Survival Of The Fittest

31

At 6:00 A.M. after working since midnight, Daniel opened the shutters on the computer room's windows and breathed in light.

Putting on his phylacteries, he prayed without feeling, looking out at the tiny backyard clad in concrete.

He'd spent most of the night on the phone, accommodating the European and Asian and Middle Eastern time zones. Making police-officer small talk in four languages, calling in favors, making his way through the various law-enforcement bureaucracies that somehow never changed from city to city.

Searching for DVLL references, murders with racial and ethnic overtones, any hints of serial crimes linked to genetic cleansing, any major changes in the policies of neo-Nazi and nationalist groups and others who thought themselves superior.

Quantity wasn't the problem. Plenty of information- as democracy spread over Europe, more and more lunatics crawled out of their holes and gorged themselves on free speech. But in the end he was left with no connections to the L.A. murders, nothing even close to a lead.

He cut his prayers short, apologized to God, wrapped up the tfillin, and went into the small, dark bathroom where he turned on the shower, stripped, and stepped in, not waiting for the water to turn hot.

It took exactly two minutes forty-one seconds for the old pipes to kick in. He'd timed it yesterday, arranged his morning schedule accordingly.

But this morning he endured the cold needles.

Flogging himself for the futile night?

He'd begun with Heinz-Dietrich Halzell at the Berlin police, who'd informed him the racist presses continued to churn out the nasty stuff; the moment the polizei got an injunction, the slime just moved and started up again. And stupid punks kept beating up Turks and anyone else with a dark skin, starting brawls, desecrating graveyards.

Apology in his voice. Deeply sorry, the way only a German could be. Daniel had hosted him at a security conference in Jerusalem, last year. A really decent guy, but weren't they always the ones who let themselves feel?

Murders of retarded kids? No, Heinz-Dietrich hadn't heard of anything like that. DVLL? Not in any of their files, but he'd ask around. What was going on in L.A.?

When Daniel told him, sketchily, he sighed and said he'd ask around seriously.

Uri Drori at the Israeli Embassy in Berlin did some double-checking and verified everything Halzell had said. Daniel called him not because he didn't trust the German, but because sometimes what you learned depended on who you were.

Drori reported a slowly escalating rate of low-level incidents, repeated almost word for word Heinz-Dietrich's lament about the idiots popping up like toadstools.

It will never end, Dani. The more democracy you have, the more you get this shit, but what's the alternative?

Same story with Bernard Lamont in Paris, Joop Van Gelder in Amsterdam, Carlos Velasquez in Spain, all the others.

No murders of defectives, no DVLL.

Which didn't really surprise him. These crimes seemed American. Though he couldn't explain why.

A wonderful country, America. Huge and free and naive; big-hearted people always willing to grant the benefit of the doubt.

Even after the Trade Center bombing, you didn't see large-scale anti-Muslim feelings. The Israeli Embassy in New York tracked that kind of thing.

Free country.

But what was the price?

Last night, taking a coffee break, he'd heard police sirens, loud, close, looked out the same rear window and saw a helicopter circling low, beaming down on backyards, like some giant mantis scouting for prey.

His police scanner told him they were searching for an armed-robbery suspect- holdup at Beverly Drive and Pico.

A mile away, right near Zev Carmeli's place.

Not far from the house on Monte Mar where Laura had grown up. Her parents had sold it and bought two tiny condos. Beverly Hills, and Jerusalem, where they were now.

Before he'd left for the States, his father-in-law had warned him: Be careful, things have changed.

Gene said, Total breakdown, Danny Boy. Going to school can be hazardous to a kid's health.

Which was one reason Gene had sold his big house in Lafayette Park. Heading for Arizona… no real reason for Arizona, except that it was warm and “I'm not exactly worried about melanoma, right?”

Gene looked old. Since Luanne's death, his hair and mustache had turned snow-white and his skin bagged.

