Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04] Page 8

  “And what exactly is that?”

  “The ability to avoid a heartache and prevent the terrible agony of another from ever occurring. You can get on with your life. Have another a child.”

  “No,” Danielle said, starting for the door. “No more.”

  Her trembling hand had trouble with the knob until Ben turned it for her.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, as Danielle disappeared into the waiting room that was filling with patients. “I’m sure she’ll be in touch with you soon.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  I

  almost lost it in there,” Danielle said, sitting across from Ben at a table in the Bracha Bakery.

  “I don’t blame you,” Ben told her. She had reminded him to look for the yellow awning in Jerusalem’s Hurva Square. Finding a parking space had proven next to impossible, but the smells of fresh baked rolls quickly relaxed him once he was inside. Ben used to come here often when he was in Jerusalem, usually with Danielle on the pretext of business. The bakery smelled the way his mother’s kitchen in Ramallah had when she started preparing for family gatherings the day before.

  “I’m going to get a second opinion, as many opinions as it takes.”

  “Until you hear what you want?”

  “That’s right. Do you blame me?”

  “Not at all.”

  She studied the mug he had brought her, along with a sweet smelling basket of bakloua and ketaify. Neither of them had touched a morsel yet, focused as they still were on the doctor’s news. “I guess I don’t have to worry about caffeine anymore.”

  “I got you decaf,” Ben told her.

  Danielle tried to smile. “You think I’m wasting my time?” she asked him.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve relived the night my family was killed, Danielle?”

  “You don’t have to talk about this.”

  “Yes, I do, because it helps. I’ve relived that night a thousand times, wondering what I could have done different, what would have happened if I had gotten home just a few minutes earlier. Those few minutes could have meant everything, and I’d give anything to have them back. But I can’t.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “That you’ve got to exhaust every resource you can. Tragedy is bad enough. Thinking you could have done something more is worse.”

  Danielle shook her head, her eyes dry with unspent tears. Her expression was bleak, colorless. “At least I have my career.” And she sipped her coffee which tasted as sharp as the bite in her voice.

  “Things are not going well with Moshe Baruch then.”

  “No, things are going fine so long as I continue to close all cases involving dead children.”

  “The son of a bitch ...”

  “He wants me to quit.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “And do what instead?”

  “Go back to Shin Bet.”

  Danielle felt the anger simmering in her again, careful not to turn it on Ben. “Not with Baruch’s former superior still in charge,”

  “The army?”

  She shook her head. “I won’t look good in a uniform much longer.”

  Ben studied her. “I want to tell you something. If things ... don’t work out.” He struggled again for words. “And you want to—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “Then let me say it.”

  “There’s no need.”

  “What about a future for us?”

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “Things have changed now.”

  “Not that,” Danielle said.

  “I don’t want to lose you and the baby.”

  Danielle lowered her cup to the table and looked at Ben accusingly. “You agree with the doctor, don’t you?”

  “I’d like to ask some questions, educate myself.”

  “But you agree with him.”

  Ben nodded. “I agree with him, yes.”

  “Would you feel the same way if we had planned to raise the child together?”

  “What I feel is that you need to explore all the alternatives. But you can’t lose sight of reality.”

  Danielle pushed her elbows forward on the table, the old fire and life back in her eyes. “Reality tends to change very quickly in modern medicine. Dr. Barr evaluated my case based on what is known and available today. But what about six months from now, a year? With the advances medicine is making, they might uncover a new treatment, a new drug to treat this awful thing. How would we feel then? Why do we have to rush into this?”

  “We don’t,” Ben said, echoing her use of the plural. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

  “I need to have hope. I need to hold onto this. Exhaust all our options.”

  “I agree.”

  “Alternative medicine, faith healing, Romanian gypsies— whatever it takes.”

  “I’m not sure about the faith healing,” Ben said, waiting for Danielle to smile before smiling himself.

  “You know Baruch assigns me these cases of dead children because he wants to make me squirm. But I refuse to give him the satisfaction. Instead, I close each case as ordered.”

  “Since when did this kind of crime become the realm of National Police?”

  “Since Moshe Baruch took over and I didn’t quit.” She sipped her coffee. “But yesterday I actually found a case that hadn’t been investigated properly.”

  “What happened?”

  “Suicide of a high school senior. But the pistol was found next to his right hand when he was left-handed.”

  “Someone trying to make it look like suicide?”

  “I’m proceeding on that assumption, yes.”

