Pattern crimes

MARRED FLESH

JERUSALEM. ONE YEAR LATER…

It snowed that winter in Jerusalem. Deep drifts piled up against the walls. Roofs were blanketed and icicles hung from battlements. Men walked stooped before the gently falling flakes.

When the snow stopped, the city dazzled, a maze of white cubes sparkling in the sun. One night in January, David Bar-Lev sat before the large window of his apartment in the residential district of Abu Tor and gazed in wonder as the snow-covered capital glowed a strange blue-silver beneath the moon.

For a long while he stared, across the Hinnom Valley, through encrusted olive trees and cypresses toward Mount Zion, the Mount of Olives, the Dome of the Rock brooding upon the Temple Mount. Beyond the chilled glass, Jerusalem was silent; the only sound he heard was Anna breathing lightly in her sleep.

He looked toward her. Her cello stood in the corner like a sentinel. Her comb and face cream and pearl necklace lay entangled on the little table beside the bed. The planes of her face glowed like the moonlit roofs. Her thick black hair was glossy as a cat's.

He reached for the gray silk dress in which she'd performed that evening, from which a quarter hour before he'd watched her step so carefully. It lay just where she'd left it, across the back of the couch. It was still damp from her concert, and he remembered the droplets he'd wiped from her forehead in the dressing room and again in the car before they'd driven home.

He held the silk to his lips as he tried to match his breathing to the slow even rising of her chest. He loved her and he wondered then whether he could only love a mystery-women who were puzzles, crimes that were difficult to solve, designs he sensed but could not read, this city in which he'd been born and raised but whose pattern he had never grasped.

The first killings came with the spring.

The snow melted quickly; the runoff was huge. By late March the Judean hills were coated with desert grass, almond blossoms, and budding poppies. Before dawn, the smoke from fires in Bedouin camps drifted in to perfume the city. The sky above Jerusalem was a deep dark blue and the winds brought air so cold and pure it seemed to cut one's lungs.

When the telephone rang, David was sipping coffee. Anna wore a white terry cloth robe and her hair was still wet from her shower. Her eyes followed him as he carried the phone to the window and peered out into the dawn. He was looking for something a thousand meters across the valley. He nodded when he found it-a tiny whirling light.

"I can see your flasher, Rafi."

"So you could have been a witness. Want to come over here? It's cold."

"Are you calling because I live across the way?"

"David, David-what a question!" David pulled the receiver from his ear; the patch-in with the patrol car was bad. "…have to leave, have a meeting. Want you to take a look before things get disarranged. No need to take charge. There's a sergeant here already. So-is there a pattern? Maybe. We'll talk about it later in the morning. But it's really cold. You have gloves? If you don't, maybe Anna does. But don't bring her, David. I don't think she'd like it. See you later…" Rafi's voice drifted off and then the connection was cut.

The body, discovered before sunrise by an Arab boy riding his horse along the walls, lay amidst stones and other debris between the Dung and Zion gates. The limbs protruded at terrible angles no living creature could simulate. Crumpled, David thought. She was killed somewhere else, then brought here and dumped. Thrown out of a car like trash.

Liederman was in command. David knew him slightly, a small graying middle-aged man with thick glasses and a wizened Polish face. An old-style Ashkenazi policeman recruited in the 1950s, before the force was flooded with immigrants and cops were classified with garbage men.

"Rafi says wait for you." Liederman's voice was hoarse, his fingers stained from smoking. He wore a beaten-up leather commando jacket. "Says I should tell you everything."

"So go ahead. Tell me."

Liederman shrugged as he danced from foot to foot to fight off the morning chill. "She's young, maybe eighteen, twenty. Throat cut. Beaten and mutilated. Found naked under that old army blanket there. No ID. No idea who she is."

An empty tourist bus rounded the corner, stopped, and blocked the road. The driver peered at them and then at the body.

"Hey! Get him out of here," Liederman yelled at one of his men. "Keep traffic moving. I told you that."

"Jewish?" David asked.

"How the hell should I know?"

Use your instinct."

"I don't have any instinct. I'm just an old cop. This year, thank God, I retire."

"Ask him." David gestured at the Arab boy who was sitting on the ground; his horse was grazing the sparse plants that grew along the base of the wall. Liederman grinned and fumbled with his Polaroid. David walked closer to the body, shivered, and stared down.

The girl's face was puffed. Her skin was already turning blue. Her cheeks were marked, two shallow vertical slashes across each, cut quickly, David thought, like a pair of bars drawn across a check.

There were similar pairs of marks, harsh, ugly, brutal, cut into her lips and breasts and a neat slit across her throat. Very little blood. No expression on her face, no frozen look of agony or fear. She was very young. Her eyes were closed and there was a residue of kohl around them. Attractive, perhaps even pretty. He could hardly bear to look at her. He turned away.

Liederman called to him. He was standing with the Arab boy. "He thinks she's Jewish," he said.

David walked over. "You've seen her?" he asked the boy in Arabic.

The boy nodded. "She stands by the Damascus Gate."

"A prostitute?"

The boy nodded again. He was wearing two brown sweaters, the outer one old and torn.

"A Jewish prostitute?"

"I think so."

"Did you ever go with her?"

The boy shook his head.

"You ride down here every morning?"

He explained that he exercised the horse, which belonged to his uncle who lived beyond Ramat Rahel on the road to Bethlehem.

"So why ride this way?"

"I ride her to Shiloah. Besides I find it beautiful."

David looked around. "Yes, you're right. It is beautiful here. Especially just at dawn."

The boy stared deeply at David, then patted the neck of his horse. He had the very gentle sort of Arab-Christian face that always filled David with guilt. No angry PLO kid from Hebron University but a sweet thin Jerusalem boy with large sad injured eyes.

