The Butcher's Theatre (30 page)

“You saw the needle marks on her arms, right?”

Yalom sighed. “Yes.”

“She mention any friends or suppliers?”

“No.”

“Anything about her past that could connect her to anyone? Maybe one of the educated ones?”

“No. We were in back of the halftrack, riding south in the dark. There wasn’t much conversation.”

“Nothing about the seizures?”

“No, that took me by surprise. All of a sudden she’s all rigid, moving back and forth, teeth chattering, frothing at the mouth—I thought she was dying. You ever see that kind of thing?”

Avi remembered the epileptic kids in the Special Class. Retards and spastics, shaking and drooling. He’d felt like a freak being with them, cried hysterically until his mother had pulled him out.

“Never,” he said. “What was she doing when it started to happen?”

“Sleeping.”

“Lucky, huh?”

Yalom looked at the detective, puzzled.

“Lucky,” said Avi, smiling, “that she wasn’t going down on you when she started to shake. Hell of a way to pick up a war wound.”

There was no record of Juliet’s whereabouts during the four months following her release by Northern District. No pimp or whore or drug dealer admitted to knowing her; no substation had booked her. She hadn’t applied for welfare or any other kind of public assistance, nor had she worked in a legitimate job and gotten on the tax rolls.

It was as if she’d gone underground, thought Daniel, like some kind of burrowing animal, surfacing only to be torn apart by a waiting predator.

She could have plied her profession independently, he knew, pulling tricks on side streets in out-of-the-way neighborhoods. Or taken an unregistered side job—as a charwoman or fruit picker. In neither case were they likely to find out about it. An employer would be less than enthusiastic about admitting he’d hired her illegally, and those who’d purchased her favors were sure to keep silent.

The strongest thing they had going for them was the epilepsy angle and the best way to work that was footwork: a canvass of doctors, hospitals, Kupat Holim clinics, and pharmacists. The medication she’d received at Rambam had run out some time ago, which meant she’d have gotten a refill somewhere.

They started, all of them, checking out neurologists and neurological clinics; when none of that bore fruit, moved on to general practitioners and emergency rooms. Showing Juliet’s picture to busy people in white uniforms, searching for her name in patient rosters and charts. Eye-straining work, reeking of tedium. Avi Cohen was less than useless for most of it, so Daniel had him handle the telephones, cataloging crank calls and following the false leads and compulsive confessions

that the newspaper articles had started to bring in.

By the end of the week they’d learned nothing and Daniel knew that the whole endeavor was questionable. If Juliet had been streetwise enough to get her hands on fake ID within days of coming across the border, she probably had multiples, with false names and birth dates. Her baby face would have allowed her to claim anything from seventeen to thirty. How could you trace someone like that?

Even if they managed to connect her to some doctor or druggist, what good would it do? This was no crime of passion, the victim’s destiny interlaced with that of the killer. She’d been slain because of a chance meeting with a monster. Persuasive words, the exchange of money, perhaps. Then a rendezvous in some secret, dark place, the expectation of hurried sex, a recreational shot of dope. Blackness. Surgery.

He hoped neither she nor Fatma had ever known what was happening to them.

Surgery. He’d started thinking of it in medical terms, because of the anesthesia, the washing, the removal of the uterus, though Levi assured him that no special medical knowledge had been necessary to perform the extraction.

Simple stuff, Dani. A butcher orshohet or nurse or medical corpsman could have done it without special training. If I gave you an anatomy book you could do it yourself. Anyone could. Whenever something like this happens people always start looking for a doctor. It’s nonsense.

The pathologist had sounded defensive, protective of his profession, but Daniel had no reason to doubt what he was saying.

Anyone.

But here they were, talking to doctors.

Hospitals.

Right after Fatma’s murder, he’d thought about the Amelia Catherine, the proximity of the hospital to the dumping ground, how easy it would have been to hide the body in a big, empty building like that, sneak out at the right time during Schlesinger’s shift in order to dump it. But apart from a rumor that Dr. Walid Darousha was homosexual, the Amelia Catherine people had turned up clean on every record check. And the trail he’d followed

up through Silwan had made him forget about the U.N. hospital.

