Текст книги "The Butcher's Theatre"

Автор книги: Jonathan Kellerman

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The young man saw him and ground out his cigarette on the marble floor. Inconsiderate, thought Daniel. He was about to ask him what his business was, in English, when the young man began walking toward him, hand extended, saying, in fluent, native Hebrew: "Pakad Sharavi? I'm Avi Cohen. I've been assigned to your team. I got the message late last night and thought I'd come over and check in personally."

Sophisticated rich kid, thought Daniel, irritated that his intuition had been wrong. North Tel-Avivnik. Politician's son with plenty of travel experience. Which explained the foreign threads. He took the hand and let go of it quickly, surprised at how much instant dislike he'd built up for the new hire.

"The briefing was yesterday," he said.

"Yes, I know," said Cohen, matter-of-factly, without apology. "I was moving into a new flat. No phone. Tat Nitzav Laufer sent a messenger over but he got lost."

A smile, full of boyish charm. No doubt it had worked wonders with Asher Davidoff's blonde. A samal connected to the deputy commander-what was a rich kid like this doing as a policeman?

Daniel walked toward the door.

"I'm ready, now," said Cohen, tagging along.

"Ready for what?"

"My assignment. Tat Nitzav Laufer told me it's a heavy case."

"Did he?"

"Sex cutting, no motive, no suspect-"

"Do you and Tat Nitzav Laufer confer regularly?"

"No," said Cohen flustered. "He… my father-"

"Never mind," said Daniel, then remembered that the kid's father had died recently, and softened his tone.

"I was sorry to hear about your father."

"Did you know him?" asked Cohen, surprised.

"Just by reputation."

"He was a tough guy, a real ball-breaker." Cohen uttered it automatically, without emotion, as if it were a psalm that he'd recited hundreds of times before. Daniel felt his hostility toward the new hire rise again. Pushing the door open, he let it swing back for Cohen to catch and stepped out into the sunlight. There was an unfamiliar car in the parking lot. A red BMW 330i.

"My assignment, Pakad?"

"Your assignment is to be present for all meetings at precisely the time they're called."

"I told you, my flat-"

"I'm not interested in excuses, only results."

Cohen's eyebrows lowered. His icy blue eyes clouded with anger.

"Is that understood, Samal Cohen?"

"Yes, Pakad." The right thing to say, but with a hint of arrogance in the tone. Daniel let it pass.

"You'll be assigned to Mefakeah Nahum Shmeltzer. Call him at eight tomorrow morning and do what he tells you to do. In the meantime, there are some files I want you to go through. At National Headquarters-the computer boys are getting them ready." He reached into the envelope, drew out a photo, and handed it to Cohen. "Go through each file and see if you can find a match with this one. Don't look only for exact matches-take into account that she may have changed her hair style or aged a bit since the file was opened. If there's any sort of resemblance, set it aside. Keep meticulous records, and when in doubt, ask questions. Got it?"

"Yes." Cohen looked at the picture and said, "Young."

"A very astute observation," said Daniel. Turning his back, he walked away.

He covered the three-kilometer walk quickly, with little regard for his surroundings, walking southwest, then west on Yehuda HaNasi, where he entered the Katamonim. The neighborhood started deteriorating when he came to Katamon Eight. Some evidence of renewal was visible: a newly painted building here, a freshly planted tree there. The government had been pushing it until the recession hit. But for the most part it was as he remembered it: curbless streets cracked and litter-strewn; what little grass there was, brown and dry. Laundry billowed from the rust-streaked balconies of decaying cinder-block buildings, the bunkerlike construction harking back to pre-'67 days, when south Jerusalem faced Jordanian guns, the sudden, murderous sniping attributed by the Arabs to a soldier "gone berserk."

Berserk marksmen. Lots of shootings. Bitter jokes had arisen: The psychiatric wards of Amman had been emptied in order to staff Hussein's army.

The change of borders in '67 had brought about a shift in character in other poor districts-Yemin Moshe with its cobbled alleys and artists' studios, so inflated now that only foreigners could afford it; even Musrara had begun looking a little better-but the lower Katamonim remained a living monument to urban blight.

