A Possibility of Violence (2 page)

The computer was off and he switched it on.

There was dust on everything. A gray layer on the desk and on the shelves and on the black desk lamp. How does dust get into a room without a window? In the garbage can were bits of a brown envelope and a few crumpled pieces of paper he didn't remember throwing out.

 

AT EXACTLY TWELVE O'CLOCK AVRAHAM REPORTED
to the entrance of the office on the third floor and was asked to wait until the commander, Benny Saban, finished a telephone call. In the meantime, he sent a text to Marianka:
About to meet with the new commander. I'll tell you how it goes. Xo.
The secretary also spoke on the telephone, not about work.

Saban came out of his office at twelve fifteen and invited Avraham to come inside. He shook his hand and said, “I can't make heads or tails of the mess they left me with here.” He signaled for Avraham to sit and offered him coffee. “Half the precinct is sick, like we're in the middle of winter, and the other half is on vacation. I'm working with zero manpower, and since this morning I've had an armed robbery at the Union Bank, a bomb next to a daycare, and someone who tried to light himself on fire on the roof of the National Insurance building. I have citizens who are waiting since five to lodge complaints, and detainees I have no idea what to do with. I have no investigating officers, and if I don't get someone in front of them by this evening, they go home.”

Avraham said he'd already had coffee.

Saban interested him. The man had a child's round, soft face, and smooth brown hair that fell across his forehead with childlike bangs. His desk was in order, free of files and papers, except for a thin pile of pages upon which were printed large letters in short lines, ready to be read. He hadn't managed to bring in any personal items to the office, and nothing had changed in it. On the walls hung ribbons and certificates of excellence that had been awarded to the precinct. Avraham asked, “Can I help?” and Saban laughed. “Can you fill five positions for me by this evening?” The secretary entered the room without knocking and set a glass plate in front of him upon which was a large mug of hot water and two pretzels, and he sat down and asked Avraham if he wanted coffee again. “Maybe she will interrogate them,” he said after she left.

Avraham had heard about Saban's appointment to district commander while he was in Brussels, in a phone conversation with Eliyahu Ma'alul. He hadn't met him before this and didn't know a thing about him, only that over the last three years he was a district commander up north, and before that deputy chief of the Planning Division. He wasn't an investigator or a field agent, and had made his way up the organization mainly through a series of administrative positions. The palms of his hands were small and smooth, and the sleeves of his shirt were neatly ironed. From time to time he leaned back in his chair, bent forward again with a sudden movement, and placed his hands on the desk. Picked up a pen and drew sharp lines on the pages in front of him. There was an involuntary twitch in his eyes. For a moment he fixed them on Avraham, and then he began blinking as if something was blinding him, lowered his gaze to the desk, and covered his eyes with an incidental movement of his small palm. He said, “In any case, to the matter at hand. I know that your vacation isn't over, but it was important to me to invite you to an early introductory meeting and to hear that you're coming back and that everything's okay. There were rumors you might not be returning.”

Avraham responded that he had no plan not to return, and Saban said, “Good, good to hear. That makes me happy. I heard positive things about you and we need quality manpower. I read about your previous case, and the report that Ilana Lis wrote as well, and I don't think there was any problem with the way in which the investigation was conducted. You have full support from me. The guilty parties were caught and we're moving on. Clean slate.”

Saban blinked again. And tried to smile.

Avraham didn't know a thing about the report that Ilana Lis wrote about his last investigation. At whose request did she write it? And who saw it? And why didn't she tell him?

They spoke a few times over the phone while he was on vacation and Ilana didn't mention the report. He said to Saban, “Thank you. I don't know what you read, or where, but the investigation you're talking about is behind me.”

“Excellent, excellent. Good to hear. And, by the way, since you're already here, I would be happy if you stayed for the welcoming toast in my honor this afternoon. Can you? I'm going to talk about what I see as the objectives of the district's policework.”