There were more cars now. Cops were blowing their whistles trying to keep the traffic moving up the hill. People gazed out of car windows, their faces curious and disturbed. An ambulance arrived. Several pedestrians stopped by the side of the road to watch. David looked over at Abu Tor, found his building, wondered if Anna was standing before the large window rubbing her hands together, or sitting on her stool in the middle of the room already at work practicing her scales.

Liederman followed David to his car. "How did you know he'd know if she was Jewish?"

"I'm a detective."

"Yeah, I see that. But how did you know?"

"Just a guess."

"A good one. I've heard about you. I've heard you're very good." Liederman threw down his cigarette, then leaned in through the window so he could speak in confidence. "Rafi wouldn't have called you here if he wasn't going to give this to your section. If it turns out she was definitely Jewish, this could turn out to be a pretty interesting case."

David waited. The sun was up, already caressing the walls. In a few minutes it would strike full force and set Jerusalem aflame.

"…I never worked a good case, never worked anything that wasn't shit. I can't wait to retire. I've got other things to do. I have an archive. Books, old newspapers, documents. It's stashed in a room in the German Colony. An old lady's house. I do odd jobs for her, stay there when she's gone and keep an eye on everything. And for that she lets me have the room."

"What sort of archive?"

"Early 1940s. Poland. My father's collection. And I've added to it on my own. Thing is, I wonder if you'd come out one day and look it over. You've a good eye. You see things. I've heard that and now I know it's true."

"What could I see in all your papers?"

"Well, you might see something if you looked." Liederman stopped. "You don't like that kind of study, do you-examining the past?" He backed away. "I'm sorry. You're young. You were born here. People born here don't like that kind of thing. I understand."

"I'm thirty-six years old," David said. "Examining the past is my passion. If you think I can help, then of course I'll look at your stuff. Sarah in Rafi's office has my schedule. Pick a day when both of us are free."

At ten that morning he was sitting in the office of Rafi Shahar, Chief of Criminal Investigation, staring at stripes on the terra cotta floor projected by the sun through Rafi's blinds. Through the open window he could hear the buses grinding their way up Jaffa Road, and in the courtyard patrol cars revving up. He could also hear phones ringing unanswered in other offices, and echoes from the hall beyond the door, people striding, talking, cursing the coffee machine, and the quick high-heeled steps of the Moroccan girl who worked in Superintendent Latsky's office, who wore tight sweaters and used henna on her hair and fought with her fingernails and for this had been dubbed "The Claw."

Rafi sat back, his eyes watery and sad. The sun made a halo around his balding head. He held the headset of his phone between his cheek and shoulder and drummed his fingers on his desk. Every so often he nodded at Sarah Dorfman, who sat at her little table across the room listening on the extension and taking notes.

Finally, when Rafi put down the phone, the stripes on the floor compressed. David looked up; the back of Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds against the sill.

"So?"

"Nasty marks. Unusual."

"That's all you have to say?"

"Well -"

"What?"

David glanced back at Sarah Dorfman, then down at the floor. "Maybe whoever killed her marked her to say 'She's mine, belongs to me.' "

He looked up at Rafi, saw his eyes enlarge behind his glasses. Since the day David had met him, he'd been aware of the sadness in his eyes. Rafi was only five years older, but his remaining hair was graying above his ears and he had developed the pale complexion and growing paunch of a ranking officer who now, to his great regret, was forced to work behind a desk.

"Marks of ownership. Interesting, David. You've always had an interesting kind of mind."

Rafi stared at him a moment, then leaned forward. From the clutter on his desk he picked out a pipe. Pipes and orchids: Rafi liked Turkish tobacco and bred air orchids in his greenhouse after work. Though David considered him a friend, he was aware of the methods by which Rafi distanced himself: hiding at work behind clouds of aromatic smoke, performing his solitary hobby behind a wall of glass.

Rafi lit his pipe, then selected a file folder. He pushed it across the desk. There were photographs inside. As David examined them, he felt his stomach tighten. When Rafi spoke again, it was in a hoarse whisper that filled the little room.

"Same marks. Cheeks, breasts, lips. Found ten days ago in a wadi on the side road that leads up to Mevasseret. A nun from St. Louis, U.S.A. Staying at the Holyland Hotel. Doorman saw her get into a car, thinks it had Tel Aviv plates. No one else saw her after that."

Rafi pushed across another folder containing another set of photos. The same marks, except this time they were on the face and body of a boy.

"…Halil Ghemaiem. Arab street kid. Drug user. Male hustler. Sometime transvestite prostitute. Worked the beach in Tel Aviv. Picked up about one A.M. last Tuesday by a well-dressed gentleman. Driven away in a foreign car. Found dumped up here five days ago behind the Augusta Victoria Hospital at a construction site."

David heard a snap. Rafi's chair was crushing the blinds again. "You see what we have here, David? Marred flesh, consistently marred flesh. We have a pattern crime and," Rafi paused, "perhaps our first Israeli serial murder case."

Rafi accompanied him to the hall, stood with him as he fed coins into the coffee machine, getting half of them back, trying different ones from his pocket. The machine finally delivered scalding coffee with a hiss; it overflowed David's plastic cup.

"…kind of thing that happens in America. So maybe if we're lucky it'll turn out the killer's an American." Rafi started banging on the machine; he hadn't gotten his coins back and hadn't gotten any coffee either. "But suppose he's Israeli? Wouldn't surprise me much, the way things are going these days. A suburban housewife in Haifa feeds rat poison to her husband. A nice South African-born gentleman, technician at the Weizman Institute, injects his aging mother with kerosene. Beautiful kibbutz kids refuse to join the army. My younger brother, a tank commander, wants to move to New York and drive a taxi."

