Pattern Crimes (26 page)

"You promised us you'd only interview her once."

His wife nodded. "You can't see her now. She's gone to sleep. She's been very nervous since that afternoon."

David apologized. He and Uri had worked gently. They'd done their best to turn the questioning into a game. All he wanted now was to show Amit a few photographs.

"She won't be able to help you," Mrs. Nissim said. But when David lowered his eyes and asked again she reluctantly agreed.

When he came into Amit's bedroom and leaned over her bed to say hello, she reached up and gave him a big wet kiss. Then, when he sat down beside her, she reached for her policewoman doll and rocked it proudly while they talked.

David told her he'd brought along some pictures and all she had to do was look at them and tell him if she recognized any of the men.

He spread the pictures out on her bed. She looked carefully at each photo and was clearly disappointed that she couldn't recognize a face. When he brought out the IdentiKit sketch of the "nephew" who'd picked up Susan Mill's film, she shook her head again.

David thanked her, kissed her good night, and was across the room and at the door when she called out.

"I saw him on TV."

"Who?" He turned.

"Oh, one of the men," she said.

David walked back, crouched down. "The policeman?" She shook
her head. "The man who hurt his leg?"

She grinned up at him. "No."

"Oh," he said, "then it must have been one of the two who helped him walk away."

Amit beamed. "Uh huh."

David sat beside her again. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

"You didn't ask me."

"You're right." He smiled. "So, what did he look like, this man you saw?"

"Oh, he had a beard," she said. Her eyes enlarged. "He looked real scary too."

Mrs. Nissim came into the room. "I thought you'd be finished by now."

"Amit's just telling me about something she saw on TV."

"Tales. Nonsense. Ever since you questioned her she's been pointing at people on the screen. Look! The child's blinking again. It's time for you to go. And I'd appreciate it very much, captain, if this time you'd keep your promise and not bother us again."

There was something overtly irritable in Anna now—a sense he had that she was more than anxious, was truly distraught. Sometimes he would gaze at her and, before she'd notice and recompose her features, would catch a glimpse of pain.

What was bothering her? Whenever he asked she brushed his question aside. One time she told him it was her music—that she had felt she was struggling toward a breakthrough but instead now found herself against a wall.

"Tell me about it," he asked.

She touched her forehead. "It's difficult," she said. And then, after a pause, in a whisper filled with pain: "I want so much to be a major performer, David. Not just a fine cellist but a major one." She looked down then, as if ashamed of sounding grandiose. "Not just major either, David. Even better than major. Maybe ..." She paused again; she could hardly bring herself to say the word. She whispered: "Maybe even the best."

The next few days were quiet. Members of the unit sat around sluggishly going through old dossiers. There were the unsolved pattern cases of the burglarized grocery stores, the kidnapped pedigreed dogs, and the "gentle rapist" who hadn't attacked in months.

Rebecca Marcus carefully took down all the pictures, maps, and documents relating to the case that were tacked up on the squad room walls. When she asked David where to store them, he instructed her to pack them up for him in a box.

Moshe Liederman asked to see him. He'd spoken with an officer in personnel and learned that with his accumulated vacation time he could begin his retirement at once. With the murder investigation shut down he saw no reason to wait. He had some papers for David to sign.

"No bother," David said. He signed Liederman's papers and thanked him for his help.

"It's me who should thank you," Liederman said. "I want you to know this—I've been a cop for more than thirty years but until I worked with you I never had any self-respect. I'm not talking about the cruel jokes—'Why do cops always work in pairs?' `Because one can read and the other can write.' That kind of stuff never bothered me. What bothered me, I think, was that I never really believed in the concept of a Jewish cop. When I put on the uniform and looked at myself in the mirror I felt I was looking at a clown."

"Maybe you just needed to work in civilian clothes, Moshe. The uniform's not for everyone. You'll be working on your archive now. I'm sorry I haven't had a chance to see it yet."

