The Missing File (9 page)

“He won't end up just another missing child who was never found,” Ilana said. “Did the interviews with the friends and neighbors really give us nothing?”

“Practically nothing. There's an odd neighbor in the building who also came yesterday to help with the searches. He insists he knew Ofer better than anyone else. I'll be bringing him in for another interview—tomorrow, when I'm done with the father.”

“Good idea. And shouldn't you be getting ready for your trip? When are you off?”

“Next week. But I'm not sure if I'll go. I'm thinking about canceling.”

“What do you mean, canceling? It's a six-day work trip, and even if we're not done by then, the investigation can go on without you—if it's still in our hands.”

He couldn't believe what he was hearing—and this just moments before she would be chasing him out of her office as she hurried to leave.

“Still in our hands?”

“We all hope the investigation will be over in a week, right? And you know that if the case goes bad or we believe it is no longer merely a missing-persons investigation but something else, like a murder inquiry, we may be forced to set up a special investigation team and hand the case over to them. Especially if there's pressure from the family. It won't be up to me. The case could be handed over to the Serious Crimes Unit. For now, just don't let it get in the way of your investigation. It's a missing-persons case and it's yours. If and when it turns into something else, we'll have to think how best to deal with it. There's time.”

Just then, as he was beginning to feel the fresh air and the clarity of thought she had been talking about before, he felt his dejection return.

He looked her in the eyes as directly as he was capable of doing and implored: “Ilana, please don't take this case away from me. Just half an hour ago I wanted to ask you to hand it over to someone else, but we both know it would kill me. This is my investigation. It has been mine from the moment Ofer's mother walked into the station, and it has to stay mine until I find the boy and bring him home.”

H
e had a week. Ilana had made no bones about it. Barring a breakthrough in the investigation before he left on his trip, he would return from Brussels to find the case in strange hands. And even if they didn't set up a special investigation team headed by a higher-ranking officer, or even if the case wasn't handed over to the Serious Crimes Unit, who knew what Shrapstein was capable of doing in his week's absence, if he wouldn't take that opportunity to steal Ofer away from him. Avraham was terrified by the thought that the case could be wrapped up while he was in Brussels.

He drove back to the station via Jaffa, stopping for a moment at the Abulafia bakery to buy himself a pastry with cheese. El Al flight 382 from Milan would be coming in at 22:50. He could wait for Ofer's father in the airport arrivals hall and drive him directly to the station for questioning, or allow him to spend the night with his family and call him in for an interview in the morning. Perhaps he would simply show up and knock on the door to their apartment. He wanted to see it again, to be in the last place Ofer had been before he disappeared, and he wanted to get a look at the mother and the father there together. He hadn't seen Hannah Sharabi since Friday. Perhaps she would be less anxious in the company of her husband and would be able to tell him more about her son. And he wanted to see the father's face and picture Ofer at the same age. He wanted to go into Ofer's room with him, sit next to him on the bed, open the same drawers with him that he had opened on Friday. Would the father's face reveal more details about the son and his life than the mother's had? Isn't that always the case? And if he was to interview the father in his home, he'd be able to work in a quick visit to the odd neighbor. He needed to remember to get in touch with him first to make sure he would be at home.

His cell phone rang just as he pulled into the station parking lot. It was an unlisted number.

“May I speak to the esteemed Chief Inspector Avraham Avraham,” said the voice on the line.

He hadn't heard the voice for at least six months but recognized it immediately—and was sorry he had answered the call. “Yes, speaking,” he said.

“Hi there, Avraham Avraham, this is Uri Uri from security security service service,” the voice said. His childish giggle was confusing. “I'm calling about the investigation into the MIA MIA.”

Avraham drove his car to his usual parking place and remained in his seat.

“Are you there?” came the voice again. “Don't be offended. You know I horse around with you only because I feel we have a good bond. The Israel Police investigators have become awfully sensitive ever since female officers started taking up the senior command posts, don't you think?”

Though they had never met, Avraham detested him. They had spoken on the phone some six months earlier about an investigation into a car thief from a village near Nablus who had been apprehended in the south of Tel Aviv. The Shin Bet security service had expropriated the case from the police because the young Palestinian was also suspected of crossing over into Israel illegally and being a member of a terror organization. His brother, some ten years his senior, had been sentenced to a number of years in prison for being involved in security-related offenses. Back then, “Uri from the service” had spoken to him like the owner of a restaurant would speak to his lowliest dishwasher, despite probably being his junior both in age and in rank. Avraham hadn't dared to put up a fuss when asked to send over the file and evidentiary material he had collected over many days of hard work.

