The Missing File (2 page)

He hadn't heard anything for a few minutes. He had been listening only to himself, an internal dialogue. He couldn't forget that woman. He recalled the murder of Inbal Amram in 2006. The court ruling was mailed out to every policeman in the country. It found that the police had been negligent in their search and were responsible for her death. But the circumstances were very different. The son of the woman who had sat in his office earlier hadn't disappeared at night. And there was nothing at this stage to indicate the need for any urgent missing-persons procedures or for mounting a comprehensive and expensive search operation. He had even taken the time, in the presence of the mother, to make some calls to hospitals in the area. None had reported admitting a boy by the name of Ofer Sharabi or anyone matching his description.

Before leaving the station, he had asked to be notified about any relevant report on the matter, to be called in the middle of the night if necessary. He had told the mother how to keep searching on her own, and had left the duty officer with a description of the black backpack with its white stripes—an Adidas knockoff—in case it came up in reports about a suspicious object in the area. Any other course of action would have been a waste of resources—and could land him in hot water. But if something were to happen to the boy that night, something he could have prevented, they'd really let him have it. He regretted his little speech about detective novels and crime statistics in Israel. Inbal Amram was murdered by a car thief who didn't know her—a carjacking that went wrong.

T
he dunes between Neve Remez and Kiryat Sharet, the two gray neighborhoods he had lived in all his life, were almost gone—replaced by apartment towers, a public library, a design museum, and a shopping mall, glowing in the darkness like a space station on the moon. At the halfway mark to Kiryat Sharet, the bright neon signs of Zara, Office Depot, and Cup o' Joe beckoned to his left, and he thought about crossing the street and going into the mall. He could get a coffee and a cheese sandwich and sit at one of the empty tables outside to quietly watch the soothing motion of the car headlights and think for a while. As he did most nights, he chose not to.

He wanted to think about other cases he was working on. One, in which he didn't have a single lead, involved three burglaries within a week on two adjacent streets in the Kiryat Ben-Gurion neighborhood. All had happened during the day, when the occupants were out. Clean break-ins. No broken locks or sawed bars. The burglars seemed to have had precise information on the comings and goings of the occupants. And they were obviously good at opening doors and locks without much noise. These weren't random break-ins by dopeheads. They stole jewelry, checkbooks, cash. And broke into a safe in one of the apartments.

It was a frustrating case. His only real line of investigation was to wait for the next burglary and hope that the thieves would leave something behind for forensics to pick up. They hadn't done so yet. Or perhaps some of the stolen property would turn up in a raid on a warehouse somewhere and there'd be someone to question. And he had a hunch that he dared not confess to in team meetings. That only one of the three burglaries was a real one. That only one had any significance to the burglars. And the thing they were looking for, and perhaps found, had nothing to do with money or property. The other two burglaries were staged, to throw the police off the scent.

He had had some success with his other case—but things had gone wrong over the last two days. Igor Kintiev, a twenty-year-old who had been discharged early from the army, was arrested in connection with a series of sexual assaults on women south of Tel Aviv, along the Bat Yam promenade. They had taken place on and off over a two-month period. Kintiev was picked up by detectives who were on a stakeout operation. They noticed him walking back and forth along the promenade, following women—mostly older than him, in their forties at least. He'd follow them and then turn and walk in the opposite direction, or cross the street, until he found another one to follow. He was picked out in a lineup by four of the seven victims. When first questioned, he denied everything, but then, two days ago, he opened up and confessed to the sex crimes and to dozens of crimes that had nothing to do with the original investigation, like setting fire to a retirement home up north two years ago, or an unreported case of attempted arson at a restaurant in 2005.

He was a strange kid, and his Hebrew was odd too—distant. His mother had stayed back in Russia; his father died in Israel. He had no fixed address. He had lived for a few months in a rented basement in the North, and then moved six months ago to the apartment of relatives in Bat Yam, for work purposes. Avraham didn't believe a word he had said. During one of the assaults, Kintiev had gripped the arm of a fifty-year-old cosmetics marketing manager and forced it into his pants—in the middle of the promenade, on a Friday evening. He was picked up without any ID papers on him and no money at all. In his backpack they had found a brand-new sophisticated compass and a copy of Shai Agnon's
A Simple Story
, a special edition for schools—its worn, blue, soft cover peeling apart. The first page displayed a handwritten dedication dated August 10, 1993:
To Yoela, a simple love story lost
. The name of the inscriber had been erased with Wite-Out.