During his rookie days, he'd driven patrol here, and though his own origins had been anything but affluent, the experience had depressed him. Prefab buildings knocked up hastily for tides of Jewish immigrants from North Africa, strung together like railroad cars and sectioned into dreary one-hundred-square-meter flats that seemed incurably plagued with mildew and rot. Tiny windows built for safety but now unnecessary and oppressive. Rutted streets, empty fields used for garbage dumps. The flats crammed with angry people, boiling in the summer, clammy and cold in the winter. Fathers unemployed and losing face, the wives easy targets for tirades and beatings, the kids running wild in the streets. A recipe for crime-just add opportunity.

The pooshtakim had hated him. To them, the Yemenites were an affront, poorer than anyone, different-looking, regarded as primitives and outsiders. Smiling fools-you could beat them and they'd smile. But those smiles reflected an unerring sense of faith and optimism that had enabled the Yemenites to climb up the economic ladder with relative haste. And the fact that their crime rate was low was a slap in the face to the poverty excuse.

Where else could that lead but to scapegoating? He'd been called Blackie more times than he could count, ridiculed and ignored and forced to come down hard on defiant punks. A hell of an initiation. He'd endured it, gradually ingratiated himself with some of them, and done his job. But though it had been his idea to work there in the first place, he'd welcomed the completion of his assignment.

Now he was back, on a Shabbat, no less, embarking on an outing that was a long shot at best.

On the surface, coming down here did have a certain logic to it. The girl was poor and Oriental, maybe a street girl. Though other neighborhoods bred that type, too, Eight and Nine were the right places to start.

But he admitted to himself that a good part of it was symbolic-setting a good example by showing the others that a pakad was still willing to work the streets. And laying to rest any suspicions that a religious pakad would use Shabbat as an excuse to loaf.

He despised the idea of disrupting the Sabbath, resented the break in routine that separated him from family and ritual. Few cases made that kind of demand on him, but this one was different. Although the dead girl was beyond help, if a madman was at work, he wouldn'd stop at one. And the saving of a life overrode Shabbat.

Still, he did what he could to minimize the violation– wearing the beeper but carrying no money or weapon, walking instead of driving, using his memory rather than pen and paper to record his observations. Doing his best to think of spiritual things during the empty moments that constituted so much of a detective's working life.

An elderly Moroccan couple approached him, on their way to synagogue, the husband wearing an outsized embroidered kipuh, mouthing psalms, walking several paces ahead of his wife. In Eight and Nine, only the old ones remained observant.

"Shabbat shalom," he greeted them and showed them the picture.

The man apologized for not having his glasses, said he couldn't see a thing. The woman looked at it, shook her head, and said, "No. What happened? Is she lost?"

"In a way," said Daniel, thanking them and moving on.

The scene repeated itself a score of times. On Rehov San Martin, at the southern tip of Nine, he encountered a group of muscular, swarthy young men playing soccer in a field. Waiting until a goal had been scored, he approached them. They passed the photo around, made lewd comments, and giving it back to him, resumed their game.

He continued on until eleven, eating a late breakfast of shrugs, ignorance, and bad jokes, feeling like a rookie again. Deciding that he'd been stupid to waste his time and abandon his family in the name of symbolism, he began the return trip in a foul mood.

On his way out of Eight, he passed a kiosk that had been closed when he'd entered the district, a makeshift stand where children stood in line for ice cream and candy bars. Approaching, he noticed that a particularly sickening-looking blue ice seemed to be the favorite.

The proprietor was a squat Turk in his fifties, with black-rimmed eyeglasses, bad teeth, and a three-day growth of beard. His shirt was sweat-soaked and he smelled of confection. When he saw Daniel's kipah, he frowned.

"No Shabbat credit. Cash only."

Daniel showed him his ID, removed the photo from the envelope.

"Aha, police. They force a religious one to work today?"

"Have you seen this girl?"

The man took a look, said casually, "Her? Sure. She's an Arab, used to work as a maid at the monks' place in the Old City."

"Which monks' place?"

"The one near the New Gate."

"Saint Saviour's?"

"Yeah." The Turk peered closely at the photo, turned serious. "What's the matter with her? Is she-"

"Do you know her name?"

