Pattern crimes

HER DREAM

David was speaking to her. Anna looked up.

"Now we have a very peculiar situation," David was saying. "The man Liederman is following meets the man Rokovsky is following. Ephraim Cohen meets Sergei Sokolov. What's the connection? Why?"

He had broken in on her mid-afternoon when she'd been practicing. Now, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, the tortured sonata still whirling through her brain, she was aware only of a feeling that she was needed. Yes, now finally he needs me, she thought.

"… but how can this be?" David continued. "Of course I remembered what you told me-Sasha saying he'd uncovered some kind of fraud. But still…"

"David, I'll find out for you." At the moment she had realized that he needed her, she had felt a surge of joy.

"I thought of that. But I'm not sure I want you involved. What if Sasha's implicated? This is a nasty case. If only there were some other way…"

She stood up. "There is no other way."

He smiled. "Well, since you're so insistent, I'll drive you over there. We'll talk about it. You'll have to be careful, guarded about what you say."

"Oh, I'll be guarded." She was already at the door.

"Anna! Wait! Where are you going?"

"I'll walk," she said, gripping the knob. "You be careful, David. Don't step on my bow." And at that she slipped out quietly, then fled down the stairs.

As she crashed out the front door of the apartment house the hot dry August air hit her in the face. Hurrying up En Rogel, past the old Arab houses and the path to the Abu Tor observation point, she brought up her hand to push aside her hair, smelled the rosin on her fingertips, and felt an urgency she hadn't felt in weeks.

At the corner, where the five streets met, she waited impatiently for the traffic light. If I can help him now, she thought, then maybe I can help myself.

Yes, she thought, if she could help David break through the wall of his case, then maybe she could break through the wall that blocked her too. She had no idea why this would be so, but was absolutely certain that it was.

Crossing and then starting down the hill, her nose caught the aroma of pines; the scent wafted to her from the trees that grew on the slopes of Mount Zion. That was the way she liked to walk, the regular march she'd been making these broiling summer afternoons: from the apartment on En Rogel up Mount Zion to the top; then into the strange room called the Coenaculum where The Last Supper had taken place; then down to the cellar which was called King David's Tomb; then out past the Diaspora Yeshiva and around the side of the Church of the Dormition; and then along a whitewashed wall that glowed in the fading light. And whenever she went that way she thought of David, but not of David the ancient King. She thought of David Bar-Lev, the strong, intense young man with whom she lived; the obsessed, tormented, endlessly probing Israeli detective with his despair at disorder and his love of patterns; her handsome, tender, dark-haired Jewish lover; this David whom she loved, her David… hers.

There was new construction on Derekh Hevron; the sidewalks had been torn up. On her descent she had to pick her way through clay and sand and chunks of Jerusalem stone. She paused at the corner where the street swerved down toward the Cinemateque and Bloomfield Park began. Thirty feet from where she stood sat the rusting dumpster of David's case, where, on the second night of Passover, he had gone to see the marred and naked body of Yael Safir.

There it was-that awful hollow metal coffin to which David had rushed that evening through the storm. When he'd returned, shoes muddy, clothing soaked, he'd spoken of Ephraim Cohen. He hadn't been furious the way he was now; now he hated Ephraim more than any man on earth. But he was angry even then, when he still thought Peretz was the killer, and she had sensed his anger and because of it had made no overtures, although all that afternoon she'd been looking forward to making love. Instead she had touched him gently and cooked him an omelet and then watched as he had faced the window, staring out bitterly as the lightning cracked the sky. And she had known even then that he would not be whole again, not until his case was solved.

She entered Bloomfield Park, then walked along the paths which crisscrossed the manicured lawn. Approaching Mishkenot she compared the two men in her life: David, on whose behalf she was now on an important mission, and Sasha, her former lover, whom she was now on her way to meet.

David first, of course; his body seemed to have been made for hers. When they made love they fit together perfectly. There was lightness in their play and never repetition. They were like two musicians who played entwined variations, joining perfectly in the obbligato, and always arriving with perfect timing at the coda.

Sasha had felt heavy upon her, a good father-like heaviness. His old skin was leathery, his hands powerful from smoothing clay, and he was always eager, ready, huge, and always, endlessly, erect. Something a little perverse about him-Sasha's tastes were sometimes odd. He liked to nibble on her toes, have her pose in strange positions. He'd ask her to play her cello half nude, then stalk behind her and plant kisses on her shoulder blades. In bed he'd make her giggle. "Now I'll be the cellist," he'd whisper, and you'll be the instrument." And so she would let him play her until he made her moan, and afterward she would grin and he would laugh and pat her head and compliment her on her tone. She knew he didn't love her; he enjoyed her as he'd enjoyed all the many women he'd possessed. She knew that all of them, herself included, were but surrogates for the Irina of his youth.

The Jerusalem Music Center was situated just above the entrance to Mishkenot. Coming upon it, thinking suddenly of Igor, she froze on the narrow stone stairs.

It was her first thought of him in weeks, since she discussed him with David on her return from Europe, and now she remembered his voice when he'd called from Moscow and awakened her in Paris. The pleading in it, the cries, the sobs-so pathetic and so different from the Igor Titanov she had known.