A
vraham didn't know why he thought the things he did. For no apparent reason, he had formed a picture in his mind of the computer screen in the room of Ofer Sharabi and his brother. An old, heavy monitor, in a shade of cream—or so he saw it. He was primarily concerned, however, with the age difference between the children. A sixteen-year-old boy, a fourteen-year-old girl, and a five-year-old. Why were there nine years between the girl and the young son? Why would a couple who starts having children suddenly stop and wait such a long time for the next one? Perhaps it had something to do with the family's financial situation, health issues, a marriage crisis. Or maybe the mother had been pregnant before then and had lost the baby? Why the hell does everything need an explanation?

His mind wandered to eight in the morning. The three children leave for school and kindergarten, and the mother remains alone. The apartment's quiet. The rooms are empty. There's a soft sound coming from the white living room curtains. What does she begin doing first? Wander through the empty rooms? The boys' room—a large space, with a bed that folds into a sofa and a desk on which the old computer monitor sits. On the other side, a child's bed, and a sideboard. And the girl's room—small, whitewashed, with a long mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door, in which the mother comes face-to-face with herself. In his imagination she is carrying a washing basket.

Five young boys and girls were standing at the number 97 bus stop on the main road at the entrance to Kiryat Sharet. The line's final stop was in Tel Aviv. One of the young girls was showing one of the boys something on her iPod. She was short and stocky, but noisily cheerful nevertheless. Dressed in unflattering black tights and a gray Gap sweatshirt, she tried to coax the boy into putting the earbuds into his ears. He refused, acting as if he were disgusted by the idea. Without meaning to, Avraham fixed them with a stern gaze. They were silent as he passed by, smiling in his wake. The girl with the iPod may have made some funny gesture. Was Ofer there among them? He must be. And if not there, then at a different stop.

Toward the end of his talk with the mother, just before she agreed to leave, she told him that Ofer had run away from home twice before. He wasn't yet twelve the first time. He walked—“in flip-flops,” she said—more than six miles, to his grandparents' house. It was on one of the holidays, after a fight with his father. A year or so ago, he fought with her too, and left the house that afternoon saying he wasn't coming back. He returned after nine, in the end, let himself in with his key, and went straight to his room, without a word about what he had done that evening. They never spoke about it again. Avraham had asked her why she hadn't gone to the police then too, but she didn't answer. Probably because the father was home at the time.

An image froze in his mind. He didn't know exactly what the boy looked like, but he could see Ofer Sharabi placing his black bag on a bench in a dimly lit, deserted public park and lying down on his back. He's covering his body with a gray sweatshirt—like the one on the girl at the bus stop. He's getting ready to go to sleep. There's not a soul there aside from Ofer. And that's good. He's not in any danger.

A
vraham passed by the building in which he had grown up—26 Alufei Tzahal Street. His parents' home. He inadvertently lifted his head to look up to the third-floor window. Everything was shut tight. Not a sign of life. How long had it been since he was last here? The shutters of the second-floor window were open, and a shirtless man sat there on the windowsill with his back to the street, his face turned toward the glow of the living room and the sounds of the television set coming from it. The news would be on soon. The man spoke to someone in the apartment, maybe his wife in the kitchen. He was one of the neighbors who a few years earlier had found Avraham's father lying in the stairwell after the stroke.

He continued up the road and went into the supermarket. He thought for a moment about changing his plans, about cooking himself a nice dinner that would clear his mind of all his thoughts and make him happy. Maybe a simple bottle of Côtes du Rhône with some packaged ravioli that he could boil and then top with some olive oil and grated cheese. But his bubble popped again. He went over to the refrigerated section and took out a small single-portion tub of spicy tahini. It took him a while, but he eventually found a semi-fresh bread roll among the few items that still remained on the bread shelf, feeling them with his bare hands. He added a small box of tomatoes to his basket as he approached the cashier. Had he not forgotten to take the sheet of paper on which he had written the address, he would have gone home, got in his car, and driven to the building where the mother now waited. He would have staked out the place until he saw Ofer Sharabi walking into the stairwell and heard the mother's shouting or weeping. He would have slept easier. But he forgot to take the paper—even though he had folded it into a small square with the intention of putting it in his shirt pocket. Perhaps he didn't want to take the drawing that had startled him for no reason. He had an idea: he could call Ilana for advice. If Ilana told him to return to the station and put out an urgent missing-persons report, that's what he would do despite the late hour. But if he called her, he would again be exposing his insecurity, and he didn't want to do that. He paid with a credit card so as not to spend the small amount of cash in his wallet.

