link to Guetta?’

‘No idea. Unless Guetta was doing research on Churchill, or had an interest in “nuclear medicine”.’

‘“Nuclear medicine”? Maybe Guetta had some disease he didn’t want to tell anyone about…’

‘I doubt it. Why meet him in a café and not the hospital? As far as I can tell so far, no one knew about him having any disease.’

‘So it’s a dead end. Our case is dead.’

‘Not at all. Did I tell you I spoke to Guetta’s friend? Haim? He was in the army with him. He was listed in Guetta’s address book, and I had a hunch he might be interesting. He said Guetta was a killer, in Gaza.’

‘A murderer?’

‘In the army, Croc. He was in the Border Police. They called him “The Killer”. He scratched two “X”s on his barrel during the intifada, possibly three. There’s an argument about the third one, with some other killer in his company.’

‘I remember. There were quite a few Border Police at the funeral.’

‘Yeah. Haim and Guetta did their service together. They were in Gaza for a couple of years and saw some terrible stuff, he claims.’

‘So that helps us how, exactly?’

Bar adjusted his baseball hat so it shaded his eyes and stood up. ‘Come on, Croc. Stick with it. Poirot always knew that everything was a clue.’

When we returned to the office, he emailed me. ‘Binyamin Warshawski = suspect of investigation = the murder suspect = this is a suspicious historian.’

My new role in Time’s Arrow was to test the voice recognition system’s capacities. On older telephone switchboards, operators wasted an average of forty seconds on each call: the welcome greeting, the request for name and town, the computer search, reading the number, and then a farewell to the customer. The new system saved time by replacing the operators at the beginning (greeting, request for name and town) and end (reading the requested number, farewell) with the software. In this way the operator’s contribution to the call was shortened to twenty-something seconds.

But lots of companies do this, and Time’s Arrow needed to find an edge over them. Hence the voice recognition system we’d developed. Our goal: the whole call handled by the software. But voice recognition is extremely complex. People talk different languages, or dialects; they speak in different accents and make mistakes in their pronunciation; there’s the problem of background noise. So, in order to adapt the product to our various customers, we were ‘teaching’ the software to recognise the languages and the local accents. My role in QA was to conduct a long series of tests of the system’s success in recognising languages and accents. So for a French client I would get a Frenchman to try the system out, then test it with my own voice, then find a North African French speaker, a West African one, and so on. It was a pretty easy job. All I needed to do was conduct some tests and fill in some forms. And, as Jimmy had mentioned, the company wasn’t doing too well, so I was hardly snowed under. I was working on software we’d developed for the Belgians: tests in French, Flemish and all the relevant accents.

One day, while drowsily scrolling around an Internet map of Africa to see where the Belgian Congo was, my phone rang.

‘I think I have found something of immense value.’

‘Who am I speaking to, if I may ask?’ I said, suddenly excited.

‘It’s Bar, you imbecile.’

A falafel-stall meeting was convened. Bar had indeed found something: in Guetta’s Palm’s Notes sub-folder he had discovered a single encrypted file. When he tried to open it, he was asked to enter a password. He tried ‘Shuli’. It worked. The note said: Tamer Sarsur. America Fruit and Veg, Be’eri.Physiotherapy. Don’t mix with the brother.

So we decided to drive over after work and, having walked the length of Be’eri Street, came across a greengrocer’s on the corner of Weizmann Street which was indeed called ‘America Fruit and Veg’. We entered and bought cherries, tomatoes, grapes, and asked the guy who was serving to cut a watermelon in two for us. We observed him intently: an Arab. What it meant, we hadn’t a clue.

Duchi was surprised to see the cornucopia of fruit that had suddenly taken over the fridge.

‘But I was in the supermarket just yesterday,’ she protested.

I shrugged. ‘I just felt like it, Dooch.’

We never got round to eating the fruit in any case. Several weeks later I found the grapes and cherries in the fridge, rotten and stinking. The half of watermelon met its end in a violent collision with the road.

The doctor told me that if I didn’t want to ruin my back for ever, I could no longer work in such a strenuous job. After four days off I returned to the packing-house and talked to Sa’id. He agreed to train me as a forklift driver but couldn’t promise work. And so it was. Except for a single day when I covered a sick driver and suffered every minute through inexperience, the packing-house never called me again. I went back to asking around for work — in the mosque, guys I’d met at the packing-house, even Razal and Wasime. One evening my friend Ibrahim from the packing-house called me at the house.