A Possibility of Violence (24 page)

He also wouldn't be traveling anymore through the dark morning streets, deserted except for the street cleaners.

Chaim wasn't sure that Avraham would bring the children until the sound of the door opening jolted him out of his thoughts and he saw the two of them before him. And suddenly he didn't know what to say.

15

THE BACKHOE OPERATOR COMMENCED WORK AT
five in the morning, and continued ever so slowly for some time in order not to compromise the integrity of the dead body. Jennifer Salazar was hidden in the yard under a cement path leading to the house of Sara's mother, which was paved after she was buried. Upon first inspection, there were no marks found on her corpse that contradicted the account Sara gave during the night. There were no evident signs of violence or injury, and the general swelling of the buried body suggested that the murder did indeed occur approximately three weeks earlier. In the brief report that Ma'alul composed at the scene in small, round letters and in his typically direct language, he wrote the following:

Salazar was buried in her clothes and wrapped from head to toe in a few layers of plastic sheeting in order to ward off the stench. And her possessions were found in the shed in the yard, as the suspect mentioned during his confession.

Avraham was not a witness to the disinterment of the body, and afterward he regretted this.

He brought Sara before the judge on duty for his remand and then oversaw the re-creation of the murder, which took place immediately afterward, so that Sara wouldn't change his version or have any second thoughts.

 

THE BUILDING ON AHARONOVITCH STREET WAS
dark and silent when they arrived there at three in the morning.

None of the neighbors woke up, or at least no one peeked into the stairwell when they walked up and paused before the door on the second floor. Sara's left hand was cuffed to Zaytuni's right and with his other hand he pointed out the correct key and Avraham opened the door.

It was his first visit to the apartment, but nevertheless it was familiar.

He entered all the rooms and turned on the lights in them. The apartment was clean and organized, perhaps because of the planned trip, and a sweet smell of cleaning supplies rose from the floor. This time Avraham planned not to leave a single door closed.

Sara looked confused even before the video team got started, as if his thoughts had wandered someplace else. Prior to this, at the station, after he collapsed before his children in the interrogation room, he actually calmed down, and delivered his detailed confession to Avraham in a quiet voice, while sipping from the tea that he asked to be brought to him. But when they arrived at the apartment he again grew tense and quiet and looked upset, as if he hadn't understood that they'd return there when he agreed to carry out the re-creation. He stood next to Zaytuni in the narrow entranceway and followed Avraham with his gaze while he opened the doors to the bedrooms and the bathroom and went into the small kitchen, with the old cupboards and the table covered in red Formica and surrounded by four short chairs. Afterward Avraham returned to the entryway and asked him to indicate which was the children's room, and with his free hand Sara pointed to the tiny room with the bunk beds on which sheets and blankets were folded.

According to his confession, the time of the re-creation was close to the time of day when the murder took place.

Zaytuni removed the handcuffs and Avraham asked Sara to show him on which side of the bed his wife lay and in what position—and he asked Zaytuni to lie in her place.

Jennifer Salazar lay on her back on the right side, close to the closet, and her eyes were closed when Sara got up from the bed,
he wrote in the report summary of the investigation. He stood behind Sara with a black microphone in his hand, the photographer standing next to them. Sara walked to the children's room to confirm that the two of them were sleeping and on the way back to the bedroom took the blue pillow from the sofa in the living room. Avraham hoped that he wouldn't close the bedroom door behind him, and he did indeed neglect to close it.

Zaytuni lay on the bed with eyes open as Sara placed the large pillow on the face of Jennifer Salazar and pushed it down forcefully with both hands. According to his confession, he couldn't see his wife wake up because her face was covered with the pillow, but she swung her hands toward him and tried to grab his hair and kicked the mattress a few times, and afterward stopped. Sara left the pillow on her face for a few minutes before removing it. And throughout this entire time the bedroom door was open.

Avraham asked Sara to repeat the action and Zaytuni to kick at the bed, and he left the bedroom and waited next to the doorway to the children's room. Because of the angle he saw nothing, but he heard the sounds of feet striking the mattress quite well.

