"Then why don't you just tell me the truth and I'll do my best to keep your name out of the papers."
"All right, all right. What I told you about picking her up out of sympathy is right-I was trying to be human. Look where it got me-when we let the Arabs massacre each other we're fucked and when we try to be human, the same damned thing. No way to win."
"You picked her up out of sympathy," said Avi, prompting. "But "
"But a bunch of us had her, okay? She offered it for free, she was cute-looking, and we'd just been through two months of hell-the snipers, two of my best drivers were blown up by mines For God's sake, you know what it was like."
Avi thought of his own tour in Lebanon. Hand-to-hand fighting in the streets of Beirut, routing the PLO, putting his own ass on the line in order not to shoot the women and children-the human shields those bastards used habitually. Then, a month of guard duty at Ansar Prison, feeling out of control as he stood watch over sulking hordes of PLO captives wearing the blue jogging suits the army issued them. Unable to stop the tough guys from bullying the weaker ones, unable to prevent them from building homemade spears and daggers. Hugging his Uzi like a lover as he watched the tough ones circle the flock, picking off the effeminate ones. Choosing the softest boys to be brides at mock weddings. Dressing them up like girls, painting their faces and plucking their eyebrows and beating them when they cried.
Gang-fucks when the lights went out. Avi and the other soldiers trying to shut out the screams that rose, like bloody clouds, above the grunts and heavy breathing. The "brides" who survived were treated the next morning for shock and torn anuses.
"I know," said Avi, meaning it. "I know."
"Three fucking years," said Yalom, "and for what? We've replaced the PLO with Sh?tes and now they're shooting Katyushas at us. You going to blame us for having a free taste? We didn't know if we were going to get out of there alive, so we had her, had a few giggles-it was temporary relief. I'd do it all over again-" He stopped himself. "Maybe I wouldn't. I don't know."
"What else did she say about her clients?" asked Avi, following the outline the Yemenite had suggested to him.
"They went in for rough stuff," said Yalom. "The brothel was designed to accommodate that type. Professors, educated types, you'd be surprised at the things that turned them on. I asked her how she could stand it. She said it was okay, pain was okay."
"As if she liked it?"
Yalom shook his head. "As if she didn't care. I know it sounds strange, but she was strange-kind of dull, half asleep."
"Like a defective?"
"Just dull, as if she'd been knocked around so much nothing mattered to her anymore."
"When she begged you to take her with you it mattered."
Yalom's face registered self-disgust. "She conned me. I'm a fool, okay?"
"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.