She paged through the notebooks, trying to rekindle that spark of memory that had flashed through her mind while listening to Aharon Levin’s story, that elusive inkling that was playing tricks on the edges of her consciousness.
When she got to the fifth notebook, it all came back to her.
21
ASHDOD, JANUARY 2013
“Since you’ve come all the way back here again, I’ll tell you. It happened in the early 1990s, in the winter of 1992. A year after the Gulf War, to be precise. As always, a team from the Operations Division was monitoring the movements and activities of the usual suspects. They weren’t busy with any special assignment, and the team leader was running things at his own discretion, sniffing things out as he saw fit. And it was only the intelligence officer’s inexplicable gut feeling that prompted him into action at the time. Based on intuition, he decided to keep tabs on an attractive and well-groomed woman in her forties who was seen leaving one of the locations they monitored from time to time, on a routine basis. They followed her for more than two or three hours, and she did nothing. And the next minute she was gone. Either they lost focus momentarily, a possibility that cannot be ruled out, or she managed to lull them into complacency and then grabbed her chance. The fact is she disappeared. She and the large bag that was slung over her shoulder. A fake crocodile-skin bag, the report said. Seriously? They’re fashion experts all of a sudden now, too? They came across her again the following day completely by chance, while combing the area around Arlosoroff Street. The team leader swore not to allow her to give them the slip again. And they stuck with her for four days. Four days around the clock. And nothing. Absolutely nothing. They weren’t able to come up with anything on her at all. Apart from the lover!”
The three of them were sitting together again at a round table at the café in the square, but the strong winds had forced them indoors this time. Aharon remained silent and allowed Hagar to remember and recount her story at her own pace. Michael was looking at her, and Hagar Beit-Hallahmi suddenly appeared younger than she had the day before, her old blue eyes open wide and aglow.
“She met up with someone in Bat Yam. An older man. They spent four days together. Talking. Holding hands, like two young lovers. Sitting together in a park, having a picnic on a bench, vodka and cheeses and expensive cold cuts.” Hagar spoke dreamily as if she, too, was sitting on the bench with them. And that’s just when Michael realized that she was far more cunning and dangerous than she appeared. Hagar Beit-Hallahmi had never been a romantic or sentimental soul. He had met people like her, people who immerse themselves in the finer details seemingly out of a sense of solidarity, only to be able to snare their prey with a single sudden motion. “They went by bus to Tel Aviv,” she continued. “Visited used-book stores. Strolled arm in arm along the promenade. Dined three evenings in a row at Shtsupak, holding hands over plates of fish cooked whole on the grill. They slept at his place, his home, a shabby apartment in a tenement building in Bat Yam. Three nights…”
Aharon indicated to Michael that Hagar could do with another cup of tea. Go, go, he motioned with his eyes, go get some tea to keep her warm. The wind raged outside, and although it was warm inside the café, a chill went through him, as with the first signs of flu. Aharon stared intently into Hagar’s face. She went on, plucking the facts from memory without having to look even once at her notes.
“Naturally, we ran a background check on him right away. Igor Abramovich. An artist, a painter. Immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Widowed a few years later. An only daughter. No ties to anything that could interest the Russians. Not to the military, not to the electricity corporation. Not even to the Egged bus company. His daughter served in the IDF’s Southern Command, in a liaison unit of a reserves brigade. He hadn’t left the country since immigrating, aside from just two short trips. Once, when his wife was still alive, they went to Cyprus for five days. And on another occasion, in the late 1980s, he went away alone for a week. Border control records showed that he had flown to Frankfurt. His paintings barely sell. He had a small degree of success in Russia, locally, but in Israel—nothing. Igor Abramovich made a living teaching art at a junior high school. He wasn’t a rich man, not at all, but he was debt-free. A responsible and cautious individual when it came to his financial affairs. Nothing owed to the income tax or social security authorities. No overdraft at the bank. The apartment was his, the mortgage fully paid off two years before we came into the picture.”
Aharon didn’t say a word. And Hagar, too, went silent.
“And…?”
“Abramovich was called in for a talk the moment the woman boarded a flight out of Israel to Vienna. We were still acting on a gut feeling, even though we hadn’t found a thing. There’s no arguing with gut feelings, as you know. We called it a routine background check, and either he believed us or he simply didn’t care. Abramovich came in without a fuss. Someone who grows up in the Soviet Union probably gets used to being summoned for a ‘talk’ or clarification, and he doesn’t even think of asking why. That’s just the way it is. He was called in to the Beit Dagan police station—we had use of several rooms there, back then, at least, I don’t know if the same arrangement still holds today. We showed him our Shin Bet IDs. I was there and one of the investigators from the division joined me. We asked him about acquaintances, about ties he had abroad, about relatives who were still living in the Soviet Union. He was either a great actor or truly was an innocent and simple man. He answered all our questions. Aside from the death of his wife, almost nothing in his life had changed since his initial interview, some twenty years earlier. Yes, as you know, we checked them out one by one, there wasn’t a single immigrant we didn’t meet. Everything was recorded and everything was filed. That’s how we worked back then. And everything he had told us the first time remained unchanged, apart from a few new acquaintances, neighbors in the tenement building, two or three painters from the Bat Yam Artists Association.”
“And the woman, what about the attractive woman who was with him?”
“He didn’t try to hide her, but was very shy. He told us about her, too, but blushed like a young boy, and tried to find in me, in me of all people, someone who’d understand the delicate nature of the relationship, who’d understand that it was an affair of the heart, that it needed to be viewed differently, with sensitivity.
“He told us that four or five years earlier, in the winter of ’87—he was more precise after thinking about it for a moment—he met a woman he found very attractive at the Tel Aviv Museum one day. He had been a widower for several years already, he took the trouble to explain, and when he suddenly saw the woman narrow her eyes, tilt her pretty head, take a step or two back to look again, differently, at a painting—a piece by Monet—when he saw her, he told us in a thick accent, his heart was overcome with a sense of warmth that melted the block of ice he had there. Those were his words, that’s how he described his first encounter with Katrina Geifman. And that was the beginning of a wonderful romance, he recounted, a romance kept alive from one year to the next via the exchange of letters. No, she couldn’t come to see him more than once a year, and no, he wasn’t able to visit her in the Soviet Union either. She was married, she had told him, a bad and unhappy marriage, but her husband wasn’t well, and it was all too painful and complicated in general, and there was no way out at the time, and she would see him when she visited Israel, and maybe, if she got the chance, she would let him know when she would be traveling to Europe. Paris, maybe London. And perhaps he could join her there.