Did U.N. clinics, he wondered, see epilepsy patients? He was almost certain they had to—the disorder was common. Those files would be off-limits to his men. Unless he wanted to make a stink about it, get embroiled with Sorrel Baldwin and others like him. All that U.N. bureaucracy.

Baldwin—now there was something interesting. Before coming to Jerusalem, the American had lived in Beirut, Juliet’s former home base. He’d earned a degree from the American University—sociology; Daniel remembered the diploma. According to the tank captain Cohen had interviewed, Juliet’s brothel had catered to foreigners. American University personnel—Yalom had mentioned that specifically. A coincidence? Probably. The university was a breeding ground for Arabists; lots of them ended up working for the U.N. Still, it would have been interesting to talk to Baldwin in depth. Impossible without going through the brass.

Evidence, Laufer would bark at him. What evidence do you have for me to get my hands dirty, Sharavi? Challenging their diplomatic immunity? Stick with the case and don’t run off on another tangent, Sharavi.

Since the discovery of Juliet’s body, the deputy commander was in foul spirits. Pickled by his own press release, fermenting in ruined optimism. Firing off memos that inquired shrilly about progress. Or the lack of it.

Evidence. Daniel knew he had none. There was nothing to tie Juliet in with Baldwin or anyone else at the Amelia Catherine. Her body had been dumped clear across town, in the pine forest near Ein Qerem, on the southwest side of town. About as far from Scopus as you could get.

A Jewish National Fund forest, financed by the penny-in-a-blue-box donations of schoolchildren. The corpse wrapped in white sheeting, just like Fatma’s. Discovered by a pair of early morning hikers, teenage boys, who’d run from the sight, goggle-eyed with fear. The Russian nuns who lived nearby at the Ein Qerem Convent had seen and heard nothing.

Then there was the matter of Brother Joseph Roselli. Daniel had dropped by Saint Saviour’s hours after the discovery of the second body, found the monk on his rooftop,

and showed him Juliet’s death picture. Roselli had exclaimed: “She could be Fatma’s sister!” Then his face had seemed to collapse, features falling, restructuring suddenly in a tight-lipped mask. His demeanor from that point had been hard and cold, taut with outrage. A completely different side of the man. Daniel supposed he couldn’t be faulted for his indignation: Men of God weren’t accustomed to being considered murder suspects. But the shift was sudden. Strange.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that Roselli was harboring some secret, struggling with something … but the resumption of Daoud’s nighttime surveillance had turned up nothing so far.

No evidence and two dead girls.

He thought about Fatma and Juliet for a while, tried to establish some kind of connection between the runaway from Silwan and the whore from Beirut, then scolded himself for going off on tangents. Obsessing about the victims instead of trying to understand the killer, because the victims had names, identities, and the killer was an enigma.

Seven days had separated the two murders. Now, a week had passed since Juliet had been found.

Was something happening right now? Another helpless woman seduced into endless sleep?

And if so, what was there to do?

He kept thinking about it—cursing his helplessness—until his belly filled with fire and his head felt ready to burst.

After a Shabbat supper during which he nodded and smiled at Laura and the children, hearing them but not listening, he went into the laundry room that Laura had converted to a studio, carrying an armful of books and monographs checked out of the library at National Headquarters. The room was bright—he’d left the light on before Sabbath, stacked Laura’s stretched canvases neatly on the floor. Sitting among rolls of fabrics and tins of wax, jars filled with brushes and paint-encrusted palettes, he began to read.

Case histories of serial killers: Landru; Herman Mudgett; Albert Fish, who murdered and ate little children; Peter Kurten, a nauseating excuse for a human being who had well earned the nickname Dusseldorf Monster. According to one

expert, the Germans produced a disproportionate number of sex murders—something to do with an impoverished collective unconscious.

And, of course, Jack the Ripper. Rereading a book on the Ripper case give him pause, because some experts were convinced the scourge of Whitechapel had been a Jew—a shohet whose experience as a ritual slaughterer made him an expert in anatomy. He remembered what Dr. Levi had said, and he thought of the shohtim he knew: Mori Gerafi, a tiny, kind Yemenite who seemed too gentle for the job. Rabbi Landau, who worked out of the Mehane Yehuda market. Learned men, pious and scholarly. The thought of them carving up women was absurd.