H
e returned to Alufei Tzahal Street, passed by his parents' home again, and decided against going up. His father was probably sitting in the dark in front of the TV, staring at the news. It was the worst time to disturb him. If his mother wasn't out walking, she would be sitting at the kitchen table and speaking on the phone. He wasn't in the mood for listening to her. Besides, he could already hear her voice playing in his head as she spoke to some friend: “Oh my, it's Avi. I must go heat up something for him to eat.” He preferred to eat on his own and watch an old episode from the third season of
Law & Order
that he had seen countless times before. It was on Channel 3. He discovered something new each time he watched—another mistake in the investigation, a new way to acquit a defendant. He walked down the road and turned left, continuing for another three or so minutes past dark, silent buildings before reaching his own on Yom Kippur Street.

He'd leave his cell phone by the bed that night in case someone from the station called.

2

Z
e'ev knew why the police cars were there the moment he saw them parked outside the building. It was a gut feeling, a sharp searing of his conscience, from deep within. He knew, too, that he was ready, but didn't know for what just yet.

It was strange—as if his life had secretly steered him toward this moment over the last few years, without any awareness at all on his part. He felt something explode inside him, like an unexpected birth: the moment he saw the patrol cars, a different person emerged from him, someone who had been inside him for years, waiting. With Elie's birth, it had been the opposite. They had prepared for nine months, but his arrival had hit them like a bombshell, out of nowhere. The parents within them that were supposed to emerge didn't. They both became children again, so very helpless.

H
e saw the patrol cars from the intersection, while waiting for the light to change. There were two of them parked at the entrance to the building, both with their front passenger doors open. A uniformed policewoman leaned against one, speaking on a cell phone. He parked his motorbike alongside the entrance to the building and walked into the stairwell. The door was open and voices were coming from the floors above. He passed by the door to his apartment and went up to the third floor. The door to the Sharabis' apartment was open too and a policewoman was standing at the entrance. Doors are open when a disaster has occurred, he thought. Perhaps that's what he had felt. Something opening.

The policewoman noticed him and asked who he was. “My name's Ze'ev. I'm a neighbor from the second floor,” he replied, and asked her if something had happened. Standing firm at the entrance to the apartment, as if to indicate to him that he wasn't allowed in, she said nothing had happened. He hadn't thought of going in.

Michal was sitting on the sofa in their living room. Elie slept beside her. She was still in her pajamas and was watching
Dr. Phil
on the TV. The shutters were closed and the apartment was dark. He asked if she knew what had happened at the neighbors', but she hadn't even noticed that there were police cars outside the building and that something was going on. He was home early, and she was surprised to see him. She quietly asked if he wanted something to eat. Then she took Elie to his room, carefully so as not to wake him, and opened a small crack in the shutters on the balcony to look outside. She went over to the door and peeked out into the hallway. Two policemen were bounding down the stairs, and she quickly shut the door again, asking, “Perhaps they were burgled?”

Ze'ev said they wouldn't send out so many police to deal with a burglary.

“It's frightening. What could have happened?”

“Nothing terrible, I'm sure,” he answered, hugging her close.

T
hat afternoon, Ze'ev sat on the enclosed balcony that had been turned into an uncomfortable study and marked exams. He could continue following the goings-on outside from there. Policemen came and went. One of them, a short bald man, appeared to be the senior officer on the scene. He was agitated, constantly on the phone, and sometimes raising his voice. “Take him back. I'm not to blame that the fools didn't get the message,” Ze'ev heard him shout. “It can't wait. I've been trying to reach her all morning and can't wait any longer. Get her out of the meeting,” he then shouted into the telephone.