"No idea. Only reason I remember her at all is that she was good-looking." Another downward glance: "Someone got her, right?"

Daniel took the picture away from him. "Your name, please, adoni."

"Sabhan, Eli, but I don't want to get involved in this, okay?"

Two little girls in T-shirts and flowered pants came up to the counter and asked for blue ice bars. Daniel stepped aside and allowed Sabhan to complete the transaction. After the Turk had pocketed the money, he came forward again and asked, "What were you doing at the Saint Saviour's monastery, Adon Sabhan?"

The Turk waved his hand around the interior of the kiosk and gave a disgusted look.

"This is not my career. I used to have a real business until the fucking government taxed me out of it. Painting and plastering. I contracted to paint the monks' infirmary and finished two walls before some Arabs underbid me and the so-called holy men kicked me off the job. All those brown-robes-fucking anti-Semites."

"What do you know about the girl?"

"Nothing. I just saw her. Scrubbing the floor."

"How long ago was this?"

"Let's see-it was before I went bust, which would be about two weeks."

Two weeks, thought Daniel. Poor guy's just gone under. Which could explain all the anger.

"Did you ever see her with anyone else, Adon Sabhan?"

"Just her mop and pail." Sabhan wiped his face with his hand, leaned in, and said conspiratorially: "Ten to one, one of the brown-robes did her in. She was raped, wasn't she?"

"Why do you say that?"

"A guy has needs, you know? It's not normal, the way they live-no sex, the only women in sight a few dried-up nuns. That's got to do something to your mind, right? Young piece like that comes around, no bra, shaking like jelly, squatting down, someone gets heated up and boom, right?"

"Did you ever observe any conflict between her and the monks?"

Sabhan shook his head.

"What about between her and anyone else?"

"Nah, I was busy painting," said Sabhan, "my face to the wall. But take my word for it, that's what happened."

Daniel asked him a few more questions, got nothing more, and examined the Turk's business license. On it was listed a Katamon Two home address. He committed it to memory and left the kiosk, heart pounding. Quickening his pace to a jog, he retraced his path but turned east onto Ben Zakai, then northeast, making his way up toward the Old City.

He'd reached the David Remez intersection, just yards from the city walls, when his beeper went off.

"What's he like?" Avi Cohen asked Shmeltzer.

"Who?"

They were sitting in a gray, windowless room at Headquarters, surrounded by file folders and sheaves of computer print-out. The room was freezing and Cohen's arms were studded with goose bumps. When he'd asked Shmeitzer about it, the old guy had shrugged and said, "The polygraph officer next door, he likes it that way." As if that explained it.

"Sharavi," said Cohen, opening a missing-kid file. He gazed at the picture and put it atop the growing mounting of rejects. Donkey work-a cleaning woman could do it.

"What do you mean, what's he like?"

Shmeitzer's tone was sharp and Cohen thought: Touchy bastards, all them in this section.

"As a boss," he clarified.

"Why do you ask?"

"Just curious. Forget I asked."

"Curious, eh? You generally a curious fellow?"

"Sometimes." Cohen smiled. "It's supposed to be a good quality in a detective."

Shmeitzer shook his head, lowered his eyes, and ran his index finger down a column of names. Sex offenders, hundreds of them.

They'd been working together for two hours, collating, sorting, and for two hours the old guy had worked without complaining. Hunched over the list, making subfiles, cross-referencing, checking for aliases or duplicates. Not much of a challenge for a mefakeah, thought Cohen, but it didn't seem to bother him. Probably a burnout, liked playing it safe.

His own assignment was even more tedious: going through more than 2,000 missing-kid files and matching them up with the photo of the cutting victim. Only 1,633 were open cases, the computer officer had assured him. Only. But someone had mistakenly left more than 400 solved ones mixed in.

He'd made a remark about clerical incompetence to Shrneltzer, who replied, "Don't gripe. You never know where your next lead will come from. She could be one who'd been found, then ran away again-wouldn't hurt to look at all the closed ones." Great.

"He's a good boss," Shmeitzer. "You hear any different?"

"No." Cohen came across a photo of a girl from Romema who resembled the dead girl. Not exactly, but close enough to put aside.