"Someday you will. Meantime, if you ever need help, unofficially, on the outside, please remember me. I'm not like you, I don't have intuition. And I'm not as smart as Dov or as fast as Shoshana or as ingenious as Micha or as tough as Uri. But after thirty years there're a few things I know how to do. I'm good at following people and I like to look under every stone."

He called in Shoshana. "When you go by Amit's school this afternoon ask her about the man she saw."

"Huh?"

"On TV. The scary looking man with the beard. She'll know who you mean."

Shoshana stared at him.

"You
were
going to stop by and see her, weren't you?"

"Well sure, David. Of course." Shoshana smiled. "I take it, then, we're still...."

He looked at his watch. "Friday afternoon. They probably let the kids out early...."

When he glanced up she was gone.

The Friday morning
Jerusalem Post:
He didn't get to his copy until four o'clock. He read it slowly; he'd been so busy the past week he'd lost track of the stream of news.

A taxi drivers' strike looming in Tel Aviv. The plummeting shekel. Gyrations on the Stock Exchange. A suicide car-bomb attack at the Lebanese frontier. Rabbi Katzer, visiting New York, raving against the Diaspora. A settler's demonstration—the Bloc of the Faithful accusing the government of welshing on a deal.

In the magazine supplement there was an article about five self-proclaimed "Messiahs" presently wandering the streets of Old Jerusalem. David moved on to a profile of a Peace Now activist who posed the eternal Israeli Question: "What Is to Be Done?" He was impressed until he reached the second paragraph where the man said he was fed up and moving to England for a year. He crumpled the paper, was about to throw it away, when a caption caught his eye.

A picture of a handsome man with flowing white hair; underneath it a name he remembered from his talk with Stephanie Porter. David spread the paper out and began to read a lengthy interview in which Aleksandr Targov, presently residing at the city's artists' guesthouse, Mishkenot Sha'ananim, spoke of the sculpture he had created especially for Jerusalem and which now he'd come to donate and install.

She was nervous—he sensed it the moment he entered the apartment. She was practicing, in a pair of white shorts and a sleeveless white jersey, and when she pulled her bow she looked as though she were trying to saw through the cello's strings.

He moved toward her. Her forehead was dripping. When he raised her hair and felt the back of her neck he found it slick.

She stopped.

"What's the matter?"

"'Something Yosef said this afternoon. I got upset."

David sat down. "What did he say?"

"Nothing. He had the right to say it. We criticize each other all the time. It's just that we've been working on the Mendelssohn and he said the way I was doing this passage was 'gypsyish.' " She picked up her cello, played a portion of the D Major Sonata with exaggerated sentimentality. "Later he took it back, said what he meant was I was playing like I was trying too hard to please. I wanted to kill him." She paused. "I think maybe he was right."

He watched as she carefully placed the cello back on the floor, stood up, and walked into the kitchen. When she came back out she was smoking a long black silver-tipped Russian cigarette.

"Smoking again?"

"Just since this afternoon. I got so nervous I walked over to the King David and bought myself a pack." She exhaled. "No wonder Israelis are such smokestacks. Everyone's nervous here. I'd be too if I weren't so damned disciplined."

He studied her. "What's the matter, Anna?"

She started to pace the room. "Every day now you ask me that."

"Someone's turned up, hasn't he?"

She stopped pacing. "David, how did you know?"

"It's Targov, isn't it? There's an interview with him in the
Post."

She nodded. "But how do you know his name? I'm sure I never mentioned him, unless I talk in my sleep."

"I'm a detective, remember."

The Russian in her accepted that: in the USSR detectives knew everything, so why not in Israel too?

She took another long puff. "Damn him for coming.
Damn!"

"Sit with me." She came to the couch. "What's the matter? Have you seen him? Did he come here to track you down?"

"No. His secretary phoned. A very strange, very thin man named Anatole Rokovsky. He said Sasha was here and asked me to please come and see him. I told him I'd think about it. I was doing that when you walked in."