“I wanted to let you know that at this stage, we have no interest at all in the investigation into the missing boy,” Uri continued. “We have run our checks and we aren't dealing here with a hostile act of terror. But if at some point in the investigation even a single Arabic letter turns up, you'll let me know immediately, right?”

“I will,” Avraham spat out.

“Great. That's what we call cooperation between the various security branches.”

Where was he calling from? Avraham wondered. Where, in fact, was the office of “Uri from the service”? He thought for a moment that Israel had another police force about which he knew very little—a special police force, only for Arab-related matters, without stations, without published telephone numbers.

“Is that it? Is there anything else you need?” Avraham dared to ask.

“Yes, there is one small thing, in fact—a surprise I prepared especially for you,” replied the youthful voice. “Are you ready? A little birdie told me that you were interested in the question of why Israel doesn't produce detective novels. Is that true? Am I right or not?”

Avraham felt a shudder go through him. Surely the Shin Bet doesn't bug police interview rooms or tap the phones of police investigators. That's impossible. Someone from within the police must have told him.

“What?” Avraham asked. “I didn't get that.”

“Yes, a songbird. So listen up. We held an urgent team meeting to discuss the matter, and we have an official answer for you. Would you like to hear it?”

No, Avraham said to himself. I don't want to hear it.

“The answer is that the police in Israel are responsible for trivial investigations that no one would bother reading or writing a book about, and also because most of the police investigators aren't particularly bright. The Shin Bet handles the important investigations, and no one knows anything about us. And those who do know aren't allowed to breathe a word. Did you get that get that?”

6

T
he elderly woman's voice trembled as she came to the end of her story.

She described her mother getting off an old bus on a Jerusalem street and the heavy rain washing over her face. From time to time she would stop reading in midsentence and sigh, in an effort, perhaps, to ease the tension in her voice. She may have been hoping that they'd think her emotion stemmed from the content of the story and not the fact that she was reading out loud, standing up, in front of all the other writing workshop students.

Ze'ev couldn't remember the name of the elderly woman, who appeared so nervous that she was about to choke on her words. When he first saw her before the opening class of the workshop, he wanted to run away and give up on the whole idea. She was sitting on one of the ten or so chairs that had been arranged in a circle in the small room, and looked like someone who'd be more suited to a bridge group. He decided to stay only when, a minute or two after his arrival, a man who looked his age walked in, followed by two young women.

As expected, the elderly woman's story ended with the death of her sick mother. She sat back down, looking distinctly relieved. No one clapped—they had agreed on that in the first lesson—and not a single hand was raised. They knew Michael Rosen wouldn't say anything, yet all the students turned to look at him. He was sitting there on his chair in his usual listening position, slightly hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees, his clenched fists supporting his forehead, and his face hidden. They were all trying to guess what he thought, in order to say something similar. There was silence in the room and Michael respected, even prolonged it. “Silence is an important response to a story,” he had told them in the first class.

“The content is certainly touching, but as a literary text the story misses the mark.” As in the previous classes, the silence was broken by a man of around his age, Avner, who had introduced himself as a journalist when they all first met. He had taken on the role of the bad boy of the workshop from the outset and appeared to take an excess of pleasure in the ridiculous argumentative stance he always adopted. “I am not convinced by the character's last-minute turnaround; it's too optimistic,” Avner continued. “The protagonist is angry with her mother throughout the story, and then suddenly she softens, for no apparent reason.” His customary response. He could never understand how people changed, and he viewed every emotional upheaval as sudden and mechanical.

How would he explain the change Ze'ev had undergone, what had happened to him since last week? Now more than ever before, Ze'ev had doubts as to whether deep emotional change could be understood at all.

