Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

Friday was the beginning of the end of the summer. The wind had gained a little strength, and clouds were cooling some odd corners of the sky. The first days of the end of the summer are the best days of the year. They’re the farthest point in time from the next summer.

Bar bought a large bouquet in the lobby of Ichilov and described nuclear medicine to me on our way to the department. ‘It’s basically mapping of the body. Huge cameras that photograph the inside of the body.’

‘X-rays,’ I said.

‘Not X-rays. It’s similar but a lot more top-end. In X-rays you can only see the bones, but nuclear mapping lets you see everything.’

‘What’s nuclear about it?’ I was picturing the blood flowing, white blood cells, muscles being stretched and relaxed, fat, microbes, lungs dirty from nicotine.

‘The nuclear cameras can decipher radiation emitted by the body,’ continued Bar. We’d arrived at a quieter part of the hospital. ‘They inject this radioactive fluid, a really low isotope, whatever, into the blood and the…’

‘Can I help you?’ asked a brown-haired nurse.

‘Ah, yes, we’re looking for Professor Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski.’

‘Can I ask what it concerns?’

‘Yes. He recently treated our mother, so we just wanted to give him these flowers and ask him a couple of brief questions about the diagnosis.’ I don’t know how Bar comes up with this stuff sometimes.

‘And your mother’s name?’

‘Enoch,’ Bar said. I kept my head down in a women’s magazine, whose cover promised me twenty-five tips for a perfect sex life in Chapter 5. I flicked through to Chapter 5.

‘Sorry, sir. There doesn’t appear to be any Enoch in the system.’

‘Look, is he here? We just need to ask him one small thing.’

‘I’m afraid that’s impossible. The professor’s extremely busy this morning.’

‘Tell him it’s related to Giora Guetta,’ Bar said, deciding to deploy the one weapon we had in our armoury.

He came out immediately. He looked old. Later, we would learn that he was only sixty-one, but our first impression of him was of a man in his mid-seventies. White hair, white beard, a high-blood-pressure colour to him, a wide mouth and large tombstone-like teeth. His eyes were clear and intelligent, but there had been fear in his first glance towards us. It was the fear which had made him seem old. Weak handshake. He took us to the cafeteria and ordered coffee for us and tea for himself.

‘Who are you?’ he said. Professors of nuclear medicine tend not to watch Noah’s Ark .

‘We’re investigating the death of Giora Guetta,’ said Bar.

‘Guetta…he was killed in a terrorist attack, wasn’t he?’

Warshawski’s hands were both palm down on the table, like he was braced against a shock. His voice was weak and defeated-sounding.

‘Yes he was. But a short time before the bombing he met a Professor Binyamin-Moshe Warshawski in a café in Yehuda Maccabi Street.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Let’s just say that we know,’ said Bar. ‘And we know that money was involved.’

Warshawski raised his eyes and looked at us in turn.

‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Why did you meet Guetta?’ asked Bar, with a persistence that reminded me of Duchi.

Warshawski didn’t answer for a while.

‘Who are you, and what do you want?’ he repeated. And we could have told him the truth: that we were trying to find out about Guetta as a gesture to his girlfriend, who had since died. He looked like a basically decent man to me. I thought he’d give us the answer and we could put the whole story behind us. But Bar suddenly stood up, scribbling his phone number on a piece of paper:

‘We’ll be back, Professor,’ he said. ‘If you remember why you met Guetta on the morning of his death, give us a call.’

‘What was all that about?’ I asked Bar, trying to catch him up. ‘What are we hiding?’

‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ he replied. ‘And other leads to check. We don’t have to reveal everything, do we?’ Bar stopped next to a bin and threw the bouquet into it. ‘Listen, Croc, if he realises that he’s dealing with a couple of nerds playing at being detectives because they’re bored, he won’t tell us anything.’

‘I’m not playing at detectives because I’m bored,’ I said, but Bar was already striding ahead of me into the Sarsur grocery.

We asked Amin whether he knew Warshawski, and he did: he and his wife Dvora were regular customers. They lived near the store, in King David Street. But when we asked him whether his brother had any dealings with the professor, Amin clammed up. It was Friday and there were a million customers to deal with, and he was suddenly too busy to talk.

‘Interesting,’ said Bar, and we went back to the hospital to look for Tamer. But he wasn’t at work, and his next shift wasn’t before the middle of next week. Another dead end, in my opinion. It infuriated Bar whenever I said that — and I said it pretty often.

‘No, man — we’re almost there. Stick with it. All we’ve got to do is connect Warshawski and Tamer, and then we’ll get the link to Guetta.’

‘Yeah, but how are we going to do that?’

‘We’re a couple of bored nerds playing at detectives. We’ll find a way.’

On Sunday morning I recorded the Arab guy who had replaced this rather cute cleaner we had at Time’s Arrow, a kid with a wispy moustache and a startled look. I wouldn’t have given him a second thought except he’d fixed my PalmPilot. After lying dead on my desk for almost a year, my Palm was reborn after a couple of hours in the hands of Fahmi the Cleaner from Kafr Qasim — who’d have thought? I can’t even remember how it came about. Once upon a time, he told me, he’d been an electrician. Then he asked whether I was the Croc from Noah’s Ark . Weird to think of Arabs watching it. Anyway, the Belgians had asked for a North African Arab and I suppose if I’d searched hard enough I could probably have found a Moroccan or a Tunisian, but what the hell, I thought, let’s see what our software can do with a Palestinian accent.

He was a little nervous when he showed up on Sunday, so I told him not to worry — no one was going to bite him. He told me he wasn’t worried, just a little sick in the stomach. I wanted to say something like ‘Too much hummus, eh?’ but I managed to stop myself. There’s a limit.

I think I used the hummus joke later that day, because it turned out that Fahmi was an all-right kid. He did Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese accents, which he’d picked up off the TV. He didn’t know a North African accent, but the system got along fine with him. He had a funny ‘Hello’, which he kind of mooed while lowering his head: ‘Hellooooo.’ I started to imitate him and he laughed and said that at least he didn’t keep a broken PalmPilot on his desk for a whole year. At lunch I asked him whether he wanted to let me buy him a falafel and a Coke. The falafel was OK, he said, but not as good as in his village.

‘You ever tried the falafel in Tel Aviv?’

‘I’ve never been to Tel Aviv…’ he said, and we were interrupted by Bar’s arrival. I introduced him to Fahmi and he inexplicably shot me a look as if he wanted to kill me. Maybe he was angry because I was lunching with an Arab. Or just annoyed that I’d forgotten him: it used to drive Talia Tenne nuts when people ordered food without telling her. But he took me aside and told me I was an idiot.

‘Don’t you get it? He’s from Kafr Qasim!’

‘Yes, so?’

‘The Sarsurs are from Kafr Qasim.’

‘So?’

Bar shook his head at me and then his anger dissolved into laughter. ‘Oh, man. You’re the true heir to Poirot, aren’t you? Fucking…Hushash the fucking Detective is nothing next to the CrocDetective. It never crossed your mind to ask him about the Sarsur brothers?’