Rafi stood back and gave the machine a tremendous kick. Coffee started gushing out. He often spoke to David like this, bitter, ironic, contemptuous of what he called "the new mores," which he blamed upon the present government.

"A government elected by pickle sellers, so what should we expect? Much as I hated the old light-unto-the-nations crap, it was a lot better than this meanness we exhibit now." He sipped some coffee. "Still, David, now that we've got ourselves a crazy American-style society, isn't it time we got an American-style murder case? Long overdue, but," he shook his head, "very very difficult to solve. Random victims, no prior connection-don't need to tell you how tough that's going to be. A great big mess." He gazed at David. "I'm handing it to you. Refuse if you like-I'll understand."

"It's a pattern crime, Rafi. How can I refuse?"

"You can't." Rafi slapped him gently on the back. "Get the dossiers from Sarah. And give my best to Anna." He shook his head. "I like her, David-very much. What will she think of us when she hears about all of this?"

As he walked back to the Pattern Crimes offices, he turned over Rafi's phrase: "Consistently marred flesh." Of all the possible pattern crimes, he thought, consistently marred flesh was probably the worst. The PC Unit, of which he was commanding officer, was located on the second floor of Jerusalem District Police Headquarters in a complex of buildings known collectively as the Russian Compound, a hundred meters up from Bar Kokba Square.

The building was old, its ceilings twenty feet high, and its cavernous tiled corridors, lit by fluorescent lamps suspended from iron chains, echoed and re-echoed with the footsteps of cops, clerks, detectives, prisoners, informers, witnesses, and an occasional lost citizen looking for a place to lodge a complaint. The beaten-up pay telephones and recalcitrant soup, coffee, and candy machines in these corridors were notorious, the interlocking squad rooms a maze. Few outsiders could find their way around this rabbit warren carved out of what once had been the huge intimidating offices of police officials in the period of the British Mandate.

David Bar-Lev did not think anyone would be intimidated by his office, barely wide enough to contain his desk. Dossiers were crammed into bookcases. A bulletin board was crowded with overlapping notes. There were two heavily chipped black metal chairs, two telephones, and a carefully cropped photograph of his daughter, Hagith, with just the left hand of his ex-wife, Judith, showing beside her arm.

Although the walls here had been soundproofed and a false ceiling installed for privacy, David always left his door open to the room where the rest of the PC Unit worked. Here the partition walls were barely taller than a man so that raised voices and ringing phones from the squad rooms of adjoining units swirled together and merged. No single word was ever intelligible out of all this restless sound, but David felt there was an underlying harmony. "Crime and Torment," he called it, as if it were a piece of music, a piece he sometimes struggled to decode and at other times loathed so much he would make up any excuse no matter how absurd to escape it, fleeing the building, taking to the streets, even driving out into the Judean hills…and sometimes even then it would still ring in his ears.

"Shoshana!"

She appeared almost instantly in his doorway, a short young woman with eager black eyes, tight black curls, and olive skin. "Where's Dov?"

"Working the Rehavia burglary case. A lady came in. Said she saw some of her silverware in East Jerusalem. He went out to check."

"Micha…?"

"With Uri having coffee. My turn next unless things start picking up."

"So you're bored, Shoshana?"

"Not really bored. It's just that here I never get a chance to fight."

She'd been in a narcotics unit when David met her, an unhappy office mascot. She wasn't getting along with her boss and was angry at being assigned to cover the phones while the boys got to work the streets. She had the plump fresh cheeks and guileless smile of a high school girl, but there was cunning behind the facade. David liked her, and when he saw her perform at a police karate competition, all flashing black eyes and short black curls, he was so impressed by her self-assurance he arranged her transfer to Pattern Crimes.

"We don't fight. We investigate. If you like to fight so much, go back into the army." She grinned. "While you're considering it, go downstairs and see if you can find us a halfway decent car."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to check out a place where an American nun was dumped."

He heard her footsteps as she ran out through the squad room; he was fascinated by her sudden entrances and exits. One moment she was there and the next was gone, yet he could never remember actually seeing her come or go.

He told her to drive, thought that might use up some of her restless energy. The car, a dilapidated white Subaru, had ripped seats and dented fenders. On their way up Jaffa Road, he told her what he wanted her to do.

"Get good photos. Then go with Uri to the Damascus Gate. He stands aside while you talk to the women, as nonthreatening and sympathetic as you can be. Find out who she is. Name, address, everything. Did anyone see her get picked up last night? Does she operate for a pimp? It may turn out the kid was wrong. Maybe she wasn't a prostitute. But talk to them anyway. See if they heard about any guys who like to cut. Tell them about the marks, but not about the breasts-we're going to keep that to ourselves…"

There was a traffic jam in front of the Mahane Yehuda market, trucks and cars stalled, blasting one another with horns. A woman lugging a market basket wove her way across the street. A group of schoolchildren, five- and six-year-olds, waited with perfect discipline at the curb.

"What the hell is this?" Shoshana wiped her forehead; it was eleven o'clock and getting hot. David thought of Anna practicing, her bow cutting across the strings, filling the apartment with dark rich sounds. Every so often she too would wipe her brow.

"I'll put on the siren."

David shook his head. Something was happening in the market. People were pouring in but few were coming out. "Meet me up there on the right," he said. Then he stepped out of the car.

As he made his way down the dark arcade that was the market axis, he heard the shrill whistles of police. He pushed past stands piled with eggplants, onions, Jaffa oranges, past vendors and buyers, through the debris of fruit skins and discarded vegetable greens, then took a shortcut through one of the little cross alleys until he came up against an immobile human mass.

"What is it?" he asked a stooped old lady in black who was grasping her purchases to her chest.