The musicians had all called him "Wild Man," on account of his grandiose, swooning, arm-thrashing style. It was a manner he had copied from Leonard Bernstein, even to the flashy tossings of his mane, and into which he'd integrated several gestures of Stokowski, trying sometimes to actually model the music, using his hands to carve the air and sculpt it out.

But when he took her to bed the gestures were not refined. He hurt her, hammered her, turned sex into a game of conqueror and slave. If she and David always climaxed together, following separate threads that always knotted in the end, and if she had found release with Sasha because he had played upon her with a certain tender wit, still it was only Igor who had had the power to make her howl. He was her conductor and she was his orchestra and the music he made her play was a long symphony of ecstasy and pain.

How she'd loathed him! How she'd longed for him! During the year that they'd been lovers a single lustful glance from him was enough to make her wet. She'd both hated and craved the sharp tang of his sweat as he pumped roughly up and down upon her, the hard slap of his hard body, and the obscenities he whispered as he bit her ear. "Resist!" he'd commanded. "Resist! Enjoy!" And so she had resisted, allowed him to beat upon her as if she were a drum, listening to him vow that this time he would break her to his will.

Sometimes she wondered if she had not defected in Milan just to escape his rule of her. Sometimes she wondered if she had really defected to escape her shame in her pleasure at being ruled.

A productive hour spent at Mishkenot with Sasha and Rokovsky, and now she was back at the apartment to give David her report. He was on the phone, but had looked up at her and squinted when she came in.

"Why do you always look at me like that?" she asked, when he had finished his call.

"Like what?"

"Like you're relieved to see my hair still in place, my clothing untorn." He smiled. "It's Sasha, isn't it? You think I go to see him to tear one off."

"Never, Anna! Never have I had such a thought! But don't be too clever. It's an old trick-trying to throw off the investigator by mocking his accusations in advance."

She growled at him, formed her hands into claws, pulled off her blouse, and pounced. She ripped the upper buttons off his shirt, then they rolled upon the floor. They grabbed and clawed and pretended they were cats. He took her finally, laughing, facing the window, over the back of the couch.

"This is the way you like it, isn't it? Isn't it?" she hissed. "The way you did it all those times with Stephanie. Wrestling with her. That bitch! That Lynx!"

He was sitting now smoothing out his clothing, while she sat in a chair opposite and formally presented her report.

"Sasha says Sergei received a grant from an American foundation. It was to design some kind of abstract environmental sculpture in the Negev. The thing's actually been built-Sasha's gone out there twice to look at it. He says it's a phony: Sergei didn't design it, and Sasha doesn't even think it's a work of art. He wouldn't care except that Sergei made such a big point of telling him he'd created it and boasted to him about how big it was. So after following Sergei around for several days, he decided to put on some pressure. It seemed to work. Sergei took off, and Rokovsky followed him to the offices of that foundation where he overheard him demanding extra money."

"From Ephraim Cohen?"

"Rokovsky doesn't know. He never saw the other man. And since he doesn't speak Hebrew he could barely make out what they were saying."

"But he's certain Sergei asked for money?"

"Yes, and that he was very angry too. The other man tried to mollify him. Rokovsky, by the way, was very frightened when Liederman stopped him in the dark."

For a few moments David gazed at her. His silent intensity always fascinated her-she could sense the wheels turning in his brain. Finally he spoke: "How did Sasha pressure him?"

"Apparently by handing him a stack of Polaroids, ones he'd taken at the site. And then by taunting him and telling him straight out he knew the sculpture was a fraud."

"That's it?"

"Pretty much. I didn't tell him about your case. Just that you'd been interested in what he'd told me and asked me to find out more. He'd like to talk to you about it directly, David. He's obsessed with it." She smiled. "That's what struck me most of all."

"What?"

"The way you both feel-so strongly. This obsessive intensity about you both. You're different men, completely different in most every way. But in that you're nearly the same."

She had a secret: that when she played she could become the cello. She could enter into it until she merged with it, and then she could find the music, and then the music could flow out. That was the way she felt when she was playing well-that she was the cello, that there was no distinction between it and her, and that the music was not to be found on the sheets of the score, but deep inside, in the dark interior cavity of the instrument. The music, all the cello music ever written, was there, waiting for her to hear it, waiting to be released. Playing, then, became releasing-she was all that stood between the hearing of it and the silence; when she became the cello all she had to do was open up.

But now, for some reason, she could not become the cello. She was merely a cellist, as she had been when she was a student, before the secret had been revealed. I have no trouble opening up, she thought; I do that all the time with David. My trouble now is that I cannot become the cello. I must find my way back into it, squeeze myself back inside.

She decided that night that she would dream her way inside her instrument, and that when she did she would listen carefully to the music so that she would know how it must be played.

But it was very difficult to will herself a dream, and that night this dream she longed for did not come. Instead she dreamed of something else: two men, David and Sasha, moving on separate vectors toward a particular meeting point in space and time. But hard as she tried, she could not see the place of their convergence, though she could see very clearly that they were moving toward it at increasing speed.