A Possibility of Violence (20 page)

THE SECURITY AGENT POINTED TOWARD THE
luggage-scanning machine and Chaim rolled the cart there. Ezer and Shalom walked behind him but he didn't see them. In front of him a young couple with backpacks and a baby in a carrier waited.

When his turn came he lifted up the suitcase and inserted it into the mouth of the machine, and he waited in place until the man working it instructed him to move to the other side. Shalom sobbed that they hadn't let him talk to his mother and Chaim heard Ezer say to him, “But maybe we'll see her in a little bit, Shalom, after we get off the plane.” The suitcase slid out of the machine, Chaim grabbed it, and they continued on to the airline counters.

He didn't ask himself then who it was he had spoken with but rather why he hadn't immediately returned the device to the security agent and told him that the voice coming out of it wasn't Jenny's voice. Because of the shock? Or the presence of the security agent and the looks of the children?

Midway through the conversation the possibility occurred to him that his mother had turned on Jenny's phone, understood what was happening, and impersonated Jenny—and therefore he wanted to hear that voice again. It couldn't be that his mother had taken the phone out of the shed, inserted a battery, and turned it on, but more impossible was the dim feeling that perhaps it truly was Jenny's voice, a feeling that he understood later was tied to the story he had told to his children, and also to the police detective, a feeling he would have many more times afterward. He'd held the old phone receiver in the bedroom at his mother's house and dialed Jenny's number in order for her to speak with the children, but there was no answer. This was on Rosh Hashanah. And later he did it from their house. A few days ago it even seemed to him that he sensed her walking behind him on the street and visiting the apartment in his absence. Perhaps this was a hope? He heard the counter attendant say, “Passports and tickets,” and he extended them to her distractedly. Afterward he loaded the suitcase onto the conveyor belt and accepted the tickets from her. She circled the details with a pen: “Gate B9, and boarding begins at seven forty-five.”

And maybe there was an additional reason he didn't immediately return the phone: the feeling that he had been caught. And that nothing could change that.

He waited for something else to happen, but nothing happened.

They stood a few minutes in the departure hall, without the suitcase that they had checked in, and waited for someone who didn't come. Ezer said to him, “Give me, Dad, it's heavy,” and took the large bag from him. For a moment he thought it was a good idea to leave the hall and breathe some air outside, and if they had indeed left, perhaps they wouldn't have returned.

Thousands of travelers moved all around them and no one paid them any attention.

He searched the crowd for a suspecting eye and didn't find one.

Suddenly from a distance he saw the young security agent questioning two young men. He took their passports from them and walked off and again conferred privately with the older agent, and returned to them with the phone up to his ear. Again and again he could hear the strange voice asking him, “Chaim, can you hear me? How are you?”

Jenny had never asked him how he was doing, and wouldn't have asked even if she were in the Philippines now.

Ezer said, “Dad, aren't we going?” and he answered yes, but then decided to call his mother and ask her if someone from the airport had contacted her. She said no, and asked him why he called, and he said it wasn't important. Then he asked her, “Where is Jenny's phone?”

She answered him in a whisper, surprised, “Where should it be?”

He could have asked her to go check in the shed but didn't.

“Are you on the plane already?” she asked, and he said, “Yes. Taking off any minute.”

 

THEY CONTINUED ON THEIR WAY AS
if nothing had happened, but Chaim already knew that, in the end, there would be no plane waiting for them. The voice of the woman who wasn't Jenny continued to speak inside his head, cheerful and smiling, like a voice from a life that wasn't his. In the passage to the hall where carry-on bags and travelers are checked with metal detectors they were asked to present passports. He held them out to the clerk, who looked for the stickers that the security agent had put on and allowed them to continue onward without looking at their faces. He held the children's hands tightly when they stood at the end of the long line of travelers waiting to be checked. It was precisely because nothing had happened since the phone conversation more than half an hour ago that the recognition that someone was waiting for them at the end of the road deepened inside him. And he thought about the children, about them only. Would they try to separate them from him? He could call his mother and ask her to come to the airport in a cab in order to be with them if something happened. Then he thought for the first time that if he were to be caught, he'd have to tell them the truth about Jenny.

Ezer placed the carryall on the conveyor belt of the X-ray machine and passed through the metal detectors without a peep. Chaim was asked to take off his shoes and remove his belt. He took his key chain and cell phone out of his pants pocket and placed them with the documents folder and his wallet on a tray that was itself passed through the X-ray machine. And still nothing happened. The keys and wallet and phone and documents were returned to him and another woman said to him, “Have a pleasant flight.”