She looked at him, lips tight. "Katzer." And then all around David heard the name. Some whispered it, others hissed it, a few yelled it out like a cheer: "Katzer!" "Katzer!"

Suddenly David caught a glimpse of him, escorted by police, bobbing along behind a phalanx of his supporters, sullen young males in knitted skullcaps bullying their way through the crowd. There was something thug-like, dull and stupid, about this vanguard, but the rabbi's small hard eyes gleamed with calculation.

David watched, fascinated, as Katzer embraced a seller of olives, a seller of fish, an old man with a cane who sewed buttons and hems.

David was surprised at how short he was; although he knew his face well from TV, this was the first time he had seen him in the flesh. Now he was struck by his animal magnetism and rabid quality too: moist eyes, sweaty beard, mouth that twisted as he spoke. Nothing otherworldly about him, nothing pious or Talmudic. This was a politician who thrived on touching faces, patting shoulders, grasping extended hands. His supporters needed him, wanted to feel his power, and Katzer eagerly obliged. But then David noticed something else. The rabbi's eyes squirreled up at the sound of a passing airplane, and then again at the pop of a beer can being opened up. A glimmer of fear: He was political meat and knew the passions he unleashed could also put a bullet in his chest.

The cops blew their whistles, the thugs marched past, and Katzer was swallowed by the mob. Making his way back past the butcher's stalls to find Shoshana and the car, David felt his shirt sticking to his back.

I t was a drainage ditch, dusty, overgrown with brambles, separated by bushes from the narrow access road that led up to Mevasseret. Police stakes tipped with orange fluorescent paint marked the place where the body had been found. David circled the site, careful not to walk upon it, then leaned against the car. There was a constant roar of traffic from the highway, a harsh whirling sound of speeding cars and trucks. Just the sort of spot, he thought, you might pull up to if you were starting down to Tel Aviv and then decided to stop and take a piss.

"She was seen getting into a Tel Aviv car," Shoshana said. "Looks like whoever killed her pulled off at the exit, threw her out, then continued on his way."

The sun was beating down full force. David looked up at the white villas glittering on the barren heights. The people who lived up there were wealthy, the kind who owned two cars. They'd drive past where he was standing several times a day. Someone would notice the body pretty quick.

"If he really wanted to ditch her, he would have taken her into Judea. He didn't care if she was found."

"Why care? He was done with her."

"So just pull in the way we did, drag her out, toss an old blanket on top of her, don't even bother to cover her legs, then zip on down to the sunny coast?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, if he wasn't trying to hide his workmanship. Maybe the best solution, if he wanted it displayed."

"Think that's what he wanted?"

David shrugged. "He couldn't have chosen a better spot. Except for his spot this morning. That was better." He took a last look at the orange stakes, then turned away.

Back at the Russian Compound, he smiled when he saw them, Micha and Uri in sloppy army jackets, Dov Meltzer in striped track pants sporting an oversized submariner's watch. All three wore the beaten-up runner's shoes that were the trademark of Jerusalem plainclothes cops. They were sprawled out in swivel chairs while prim, smiling, orthodox Rebecca Marcus, clerk of Pattern Crimes, sat upright typing reports on her vintage Royal, her legs and arms nicely covered, her head wrapped neatly in a scarf.

"Murder case?"

"Triple," Shoshana said.

"Report says the nun was tortured, but no sign of intercourse."

"Madonna, girl-whore, boy-whore," said Dov. "Sounds like psycho-time."

"It's psycho-time all right."

He looked at them. They were excited. Detectives in other units sometimes called them "David's Dogs." Now they had a new and very disturbing case, perhaps the best they'd gotten in a year.

"Shoshana and Uri work the girl this morning. Micha, you get the Arab boy, and Dov, you take the nun. They say the boy was a drug user, so find out if he dealt. This Sister Susan Mills-was she really a Madonna? How does a woman like that end up in a ditch?"

"What about the marks, David?"

"I'm very interested in those marks."

"Report on the sister says the cutting was done after she was dead."

"Ten to one it's the same with the other two."

"An afterthought?"

"Some kind of ritual?"

"Sarah says you thought it could be some kind of brand," Dov said.

David nodded. "A brand says: 'She's mine.' But this could be more. A signature. Signature says: 'I did this work. My work.' Could be either one."

He ran Pattern Crimes like a small unit in the army-first names, anyone could say what he thought, minimal distinction between commanding officer and men. He felt closest to Dov, whom he considered the smartest, but Uri Schuster was formidable, a tracker, a bloodhound on the streets. Uri, David thought, could have been a criminal, which was why he was so valuable, and why, despite complaints that he was rough, sometimes even brutal, David was determined never to let him go. Micha Benyamani was the unit chess player, sad-faced, gaunt, a thorough paperwork-and-telephone detective. Shoshana Nahon-self-styled fighter, she made up for her inexperience with zest.

He told Rebecca Marcus to telex to the Israeli police liaison in New York. "The U.S. Justice Department has some kind of serial killer clearinghouse. Send them a straight query: Have they ever seen these kinds of marks?"

Rebecca smiled sweetly. "Whenever anything horrible happens, Rafi always thinks it's an American."

"An American Jew."

"Yes." She giggled. "But never an Israeli. Oh no! Never!"

He called in Dov. "What happened this morning?"

"Found a pair of candlesticks. An Arab trinket dealer on Salah el Din."

"Good stuff?"

"Nothing special. That blue-dye-job who was robbed last fall says they aren't worth much."

"How did he get them?"

"Had a story. Flea market in Hebron. But, David, there was other stuff there. Judaica. And that doesn't fit."

"Good Judaica?"

"I don't think so. It's a pretty dumpy place. I saw some Torah crowns. That bothered me. You don't fence stuff like that in East Jerusalem."

"You're thinking…?"

