Dara was standing in the kitchen. She held a cup of coffee in her hand. As he entered the living room, he turned and looked at her and shrugged a little shrug and said, “I’m sorry, Dara.”
“Is it bad?” she asked, looking down at something on the floor. It was a piece of plastic, a tiny bright red Lego block. She bent down and picked it up.
“Don’t know yet,” he replied. Then he kissed her gently on the forehead. At six feet two inches, Seiden towered over his wife. He pressed her sleepy face between his hands. “But it’s never good, is it?”
It took Seiden only thirty-five minutes to make his way to the little row of apartment buildings on the north side of Tel Aviv. At this hour, the traffic that normally snarled the seaside city streets during the day was blissfully absent. Seiden pulled up beside the building. It was a six-story white affair, typical of the apartment blocks erected north of the city over the last ten years. Anonymous and neuter. A soulless structure. The architect had designed the building so that white blocks of fossil-encrusted sandstone poked out at intermittent levels from the façade beside the balconies. While the design did something to break up the otherwise bland surface, it also afforded anyone the opportunity to scale the building quickly and efficiently. He noticed bars on many of the sliding doors leading out onto the balconies. Some enterprising tenants had even mounted razor wire on their railings, fencing off the stone protrusions.
Three policemen stood at the foot of the front steps, smoking cigarettes. They talked and laughed, ignoring the naked woman splayed out across the roof of the crumpled light blue Fiat only a meter or two away. Despite the fall, Seiden noticed, the body looked strangely intact. Her arms hung over the windshield and he could clearly see that both of her wrists were slashed. Like a suicide.
The three policemen spotted Seiden and stepped up to block his path. He flashed his identity card. The policeman closest to him gave it a cursory glance, then suddenly stepped back, dropped his cigarette to the ground, and issued a sharp salute.
Seiden saluted back. “Is Captain Rubenstein inside?”
“Apartment 2 B. Yes, sir.”
Seiden stared at the policeman with a level gaze. Then he glanced down at the cigarette still burning at his feet. “As you were.”
Seiden mounted the steps. As soon as he had disappeared into the lobby, the young lieutenant turned to his fellow cops and mouthed the word, “Mossad.”
Seiden took the stairs instead of the elevator. He didn’t like elevators. He’d always considered them a waste of electricity. Seiden couldn’t understand why people invariably took the elevator even when they were only going up one flight or two. And then they paid outrageous sums to join a health club or a gym. It made no sense. He was a man who disliked tall buildings, not from vertigo or fear of fire. He simply preferred things in human dimensions.
Captain Rubenstein was waiting outside apartment 2 B. The lieutenant downstairs must have alerted him to his arrival, Seiden thought, because he stood there poised and ready. Seiden shook the Captain’s hand. Rubenstein looked pale and ill at ease. His fingers were moist. Seiden had never seen him so distraught.
“Acting Chief Seiden,” the Captain said, and Seiden noticed how Rubenstein found solace in the salutation. Titles were settling things. They showed you where you stood. They rooted you.
“I’m sorry I had to bother you at this hour… ”
Seiden waved a hand and the Captain opened the door to the apartment. They were immediately assaulted by the acrid smell of smoke. Rubenstein moved ahead of him to lead the way.
Policemen and members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) crowded the living room. Near the sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony, Seiden spotted a dead, middle-aged bald man tied to a chair with his back to him. Beside him, kneeling on the floor, his hands handcuffed behind him, was a skinny Arab. He was dressed in traditional Arab garb, with a grey aba, and the red and white keffiyeh headdress of the Palestinian. Two soldiers stood above the suspect, their automatic weapons trained on the back of his head.
Two young boys, no more than ten or eleven, were lashed to another pair of chairs, perpendicular to the dead man by the windows. Seiden could see strange cuts, in the shape of Arabic script, slashed into their skin. They both appeared to be naked. It was difficult to tell. Their bodies were ribbed with glassy burn marks, gunpowder black.
Seiden turned toward Rubenstein and said, “Please have the room cleared, Captain.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pair of off-white latex gloves.
Rubenstein issued the order, and the soldiers and policemen filed out one by one without a word. Seiden walked over to where the Arab was kneeling on the floor. The suspect didn’t look at him. He didn’t even look up. He simply knelt there, facing the floor, as if in prayer. Seiden slipped on the latex gloves.
All of the victims were lined up in a row, with the middle-aged man facing the sea, and the children at right angles to him. A bloody carpet lay on the floor by the glass door leading to the balcony. Seiden approached the bodies of the boys. He touched the forehead of the nearest victim, tilting the head back. It lolled over to the side. No rigor mortis, he thought. He peered into the open mouth. The face was practically warm. He leaned over, taking a closer look at the wounds on the boy’s chest and stomach: carved Arabic script; and some kind of foliation, burned into the flesh. It appeared as if each of the victims had been tortured and then set ablaze with some kind of combustible material. Probably magnesium ribbon, Seiden thought, remembering a high school science class from years before, when he had set a magnesium strip on fire, acetylene bright, spitting and smoking like a sparkler. Around their arms. Around their necks and thighs.
Captain Rubenstein was calling him. “I think you’d better take a look at this.” He pointed toward a video camera set up on a tripod in a corner of the room. “He taped the entire… thing,” he added, faltering. “Shall I play it for you?” Rubenstein rewound the tape. It was one of those Japanese models with a mini-screen that popped out to the side. It whirred like a toy.
“Not now,” said Seiden. “Later. I think I can see what happened.” He turned toward the sliding door. “The suspect scaled the façade of the apartment building and climbed up over the balcony. The curtains were probably drawn at the time and they didn’t see him until he was in the room. By then, of course, it was too late.”
Seiden walked over toward the balcony and gazed down through the sliding door at the street below, the stores and small apartment buildings just across the way, the tranquil sea… the naked woman lying on the broken light blue Fiat. Without turning, he added, “He probably threatened to kill the children, the two boys, unless she killed herself, sacrificed her own life for theirs.” His voice was slow and steady, emotionless. “Eventually she agreed, and slit her own wrists.” He turned and looked at the immolated figures in the chairs. “Then he stripped the children of their clothes and lashed them to the chairs. Once their ankles and wrists were secured, he used what appears to have been a long, sharp knife or razor blade, flaying the skin on their backs into those tiny curved strips.” He shook his head. “Although he was faced the other way, I’m sure the father knew exactly what was happening to his children. Then the suspect pulled out a roll of metal ribbon and trussed the bodies up in silver coils — first the boys, and then the man — wrapping them up like… like presents at Hanukkah. He set them on fire, while they were still alive. You can see that from the soot in their throats. They were still breathing when their skin began to burn.”