"Just curious, eh?"

"Right."

"Listen," said the old man, "you're going to hear stuff– that he made it because of protekzia or because he's a Yemenite. Forget all that crap. The protekzia may have gotten him started but"-he smiled meaningfully-"nothing wrong with connections, is there, son?"

Cohen blushed furiously.

"And as far as the Yemenite stuff goes, they may very well have been looking for a token blackie, but by itself that wouldn't have done the trick, understand?"

Cohen nodded, flipped the pages of a file.

"He got to where he is because he does his job and does it well. Which is something, Mr. Curious, that you might consider for yourself."

Daoud looked terrible. One glance told Daniel that he'd been up all night. His tan suit was limp and dirt-streaked, his white shirt grayed by sweat. Coppery stubble barbed his face and made his wispy mustache seem even more indistinct. His hair was greasy and disordered, furrowed with finger-tracks, his eyes swollen and bloodshot. Only the hint of a smile-faintest upturning of lips-which he struggled manfully to conceal-suggested that the morning had been other than disastrous.

"Her name is Fatma Rashmawi," he said. "The family lives up there, in the house with the arched window. Father, two wives, three sons, four daughters, two daughters-in-law, assorted grandchildren. The men are all masons. Two of the sons left for work at seven. The father stays home-injured."

"The pools," said Daniel. "Your hunch was right."

"Yes," said Daoud.

They stood near the top of Silwan, concealed in a grove of olive trees. The residence Daoud indicated was of intermediate size, sitting at the edge of a dry white bluff, set apart from its neighbors. A plain house, ascetic even, the masonry arch above the front window the sole decorative detail.

"How did you find them?"

"An idiot helped me. Deaf kid name of Nasif, lives down there, with a widowed mother. I came across him yesterday and he seemed to recognize the picture, kept calling her a bad girl, but he was too stupid for me to believe it meant anything. Then the mother came out, showed no sign of recognition, and claimed the boy was talking nonsense. So I left and went to the Old City, did a little work in the Muslim Quarter. But it kept bothering me-I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen the girl at the pools. So I came back this morning and leaned on her for a while and finally she told me. After pleading with me not to let on that she'd talked-apparently the Rashmawis are a hotheaded bunch, old-fashioned. Father's the king; the kids stay under his thumb even after they marry. Fatma was the youngest and somewhat of a rebel-pop music, an eye for the boys. There were quarrels, the father and brothers beat her, and she ran away or was kicked out about two months ago-at least that's what Mrs. Nasif says. According to her, no one's seen Fatma since then and she claims no one has any idea where she went. But she may be lying, still holding back. She was frightened-the message between the lines was that the Rashmawis were capable of doing violence to the girl or anyone else who broke their rules."

Families, thought Daniel. The same old story? He found it hard to reconcile what had been done to Fatma Rashmawi with a family squabble. Still, the case was starting to take form. Names, places, the signposts of reality.

"I have an idea where she went," he said, and told Daoud the Turk's story about Saint Saviour's.

"Yes, that would make sense," said Daoud, green eyes sparkling from beneath thickened lids.

"You did excellent work," said Daniel. "Absolutely first-rate."

"Just following procedure," Daoud insisted, but he stood up straight, threw back his shoulders with pride.

A cock crowed and a warm breeze rustled the leaves of the olive trees. The ground was soft with fallen olives, the air marinated with the salt smell of rotting fruit.

Daniel looked up at the Rashmawi house.

"We'll go together and talk to them," he said. "But not right now. Drive over to Kishle and phone the others. Shmeltzer should be at French Hill, in Records. Tell him what we've learned and have him do background checks on the Rashmawis and any of their kin. Find out, also, if a file's ever been opened on Fatma. The Chinaman will probably be on beeper-have him come here and meet me. You go home, wash up, eat something, and come back at two. We'll proceed from there."

"Yes, sir," said Daoud, writing it all down.

The front door of the Rashmawi house opened and a young pregnant woman came out, carrying a rolled-up rug. A swarm of small children tumbled out behind her. The woman unfurled the rug, held it with one hand, and began beating it with a stick. The children danced around her as if she were a maypole, squealing with delight as they tried to grab hold of dissolving dust swirls.