  Ben drummed his fingers on the table, narrowed his features. “I met a woman at the new hospital in Jericho yesterday who had been summoned to identify the body of her son, murdered in what seemed to be a random crime. But the evidence didn’t support that it was random at all. And the woman insisted her son had been terrified of something for over a week before he was killed. He’d been spending a lot of time on his computer, so I thought I might find a clue there. Only the files had been erased.” Ben squeezed his features together and shook his head. “I’m wondering if it might have something to do with the boy having attended school in Israel.”

  “Did you say a school in Israeli?”

  Ben nodded. “An experimental collaborative outside of Abu Gosh.”

  “Oh my God,” Danielle said, nearly spilling her coffee.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 17

  T

  he cooperative school had been built in the shadow of the dry brown Judean Hills halfway between the Arab village of Abu Gosh and the Israeli village of Beit Nakufah. A single level, wheat-colored structure with a bunker-style construction surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and guarded by four Israeli soldiers armed with Galil assault rifles. Around the rear a pair of playing fields had been baked dusty brown, the grass dead in spite of constant efforts of powerful rotating sprinklers. The lime chalk from white lines marking soccer boundaries and boxes fluttered flakily into the air with each stiff breeze.

  ‘“You’d better let me do the talking inside,” Danielle suggested, the shock raised by the connection between two dead high school students, Michael Saltzman and Shahir Falaya, just lifting. Including Michael’s friend Beth Jacober, three teenagers previously enrolled in the school had died in the past ten days. “This may be a collaborative school, but I doubt they’ve ever met a Palestinian policeman before.”

  And, in fact, the soldiers guarding the school at first balked at allowing Ben entry. It was only when Danielle pointed out that his credentials still permitted free passage in this area and reminded them of the school’s cooperative nature that they reluctantly relented.

  Inside, the building seemed bigger than it had looked from the outside, composed of a dozen classrooms containing one hundred and fifty high school students evenly split between Israelis and Palesti
nians. An armed soldier on duty inside the school lobby directed them to the main office where they saw a woman busy stuffing notices into boxes labeled with teachers’ names.

  “Excuse me,” Danielle said and readied her ID, flashing it when the woman turned. “I am Pakad Danielle Barnea of National Police and this is Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police force. We would like to speak to the principal.”

  “That would be me,” the woman said, looking at each of them in turn. “Jane Wexler,” she added, without extending a hand. She appeared to be in her mid-forties and wore her flaxen hair in a smooth bob. Her lightweight olive skirt and matching blouse were almost the same color as the uniforms of the soldiers outside. “How can I help you?”

  “Can we speak somewhere in private?”

  Jane Wexler slid a pair of round wire-rimmed glasses onto her nose. “My secretary’s on break. Someone has to watch the office.”

  “It’s about two of your students,” said Ben. “An Israeli and a Palestinian.”

  “Michael Saltzman,” added Danielle, “and ...”

  “Shahir Falaya,” Ben completed.

  “They’re not my students anymore. They completed their semester here and returned to their regular schools two weeks ago.” Her face tightened in concern. “Why? Has something happened to them?”

  Ben and Danielle looked at each other.

  “What is it? Are they in trouble?”

  “I’m afraid they were both killed within the last week,” said Danielle.

  The color drained from Jane Wexler’s face. “Killed? Please,” she said, gesturing down a short hallway, “let’s go into my office.”

  * * * *

  I

  can’t believe it,” Jane Wexler muttered after Ben and Danielle had finished telling her what had happened, careful to leave out their own unsubstantiated suppositions. She sat back, paralyzed in her chair, holding tight to the arms. “A suicide and a murder. With all that’s going on here, with all the students of this school have had to overcome...” She shook her head. “It makes everything seem so pointless.”

  “Did the school provide them with computers?” Ben asked.

  “What? No. Michael already owned one. We did provide one for Shahir, as I recall.”

  “And got him a job in Israel, a most difficult task given the current state of affairs.”

  “Which makes it all the more vital,” Wexler said stridently. “If there’s any hope for the future, Inspector, it lies in bringing together the same youths who would otherwise be firing bullets at each other. And a crucial part of that is finding work for young Palestinians in Israel.”

  “What job did you find for Shahir?” Danielle asked.

  “I really couldn’t say. We have a placement counselor who handles all that.”

  Ben noted that on his pad. “We may wish to speak to him later.”

  “Michael Saltzman’s mother mentioned Michael had been despondent in the days leading up to his death,” Danielle interjected before Wexler could respond to Ben’s request. “She said something about the death of another good friend of his. A girl.”