That morning, at 7:45 a.m., he had called the school secretary to report he was ill. Following his conversation with Inspector Avraham Avraham on the dunes, he had stayed in bed for the entire day yesterday, and was burning up with a fever when Michal and Elie returned in the afternoon from her parents'. He slept, and may have mumbled a few words as he did. He woke in the middle of the night and made himself a cup of tea with milk. He sat in the living room and waited. He slowly came to realize that more than twelve hours had passed since his talk with Avraham and his slip of the tongue, and no one had shown up to arrest him, and no one probably would. He could have prepared his lesson but decided instead to take the day off work. The thought of policemen coming into the classroom terrified him. He could picture himself being led through the school courtyard in handcuffs, with all the teachers and students watching him from the windows above. It was past 5:00 a.m. when he finally went back to bed. He had spent most of that day in Tel Aviv, and had caught a British period drama at the cinema. He didn't want to be at home; his mother-in-law looked after Elie on Sundays.

One of the young female students quickly came to the defense of the elderly woman. “What are you talking about?” she addressed Avner. “Of course there's a reason for her change. She remembered what happened on the bus.”

“And she couldn't remember it before? So why does she remember just then? There should be some textual justification, shouldn't there?”

Michael Rosen remained silent, as did Ze'ev. Ze'ev hadn't yet spoken during the workshop, and hadn't written any stories. He would just observe and occasionally write down comments in a black notebook, and was under the impression that his silence made the other students even more curious about his opinion of their stories. It may have also piqued the curiosity of Michael, who, during their talk in the car after the previous lesson, had gently urged him to read something of his own at one of upcoming classes. That was a week ago—before Ofer, and before Ofer's mother, and before Inspector Avraham, and before the call to the police, and the searches. He had yet to decide if he would say anything to Michael on their ride home that evening. They had met only four weeks ago, but Ze'ev felt they shared a sense of quiet affinity, which was almost always a sign of a close friendship in the making.

T
he discussion in class was becoming repetitive and dreary. Ze'ev knew what Michael Rosen was thinking, and he waited.

“I was very moved by the story,” Michael said, lifting his head and speaking in a soft voice. Somewhat taken aback by the choice of words, Ze'ev tried to read the teacher's eyes, to ask them if he had indeed been moved. Michael's piercing gaze was focused on the elderly woman, who was still trying to catch her breath.

The class went silent, and Michael continued: “I think you have a wonderful talent for depicting a complete scene in just a few sentences. In just two and a half pages you have created two emotionally credible characters. Aside from that, you have successfully created two story planes, which are set far apart from one another, without using any specific time points, and only with the help of place references, the modern hospital ward and the old bus.”

Michael's voice remained soft even when the tone changed. “Nevertheless, in my opinion your story could have been even better and more powerful than it already is—and it is a wonderful story, I want to stress that—had you not done what I have been speaking about since the first meeting; that is, had you not written literature,” he said. “The pain in your story is still alive, and it seems to me that when it becomes unbearable, you escape into literature, so-called literature—in other words, into analogies and symbolism. In reality there are no analogies and no symbols, like the rain that washes over the mother's face or the moment at the end when the daughter closes the mother's eyes and says to her in Polish, ‘Forgive me, my darling,' repeating the words her mother had said to her on the bus.”

Ze'ev could not resolve the profound contradiction between Michael Rosen's provocative appearance and the softness and sensitivity of his voice. His beard was wild and unkempt, and his eyes were red. As they sat alongside each other in his car a week ago, his black sweatshirt had reeked of cigarette smoke and sweat, and alcohol too, perhaps. He tried to picture Michael's apartment, his study, and his mind conjured up images of ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and piles of books and half-empty bottles of wine on the desk. Michael wouldn't be inviting him in this evening, after their ride home together, but it could happen over the coming weeks, before the workshop ended.

Michael's soft, comforting gaze remained fixed on the elderly woman.

“You wanted the story to come to a harmonious conclusion,” he continued, “and so you ended it with the daughter's repetition of the mother's words. We are all under the impression that literature, and beauty in art in general, is harmony, and that anger isn't literature. But I think that it doesn't matter what literature is. As I said in our first meeting, I can't and don't want to help you to write literature. I want to help you to write.”

“What's wrong with writing literature?” the young student asked. “Everyone can write.”

“There's nothing wrong with it, Einat. It's simply using someone else's words and patterns. And I don't agree with what you said about everyone being able to write. Remember what I read to you in the first class, that excerpt from Kafka's letter?” Michael closed his eyes and quoted from memory: “ ‘I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into faraway forests, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.' ”

Michael's gaze moved over the faces of the students, stopping to focus on Ze'ev's eyes.