 

TWO HOURS AFTER THIS, AT SIX
in the morning, on the Sunday after Yom Kippur, Amos Uzan and Ilanit Hadad were each put inside a squad car and transported from the police station in Eilat to Holon. Sara had already been moved to a holding cell in the Abu Kabir main detention center and Avraham returned to the station to wait.

Twenty minutes after the start of the trip the radios in both cars broadcast an announcement about an infiltration from the Egyptian border. All policemen in the southern district were asked to join the search, because some of the infiltrators were Bedouin who had smuggled in weapons from the Sinai. The police escorting Uzan and his girlfriend asked if they were to continue traveling to Holon, as planned, and received clear instructions over the radio, which both prisoners could hear. At a gas station they stopped and Ilanit Hadad was moved to the car in which Uzan was being transported, and the other car joined the search. Actually, it stopped and waited two kilometers away for additional directions from Avraham. In the meantime he drank his first coffee since the evening hours and ate a dry cinnamon roll, and went to smoke a cigarette outside the station. A bus rolled by him in the dark along Fichman Street with its headlights on and three passengers inside. Was this really the end? Visions of the reenactment and Sara's unclear confession wouldn't let go of him. He returned to his office and opened the investigation file in order to review his notes and suddenly noticed that the old picture of Jennifer Salazar that Garbo sent him wasn't in the cardboard folder. He had no particular need of the picture, but he looked for it among the documents in the folder and on his desk, and couldn't find it. He dispatched Zaytuni to search again for the letter that Sara claimed he wrote to his sons in the name of Jennifer Salazar and had buried in the suitcase that was moved from the airport to the station on Friday.

The police officer who remained at the gas station went to the bathroom, but first he asked the two detainees to exit the vehicle and he handcuffed them to an electric pole next to the entrance to the convenience store. He instructed them not to speak to each other, and when he returned he put them back into the car. A quarter of an hour later he received a radio message that the infiltrators had been caught and that the second car was returning to the gas station. The trip to Holon continued.

 

AMOS UZAN SMILED WHEN AVRAHAM ENTERED
the interrogation room where Sara had confessed a few hours earlier. He appeared relaxed when Avraham sat down across from him and said, “I promised that we'd see each other again. Do you remember?”

He wasn't supposed to interrogate him then; in fact, he had returned to the station for a meeting with Benny Saban, in white pants and the ridiculous peach-colored shirt that Marianka bought him and which he hadn't worn since then. Uzan laughed. “Right, you promised. So take a good look, so you won't miss me, because I'm not staying for long this time, either,” and added, “Can I get something cold to drink?” But the smile was wiped off his face when Avraham turned on the recording device and played him the short conversation he and his girlfriend had next to that random electric pole they were handcuffed to at the gas station. “Motherfucker,” he said and added, “That's not admissible, so you might as well slather it in Vaseline and shove it up your ass.” On the recording Uzan could be heard asking his girlfriend to be quiet during the interrogation and threatened that if she did speak, he'd dump everything on her and say that she had asked him to attack Chava Cohen. Ilanit Hadad didn't say a word during their brief conversation, only cried, and Uzan said, “Give it a rest. Just watch that mouth of yours and everything will be fine.”

Now it was Avraham's turn to smile, but he didn't.

In many senses he was indebted to Uzan, he thought.

If Uzan had broken during the first interrogation and admitted that he was involved in placing the bomb next to the daycare, Chaim Sara would be in Manila now with his two sons, if they were still alive, and no one would have thought of searching for their mother's body. He just said to Uzan, “We'll see about that in court. Now tell me, please, why you attacked Chava Cohen. Just because your girlfriend was fired from her job, or were there additional reasons?”

Uzan looked at him and asked, “Who's Chava Cohen?”

There was no point in persisting.