  Jane Wexler’s mouth dropped. “My God ... Beth? Beth Jacober?”

  “I think that was the name. She attended this school too, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Beth was a good friend of both Michael and Shahir. There were rumors she and Shahir were more than friends, but, well, the staff didn’t think it was any of our business. This school exists to break down walls, mythologies, the barriers that have kept our two cultures apart for centuries. For six months now authorities on both sides have been trying to shut us down. Do you know how we’ve withstood them?” Wexler continued without waiting for Ben or Danielle to respond. “By succeeding! Our students are committed to peace, even if no one else is. They will come here every day no matter what, even if we have to hold class in the hills. Can either of you understand that?”

  “Go on,” Danielle said, exchanging a glance with Ben.

  Jane Wexler smiled sadly, her eyes moistening. “I guess you could count their relationship as proof of our success. This is all so terrible. How, how was Beth killed?”

  “A car accident, I believe.”

  Suddenly the principal’s eyes turned wary and she dabbed at them with her sleeve. “An accident, suicide, and a carjacking. So what exactly are the two of you investigating?”

  “We’re not convinced the deaths of these students are what they appear to be,” Danielle said, and left it at that. “It would be helpful if you could tell us more about them.”

  Jane Wexler nodded slowly, sadly. “Within a month of beginning their term here, the three of them were inseparable. Michael and Beth attended the same school in Israel for a time. It was he who introduced her to Shahir after the three boys became friends.”

  “Three?” said Ben.

  “Yes, there was a fourth in their group. The best students in their class; four of the best I’ve ever seen. What was his name, what was his name ...” Wexler tapped the desk as she searched her thoughts. “Yakov. Yakov Katavi. From the Golan Heights, I believe.”

  “Would you have an address?”

  “I must, in my files.”

  “Just those four?” asked Danielle.

  “There was a Palestinian girl for a while, as I recall, but something must have happened because suddenly she stopped hanging around with them. It happens often. You know how kids are.”

  “Of course,” said Ben.

  “I was sorry when they were rotated out. So bright and vibrant. Absolute whizzes with their computers. Knew more than our technology teacher. I wanted to offer them jobs.” Wexler started to smile, stopped quickly. “I missed them when they left. You don’t have students long enough to really get to know them, like you do in a regular school. But they were the best we’ve had in our two years of existence. I often had to chase them out of the computer room myself before I went home.”

  “Can you get Yakov Katavi’s address for us?” Danielle asked her.

  “And the name and address of the Palestinian girl,” Ben added. “The one who stopped getting along with the rest of the group.”

  “Right away,” said Jane Wexler.

  * * * *

  B

  y the time they were halfway back to Danielle’s car, she had received a call on her cell phone from an army detachment sent to check on Yakov Katavi’s well-being. “Well, the boy is alive and well and in school as we speak,” she told Ben, sliding the phone back into her handbag. “Two soldiers will be watching him for the rest of the day.”

  “We need to see him,” Ben told her.

  Danielle checked her watch nervously. “I can’t right now. Baruch will have my head if I don’t get back to the work I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “Another of the dead children, Pakad?” Ben asked curiously.

  “No, something else,” she replied, not bothering to elaborate on her investigation into the murder of Paul Hessler’s son.

  “Maybe I should go see the boy by myself.”

  Danielle frowned skeptically. “He lives in the Golan Heights.”

  “Where my pass does not permit entry ...”

  “Wait until this afternoon and we’ll go together. If it makes you feel any better, I can contact the army and have a unit posted near his home.”

  “It would make me feel better.”

  “Consider it done,” Danielle said. “What about the Palestinian girl the school principal mentioned?”

  “From Ramallah,” Ben recalled, “where I am permitted to go.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 18

  D

  o you always keep people waiting, Pakad?” the medical examiner said caustically when Danielle finally arrived. He stood in a white lab jacket sheathed in what looked like a floor-length sheet of plastic with slots for his arms. He still had his goggles on, but not his mask. The goggles could not disguise his annoyed glare.

  “I’m sorry,” Danielle said, studying his name tag as she
continued toward him. “Dr. Ratovsky.”

  “No matter. This shouldn’t take long anyway.”

  The pathology division of National Police was located in the second sublevel at the organization’s Jerusalem headquarters. The autopsy on Paul Hessler’s attempted killer had been completed with amazing speed, especially since the department’s primary role was to evaluate and analyze data obtained from autopsies performed in the field, sometimes to offer a second opinion but often a first finding.