"Anything else, Pakad?" asked Daoud.

"Nothing until two. Go home, spend some time with your family."

Daniel waited in the grove for the Chinaman to arrive, observing the comings and goings of the village, keeping one eye fixed upon the Rashmawi house. At twelve-thirty, a woman-not the rug beater-came out and purchased eggplant and tomatoes from a peddler who'd managed to wheel his cart to the upper level. By twelve thirty-nine she was back in the house. The kids ran in and out of the door, teasing and chasing each other. Other than that, no activity.

The case seemed to be drawing him back in time. This morning in the Katamonim, and now, Silwan.

He scanned the village, wondered which of the houses was the one where his great-grandfather-the man whose name hbe bore-had grown up. Strange, he'd heard so many stories about the old days but had never bothered to check.

Dinner table stories, recited like a liturgy. Of how hundreds of the Jews of San'a had fled the Yemenite capital, escaping from rising levels of Muslim persecution. Crossing the mountains and setting out in search of the Holy Land, Of how the first Daniel Sharavi had been one of them, arriving in Jerusalem in the summer of 1881, an undernourished ten-year-old in the company of his parents. Of how the Jews of San'a hadn't been welcomed with open arms.

The other residents of Jewish Jerusalem-the Sephardim and Ashkenazim-hadn't known what to make of these small, brown, kinky-haired people who stood at their doorsteps, near-naked and penniless but smiling. Speaking Hebrew with a strange accent and claiming to be Jews who had braved storm and pestilence, climbing mountains on foot, walking through the desert from Arabia, subsisting on seeds and honey.

Jerusalem, in those days, hadn't spread beyond the Old City walls-two square kilometers stuffed with ten thousand people, a third of them Jewish, almost all of them poor, living on donations from the Diaspora. Sanitation was primitive, raw sewage flowing through the streets, the cisterns polluted, epidemics of cholera and typhoid a way of life. The last thing the residents of the Jewish Quarter needed was a band of pretenders leeching off their beleaguered communities.

After much head scratching, a test of Jewishness had been devised, the leaders of the Yemenities whisked into synagogue and tested on the finer points of Scripture by Sephardic and Ashkenazic rabbis.

Great-great-grandfather Sa'adia, so the story went, had been the first to be quizzed. A goldsmith and teacher, a learned man with a fine, pure nature. When called upon, he'd begun reciting rapidly from the Book of Genesis, letter-perfect, without pause. Questions regarding the most obscure tractates of Talmud elicited an identical response-text and commentaries recited fluently, the finer points of jurisprudence explained concisely and clearly.

The rabbis excused Sa'adia and called upon another man, who performed similarly. As did the next man, and the next. Yemenite after Yemenite knew the Torah by heart. When questioned about this, the little brown people explained that books were scarce in San'a, forcing everyone to use his head. In many cases a single volume was shared around the table, with one person learning to read conventionally, another upside down, still others from the left or right side. Happily, they demonstrated those talents, and the rabbis observed, astonished. The issue of Jewishness was laid to rest, the new arrivals allowed to share the poverty of their brethren.

In the beginning they settled just outside the walls, in the spot called Silwan, near the Siloam Pool, working as masons and laborers, living in tents while they built stone houses, moving, over the years, back into the Old City, into the Jewish Quarter the Arabs called Al Sion, in order to be nearer to the Wailing Place, a stone's throw from the Tomb of David.

It was there, within the walls, that Daniel's grandfather and father had been born, and from where he himself had been carried off as an infant in '48, rescued by strangers, squalling in terror under the thunder of gunfire.

My origins, he thought, gazing out at the village. But he felt no pangs of nostalgia, saw only the origins of a dead girl.

Warm beer, thought the Chinaman, quickening his pace. He'd been prepared to report his information on the girl, thought he'd done a pretty good job for one night out, until the Arab had called and told him of the ID. Sharp guy, Daoud. Still, the boyfriend angle was a contribution.

The village had come alive, shutters spreading, doors nudged open, a buzz of mutters and whispers trailing the detectives' footsteps. The corneal glint of the curious sparkled from grated windows, receding into the shadows at the hint of eye contact with the strangers.

