Keepers of the Gate - [Kamal & Barnea 04] Read online

  Each municipality in Israel maintained its own police force which was directly responsible for investigating crimes committed within its jurisdiction. National Police was best known for policing the country’s borders and investigating crimes committed in Israeli settlements throughout the occupied territories. The organization also handled cases that cut across districts or were by nature of the larger, more high profile variety. As such, Danielle and others were usually called in after a preliminary investigation was already underway. But in this case Paul Hessler’s influence had put them in charge from the very start.

  Danielle drew even with Ratovsky, eyeing a lumpy shape covered on the table beneath them. “What can you tell me about him?”

  Ratovsky reached for a clipboard that hung from a steel peg built into the table and studied it briefly, as the room’s chemical smell continued to assault Danielle: a mild astringent mixing with the unmistakably sour stench of formaldehyde. It always felt colder in here and she wished she had donned a jacket before taking the elevator down.

  Ratovsky finally looked up from the review of his notes. “Not very much, I’m afraid. Between the ages of seventy and eighty. An American, judging from the dental work and surgical incisions indicating three gastroenterological operations in the past ten years.”

  “Gastroenterological?”

  “This man had stomach cancer, Pakad. His original stomach had been removed and a new one fashioned in its place. Our tox screens of his blood and internal examination indicated the cancer had returned, a fact his most recent exploratory operation must have revealed.”

  “How long ago?”

  Ratovsky consulted his clipboard again. “Three to six months.”

  “He was dying, then,” Danielle surmised.

  “Depends on how aggressively his doctors elected to treat him. But at his age, with a recurrence ...” Ratovsky shook his head. “There would be little they could do.”

  Danielle considered the daunting prospects of querying all hospitals in the United States that treat stomach cancer.

  “Anything else that might be of help in identifying him?”

  “Only this,” Ratovsky said, reaching under the blue sheet for the dead man’s arm.

  He peeled the sheet back from it to expose a tattoo on the dead man’s right forearm. That arm now had more bone than muscle and the dried and withered flesh had stripped the tattoo of its shape and bulk.

  “You’ll want to find a match for this, so I took some digital shots from a number of different angles,” Ratovsky continued, and pulled a manila envelope from the bottom of his clipboard. “Scanned and enlarged for the highest degree of clarity.”

  Danielle unclasped the envelope and withdrew the top shot. The tattoo pictured was much clearer than it was under the fluorescent lights blazing down on the table. It appeared to be some sort of worm holding a knife in one of two thick mandibles fashioned to look like arms. Thin drops of blood dripped from the knife and ran in a splotchy pattern further down the dead man’s forearm.

  “Anything else?” Danielle asked, eager to be gone from this place.

  “Well, there’s evidence of a previous bullet wound from forty or fifty years ago.”

  “His age makes him right for World War II or even Korea,” Danielle surmised, “so he could be a veteran.”

  “Unfortunately, the folds of his skin are too shrunken to determine the exact diameter of the bullet, and it left only minimal scarring. So I can’t be any more specific at this time.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Danielle said, starting to back away from the table. “Please send me your final report as soon as it’s ready.”

  “There is one more thing I can tell you now,” Ratovsky added, when she was halfway to the door.

  Danielle turned back toward him. “Yes?”

  The pathologist’s gaze fell on the sheet-covered form on the table. “I don’t know if this matters, but he had a glass eye. You might want to check for an American who lost an eye in one of those wars as well. I’m sure those records exist somewhere.”

  Danielle nodded, mentally calculating the steps she would have to take to uncover the killer’s identity.

  Again she considered the man’s age: seventy-five or so, and dying of stomach cancer. What turns a dying old man into a killer? Surely something in the past, a past Danielle would have to unearth if she was going to find the reason why someone wanted Paul Hessler dead.

  She had almost reached the door when two men barged through it. Danielle had to twist sideways to avoid being struck.

  One of the men looked at her, recognition flashing in his eyes before they fell on the envelope the pathologist had just given to her. “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind, Pakad Barnea.”

  Danielle held her ground and tucked the envelope behind her hip. “I do mind. Who are you? Where are your ID badges? You’re not National Police.”

  “This is no longer a National Police matter, Pakad.”

  She studied the men more closely: twin statues fashioned out of granite squeezed into sports jackets. Each with close-cropped hair and massive shoulders.

  “Commander Baruch is waiting for you in your office,” the speaker continued. “He will explain everything.”