Avraham promised that he would try his best to stay, and Saban said to him, “You know what? Take the pages with you—worst comes to worst you'll read them at home. I'll print another copy. This is my vision for our shared work in the coming years.” From Saban's damp, combed hair it looked to Avraham as if he had gotten his hair cut that morning, before coming to the station. Were these signs of nervousness also caused by the speech he was going to give this afternoon? He thanked him, folded up the pages of the speech, and stuck them in his shirt pocket.

Saban asked, “So when are we meeting officially? When are you actually returning?” And Avraham said, “After Rosh Hashanah. But I could interrogate one of the prisoners today if you don't have anyone else. I don't have a problem staying here a few more hours.”

Saban hesitated, and this hurt him. He said, “But . . . you're still on vacation. And I thought it would be good if you returned to matters, you know, slowly. Maybe you'll join a team that's already started working. It's a shame to waste your vacation.”

Avraham was struck by a desire to enter the interrogation room now, at this moment, precisely because of Saban's hesitation. He said again, “I can stay. Tell me which is most pressing,” and Saban answered, “I'm not sure. Maybe the suspect in the fake-bomb case. He's been waiting almost five hours, and we have nothing other than his priors.”

“Fine, give me a few minutes to study the material and I'll go inside. Do you know anything about the file?”

Saban still wasn't sure that this was the right thing to do. He said, “Not much. It's probably a dispute between criminals, or neighbors. The question is, why a fake bomb, and why next to a daycare? A fake bomb is a warning, no? So another question is, who did they want to warn and what's the meaning of the warning, and, in particular, how do we prevent the next crime before it's carried out? But most important—is this connected to the daycare? This suspect, or someone else, places a fake bomb, in the light of day, when parents are bringing their children to the daycare—this disturbs me. And I'm disturbed by the thought that the next time it might be a real bomb.”

 

HE WAS SUPPOSED TO CALL MARIANKA
and tell her about the meeting with Saban, and afterward he told himself that he'd call when he left the interrogation room, but in the hours to come he was in such a race against time that he forgot, and even when he remembered he simply put off calling.

The first hour of interrogation with Uzan didn't get him any further, maybe the opposite. There was a contradiction between the neighbor's testimony about the limping and Uzan's limber gait, and there were his denials, which became more and more emphatic. It wasn't possible to locate fingerprints on the suitcase, and the forensics team didn't find anything at the scene that could tie Uzan to it. Nor in the apartment where Uzan lived with his mother. The beat cop brought in the neighbor so she could view the suspect, and suddenly she was less certain of her testimony. “Yes, it could be him, but how can I say with certainty? Do you know from what kind of distance I saw him?” Avraham inquired about the matter of the limping, which, of all things, she had no doubts about. The man who placed the suitcase fled toward Aharonovitch Street with a slow limp. At three thirty he moved Uzan to the holding cell and closed himself up in his office in order to think, as he always did at the start of an investigation.

He still hadn't visited the scene, and he knew it was vital to do this soon. And he couldn't remember whether or not there was a traffic light on Lavon Street. If there was a light and drivers stopped there, perhaps he'd find additional witnesses who saw the suspect when he placed the suitcase, or when he fled afterward. He checked if someone had questioned the owner of the daycare and the residents of the neighboring buildings about their ties to Uzan, and it turned out that no one had. In fact, he understood, the investigation hadn't yet begun. It was necessary to search additional places to which Uzan was tied, to try and find evidence of the improvised bomb's design, to interrogate Uzan's mother, who's hospitalized, but it was not possible to do all this by evening, and not by himself. And he also shouldn't get stuck on the suspect. It was necessary to consider all the possibilities, and not only because of the doubt raised by the limp. He recalled Ilana Lis and her routine warning: “We shouldn't come to any conclusions in advance, because then we won't examine certain details, while looking too closely at others.” It's possible that the man who placed the suitcase next to the daycare wasn't now sitting in the holding cell at the station but was somewhere else instead. And perhaps he was planning his next attack, just as Saban feared.

Suddenly Avraham knew that he wouldn't be sorry for taking on this case.