He put the Ripper book aside and forged onward.

Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis—people chasing pleasure in hideous ways. Interpol and FBI reports—the German theory notwithstanding, America seemed to have more serial killers than any other country. One estimate said there were forty or forty of them doing their dirty work at any given time, more than five hundred unresolved serial murders. The FBI had begun to program a computer in order to catalog all of it.

Thirty roving monsters. Such cruelty, such evil.

Street-corner Mengeles. Why had God created them?

He finished at two in the morning, dry-mouthed and heavy-lidded, Laura’s drawing lamp the sole illumination in the silent, dark apartment.

Was it happening right now? The ritual, the outrage—an inert body laid out for dissection?

Knowing his dreams would be polluted, he went to sleep.

He awoke at dawn, expecting bad news. None came and he faked his way through Shabbat.

At nine on Sunday morning he filled an attache case with papers and went to see Dr. Ben David. The psychologist’s main office was at Hebrew University but he kept a suite for private consultations in the front rooms of his flat on Rehov Ramban.

Daniel arrived early and shared the claustrophobic waiting room with a tired-looking woman who hid from eye contact

behind the international edition of Time magazine. Ten minutes before the hour, Ben David came out of the treatment room with a skinny, large-eyed boy of about five. The boy looked at Daniel and smiled shyly. The detective smiled back and wondered what could trouble such a young child so deeply that he needed a psychologist.

The woman put the Time into her purse and stood.

“All right,” said Ben David heartily, in English. “I’ll see Ronny the same time next week.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” She took her son by the hand and the two of them left quickly.

“Daniel,” said Ben David, taking the detective’s hand in both of his and shaking it energetically. He was a young man, in his early thirties, medium-sized and heavyset, with bushy black hair, a full dark beard, light-blue eyes that never rested, and a fitful nature that had taken Daniel by surprise the first time they’d met. He’d always thought of psychotherapists as passive, quiet. Listening and nodding, waiting for you to talk so they could pounce with interpretations. The one he’d seen at the rehab center had certainly fit the stereotype.

“Hello, Eli. Thank you for seeing me.”

“Come in.”

Ben David ushered him into the treatment room, a smallish, untidy office lined with bookshelves and furnished with a small desk, three sturdy chairs, and a low circular table upon which sat a dollhouse in the shape of a Swiss chalet, doll furniture, and half a dozen miniature human figurines. Behind the desk was a credenza piled high with papers and toys. Next to the papers were an aluminium coffepot, cups, and a sugar bowl. No couch, no inkblots. A single Renoir print on the wall. The room smelled pleasantly of modeling clay.

Daniel sat on one of the chairs. The psychologist went to the crcdenza.

“Coffee?”

“Please.”

Ben David prepared two cups, gave Daniel his, and sat down opposite him, sipping. He was wearing a faded burgundy polo shirt that exposed a hard, protuberant belly, baggy dark-green corduroy trousers, and scuffed loafers without socks. His hair looked disheveled; his beard needed

trimming. Casual, careless even, like a graduate student on holiday. Not like a doctor at all, but such were the perquisites of status. Ben David had been an academic prodigy, chief of the army’s psychological service at twenty-seven, a full professor two years later. Daniel supposed he could dress any way he pleased.

“So, my friend.” The psychologist smiled cursorily, then shifted in the chair, moving his shoulders with almost tic-like abruptness. “I don’t know what I can tell you that we haven’t covered on Gray Man.”

“I’m not sure, myself.” Daniel pulled the forensic reports and crime summaries out of his case and handed them over. He drank coffee and waited as the psychologist read.

“Okay,” said Ben David, scanning quickly and looking up after a few moments. “What do you want to know,

specifically?”

“What do you think about the washing of the bodies? What’s the meaning of it?”

Ben David sat back in his chair, flipped one leg over the other, and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Let me start with the same warning I gave you before. Everything I tell you is pure speculation. It could be wrong. Okay?”