  Danielle kept her eyes on both men, especially the telltale bulges their pistols made in their tight-fitting jackets. “I hope you don’t mind if I hear that from him.”

  “Not at all,” the man said and produced a wireless phone. “Press seven and you can speak to Commander Baruch directly.”

  Danielle took the phone but didn’t press the number right away. “What’s going on here?”

  “That is no longer your concern.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Also, not your concern.”

  “It’s my case.”

  “Not anymore, Pakad.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 19

  Y

  ou live here?” an old woman sitting in the lobby of the apartment building asked Ben Kamal.

  “No.”

  “They send you to fix my stove? It’s still broken.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not the repairman.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  Ben had been about to knock on the apartment building’s front door to draw the seated woman’s attention when he saw that the lock was broken and walked into the stifling lobby.

  “Who’s going to fix my stove?” the old woman persisted, as Ben walked past her toward the steel mailboxes built into one of the lobby walls, in search of the name “Ashawi,” family of the Palestinian girl named Zeima who had been friendly with the three dead students from the cooperative school.

  He recognized the building on Al-Nahdah Street near the bustling Manara Circle to be one of those built by the Palestinian Authority as an initial demonstration of its intention to provide for the people. The goal in those days had been to construct as much affordable housing as quickly as possible, with little regard for form or function. The result here was four stories with few defining features, and a concrete exterior as dull and shabby as the lobby. Ben knew that much of the funds budgeted for this and other projects had mysteriously disappeared, leading ultimately to fewer being undertaken and a surge in seaside villas on the Gaza seacoast for Palestinian officials.

  Easily the West Bank’s most progressive city, Ramallah had already been slated to replace Gaza as the administrative center of Palestinian government authority once self-rule was complete. As such, though, it had been the center of many of the worst uprisings in recent months, uprisings that had ravaged the city’s landscape, leaving deep scars the recent quelling of violence could not erase.

  Even so, the outskirts of the old city looked to Ben remarkably unchanged. The square, flat-roofed buildings here were old and faded, the dust rising continually off them in the dry heat that baked the West Bank. Indications of the modern era were limited to stray television antennas atop decaying flat roofs, haphazardly strung electrical lines, and worn cars squeezed
into spaces along the crumbling streets littered with rubble from small arms fire and an occasional stray Israeli rocket.

  Approaching the center of Ramallah, though, was like entering another world. Here newly renovated shops, stores, and outdoor cafes dotted the landscape previously occupied by abandoned and run-down buildings. But the renewal efforts seemed to have frozen in midstream. Work that had been suspended months before had never started up again on structures that seemed to exist in a perpetual state of limbo. And those that had managed to remain up and running amidst the debacle of debris struggled for the few patrons who could afford their food and wares.

  “Hey,” the old woman continued to pester, slowly coming out of her chair, “what about my stove?”

  Ben found the Ashawi family’s apartment number on their mailbox and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor where they lived. The fire door had been removed and he started down the corridor listening to the blare of televisions and radios emanating through the apartments’ paper-thin walls. The stale smell of foods long cooked and eaten hung in the air, and the corridor walls were stained with dirt and whatever vapors managed to leak out through the bottoms of the doors.

  Ben stopped at the Ashawis’ door and knocked.

  “They’re gone,” a voice said from down the hall.

  Ben turned and saw a man with a toolbox emerging from the apartment several doors down. “What do you mean gone?”

  “Gone. Left.” The man narrowed his eyes and tensed a little. “What’s it to you?”

  Ben approached, reaching for his ID. “I am Inspector Bayan Kamal of the Palestinian police.”

  “Is that why they left so fast?” the man asked, disinterested. “Because the police are after them?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I work here. The superintendent. Something breaks, I fix it.” He looked around him, shrugging. “There is much work.”

  “The Authority pays you?”

  “Used to. Then the building was sold to businessmen. Palestinian, I think, but then I hear they’re really Israeli. I never met them. They pay me a little more, invest the same amount—nothing.”

  “You say the Ashawis moved?”

  “No, I say they left. Gone.” He started forward, fishing on his belt for the proper key. “Here, I show you....”

  He tried fitting it into the front door of the Ashawi’s apartment, found it was the wrong key, and tried another. Ben waited impatiently before the superintendent was finally able to find the right key and shove the door open, the near side grinding against the doorjamb.