A short while later, the officer went into the front yard of the building, almost tripping over a rock. He was looking for something among the bushes, but when he emerged his hands were empty. There was something clumsy about his movements. He lifted his head, seemingly to meet the gaze of another policeman standing on the third-floor balcony. Ze'ev didn't know what the officer had been looking for, or if he had managed to catch a glimpse of his eyes peering out through the narrow opening in the shutters on the second floor before he backed away quickly into his study. Hannah Sharabi came down to the pavement outside the building for a few minutes, surrounded by three policemen. She explained something to them, gesturing with her hands to illustrate her point. She appeared to be directing them somewhere. If Ze'ev had opened the window properly, he would have heard them. Other neighbors too were watching from their windows, from the adjacent buildings. He didn't see Hannah Sharabi's husband or the children.

He tried to focus on the exams. The grammar exercises were easy to check, but the short essays required attention. The topic was “What will the world look like in twenty-five years?” It was intended to test usage of the future tense, and also tied in with a discussion Ze'ev wanted to raise in class after their reading of a few pages from Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World
. Between each exam, he searched through news sites and Google News for reports related to the city of Holon or the name Sharabi.

Elie had been sleeping for more than two hours—a lot longer than he usually slept in the afternoons—and Michal had had time to bathe and dress. There was a moment, while she was in the shower, when both of them seemed not to be at home, a brief moment of deep inner silence. Then she came out to the balcony and kissed Ze'ev on his cheek. “How are you getting along?” she asked, and he replied that he'd be done in time. He made himself a cup of tea with milk.

E
lie woke shortly before three, crying as usual. Ze'ev hurried to complete checking the last essay and relieved his wife, who went out onto the balcony to sit at the desk he had been sitting at before and prepare her lessons for the following day. He and Elie played with building blocks on the carpet in the living room. He would build a low tower with the colorful blocks, and Elie would knock it down, looking at his father with satisfaction and pride. Ze'ev then tried to get him interested in two colorful children's books, one with a mirror—and managed to hold his attention for a short while. He was tense, but it was a good kind of tension, primed for action. He fought the impulse to put Elie in the trampoline seat in front of the television and go check what was happening outside. The infant obviously sensed it, and he whined and tried to crawl over to his mother. “I think I'll take him out for a walk,” Ze'ev said to Michal. “Do you need anything from the supermarket?”

The first sign Ze'ev noticed was on an electricity pole outside the building. Ofer's face, somewhat blurred, in the center of a standard white A4 sheet of printer paper that had been stuck to the concrete pole with clear tape. Dark-skinned, very thin, sunken black eyes, a small nose, and thin lips that were showing signs of a black mustache that needed shaving. He looked very serious in the picture. No smile, staring straight into the camera. Ze'ev thought back to the last time he saw his face, up close and serious. He thought the picture didn't convey any of his softness. It looked more like a “Wanted” poster than the image of a missing youth.

The large bold print above the picture read “
MISSING
”—and below that were some printed lines of text:

Ofer Sharabi went missing on Wednesday, May 4, in the morning.

Age: 16. Build: Very thin. Hair: Short, black. Height: Average.

If anyone has seen him, please contact the family or the police.

There was a telephone number at the bottom of the page.

Ze'ev wondered who had put up the posters; he didn't think it was the police. They were posted the entire length of their street, on electricity poles and road signs, and he thought about tearing one off without being seen and taking it home. He might need it at some point. Had Ofer's mother made the posters herself?

Across from the retirement home, an elderly man pushed his face up close to one of the posters until his nose was almost touching it. He was wearing an old checkered shirt and carrying a light-brown leather bag in one hand. Elie was restless and was struggling to free himself from the straps of the stroller. They turned right onto Shenkar Street and walked to the kiosk at the corner, where Ze'ev bought Elie a small packet of peanut-butter snacks and placed it on his lap. Across the street, he could see the first-floor neighbor tearing off a piece of Scotch tape with her teeth and sticking up a picture of Ofer at the bus stop. He turned for home again. The police station wasn't far away.

T
he police knocked on their door early in the evening, sooner than he had expected. That was the first surprise. Ze'ev and Michal were getting Elie ready for his bath. Ze'ev opened the door to two police officers—the short clumsy one he had seen from the window in the afternoon, and a younger woman he hadn't seen before.

“Sorry to disturb you,” began the male officer, “but you must be aware that your neighbor's son has been missing since yesterday. As part of our search, we are interviewing all the neighbors, and we'd like to ask you a few questions. Is this a good time?”