Could he see what Ze'ev had yet to grasp, that at that particular moment his writing began? Or was it perhaps a little later, during the ride home together, when the words they had exchanged were closer and more intimate, and Ze'ev had felt that Michael was trying to tell him something, as if he already knew?

M
ichael was held up in class. He must have been speaking to some student who had approached him. Ze'ev waited for him in the library courtyard. Evening had fallen and upper-middle-class couples were streaming into the adjacent Cameri Theater and the Opera House.

“Are you waiting for me?” Michael asked when he came out a few minutes later with the young student and noticed Ze'ev.

“I thought you might like a ride home,” Ze'ev said.

Michael lit up a cigarette he had removed from a crumpled pack.

They stood facing each other on the steps leading up to the library. Michael was a tall man, and his eyes were a fiery red. “Oh, thanks,” he said, “but I'm off to visit a friend.”

Ze'ev quickly composed himself. “No problem,” he said. “I'll drop you off wherever you need to go.”

“It's completely out of your way,” Michael replied. “She lives in the south of Tel Aviv.”

When Ze'ev had waited for him last week and offered him a ride, he had told Michael that he lived in north Tel Aviv, not far from Michael's apartment, at the northern end of Ben Yehuda Street, where he and Michal had indeed lived before Elie was born. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I'm happy to make a detour.”

They made their way toward the lot where Ze'ev had parked his old Daihatsu. Michael walked like someone who owned the city, and Ze'ev got the impression that Michael was looking at the traffic and streetlights like a child who was seeing them for the first time. That morning he had asked Michal if he could have the car for the day purely for this ride home. He had dropped her off at school and had come into Tel Aviv with the car and not his bike.

Ze'ev cleared away the books and CDs that were strewn across the passenger seat and lying on the rubber mat on the floor, apologizing for the mess. “Wow, you have an entire mobile library in here,” Michael laughed.

The sounds of a Shostakovich string quartet filled the car soon after Ze'ev started the engine, and he removed the CD. “I'm not in the mood for that right now,” he said, as if to himself. The eight o'clock news was on the radio. Elie's car seat was in the back. Michael had noticed it the last time and had asked him how many children he had and their ages. “Just one,” Ze'ev had responded. “He's almost a year old now, and I am not quite used to it all yet.”

After asking Michael the best route to take to the south of Tel Aviv, Ze'ev turned left onto Ibn Gabirol Street and headed for Yehuda Halevy.

“That was a tough class, wasn't it?” Ze'ev said. “She didn't understand a word you said.”

Michael looked at him, surprised. “I actually thought it was a good meeting,” he replied. “She impressed me. She wrote a very nice story. I hope I didn't give the wrong impression.”

Ze'ev turned at the wrong intersection, instead of heading straight onto Yitzhak Sadeh. “Never mind,” Michael said. “You could do a U-turn somewhere, but that'll take you far out of your way; you can drop me off here.” Then he asked Ze'ev, “And when are you going to read something for us? I don't call on you in class because I don't want to pressure any of you into reading.”

Ze'ev felt a burning desire to tell Michael that he was finally so close to writing—so close, and after so many years. He could picture Ofer's face as he had seen it the last time, and had thought about how he would describe his features, the trace of a mustache, his embarrassed laughter. For three days now, he had known what he would write, but had yet to capture the precise words. They were still forming in his mind.

“I think I'll write this week,” Ze'ev said. “I believe I've found my topic—thanks to you.” But Michael was too cautious and remained silent, not asking him anything, so Ze'ev added, “And what about you? Are you writing anything at the moment?”

They were stopped at a red light. Michael sighed. His long legs were a tight fit in the small car.

“I always write. But I think it's been months since I have produced something that I can stand behind and publish. That's why I agreed to give the workshop. I am hoping it will help me with my own writing too.”

Michael's sigh and ensuing confession appeared to bring the two men in the car a little closer. Ze'ev had read his last book, published some two years earlier—initially in envy, sparked by the writer's young age, and then in wonder and admiration. Michael had published three books, two collections of short stories and a short novel, and although they hadn't sold all that well, they had won praise. Michael's red T-shirt was giving off that same pungent smell that had come from the black sweatshirt the week before, and Ze'ev wondered if it was Michael's body odor.

“Do you go through some long periods when you don't write?” Ze'ev asked, and Michael said, “I'm always writing something. But there are times when I don't write anything worth reading.”