He looked for something in the drawers and on the shelves. On the floor of the equipment room he found a ream of printer paper, and on the way to his office had already ripped open the packaging and removed a blank page from the pack. He wrote a few lines on it:

Daycare.

Precise distance from the daycare. When does it open?

Owner of the daycare—acquaintance of Amos Uzan?

List of parents. Previous crimes.

A threat—maybe for one of the kids' parents?

Scene.

6:30 a.m. (exactly?) More people were passing on the street.

More neighbors who saw?

Traffic lights. Camera?

The suitcase—maybe something unique? that's possible to trace?

Did he get out of a car?

If there was a car, was someone waiting in the car to pick him up?

Neighbors' dispute?

List of tenants.

Criminals in the area.

If we're talking about a warning—what's the message? And to whom? What's the meaning?

What will the next crime be?

Is there a convenience store on the street?

 

AT 4:30 P.M. UZAN WAS BROUGHT
back to the interrogation room, but for no purpose really. Avraham had nothing more to ask, and Uzan stroked his mustache and smiled at him with his small eyes and said, “I ate, I drank, I napped. We had an interesting chat. But hasn't the time come for you to admit you arrested a man for nothing and to let him go?”

Avraham asked, “What's your hurry? You don't want to have dinner here, too?”

But at five thirty, running late, he went out to the courtyard for the toast in honor of Saban's appointment—and Rosh Hashanah—and when he returned he signed the release forms. “I promise you that we'll see each other again,” he said to Uzan, and Uzan replied, “You're just wasting your time, but gladly.”

 

IN THE EVENING, AT HOME, AFTER
a quick cold shower, Avraham made coffee for himself and drank it, black, on the balcony in his undershirt and underwear. The investigation file was open and he again read the beat cop's report from the scene that morning. Afterward he recalled Saban's speech, which was folded up in the pocket of his shirt that he'd taken off and hung in the bathroom. Most of the cops thought the speech was ridiculous, but in Avraham's eyes there was something in it that inspired hope.

He longed to tell Marianka about his day, but now, of all times, her phone was off. He couldn't remember if she was on a shift, one of her last with the Brussels Police Department before leaving and joining him.

There was something mysterious, inexplicable, in the difference between Benny Saban's determination and focus when he addressed his new subordinates for the first time and his nervousness and lack of confidence in their meeting in his office earlier in the day.

Saban had stood in the courtyard on the improvised platform and read from a sheet of paper. Despite the heat, he didn't sweat.

At the start of his speech he spoke about the summer.

“We had a long and difficult and violent summer,” he said. “In June, Tel Aviv's southern neighborhoods ignited. Refugee infiltrators without work or shelter . . . residents' increasing complaints and cases of sexual assault and burglary . . . organized acts of revenge . . . Molotov cocktails . . . arson of homes and refugee centers. At staff meetings there was a sense that at any moment the fire could start burning up here as well, but we knew how to contain it and prevent it from spreading.”

Avraham had been so removed from all of this, on a vacation that seemed like it would never end. He kept himself updated over the Internet, and from time to time with phone calls from Brussels to Eliyahu Ma'alul and Ilana.

His summer was joyful.

“Afterward came the protests. Every Saturday evening hundreds of policemen were detailed into the streets of Tel Aviv to maintain order and prevent violence during the legal and illegal protest marches. In one of the marches the barriers were breached and windows were smashed at downtown bank branches. At another demonstration one of the protesters set himself on fire and went up in flames. Every officer who could give additional hours did so.”

Later in the speech Saban reviewed the crime rates in the precinct. “The data shows that you had an excellent year,” he said. “You met the objectives that were placed before you, and even exceeded them. You lowered by five percent the number of house burglaries and property crimes. You recorded a decline of more than ten percent in vehicular burglary and theft. Thanks to your dedication there was a decline of seven percent in violent crimes in the precinct and a decline of eight percent in car accidents.” Someone in the audience applauded, and Saban said, “Yes, you definitely deserve applause.” Some joined in the clapping.