In a nearby café, I had a small but adequate breakfast of bread and cheese and coffee. The proprietor tried to engage me in conversation about last night's shooting. I nodded in all the right places until he got bored of me and went to talk to someone else.
The café had a telephone and I placed a call to Reuben. He was not at his desk and I declined to leave a message with the officer who answered the call.
Half an hour later I called Reuben again, and this time I was in luck. He asked me if I'd read the newspapers about the three men shot to death in Jaffa, and I told him I had.
"It's like one of those Mafia movies," he said, and I agreed that it was. I felt bad about keeping information from him, but the way the case was shaping up, I doubted that it would have the sort of law-and-order ending that Reuben would feel comfortable with.
I asked him if he'd found anything worth noting about the three days Maryam Jamalka had spent in jail.
"It seems perfectly routine," he said. "She didn't make trouble, no fights with other inmates, no special requests. But I did find something intriguing when I asked one of the guards to check out the visitors' log." I wasn't surprised by the name he gave me, though I acted as if I was.
"What does this mean, Adam?" he asked me.
"It means that you need to be very careful, Reuben. Don't ask any more questions. Let it go for now."
"And you?"
"I'll be careful too."
Next I called the contact number Ahmed Jamalka had given me the day we met. The person who answered the phone had the voice of an old man who had smoked most of his life and a thick Arabic accent. But he knew Hebrew well enough. He told me he could pass on a message to Ahmed, and I asked him to tell Ahmed to be by the phone in two hours and that I had important information for him.
I went back to my hotel room and lay down for an hour and a half, thinking and planning, before heading out to call Ahmed Jamalka once more.
"Can you come over to Tel Aviv tomorrow?" I asked when I had him on the line.
"What for?"
"So I can tell you who killed your sister."
There was a pause. "I already know who killed her," he said.
"No. You just think you do. How is your brother, by the way? Is he hurt bad?"
There was a sharp intake of breath. "You? It was you?"
"Yes. Your brothers killed the wrong man last night. Well, allow me to amend that, he certainly deserved dying, but he did not kill Maryam."
"Explain."
"Not on the phone. You want to hear this in person. Can you come?"
"Yes," he said. "I can come."
We settled on ten o'clock the following morning and arranged to meet at Gan Meir, a park at the center of Tel Aviv.
"I want you to ask your brothers a few things for me," I told him.
"What things?"
I told him what I wanted him to ask them. He asked me why I wished to know these things, and I told him that it would help me prove to him who had murdered Maryam.
Then I told him to bring something along with him. And there was another pause and he asked me why.
"I'll tell you tomorrow. Just be sure to have it with you."
I ended the call and took a minute to think things through, to make sure I had gotten everything straight in my mind. Then I picked up the phone and rang another number, and fifteen minutes later, I had set up another meeting for the next day. Time: eleven thirty. Place: to be determined half an hour before that.
23
I called him at eleven o'clock, gave him the location for the meeting, and told him to come alone and on foot.
It was a hot day and he grumbled a bit over being made to walk. I told him he could either do as I said, or the meeting was off. "Fine," he said. "We'll do it your way."
I would be watching him, I told him. If he tried to play games with me, I would be gone and our deal would be off.
I took up position in a café on King George Street and watched as he made his way north and turned into Gan Meir. He was alone and punctual. The time was precisely eleven thirty.
Gan Meir was a public park in the dead center of Tel Aviv, bordered by King George Street to the east and Tchernichovski Street to the west. Never without people during the day, it was the perfect place for this meeting. Plenty of witnesses.
He took the bench I'd instructed him to take, the fourth one on the left side by the big lawn with the water fountain at its center. I followed him in and sat down beside him. The sun shone straight down from its zenith, but the bench was shaded by a looming ficus tree. He smelled of some cologne that irritated my nostrils. There was also that rich smell I remembered from last time. But now I knew what it was.
He straightened the seam of his perfectly pressed uniform pants and wiped a speck of dirt or lint from his breast pocket. He removed his cap, set it on one knee, and drummed on it with two fingers while a young mother pushing a baby carriage walked by the bench.
"I don't appreciate being dragged out of my office in the middle of the day like this," he said once the mother was out of earshot. "And I don't like walking when I have a perfectly good car I can use."
"Yet here you are," I said.
"Yes. But only because you made it clear that after this conversation you will cease your investigation into Maryam Jamalka's death. I trust that wasn't some ruse on your part."
"No ruse. Once you and I part ways today, I'm done with the case."
"Good. I must admit I was surprised to get your call. I thought you wouldn't back off without some harsh measures on my part. You struck me as the bullheaded sort that doesn't see reason unless it is shown to him the hard way."
"Like Charlie Buzaglo was shown reason the hard way?"
His flat gray eyes narrowed for an instant. "I don't believe I know the name."
"That's strange. He told me you two met about three weeks before Maryam Jamalka died."
"Would he care to make a formal statement to that effect?"
"As you very well know, Charlie Buzaglo won't be making any statements. He is dead. He was gunned down with two other men last night in Jaffa. We had a short chat as he lay dying in the street. He told me everything."
Inspector Rosen sucked in his breath. It made a faint whistling sound as the air passed through his teeth. His left eyebrow twitched. He scratched his cheek and ran a forefinger across his mustache, as if to make sure it was still perfectly aligned with the corners of his mouth.
"Well, if the man's dead, then how can I or anyone else know for sure what he told you? If indeed he told you anything in the first place. And even if he were alive to speak his mind, who would have believed such a criminal?"
"I thought you said you didn't know who he was," I said.
Rosen’s cheeks turned a little red. He looked around us. There was no one within earshot and I had no recording instrument with me. He relaxed and his lips curled in a smile that died somewhere on the way to his eyes.
"I recalled the name from the police reports that came in last night and this morning regarding the shooting in Jaffa. But pray tell, what did the estimable Mr. Buzaglo share with you as he lay dying in the street?"
"He told me of the night Maryam Jamalka was arrested. He went after the arresting officer and tried to slip him some money so he would let her go. This is what usually happens with this sort of arrest—the officer gets paid off, either with cash or with some intimate time with the prostitute. This time, though, the policeman couldn't be paid off. He had orders to bring Maryam in. Orders from high up. Orders from you."
"From me? Did the arresting officer tell you that?"
"I didn't bother asking him. The chances that he would tell me anything about it are zero. I'm certain you made sure of that. But Charlie Buzaglo tried to get Maryam out all the same. He was Maryam's pimp. She made a lot of money for him. While she was in jail, she wasn't earning. That was when you had a talk with him."