In the adjacent interrogation room Zaytuni played the same recording for Ilanit Hadad and easily convinced her to talk. And she told him everything: how Uzan thought up the plan to blackmail Chava Cohen, and how the teacher didn't give in to his demands despite the threats and fired her from her job, and how she placed the suitcase with the fake bomb that Uzan assembled next to the daycare, and arranged, at his request, the meeting with Chava Cohen by the beach in south Tel Aviv. She hadn't suspected that he planned on assaulting the teacher, and as far as she knew maybe he hadn't planned to do that at all, but the meeting turned into a violent argument and she wasn't able to stop Uzan when he lifted a rock and struck Chava in the chest and head.

Avraham rose from his seat and left, and Uzan called out behind him, “Did you give up? Just like that? Don't I even get a kiss good-bye on the cheek?”

In the entrance to the station Ilanit Hadad's parents sat waiting, and at first he didn't recognize them. But her mother ran up to him, weeping bitterly, and he remembered as she grabbed both his hands and said to him, “Let my girl go, I'm begging you. He kidnapped her, I swear, he took my girl and made her his puppet. None of this was her fault.”

The father stood next to her and didn't say a word, just as he had during the questioning in their apartment.

And only then did Avraham grasp what had happened since the day before.

Policemen stopped in the hallways of the station in order to shake his hand and his cell phone rang much more than usual, until he turned it off. Even Shrapstein knocked on the door of his office, peeked inside, and let slip, “Way to go.” At noon Benny Saban's secretary invited him up to his office and Saban received him at the entrance to the room with an awkward pat on the shoulder. He said to him, “You did great work, Avi. If you get a call from the commissioner, pretend you're surprised and don't let him know I told you he was going to call. And get ready for the star treatment from me,” and Avraham thanked him with an embarrassed smile.

The two investigations that had started together, without him knowing at first, concluded on the same day.

One opened with a suitcase holding a fake bomb placed near a daycare on Lavon Street in Holon, which had led only him to a second suitcase, in which were packed the clothes and toys of two little boys who were en route to be murdered in Manila, and to a third suitcase that was hidden in a shed and into which were hastily stuffed a dead woman's personal possessions.

Had he eaten in the cafeteria the flow of praise would have continued, but he ordered a tray and shut himself up in his office. He tried to transcribe the full confession that Sara had given at night in order to attach it to the investigation summary report but he couldn't do it. He ate slowly and felt the exhaustion spreading through every part of his body. The stewed beef he chewed had a strange taste, and he left most of it on the tray. There were moments from the tape of the interrogation that he watched again and again, but in the meantime he hadn't written a word.

He wanted to go home, to sleep, but he still had a long day ahead of him. He again searched for the photograph of Jennifer Salazar in the cardboard folder and among the papers scattered on the desk but he didn't find it, and he debated whether or not to call the jail and ask the guards to search for it among Sara's possessions. But there was something else he was missing, other than the picture, as if there was a false bottom in one of the suitcases that he hadn't discovered, or a secret compartment hidden inside it. He went to the evidence room, where Sara's suitcase was being kept, and tossed it onto the table, rummaged through the children's clothes, and even checked the toiletries bag. The letter that Sara claimed he wrote to his children in Jenny's name wasn't there. Had he lied about that as well? But if he hadn't lied, how had the letter disappeared?

The telephone in his office rang and Anselmo Garbo was on the line.

The Philippine detective sounded excited when he said to him in his sharp voice, “Inspector Avraham? Is that you? Can you hear me?”

He forgot that he had promised to keep Garbo apprised of developments.

“I have good news. We located Jennifer Salazar's sister in Berlin.”

Avraham waited a moment before saying quietly, “We already found her,” but Garbo misunderstood his response and asked, “The sister?” And Avraham said in a louder voice, “No, no. I mean Jennifer Salazar. The missing person. We found her corpse this morning. She's dead.” He apologized for not contacting him earlier, because he was busy with the investigation. The connection was bad, or Garbo was phoning from a place with poor reception, because he didn't hear his voice for a few seconds.

“How did she die?”

“She was murdered. Her husband murdered her.”

Garbo asked him to wait on the line and his voice disappeared again. The time in Manila was 7:00 p.m., and he was calling Israel in the middle of a dinner with the minister of police and other senior officers, and so he went out to the smoking vestibule at the Hotel Makati Shangri-La in order to continue the conversation without interruptions.