  Ben entered the apartment just ahead of the superintendent, realizing instantly what the man had meant. The Ashawis had left all of their furniture behind. He continued on past a galley kitchen with stools set at a counter into a living room with a clear view downtown to a pair of luxury hotels that were under construction. Even more prominent were the naked steel frames of a number of highrise office buildings built by foreign investors hoping to turn Ramallah into a prime center for commerce.

  Gazing out the window, Ben tried to remember what exactly had been torn down to make room for all the new construction, but too many years had passed and the memories must not have been important enough to keep. Replaced by the sight of cranes lowering fresh steel into place and the clanging sounds of heavy machinery at work. Ben found those sounds the most striking, because there was nothing like them recalled from his youth growing up amidst the large Palestinian-Christian community in Ramallah. Whatever was built in those days was built by hand with hammers and saws instead of heavy machines.

  Strangely, this was one of the things Ben would miss most if he decided to return to Detroit. Watching Palestine grow and evolve before his eyes. He wondered, though, whether this was reason to stay or go. After all, he had come back here because he wanted to embrace the world of his father, to find a life worth living. But in a few years Palestine would no longer be the world of his father. And the change wouldn’t be all positive, thanks to the corruption of values and new standards the Palestinians would have to accept.

  The opening of markets, tourism, and booming trade would leave entire classes of people out. No longer held in the bonds of brotherhood of a struggling race. Their world would be defined by the contents of their wallets instead of their conscience. Peace was indeed the greatest weapon of war. Skyscrapers would go up. The refugee camps would not come down. People would make a big show about caring, but the anger would be gone, dollars thrown at the same people who used to throw rocks.

  Leave now, go back to Detroit to work for John Najarian and Security Concepts, and Ben could miss all that. This world had killed his father. He didn’t have to let it destroy him too.

  “How many in the family?” Ben asked the superintendent, eager to distance himself from his own thoughts.

  “The parents and two children—no, three children. Anyway, I think it’s three.”

  The superintendent kept his distance as Ben entered the largest of three small bedrooms and opened the single closet. Plenty of clothes hung comfortably, but there were also a number of hangers scattered on the floor atop boxes and shoes. Evidence that the Ashawis had packed and left in a hurry, traveling light.

  Ben turned toward the superintendent who had remained in the bedroom’s doorway. “How long ago did they leave?”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “When did you notice?”

  “A couple days ago. Three or four, maybe.”

  Ben started from the room. “Come downstairs with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to open the Ashawis’ mailbox for me.”

  * * * *

  A

  s it turned out, Ben didn’t need the superintendent’s services in the lobby at all; the Ashawis’ mailbox no longer conformed to its slot and was easily opened without a key.

  “Hey,” the old woman, who had not moved from her chair, yelled to the superintendent this time, “you going to fix my stove today?”

  Mail spilled out as soon as Ben yanked the small door downward. Some smaller envelopes fluttered to the floor behind a number of magazines that landed with a clump. Ben checked the dates stamped across the cancelled stamps. By all indications, the Ashawis had not been here to retrieve their mail for seven days.

  The same time period in which Michael Saltzman had died in an apparent suicide and Shahir Falaya had been murdered on the road.

  “I’m guessing they didn’t leave a forwarding address,” Ben said to the superintendent.

  The man shook his head, glad to have an excuse not to pay any attention to the old woman with the broken stove. “Not with me.”

  “Were they friendly with anyone else in the building?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Is there anyone else you can ask?”

  “I wouldn’t know who. This isn’t the only building I work in.”

  Ben knelt down and began to retrieve the fallen mail. “Just get me a bag then.”

  “A bag?”

  “I need something to put the Ashawis’ mail into. I’m taking it with me.”

  “Why?”

  Ben stood up with the pile neatly in hand. “To deliver once I find them.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 20

  P

  aul Hessler flew back to the United States this morning,” Commander Moshe Baruch told Danielle when she reached his office. “Apparently he felt his life was in danger.”

  “That doesn’t explain why you’re pulling me off the case.”

  “It’s not you, Pakad. It’s us—National Police. The matter has been turned over to other authorities.”

  “Those two men in the basement...”

  “Just messengers who wanted to make sure they collected all our evidence.”

  “Mossad?” Danielle asked, referring to Israel’s foreign intelligence service.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A domestic murder shouldn’t be of any concern to them.�
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  “Unless it was committed by a foreigner.”

  “How could they know something I only just learned?”