"Our scrolls case. It's been months. I practically forgot about it until I saw those crowns. I didn't say anything. Wanted to tell you first. The Rehavia burglaries and the stolen scrolls. We never put the two together."

David thought about it. He didn't think they belonged together. "Silver is silver," he said. "The people burglarizing fancy houses in Rehavia need a place to unload silver that isn't worth shipping out. Meantime, the people stealing Torahs for resale in America have to get rid of the crowns because the crowns identify the origins of the scrolls. We're talking about items of fairly limited value. East Jerusalem's good for that. What time does this dealer close?"

"Eight o'clock."

"Okay, let's go over there around a quarter of and have ourselves a little talk."

At four that afternoon, Shoshana and Uri brought him the girl's name: Ora Goshen, nineteen years old, born of Moroccan-Jewish parents in the settlement town of Bet Shemesh. The boy on the horse had been right-she had indeed been working as a prostitute by the taxi stand at the Damascus Gate. The drivers knew her and a number of her colleagues stepped forward too. She was described as "attractive" and "friendly with a seductive timid manner," a girl who could turn four to six tricks a night and often started work in the early afternoon. She rented half a room in an apartment in Katamon but never took her clients there. Sometimes, when she needed a place, she'd pay an hourly rent to one of the other girls, or have her client hire a taxi, have it driven to a remote spot, then perform while the driver took coffee at a cafe.

"She'd go with Arab men, Jewish men-she didn't care," Shoshana said, "but most of her clients were foreigners or Arabs. She didn't charge much and she liked it quick. Her landlady says she thought she was a hotel maid. She also says that Ora spoke of having been molested by her brothers and of running away from home, first to Beersheba before she came up here. Everyone agrees she's been in Jerusalem three or four months at most. No knowledge of any boyfriends, and no mention of anyone resembling a pimp. One of the girls says she and Ora have been employed several times by a well-dressed gentleman from the Foreign Office. They were paid ten times what they usually got for which they were required to attend black men, African diplomats, staying at the King David Hotel. They both used the money to buy themselves winter coats. Another time, she says, Ora was rejected by a client because he said she looked too dark. In regard to Arabs, it's apparently fairly important that a Jewish girl make clear that's what she is. Seems part of the thrill for the Arab client is to be serviced by a member of the oppressor race. As for Tel Aviv, no one knows if she's ever been there. And as for cutters, no one's ever heard of such a thing."

Shoshana was beaming-she knew her presentation had been good, and the best part was still to come. David glanced at Uri who nodded back-he had extracted the greater part of the information and now was enjoying listening to Shoshana weave it together into a tale.

"Okay, last night, around eight o'clock, the traffic's thinning out. It's getting chilly. A tan car comes by and starts to cruise the parking lot. Fairly recent model, maybe a Renault. Maybe it had Tel Aviv plates-no one's sure. There was a man, fairly young, fairly decently dressed, European-type-no one saw him well because it was pretty dark. He gestured to Ora, she walked over to the window, they talked for half a minute, she waved to her friends and got inside. He pulled out and must have made a U-turn up the road because a minute or so later one of the girls saw them headed back toward New Jerusalem. That's it. She didn't come back, and by nine they finish up and everyone heads for home. Three points: this guy and Ora didn't act like they knew each other; no one recalls seeing the guy before; there was nothing special about the encounter-it was a typical automobile pick-up, kind that happens fifteen or twenty times a night."

"So…?"

"What?"

"How many witnesses?"

"Just two girls, her friends."

"Will they submit to interrogation by a hypnotist?"

"Didn't ask them."

"Go back tonight, Shoshana, and ask. Meantime, call the police up in Bet Shemesh and get hold of a social worker. The family has to be told and someone'll have to come up here, give us a positive ID, and waive objections to an autopsy. Make sure the social worker understands that even if the family objects we can have one done. It'll just take longer and then everyone down there will know Ora was molested and that's why she became a whore."

"Okay. Now what do I do if the girls refuse to be hypnotized?"

"Point to Uri, tell them how he'd love to run them in for vice and then how badly it stinks in the Russian Compound jail. Then tell them how much we'd appreciate their cooperation since basically the guy who did this is a potential threat to them and we wouldn't want to see them sliced up too."

He called Anna to tell her about his case and that he had to go to East Jerusalem with Dov. "We'll probably grab some dinner at the Ummayyah. You like Dov. Why don't you meet us there?"

But she had bought groceries and was at that moment in the midst of making Borscht Moskovskii, which she'd been thinking about the entire day. "If I don't eat it now I'll go crazy. Don't stuff yourself, David. There'll be a big bowl for you when you get home."

They always spoke English; she had started studying Hebrew but wasn't ready yet to practice seriously. The expression she liked best was boker tov, "good morning," which she whispered sensuously into his ear every morning to wake him up.

"How did it go today?"

"I practiced all morning, then went to Yosef s. We worked together for four hours." She and her accompanist, Yosef Barak, were preparing the Beethoven cycle for their May European tour. "Then I shopped at the Supersol. There was a terrible scene at the check-out. A woman started screaming. 'Prices, robbers…' Then she started to sob. I kept wanting to tell her how lucky she was, how the store sold practically everything and you never have to wait in line. But I knew I couldn't help her. She was-what's the word? Inconsolable?"

Yes, he thought, the perfect word to describe people suddenly breaking down, incredulous at the daily erosion of their savings. But he was touched by Anna's desire to console the woman, explain to her how lucky she was not to live in the sort of society which she, Anna, had escaped. The society she was happy to have left but the country she still desperately missed-thus her compelling need to taste Moscow-style borscht.