Even the young policewoman at passport control performed her work with indifference. She checked the passports and asked, “Who is Ezer Sara?” and Ezer stood on the tips of his toes in front of the high counter and said, “I am.” She was forced to get up off her chair where she sat in the glass booth and bend forward in order to see Shalom, who stood next to his father.

Chaim waited to hear the sound of the stamp smacking the passport, but the policewoman paused.

When she rose from her place, opened the door to her booth, and said to him, quietly, “Could you come with me for a moment?” he knew that this was the moment he had been waiting for.

The end of the road.

He called to the children to walk behind him in the direction she indicated, and Ezer asked, “Dad, what happened?”

The policewoman walked behind them.

And he said to his son, “I guess there's another checkpoint.”

The distance to the closed door they were walking to was short, maybe fifteen or twenty steps, but Chaim carried Shalom there in his arms.

When they stood in front of the door, the policewoman said to him, “Could you put the child down, please? I need you to go inside here. I'll remain with the children.”

He already understood where he was entering, but did Ezer understand as well? Chaim said, “I want to go inside with them,” and the policewoman answered in a more forceful voice, “Sir, I suggest you go inside without arguing. The children will be fine right here.”

Shalom again cried when Chaim set him down, and there was fear in Ezer's eyes. He said to his son, “Watch Shalom for a minute, okay?” and opened the door and immediately turned back around to them, because he recognized in the room the detective who had questioned him at the station. But the policewoman closed the door behind him and he only got a glimpse of Ezer holding his younger brother's hand.

13

WHEN THE CASE WAS CLOSED AND
Jennifer Salazar's body had been found, Avraham thought how close Sara had come to evading them that morning, and returning from Manila without his children.

He detained him for questioning at the last moment, but that only happened thanks to a sudden breakthrough, and in spite of Ilana's fierce opposition. And even during the interrogation at the airport there were moments when it seemed to Avraham that he was wrong and would have to release Sara. At one point his confidence was shaken to such an extent that he was about to stop the interrogation, and were it not for the burning sensation that he might be leaving Sara's children in truly life-threatening danger, he might have done so.

But something inside him refused to give up.

 

THE DAY BEFORE THE ARREST WAS
nerve-racking, and in the end he again hardly slept a wink.

Until the evening hours he hadn't found a solution to the problem of a pretext for the interrogation and he saw before his eyes Sara and his sons disappearing into the tunnel leading them to the plane the next day. The ticktock in his ears wouldn't stop. He recalled Sara sitting in his office during the previous interrogation. The first time they met. Sara was questioned then as a witness and in connection to a different matter. To Avraham it seemed that he volunteered the information that his wife had gone to Manila, without being asked. That same evening, Marianka asked him if he thought that Sara was involved in placing the bomb, and he hesitated. He couldn't say. He told Marianka that he didn't intend to trust anyone. And he was right. But then he didn't suspect that Sara had harmed his wife, or that he was planning on harming his children. Only at eight thirty, when he was sitting in Cup o' Joe, outside the mall next to the station, and eating dinner, did the solution to the problem of the pretext appear to him and he rushed to return to his office and called Anselmo Garbo.

In Manila the time was two o'clock and Avraham woke Garbo from his sleep. He apologized and explained why he was calling at such a late hour and Garbo asked him to wait on the line while he moved to his study in order to light a pipe and continue the conversation without waking his girlfriend. In his imagination Garbo wore a thin dressing gown and sank into a leather armchair in front of a dark wooden writing desk. He listened to Avraham patiently and finally said, “Wonderful idea. In a few more minutes the document will be sent. And I thank you for taking the initiative.”

That was the breakthrough, and Avraham was as proud of it as he had been of only a few investigative actions in his life.

Ilana strongly disapproved of the idea, as expected, and told him in a harsh voice, “You did something that is
not done
, Avi.” She was still certain he was fabricating a missing-persons case and added things similar to what she had said during their previous conversation, and he waited for her to finish chewing him out and said, “Maybe you're right, Ilana, but there's nothing that can be done now. The complaint has been submitted. And I promise you we won't have to apologize. Would you prefer Sara being arrested in Manila?”

He knew that she wouldn't have any choice but to authorize him to detain Sara for questioning at the airport, and even before he called her, he summoned Zaytuni and Ma'alul from their homes in order to prepare the operation.