Michal stepped out of the bathroom with Elie in her arms, undiapered, and the officer looked embarrassed. He didn't switch on the light that had gone out in the stairwell and stood there in the darkness. “Perhaps you'd like us to come back a little later,” the officer said. “We can talk to the other neighbors in the meanwhile.”

Ze'ev invited them in. Elie fixed the police officers with a serious stare, like he always did when guests arrived. The policewoman's name was engraved on the silver tag on the pocket of her shirt—Liat Mantsur. Ze'ev felt the same inner explosion he had felt that afternoon when he returned home and saw the patrol cars. The other person inside him tensed in anticipation. Perhaps this is the beginning, he thought. He must remember every detail.

T
he police surprised him again. Ze'ev hadn't expected them to question him and Michal separately, and couldn't understand why the senior officer decided to sit in the kitchen with his wife while he sat in the living room with the junior officer, Liat Mantsur. A small, blue plastic plate with the remains of Elie's vegetable mash was still on the kitchen table. Scattered around the plate were bits of moist bread and crumbs.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked the policewoman.

“No,” she replied, and rested a dark plastic clipboard on her knees. A black pen had been used to divide the sheet of paper on the board into three columns, each with a few lines of text at the top. He sat on the sofa, with the policewoman sitting opposite him, on the armchair.

“We are currently collecting information about the missing boy,” she said. “It would help us if you could tell us when you last saw him—you may have seen him yesterday, or even today—and what your impression of him is.”

They seemed to be working by the book, and procedures most likely dictated that the neighbors must be interviewed and asked the exact same questions, even if nothing helpful came of them. The policewoman didn't look around the room, not even at the solitary picture—a reproduction of van Gogh's
Bedroom in Arles
—hanging on the wall across from the sofa, above the rickety sideboard; or at the old and ugly brown sofa, draped in a black-and-white-striped sheet to cover its stains and protect it from more; or at the toys strewn across the floor, giving the living room the appearance of a warehouse. So uninspired. She didn't look, but he could see through her eyes just how temporary the apartment seemed, how gloomily lit it appeared when evening fell.

“I didn't see Ofer yesterday, or today,” Ze'ev said. “As far as my impression of him goes, he seems to be a pleasant, introverted boy.”

Already she made notes with a black pen. What the hell did she have to write about?

“I'm taking down notes while you speak, okay? When did you last see him? Do you remember, perhaps?”

“Not the exact date. At some point this week, I'm sure. In the stairwell. I teach at a high school, so we leave home at the same time, and sometimes we cross paths.”

“And did he appear the same as usual, or was there anything unusual about his behavior? Did you notice anything?”

Ze'ev was frustrated. He wasn't able to make out the conversation between Michal and the senior investigator, only Elie's crying as he sat on his mother's lap, wrapped up in a dry towel and getting more agitated with every passing moment. The boy was tired and wasn't at all happy with the fact that two people were speaking to each other and not to him.

“Are you sure you won't have something to drink?” Ze'ev asked, hoping for an excuse to go into the kitchen. He wasn't quite sure yet about when in the conversation he would surprise her. Or perhaps he should save the surprise for the senior investigator, he thought.

“No, thanks, we're fine,” she replied. “Okay . . . is there anything you know about the missing boy or his family that you'd like to share with us? Do you sometimes hear any fighting or arguing coming from there?”

So that's why the senior officer had chosen to speak to his wife, Ze'ev presumed to himself. He probably assumed that she was at home most of the time and would therefore know more about the goings-on in the building.

“Not at all,” Ze'ev said. “We hear some noise sometimes; they have three children and live above us. But I think we are actually the ones making most of the noise in the building lately.” He smiled and wondered if she understood what he had meant. Her head was tilted toward the plastic clipboard on her lap and her gaze was fixed on the piece of paper, like a shortsighted student taking a test. “We moved in here just over a year ago, before Elie was born. We used to live in the center of Tel Aviv, and I still work there. I teach at the Ironi A high school, next to the Cinematheque, if you know where that is.”

“And what was your general impression of the missing boy? Was he a good kid, or have you had any run-ins with him in the past?”

It was terrible. She wasn't even listening to the answers he gave to her routine questions. “Not at all. Like I said, I got the impression that he's a pleasant, if slightly introverted, child.” He hesitated for a moment, again glancing over toward the kitchen, and then added, “My acquaintance with him was a lot closer than neighborly ties.”