At the end of the day, Micha and Dov reappeared. Micha had driven down to Tel Aviv to interview the one witness to the pickup of Halil Ghemaiem on the beach. As he spoke, he slumped deeper into his chair, sneaker-clad feet stretched to David's desk, arms hanging loose so that they touched the floor.

"Ali Saad, heroin addict, worst eye witness I ever met. The jerks who dug him up didn't bother to try him on the IdentiKit, so I brought out mine and put him to work. Drove me crazy. We'd get a composite going, then he'd say no, it wasn't right. So we'd start again and then he'd choose a different set of eyes, ears, even formations of hair. Finally I said to him: 'What is this shit? What are you covering up?' Blank stare. Then I understood: He couldn't remember. Been too long and his brain's been fried by drugs. The only things he'll swear to are that the guy who approached Halil was dark, clean-shaven, spoke Hebrew, and was decently dressed. I got excited about the Hebrew-seemed to clinch it that he was Israeli. But then I realized this kid barely knew Hebrew himself. All he heard was something like: 'You come with me? Fuck? I got nice car.' "

"Did Halil deal?"

"Strictly small-time. Just enough to pay for his own."

"Rumors of any cutters?"

"You kidding? These kids pack knives, David. It's their clients who get cut."

Dov had done better with his investigation of Susan Mills; listening to him David could feel how much Dov liked the murdered nun.

"…here's an American school teacher on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, backpacking, using her Bible as her guide. She's been everywhere, Nazareth, the Galilee, Jericho, Bethlehem, you name it, and she's not on some goody-goody tour, and she doesn't dress in a habit like those nuns you see around Notre Dame de France. She wears normal stuff, T-shirts and jeans, shorts, too, when it's hot. She stays at hospices, carries an expensive Nikon and takes a million shots. Meets people wherever she goes. Priests, professors, archaeologists. In the mornings she jogs. She rented snorkeling equipment in Eilat. A very modern lady. So what do Rafi's schmuck jerk-offs conclude, the great homicide investigators assigned to track her stay in Israel? That she must have been forcibly abducted from the Holyland 'because,' and here I'm quoting from their report, 'holy Christian women such as this never '- their emphasis-'never go out except in pairs.' Un-fucking-believable. Where does Rafi get these slobs? Point is, David, the big deal about Susan Mills getting into a car turns out to be no big deal at all. This morning you asked how a nun winds up in a ditch. Well, however this particular nun wound up in one I don't think it had much to do with her affiliation to the church."

The three of them walked downstairs together. Cops and staff thronged the corridors. The Claw, from the superintendent's office, was gossiping with Sarah Dorfman. A jail guard, carrying a tray of cheese sandwiches, nearly slipped on the tile floor.

The bomb disposal truck was parked near the compound gate. Micha Benyamani spotted it, turned away, quickly shook their hands, then hurried off to catch his bus. Son of a watch maker, he had been a bomb disposal specialist who quit the unit when his hands began to shake. David first met him on the police firing range, where he noticed that Micha's shooting was extremely accurate; he'd squint at the very moment that he pulled the trigger, and, for that moment at least, all his trembling would stop.

David and Dov walked on to the police parking lot. It was dark and getting cold. They got into David's car. David pulled out onto Heleni Ha-Malka, where he honked at a trio of Ethiopian monks-black faces, black robes, black skull-tight hats. Traffic was heavy. The floodlit Old City walls looked stark. David slowed the car as he approached the Damascus Gate, paused at the entrance to the taxi lot. A girl, standing in the shadows of the wall, studied them a while, then walked toward them with a slow hip-swinging stride.

"Jewish?"

Dov waited until she was twenty feet away. "Yeah, think so," he finally said.

"Looking for a date?" She was young, still in her teens. Something about her, a cherubic quality, made David think of Rebecca Marcus without a scarf.

"We're cops."

"So what? Cops don't date?" She laughed. "Screw cops." Her walk back was angry, sluttish, tough.

"Bitch," Dov muttered. "Nasty bitch."

David glanced at him. "Ever see Katzer, Dov? In the flesh, I mean."

"Yeah, once, at a funeral down in Netanya. He and his goons were working the crowd. A woman had been killed by a terrorist bomb. He likes situations like that where everyone's nerves are raw."

"I saw him this morning. Short guy, shorter than I thought. You know how he rants on about 'Jewish whores'?"

"He's got a big bug up his ass."

"So, when I saw him, it occurred to me-maybe this is just the kind of guy we're looking for. Ora Goshen, a prostitute-Katzer's said a Jewess who fornicates with Arabs ought to be stoned to death. Taking off from there, reversing the reasoning, someone could say the same of an Arab boy who offers his ass to Jewish men."

"Okay, Ora and the boy make sense. But why Susan? Why kill a Christian nun?"

"Who knows? We're talking about a fruitcake. The kind of person who's very angry. Angry very deep inside."

He turned onto Salah el Din, honked his way through the nightly blockage of cars double-parked while their owners exchanged eroding shekels for black-market dollars inside Arab shops. He found a parking space around the corner from the National Palace Hotel, carefully locked the car and armed the alarm. Then he and Dov walked back toward the main business street of East Jerusalem.

It smelled and sounded different here than in the Jaffa-Ben Yehuda-King George triangle downtown, more like the Middle East, the scent of cardamom, the faint aroma of hashish, the pulsing rhythm of Egyptian love songs played on radios blasting out of stores. A busload of Americans tourists trudged into a belly-dancer joint. A souvenir shop owner, sucking on his water pipe, caught David's eye and smirked.

"Wow, they make us quick over here. Course, we make them pretty quick too on our side of town."

"Actually, Dov, I think it's you they make. Only an Israeli detective would wear striped track pants and that enormous watch."