At first he thought they'd need to instruct one of the security agents at the airport, but it turned out that Zaytuni had worked there during college. He contacted the heads of security and obtained permission to impersonate a security agent and greet Sara when he arrived at the terminal. The security company's uniform suited him better than a police uniform, and Ma'alul snapped a picture of him on his cell phone so that they'd have a keepsake.

The time was Thursday, 1:00 a.m., and not one of them went to sleep.

The official request from the External Relations Unit of the Philippine Police arrived by fax and e-mail:

B
RIGADIER
G
ENERAL
A
NSELMO
G
ARBO, CHIEF OF THE
M
ANILA
P
OLICE'S
D
EPARTMENT OF
C
RIMINAL
I
NVESTIGATIONS AND
S
URVEILLANCE
,
DEMANDS THAT THE
I
SRAELI POLICE OPEN AN INVESTIGATION WITHOUT DELAY INTO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF
P
HILIPPINE CITIZEN
J
ENNIFER
S
ALAZAR
.

Avraham added the official request to the file of the new investigation:
Salazar case
. In his office, when they reviewed the few materials that had been collected in the file, Ma'alul surprised him and said, “Do you remember the weird neighbor from Ofer Sharabi's building? Avni? The telephone ruse reminds me of what we did to the parents then—you know, with his help—remember?” Avraham smiled and didn't answer. Would Sara have been caught had Avraham not read the report that Ilana wrote about the mistakes he made in that investigation?

Zaytuni arrived at the airport at a quarter to five and grabbed a spot among the security personnel in Area E, across from the Korean Air counters. Avraham and Ma'alul waited at the station to be notified that Sara had left his home, then set out in a cab toward Ben-Gurion.

They traveled in Avraham's car and entered the terminal through a rear entrance a few minutes after Sara arrived.

The two of them sat tensely in the small interrogation room next to Charito, the Filipino woman who spoke in the name of Jennifer Salazar, when she received the phone call from Zaytuni, disguised as an agent, and heard her say to Sara, as they had asked her, “Chaim, you won't forget to buy me what I asked for from the duty-free, right? Don't forget,” and Ma'alul signaled to Charito with a rolling hand motion to keep the conversation going. She was married to the brother of one of the cops in the district, and in the past she had assisted the police with simultaneous translation and in deciphering documents. When she returned Avraham's phone to him, she asked in Hebrew, embarrassed, “Okay? You think?” as if she had just turned in a performance in front of an audience on
Israel's Got Talent
, and Ma'alul said to Avraham, “Maybe you and me and Zaytuni should go to the Philippines with their tickets?”

In his eyes the phone conversation was a sure sign that Sara was hiding something from them and a green light to continue the investigation, but Ilana listened to his detailed update without enthusiasm.

All the police officers at passport control were briefed and waited for Sara and his sons.

An adjacent interrogation room was put at Ma'alul's disposal in order to watch the children during the father's interrogation, but also, unofficially, so that he might try to draw them out and glean from them as much information as possible. He prepared drawing paper and markers, ostensibly so that they'd have something to play with while they waited.

Avraham drank black coffee and hastily smoked a cigarette in a smoking area for airport employees, next to a cleaning woman who leaned on a squeegee and let the ashes of her cigarette fall slowly into a bucket of water. The waiting continued, because Sara lingered in the departure hall after checking in his suitcase. At seven they finally saw him on the monitor, advancing toward one of the police workstations, and Avraham entered the interrogation room, to wait for him.

Like his office at the station, the room was narrow and naked, and windowless. At its center was a gray table, on both sides of which were simple metal chairs upholstered with purple fabric. And a folding partition stood in the corner. On the table, at the start of the interrogation, were only a recording device and the cardboard folder in which was printed the report Garbo sent and the formal appeal to open the investigation and a sheet of paper that summarized in black Sharpie everything he knew.

Jennifer Salazar left Israel on September 12 and has not returned
, he wrote at the top of the paper. Then:

She's forty-two years old and has resided in Israel continuously since 2005.

In his testimony from the previous interrogation, Sara said that she had traveled to Manila to take care of her sick father, but the local police officially confirmed that she hadn't entered the Philippines, and that her father died quite a few years ago. And the main thing: a short while ago Sara pretended that he was conversing with her on the telephone even though he wasn't speaking with her but rather with a stranger. For now, that was the only concrete sign that Sara had lied when asked where his wife was—and not she who had lied to her husband about the place she'd traveled to, as Ilana thought.