An untimely death, the poor woman had been only sixty when the massive stroke had knocked her to the floor of her kitchen. Gene discovering her, another reason to sell the house.

High blood pressure. A doctor friend of Daniel's told him blacks had more of it. Some said it was their diet, others genetics. His friend thought racism had a lot to do with it.

Daniel understood that. He couldn't count the times he'd been called a dirty Jew by Arabs and, because of his skin, a nigger by all sorts of people.

When it happened, he didn't react visibly but his heart pounded in his ears… he wondered if Gene was taking care of his diabetes. Cookies on the counter when he'd gone there to pick up the Ortiz file and the boy's shoes said otherwise.

His friend had come through for him and Daniel liked to think the favor had been good for Gene, too.

Nothing but time on his hands, poor guy. He'd called three times since returning the stuff, offering to do whatever Daniel needed.

But Daniel wouldn't go to Gene for any more favors. The man was ill, no reason to draw him in deeper.

If Sturgis cooperated.

He'd said he would, but hard to tell.

Sturgis would never score high on the Trust Index.

He stepped out of the shower just as the water warmed up, dried off, goose-bumped, amazed he hadn't felt any discomfort.

America.

Democracy had begun in Greece but its real home was here. Birthplace of official compassion, too- no country had been as kind as America. Now Americans were paying for their compassion in drive-by shootings, the breakdown of rules and values, child-murderers let out on parole.

Same thing back home. For all his country's image as a tough little fighter state, Daniel knew Israel as one big, soft heart populated by survivors and rooters for the underdog with a reluctance to punish.

That's why victory doesn't sit well with us, he thought. Why we end up the first country in history to voluntarily give back land won in battle in exchange for an ill-defined peace with people who hate our guts.

He'd watched, during the intifada, as the Palestinian Arabs made the most of Israeli democracy: staging rehearsed events masquerading as spontaneous shows of protest, exaggerating the very real brutality of the occupation with hyperbole, kids with rocks playing for the camera. The press, of course, gobbled it up like a rich dessert. Day after day of photo-op baton-to-skull and rubber-bullet hailstorm broadcast worldwide, while Assad executed tens of thousands of potential enemies in Syria and got maybe two lines of newsprint.

Still, who ever said life was fair. He'd rather live in a free society… though sometimes…

And now he was thinking of Elias Daoud again, resolutions tossed to the wind.

The ginger-haired Christian Arab from Bethlehem had been his best homicide detective, playing a major role in the Butcher investigation, never letting the divided-loyalties thing get in the way though it hadn't been easy- no one but Daniel had trusted him.

The closing of the Butcher file got everyone on the team promotions, but Daoud's had taken a bit more prodding of the pencil pushers.

Daniel had been obdurate and finally Daoud ended up a mefakeah, Southern Division's first Arab inspector. The raise in pay for a guy with seven kids had made it more than just another ribbon.

Daoud was kept on Daniel's squad and Daniel assigned him to the few nonpolitical homicide cases that came up: Old City gang stuff, the drug and watermelon rackets, nothing with any security overtones. For Daoud's protection as well as for the brass. Daniel didn't want him branded a collaborator.

Then the intifada heated up. More rhetoric, more audacity, more violence- the wall of fear broken down, vermin scurrying through the rubble.

Religious militancy found new life, too, and Christians in Bethlehem, and Nazareth, and everywhere else Christian, remembered Beirut and grew less vocal, many of them bribing their way across the border to Jordan and onward to families in Europe and the States.

One morning, in the midst of a serious investigation into the Ramai gang's role in the hashish trade, with Daoud scheduled to give a progress report, everyone waiting in a restaurant on King George Street, the guy didn't show.

Right away Daniel knew something was wrong. The man was a walking wristwatch.

He dismissed the griping detectives, called Daoud's house, got a disconnected line.

The usual twenty-minute drive to Bethlehem took him less than fifteen. Before he got to the city outskirts he saw the military jeeps and the police Ford Escorts, blue lights flashing, people milling around, the simmering feel of an impending riot.