They were fond of one another. David thought of Dov as a younger brother, endearing on account of his absurd wardrobe, thick neck, unkempt head of black curls, and the poetry he wrote-sweet and savage verse that combined the mellowness of a Jerusalem childhood with the emerging bitterness of a young Israeli cop.

The bric-a-brac shop was up two flights, above a store that sold electronic equipment, radios, cassette recorders, electric guitars. There was an acrid smell of cat urine on the first floor landing and an office door marked "Magic Supplies."

The junk dealer, a Mr. Aziz Mansour, was middle-aged, overweight, and worried. Behind the steel bars that divided his shop from its small entrance off the stairs were dusty piles of treasure: plates, utensils, ladles, bowls, serving platters, candlesticks made of silver, bronze, and brass.

Dov, dropping all signs of informality, respectfully introduced David as "Captain Bar-Lev."

Mansour bowed to show he acknowledged Israeli authority. "As I told the sergeant this morning, I purchased the candlesticks from an itinerant peddler in the flea market in Hebron several weeks ago. Of course I had no idea they were stolen. And now I must suffer a loss for that, since I shall doubtless never again see the swindler who sold them to me, and whom I now curse for what he did."

Like many Jerusalemites of his age, Mansour spoke a formal British-inflected English. But there was something undignified about him, a cringing quality David didn't like.

"I'm afraid it's not so simple."

"Why not simple? I give you the objects. I do not wish to profit from stolen things."

"We have to seal up your store. Tomorrow we'll send a truck. Everything must be brought to our offices and examined against lists of stolen goods."

"But surely not! I have never heard of this procedure."

"It's one we reserve for special situations."

"Why? What is special here?"

David looked around. "Something here is special, I'm sure. But if you object, Mr. Mansour, you must consult your lawyer. Israel is a free country. We respect the rights of everyone. By all means fight our confiscation. Meantime, your store will be sealed."

"Confiscation! You said nothing about confiscation! Just to examine the objects, you said."

Dov was now on the far side of the room, directing his gaze at the small collection of Torah scroll crowns he had spotted that morning amid the dusty piles.

"Perhaps we could find a way to shortcut the procedure."

"I can do something for you? Yes? Tell me-what is it that you want please?" Mansour was angry, but David could feel him calculating, wondering what this stern police captain really wanted, whether he was hinting at a bribe, and, if so, how large.

"Frankly, for me the candlesticks are trivial. If you bought them in Hebron, then you can't be held responsible for the fact they were stolen from a house on Ramban Street. We believe the robbery was committed by Jews. We have no use for such people. I'm personally much more disturbed by a Jewish thief than by an Arab fence."

Dov, now standing behind Mansour, queried David with his eyes. But David didn't think he'd gone too far.

"Sir, excuse me, I am not a fence. I promise you I bought the candlesticks in Hebron. Possibly one of the Jewish settlers there-"

"If you're going to tell lies, at least tell one that's plausible. Israeli settlers may steal Arab land but not this kind of junk." He peered around the shop with great disgust. "I'm going downstairs for a coffee. Meltzer, stay with the prisoner, advise him of his rights. When I return we'll make a preliminary search."

He walked out without looking back. Dov would wait at least a minute, until his footsteps were no longer audible on the stairs. Then he would sit across from Mansour, gaze at him with his most pitying expression, and start to explain how tough things were going to get.

Yes, Dov would lay it all out, the nature of the captain's "preliminary search," how he would methodically tear the shop apart, break all the breakable objects, crush all the fragile ones, and then how various other items Mr. Mansour probably didn't even know he had would appear miraculously on the inventory list and would be identical to objects stolen from fine Israeli homes. Mansour could certainly call his lawyer but he should be advised that the captain might then turn the matter into a security affair, in which case, of course, certain rights would be suspended and the interrogation could become extremely harsh. No, of course this wasn't political, but poor Aziz had acted stupidly from the start, when it was obvious that the only thing the captain wanted was to develop a new informer in East Jerusalem. Yes, that's all. Didn't Aziz understand? Israeli policemen don't take bribes. They value information-against crooks, burglars, Jewish burglars at that, against the very people who were using poor old Aziz's shop as a place to fence the junk they couldn't sell abroad or down in Tel Aviv…

David ordered a coffee at the National Palace cafe, picked up a copy of Al-Fajr, the Jerusalem-based Palestinian newspaper, discovered various interesting things he hadn't learned from his readings in the Israeli press, and, when he thought that Dov had Mansour sufficiently softened up, paid for his coffee, left the newspaper on the table, strode back up to Salah el Din, and then noisily ascended the stairs.

Dov gave him the nod as soon as he walked in, the big nod that said Aziz was begging now to talk. David walked straight over to the pile of Torah crowns, scooped them up, brought them over to the desk, slammed them down, then addressed Mansour in short stabbing phrases while staring hard into his imploring eyes:

"I want a name, a full description, everything you know, and I want it straight and fast. From whom, Mr. Mansour, did you obtain these silver ritual objects now piled on your desk?"

Dov's first words when they were back on the street were about how amazing it was the way the good-guy/bad-guy routine never failed. They talked about it on their way to the Ummayyah.

"Fear of an enemy, need for a friend-it's so basic it has to work."

"But corny, David. Everyone knows we use it."

"Doesn't matter. The need's too deep. Even an experienced cop'll fall for it if you do it right."

"So is this what we do-run scams, play tricks?"

"Yeah, of course, it's one of the things."

At the Ummayyah, David ordered a salad. The place was filled with journalists, archaeologists, Palestinian politicians, a large, noisy Arab restaurant where everyone was welcome, even a couple of tired Israeli cops. Dov ate ravenously-scooping up hummus, pulling meat off of skewers, gobbling it up, devouring an extra portion of baklava for dessert. Something about the encounter with Mansour had hungered him-perhaps, David thought, his pleasure in it, a pleasure Dov now wanted to deny. Watching him eat, David recalled the day that they were bonded, that morning three years before when they'd burst together into a youth hostel on Nablus Street, guns drawn, hearts pumping, ready to capture, perhaps even to kill.