 

THE TIME WAS 7:09 A.M. ON
Friday, Yom Kippur Eve, when Sara opened the interrogation room door in the Department of Border Control at Ben-Gurion Airport. Avraham saw the handle turn and after that the expression on Sara's face when he recognized him, and then turned around as the door was closing, but not so quickly that Avraham didn't manage to get a look at Sara's sons for a brief moment, for the first time.

His firstborn was tall and thin, almost adolescent from his appearance. The skin of his face was dark and his eyes were long and narrow. The younger son had long, straight, brown hair, and his eyes were also foreign, but less so than his brother's.

This wasn't how Avraham had imagined them when he visualized them the day before—being led to the plane, with Avraham extending a hand to them but failing to reach them.

He sat on the chair facing the door and waited to meet Sara's eyes when the door opened.

Shock and fear were evident in them, and Avraham thought that they immediately gave him away.

He wasn't in the interrogation room when Ofer Sharabi's father broke under the heavy pressure administered by Shrapstein and admitted to killing his son, but Avraham had no doubt that the same look had been there in his eyes. And Sara didn't evade him. He had fallen into the trap he had set for him and now he was in his hands, and Avraham had no intention of letting him go until he knew what he had done to his wife and what he planned on doing to his children, and, even more so, why. He didn't yet have an answer to this question, and without it he couldn't eliminate his doubt about what Sara had done and what his plans were.

He waited for Sara to understand that he had to sit down across from him, and with a very slow, very deliberate motion removed the photograph of Jennifer Salazar from the cardboard folder and placed it on the table without saying a word. He recalled that the last time they sat across from one another, in his office at the station, he felt a certain pity for Sara. He pictured the older father leading his son into the daycare among all the parents many years younger than he was. His son came home from daycare bruised, and he tried to speak about this with Chava Cohen, who humiliated him in front of parents and children and refused to listen to him. Only a few days after this, Sara became a prime suspect in the placement of the fake bomb and the assault on the teacher, and Avraham looked at him differently when he trailed him downtown and saw him enter the travel agency. He had to imagine him waiting for Chava Cohen in the middle of the night in south Tel Aviv and attacking her cruelly, and he succeeded in visualizing him doing this, because Sara had a motive. But he was mistaken—Sara wasn't the assailant, it was Uzan after all. And now he had to imagine Sara doing something else. To imagine if he was capable of harming his wife, and why, and, beyond that, if he intended on harming his children. And perhaps precisely because he was sure of so little, Avraham felt a need to project confidence. At the start of the interrogation his questioning strategy was direct and aggressive. He battered Sara, hoping to shake him. He often fell silent, extending these moments in order to intensify Sara's fear and uncertainty. He asked his first question at 7:13. It was: “Where is your wife?” And Sara didn't answer.

The two of them were quiet for some time before Avraham said, “I have no doubt that you know where she is,” and again waited.

Sara sat across from him expressionless, without moving. His gaze wandered all over the table, though he avoided looking at the picture lying in front of him.

Avraham asked his second question at 7:16.

“Aren't you worried about your children? Are you going to let them wait a long time?” he said quietly, and Sara looked at him with amazement, as if he didn't remember that until a few minutes ago his children were with him.

 

THAT WAS ONE OF THE THINGS
that confused Avraham that morning.

When the initial surprise passed, Sara looked to him less tense than he had been during the interrogation at the station. In that first meeting he'd identified a stressed nervousness in his face, but now he seemed almost calm. He wore brown slacks secured with a belt and a thin, dark-green sweater under which the tattered collar of a white button-down shirt that had gone gray peeked through. He ignored most of the direct questions Avraham presented him with at the start of the interrogation regarding his wife, and only to the general questions that were asked about their life did he respond briefly and without fear. In Avraham's eyes the calm and silence were signs that he hadn't been mistaken. Sara didn't object even once to being detained for interrogation, not even when the questioning was extended and it was clear that he would miss his flight, and he didn't demand to know for what crime he was being questioned or where his children were.

This is the calm that descends on someone when he's finally been caught, he thought.

Sara no longer needed to escape.

He hunkered down into his silence as if it were a cave and waited for the storm to come, and Avraham wasn't able to extract him from there, not that day.

But what if Ilana was right and he was mistaken, even in the way he interpreted Sara's calm and his silence? Almost until the end of the first interrogation he couldn't entirely manage to eliminate the doubt she stirred up in him. He recalled that when they worked on one of their first cases together, an investigation into the abuse of senior citizens at a nursing home in Holon, Ilana asked him, “Do you know what the difference is between human beings and animals? Human beings talk. They can't not talk. Do you know what I mean? If you're patient and ask enough of the right questions, in the end everyone starts talking.”