He showed his badge and made his way past grim faces to Daoud's house. Police tape had been wrapped around the little limestone cube and chickens circled the muddy ditch that passed for a yard. No more olive-wood crucifix in Daoud's window- when had that changed?

It had been a long time since Daniel had been there. Now, he realized what a sorry place it was, objectively. Not much better than the hovel in Yemen where Daniel's father had been born. But the promotion had allowed Daoud to finish payments on it, the guy had been so proud.

The uniform at the door warned him not to go in for his own sake, but he did anyway, thinking of Daoud, the young, fat wife Daoud loved madly and plied with chocolates, seven little kids…

The kids gone, no one knew where. Months later, Daniel found out they'd somehow showed up with relatives in Amman, but that was as far as the information went.

Daoud and the fat wife, still here.

Slaughtered like sheep for the market.

Sliced, trussed, dismembered, tongues severed. The wife a leaking bag of yellow adipose, eyes rolled back. Daoud castrated, his penis hacked off, the organ stuffed in his mouth.

Hatchets, the medical examiner said. And long knives, probably six or seven attackers, a midnight blitz.

Flies, so many flies.

Arabic scrawl on the wall in blood:

GOD IS GREAT! DEATH TO COLLABORATORS!

He drove back to French Hill, kept his feelings to himself.

Always, constantly, completely.

Like the Dead Sea, flat and bitter, yielding nothing organic.

Wanting to be dispassionate when he asked to run the investigation into the slaughter, so his superiors would consider it.

Of course, they refused, saying it was an Arab issue, he could never get close enough, no one would talk to him.

He kept asking, demanding, got the same answer, over and over. Refusing to give up, knowing he was being an idiot, he drove home each day with an inflamed belly and a raging headache, the strain of smiling at Laura and the kids just short of unbearable.

A case number was assigned to the Daoud murders but no one seemed to be actually investigating.

He lost interest in his gang cases; the Ramais could sell dope for another few months, big deal. And if they shot each other, no great loss.

He wrote memo after memo, received no answer.

Finally, in Laufer's office, after yet another dismissal, he exploded at the commander.

Is this what it's come to? He was an Arab so it's not worth the time and effort? Different values for different lives? What are we, Nazi Germany?

Laufer had looked him up and down, chain-smoking, sleepy eyes full of contempt, but he hadn't said a word. Daniel's solving the Butcher had gotten him kicked up from deputy commander. Who knew what other value the Yemenite might have for him?

After that, a few suspects were hauled in for questioning, but it led nowhere, the file was never closed, never would be.

Daniel thought from time to time of the savages who'd done it. Dispatched from Syria or Lebanon? Or locals, still living in Bethlehem, passing that house, now demolished, and really believing they'd shown God to be great?

And what of the seven kids? Who was raising them? What had they been told?

That the Jews had done it?

Daddy and Mommy, martyrs to Palestine?

The Arabs loved martyrs. After the intifada ended, there'd been a martyr shortage, young guys with scraped feet or the flu claiming they'd gotten hurt fighting the Zionists.

The virtue of suffering.

We, their Jewish cousins, aren't much different, are we? he thought. Though we're a little more subtle about it.

Democracy…

And now these American killings.

Three homicides of children in three separate police districts- Delaware had a point about that. Spread out over a vast, shapeless thing that calls itself a city.

Retarded kids, how could you get any crueler?

Gene said they called them something else nowadays… developmentally challenged.

“Nowadays, everyone's challenged, Danny Boy. Short people are vertically challenged, drunks are sobriety-challenged, criminal scumbags are socially challenged.”

“Socially challenged sounds more like someone shy, Gene.”

“That's the point, my friend. It's not supposed to make sense. A con game, like that book, 1984. Change the names to confuse the good guys.”

Socially challenged.

So what does that make me on this case? And Sturgis and Delaware.

Solution-challenged?

No, just stuck.