They'd been tracking narcotics dealers, four youths whom they knew were armed. The entire PC Unit had staked out the hostel for a week, boring but demanding work. Finally David had had enough. "They're in there; let's get them. Now." Dov had grinned. He was new to Pattern Crimes. He was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and a pair of beaten-up Adidas sneakers-just the garb for a frontal assault.

The place was run-down, a two-story building with odd-shaped windows and balconies on the second floor. The usual money-changer downstairs, a motor scooter parked in front, a glass shop next door from which a huge mirror was just then being loaded onto a truck. Ten o'clock in the morning, quiet, a perfect time to make a charge. David and Dov glanced at one another, David nodded, then together they hit the door.

A rush through a dingy yellow hall past a decrepit reception desk. A charge up a set of sagging stairs. Yells in Arabic. Curses. A young man in underpants suddenly dashed in front of them across the hall. A crash. He had jumped off one of the balconies. They heard the scooter revving up below. After a chaotic chase and a quick exchange of fire, David and Dov cornered two of the dealers on the roof while Uri captured a third slipping out the back. Micha had fired at the one fleeing on the scooter and had missed, but his shots had cracked the mirror. As a result, when David and Dov came back out onto the street they were confronted by strange distorted images of themselves: heads not straight on necks, limbs askew, reflections which startled them, then made them laugh, and before which they instinctively embraced.

"Aren't you hungry?" Dov was looking at him.

"Anna's saving me some Russian soup."

Dov grinned. "That's a good woman, David. You're different since you met her. Everyone says you are."

"Yes, I'm different. Mellower. Easier to get along with. Less of a shit. Right? So are you finished?"

Dov nodded, grinned.

"Good. Let's go. I'll drive you home."

They didn't talk much as he swung around the Old City Walls, up by the place where Ora Goshen's body had been found. David paused at the spot, looked over at his own building across Hinnom, saw the lights in his apartment. Anna was waiting there, probably listening to music or reading a book or an American magazine.

"What are you thinking?"

"There was an old cop here this morning, Moshe Liederman. Said he thought this could turn out to be an interesting case."

"Don't you think it is? I do. You always love a pattern."

David nodded. "Yeah, but a pattern like this? Too much brutality, Dov. A man who hates women so much he'll even kill a boy who dresses up like one. Look at how he dumps them-out of his car, like trash, trash he covers up with an old army blanket because the carcasses are naked and he wants to protect the poor things from the cold. Except he doesn't cover them up all that well because he wants them found in the morning. Wants people to see what he's done. Feel his fury. See his work. Learn to fear him. Know his power. Know."

The four-lane highway to Gillo was empty. When David hit it, he accelerated.

"What do we do about the Torah case?"

"Check out this guy Gutman. I think Mansour was too frightened to lie."

"No scrolls stolen in a while."

"Doesn't matter. It's a long-term racket. We have the new case, sure, but we still have our inventory to clear. Scrolls has been around too long. I'm getting sick of staring at the file."

They decided how they'd do it, put Shoshana on Gutman, the man Mansour had identified as the source of the Torah crowns, have her watch him on and off. Then, if Gutman looked like he might be right, send in a guy from the intelligence branch wearing a mike who could play the role of an American, say from Arizona, looking to buy a Torah for his new-built synagogue. Another scam, and it might work, and in any event they'd have developed a new informer. Except when they drove into Gillo, the modern bedroom satellite town, David knew the scroll case was nothing compared to the torn and marked-up bodies of Ora Goshen, Halil Ghemaiem, and Susan Mills.

David dropped Dov in front of his building, one of fifty huge apartment slabs, cold sheer residential bastions for the New Israeli Man. On his way back into town David was mad. A man like Dov, a police sergeant and a professional, couldn't save up enough in the New Israel to buy himself a car.

Back in the city his temper cooled. The streets were deserted; although only ten o'clock, Jerusalem was asleep. As he swept around Bloomfield Park, he was filled with a disquieting love for the place. But Jerusalem evaded him; for all his efforts to know her she continued to hold herself aloof.

On En Rogel Street he searched for a parking space, found one near the entrance to the Jerusalem of Gold Folklore Club. When he shut the car door a dog barked out, then other dogs in adjoining gardens, the barking spreading house by house through Abu Tor, then down to Shiloah and up the slope of the Mount of Offense. With a simple noise he had started a wave that now rolled across the hills.

In front of number sixteen a bar of yellow light cut across the stoop. He punched out the code that opened the apartment house door, entered, and closed it carefully behind. As he mounted the stairs and passed the various apartments, he could hear bits and pieces of the late evening news. Another big car-bomb explosion in Beirut. Katyusha rockets fired at Qiryat Shemona. An ultra-orthodox demonstration in Petah Tikva. Collapsing bank shares. The King of Jordan in Washington restating Arab claims and asking the United States for new long-term credits to purchase arms.

On the third floor he caught a hint of Anna's borscht and the sound of Janos Starker playing Bach. She was waiting up for him, just feet away, and now he paused to savor what lay in store. She would greet him, kiss him, feed him, talk to him, make him smile, lead him to their bed. There they would make love, the night city spread out before them, sparkling, still, and cold, and afterward they would lie entwined.

He slipped his key into the lock, turned it, opened the door. The aroma of the borscht and the music of Bach flowed out into the hall.

"Anna, I'm home…"

And then she was there before him, her smile so brilliant, her eyes so clear, her love for him so evident, that for a moment he felt he had to turn away lest he be blinded by so much radiance.