Then, suddenly, she began to speak. David was amazed. It was as if she had stored up her feelings for a year, and now, releasing them, was so caught up she couldn't stop.

"...we were lovers. Did you know that? We had some wonderful moments too. But in the end it was impossible. He flaunted our affair in front of his wife. I was just one in a long string of younger women brought into the house to make her feel like shit."

She was up now, pacing the room again, puffing on another cigarette, waving her arms as she described the agony of the months she'd spent with the Targovs in Big Sur.

"...not, you understand, that Irina was some poor abused creature. She engineered a lot of it. He told me once that if it weren't for her contempt, he thought she'd probably die. He's a brilliant man,
David. Knows everybody. Quotes great hunks of poetry. Pushkin,
Pasternak, Tvardovsky. Huge gnarled hands. 'Sculptor's hands,' he'd say, 'but useless now.' Then he'd start in, his litany: Artistic paralysis. Old injustices. Bureaucrats who'd hated him and detested his style. How they cut him off from state commissions, demanded he sculpt more 'realistically,' and finally how they drove him into exile —or, at least, so he said. Complaints, complaints ...all the time, too, making sure Irina knew about us. He'd steal pieces of my underwear and hide them in his bed where he knew she'd search them out. Awful scenes at dinner. The two of them screaming at one another standing inches apart. Sasha was good to me, helped me, but he used me too. I was his sounding board. He made me pay a thousand ways."

"How did you meet?"

She shook her head.

"What's the matter?"

"You don't want me to tell you that."

"I love you, Anna. We can't have secrets." He paused. "Listen—I'll tell you one of mine."

She stopped pacing, grinned. "I didn't know you had secrets."

"How do you think I found out about you and Targov?"

"How did you?" She gazed at him.

"An old girl friend of mine. An American.
You see—you're
not the only one around here with a past."

"She knew?"

"She's some kind of American agent. Jealous, and a liar too. She told me Titanov was seen recently in the West. I checked and of course it wasn't true."

She nestled beside him, hung her head. He stroked the back of her neck.

"I know your defection was legitimate, Anna. But there's something you're holding back. Tell me what it is. You'll feel better if you do."

Tears
sprang to
her eyes. "I don't think I can."

"Guilt is stupid."

"Do they teach you to say that at detective school?"

He nodded. ?They have a name for it. 'The tell-your-story method.' So come on, Anna, tell me your story. A detective who loves you—what better listener could you have?"

She began finally to tell it, starting back even before her defection in Milan. He had heard details of these incidents many times but he didn't interrupt her; he knew she had to work herself up before she got to the part that made her feel so ashamed.

"...it was a couple of months later, after I got to the States. I was temporarily settled in New York. A cold winter day. The wind was biting. I was hurrying along West Fifty-seventh Street near Carnegie Hall when a man approached. He matched his stride to mine and started speaking to me in Russian. He was friendly, polite, open about who he was and what he wanted me to do. He was with the Soviet Embassy. He proposed a mission, and said that if I didn't perform it my brother would be expelled from Moscow University. He didn't put it to me like a threat. Just stated it sadly as a fact. And when I told him that whatever happened to my brother I wasn't going to be a spy, he said this wasn't like that, that spying was for professionals, that all he wanted me to do was report to him on the thinking of some émigrés. He invited me into a coffee shop to talk. I was a little hesitant. But it was a public place, he didn't seem dangerous, and I was worried about my brother's future. There he revealed that he knew I was going out to California to give a concert the following week. While I was there he wanted me to telephone the sculptor, Targov, whose name I recognized but about whom I knew nothing at all. I was to introduce myself to Targov, arrange a meeting, then sound him out on his activities and plans. That was it. Stupidly I agreed. Now I'm so ashamed. But you see, at the time it seemed like such a harmless thing. Those people, old émigrés—all they ever do is talk."