Ample pictures of the spot in which Mrs. Gal had first seen the body were taken. They showed little apart from the drag marks Maryam Jamalka's corpse had made as it was being pulled to dry land. Nothing could be learned from them. At that point, Mrs. Gal was returned her blanket and shirt and thanked for doing her civic duty by calling the police.
An additional set of pictures was taken of the body as it now lay. They were what one would expect—cold and morbid and lifeless and empty. Maryam Jamalka's hair was plastered to the sides of her face and neck like seaweed to the pilings of a pier. Her dark skin had been bleached to a filmy paleness by her blood loss and her time in the water. Her complexion was like marble that had been smudged with soot. Only the edge of her neck wound could be seen, but it was dark and deep and obviously fatal.
The police placed an open body bag beside the corpse. Talmon then did a sensible thing. He ordered the two patrolmen who had first come to the scene to position themselves at some distance from the body and establish a perimeter that no civilian could breach. He and the photographer and the medical examiner were the only ones to see the front of the body after they had turned it over onto the body bag.
Another set of pictures was taken of the body in its new position. It showed far more than the previous set had. I looked at each picture carefully, soaking in all the details I could absorb. Apart from the wounds themselves, there was very little blood on the body, most of it having been washed away by the river. Her eyes were half open, a moon-sliver of white bordered at the top with the brown of her irises. Her full lips drooped and there was a slackness to her skin that not even sleep could bring. Where she hadn't been cut, that was.
Her cheeks and forehead were marked by a large number of cuts, none longer than an inch, and none that looked deep. These cuts were not what had ended her life. They'd been put there for another reason. To inflict pain or induce horror or simply to disfigure her face. I looked at the head shot of Maryam Jamalka that her brother had given me. My mind could tell it was the same person, but something on the inside, about where my stomach was, rebelled against the identification. I remembered people in Auschwitz, both the living and the dead, who had aroused the same feeling in me. There were times they did not seem like real men to me. Real men could not look as they did—as I did, too. They were too thin, haggard, dirty, lost. You would not see their kind on the streets of Budapest or Tel Aviv or Munich, or any other city, town, or village. In Auschwitz, the feeling was spread among the thousands I saw. Here it was focused on a single dead woman. The smiling Maryam Jamalka was the naked corpse in the black body bag. There was no doubt of that. But it was wrong. It was something that should not have been true.
I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking of the dead females in my life. My mother, my sisters, my wife, my daughters. The memory brought with it the familiar, raw pain. I clenched my teeth, shook my head, and shoved the memory down into the recesses of my mind. I opened my eyes and looked at more pictures of the dead Maryam Jamalka.
The major wounds were in her torso and neck. Five wounds in totaclass="underline" four stab wounds—two in the stomach, two in the chest—and a gaping slash across the neck. All had left dark-red gashes in her skin. Ugly puckering wounds, like earth-torn bomb craters in a grassy field. Her legs and chest and belly had not been spared. They bore a large number of shallow cuts, similar to the ones on her face, all the way from her collarbones to her ankles.
I could well understand why the medical examiner had refused to show Ahmed Jamalka more of his sister's body than was absolutely necessary for an identification. This was not a sight most people could handle well. Especially when a family member was in question. Mrs. Gal was made of sturdy stuff indeed, but had the body been supine instead of prone, she might not have been able to act as coolly as she did.
I sat back, took a long sip of tea, rubbed some stiffness out of my neck, and took a few deep breaths before returning my gaze to the pictures.
This was a passionate killing rather than a crime of passion. In the latter, the killer was driven to a reckless act, moved by an overwhelming rush of emotion; in the first, the passion did not erupt in a single unplanned burst. It was a controlled, premeditated, thought-out murder. In the latter there was shock, remorse, regret, a desire for it all to be a nightmare; in the first, there was a joy in killing, a fulfillment of a dream rather than the suffering of a nightmare.
A few questions arose: Was Maryam Jamalka killed where she had been found? If not, did the killer dump her body there or at some other point along the Yarkon? Had he hoped that her body would be washed out to sea? Was it a single killer or a number of them? Was Talmon correct in placing the blame on the two brothers, their denials to Ahmed Jamalka notwithstanding?
Once enough pictures had been taken, the police closed the body bag and loaded it into a car. It was taken to the morgue, where an autopsy was performed. The autopsy determined a number of facts: there was no water in Maryam Jamalka's lungs, meaning that she did not drown, meaning that she was dead before being placed in the water. Three of the five deep cuts could have been fatal by themselves. One had punctured the heart, another sliced the liver nearly in two, and the neck wound would have bled her out in less than a minute. The order of the wounds could not be determined. By the angles of the wounds, the medical examiner concluded that the killer was right-handed and that he'd used both upper and lower thrusts. This, I thought, meant that the killer had paused to adjust his grip on the knife, lending support to my intuition that this was not some on-the-spur-of-the-moment murder, but a calculated attack.
The medical examiner counted the number of cuts on the body. Apart from the five major wounds, there were fifty-one slashes and cuts, some very shallow, probably done as an afterthought and with a quick flick of the wrist, and others longer and slightly deeper, likely done slowly and with intention. There was no pattern to the cuts. They did not describe a shape or combine into a word or symbol.
He methodically examined each cut. Some had bled, most had not. This meant that some of the cuts had been done pre-mortem and others postmortem. The killer had taken his time with her. He wanted to leave his mark on her, and was willing to take the risk of being around a dead body for longer than necessary to do so. Even though it meant nothing to us, it did mean something to him. It was possible that there was nothing specific to be read in the arrangement of the cuts. Perhaps he simply enjoyed damaging her.
More pictures were taken of the body. In the glaring light of the morgue, the skin shone with a harsh brilliance. Maryam had a small birthmark on her left shoulder. Its shape resembled a bird in flight.
The medical examiner noted what I had already learned from the earlier pictures—the back and buttocks of the corpse were undamaged. Why this was so remained an open question in a sea of them.
He continued with a more in-depth examination. He examined her fingernails and found them to be in good condition, with no traces of skin underneath them. He noted that such traces could have been washed away by the water, but he doubted it, considering the slow flow of the Yarkon. Her wrists and ankles showed no rope marks or signs of other restraint. She had food content in her stomach. Bread and cheese and vegetables. The medical examiner estimated that she had been in the water for less than twelve hours and dead no more than twice that.
I finished reading the medical examination report. I drank the rest of my tea and got up to put the cup in the kitchen sink. I came back to the living room, lit a cigarette, and stood by the window, letting the smoke filter out to the street and curl up into the inky, starred sky.