"Morning, Tzvika."
"Morning, Dani."
The gate opened like a yawn.
A steel revolving door provided access to the lobby. Inside, all was cool and quiet, the white marble floors spotless. A solitary woman in jeans and T-shirt sat on a bench kneading her fingers and waiting. Three uniforms stood behind the shiny black reception counter, joking and laughing, nodding at him without interrupting their conversation. He walked past them quickly, past the bomb display and the burglary prevention exhibit, ignored the elevators, swung open the door to the stairs, and bounded up to the third floor.
He stepped out into a long hallway and turned right, stopping at a plain wooden door. Only a strip of tape with his name on it distinguished it from the dozens of others that checkered the corridor. Ringing telephones and the white noise of conversation filtered through the hall in tidelike waves, but at a discreet level. Businesslike. He might have been in a law firm.
So different from the old Russian Compound, with its green copper domes and cold, dingy walls, the ancient plaster crackled like eggshell. The constant press of bodies, the eternal human parade. His cubicle had been noisy, cramped, bereft of privacy. Suspects rubbing elbows with policemen. Vine-laced leaded windows offering views of manacled suspects escorted across the courtyard, bound over for hearing at the Magistrates Hall, some shuffling, others fairly dancing to judgment. The bitter smell of sweat and fear, voices raised in the same old cantata of accusation and denial. The working space of a detective.
His Major Crimes assignment had meant a move to National Headquarters. But National Headquarters had been built with administrators in mind. Paper blizzards and the high technology of contemporary police work. Basement labs and banks of computers. Well-lit conference rooms and lecture halls. Clean, respectable. Sterile.
He turned the key. His office was spanking-white and tiny-ten by ten with a view of the parking lot. His desk, files, and shelves filled it, so that there was barely space for a single guest chair; more than one visitor meant a move to one of the interrogation rooms. On the wall was a framed batik Laura had done last summer. A pair of old Yemenite men, brown figures on a cream-colored background, dancing in ecstasy under a flaming orange swirl of sun. Next to it, a pictorial calendar from the Conservation League, this month's illustration a pair of young almond trees in full snowy blossom against a backdrop of gray rolling hills.
He squeezed behind the desk. The surface was clear except for a snapshot cube of Laura and the children and a stack of mail. At the top of the stack was a message to call Laufer if he had anything to report, some Research and Development questionnaires to be filled out as soon as possible, a memo explaining new regulations for submitting expense vouchers, and a final death report from Abu Kabir on the Dutch tourist who'd been found dead three days ago in the woodlands just below the Dormition Abbey. He picked up the report and put the rest aside. Scanning the stiff, cruel poetry of the necropsy protocol ("This is the body of a well-developed, well-nourished white male "), he dropped his eyes to the last paragraph: Extensive atherosclerotic disease including blockage of several main blood vessels, no sign of toxins or foul play. Conclusion: The man had been a heart attack waiting to happen. The steep climb to the abbey had done him in.
He put the report aside, picked up the phone, dialed the main switchboard, and got put on hold. After waiting for several moments, he hung up, dialed again, and was answered by an operator with a cheerful voice. Identifying himself, he gave her three names and left messages for them to contact him as soon as possible.
She read the names back to him and he said, "Perfect. There's one more, a Samal Avi Cohen. New hire. Try Personnel and if they don't know where he can be reached, Tat Nitzav Laufer's office will. Give him the same message."
"Okay. Shalom."
"Shalom."
The next number he tried was busy. Rather than wait, he left and climbed to the fourth floor.
The office he entered was one-third larger than his, but it housed two people. A pair of desks had been placed in an L. On the wall behind them, a single shelf held books, a collection of straw dolls, and a sachet that emitted a light aroma of patchouli.
Both youth officers were on the phone, talking to bureaucrats. Both wore pastel short-sleeved blouses over jeans.
Otherwise, physically and stylistically, they were a study in contrasts.
Hanna Shalvi sat nearer to the door, diminutive, dark, be-spectacled; baby-faced, so that she didn't look much older than the children she worked with. She asked a question about a family's fitness, nodded as she listened, said "yes" and "hmm" several times, repeated the question, waited, repeated.
A few feet away, Alice Yanushevsky hunched over her desk, jabbing her pencil in the air and smoking like a chimney. Tall and moon-faced, with straw-colored hair cut in a Dutch-boy, she demanded fast action from a recalcitrant pencil-pusher in a voice tight with impatience.
"This is a girl in jeopardy! We'll have no more delays! Am I understood?" Slam.
A sweet smile for Daniel. A drop in vocal pitch: "Good morning, Dani." She picked up a cardboard tube, opened it, and unfolded the contents. "Like my new poster?"
It was a blowup of the American rock band Fleetwood Mac.
"Very nice."
"Avner gave it to me because he says I look like one of them"-she swiveled and pointed-"the English girl, Christine. What do you think?"
"A little," he conceded. "You're younger."
Alice laughed heartily, smoked, laughed again.
"Sit down, Pakad Sharavi. Just what is it that you need?"
"Photographs of missing girls. Brunettes, probably fifteen or sixteen, but let's play it safe and go twelve to nineteen."
Alice's green eyes jumped with alarm.
"Something happened to one of them?"
"Possibly."
"What?" she demanded.
"Can't say anything right now. Laufer's put a gag on."
"Oh, come on."
"Sorry."
"All take, no give, eh? That should make your job easy." She shook her head scornfully. "Laufer. Who does he think he's kidding, trying to keep anything quiet around here?"
"True. But I need to humor him."
Alice stubbed out her cigarette. Another shake of the head.
"The girl in question has dark skin, dark hair," said Daniel. "Roundish face, pretty features, chipped teeth, one missing upper tooth. Anyone come to mind?"
"Pretty genera! except for the teeth," said Alice, "and that could have happened after the disappearance." She opened one of her desk drawers, pulled out a pile of about a dozen folders, and thumbed through them, selecting three, putting the rest away.
"All our open cases are being entered into the computer, but I have a few here that just came in recently. All runaways-these are the ones in your age range."
He examined the photographs, shook his head, gave them back.