"Probably looks like a raid to them," said the Chinaman.

Neither Daniel nor Daoud responded. Both were concentrating on walking quickly enough to keep up with the big man's stride.

They reached the Rashmawi house and climbed the front steps. The arched window was open but covered with a bright floral drape. From inside came a drone of Arabic music and the aroma of coffee laced with cardamom.

Daniel knocked on the door. There was no immediate answer and he knocked again, louder. At once the volume of the music lowered and was overriden by conversation. The sound of shuffling feet grew louder and the door opened. A young man stood in the doorway-eighteen or nineteen, slender, and round-faced with a prematurely receding hairline. A pair of heavy tortoise-shell eyeglasses dominated a mild face pitted with acne scars. He wore a cheap gray shirt, beltless gray trousers a size too large, and black bedroom slippers. Looking over his shoulder, he came out to the top step, closed the door behind him, and stared at each of them, dark eyes swimming behind thick lenses.

"Yes?" His voice was soft, tentative.

"Good afternoon," said Daniel, in Arabic. "I'm Chief Inspector Sharavi of the Police Department. This is Sub-inspector Lee and this is Sergeant Daoud. Your name, please?"

"Rashmawi, Anwar."

"What's your relationship to Muhamid Rashmawi?"

"He's my father. What's this about, sir?" There was a curious lack of surprise in the question. The flat, sad nuance of anticipated misfortune.

"We'd like to come in and talk with your father."

"He's not a well man, sir."

Daniel took out the photo of Fatma and showed it to him. The young man stared at it, lips trembling, eyes blinking rapidly. For a moment it seemed as if he would break into tears. Then he wiped his face clean of expression, held the door open for them, and said, "Come in, sirs."

They entered a long, narrow, low-ceilinged room, freshly whitewashed and surprisingly cool, its stone floor covered by frayed, overlapping Oriental rugs and mattresses draped with embroidered coverlets. A rug hung also from the rear wall, next to a row of coat hooks and a framed photograph of Gamal Abdel Nasser. All the other walls were bare.

Directly under Nasser's portrait was a portable television on an aluminium stand. The coffee aroma came from a small cooking area to the left: wood stove, hot plate, homemade shelves bearing pots and utensils. A battered iron saucepan sat on the stove, sizzling over a low fire. The stove's exhaust conduit rose and pierced the ceiling. Across the room, to the right, was a flimsy-looking wooden door and from behind it came female voices, the cries and laughter of children.

An old man sat on a mattress in the center of the room, thin, sun-baked, and wrinkled as an old shopping bag. His bare head was bald and conspicuously pale, his mustache a grizzled rectangle of white filling the space between nose and upper lip. He wore a pale-gray jallabiyah striped faintly with darker gray. An unfurled kaffiyah headdress and coil lay in his lap. To his right was a small carved table upon which sat an engraved brass pitcher and matching demitasse cup, a pack of Time cigarettes, and a string of worry beads. His left hand held a red plastic transistor radio. One of his feet was curled under him; the other extended straight out and was wrapped in bandages. Next to the ankle was an assortment of vials and ointments in squeeze-tubes. Just behind the medicines, another carved table held a well-foxed copy of the Quran within arm's reach.

He stared downward, as if studying the pattern of the rug, a cigarette dangling from his lips. The sound of the detectives' entry caused him to look up, squinting. Expressionless. It was then that Daniel noticed the resemblance to Fatma-the same synchrony of features, the handsome crispness lacking in the brother.

"Father," said Anwar, "these men are with the police."

Rashmawi gave his son a sharp look and the youth rushed over and raised him to tottering feet. Once upright, the old man gave a small head bow and said, in a low, rasping voice, "Marhaba." Welcome. "Ahlan Wa Sahlan." You've found in our home a wide valley.

The hospitality ritual. Daniel looked at the hard, weathered face, like a carved mask with its hollowed cheeks and deep eye sockets, unsure if the man behind it was victim or suspect.

"Ahlan Bek," he replied. The same welcome will be extended to you when you visit my home.

"Sit, please," said Rashmawi, and he allowed his son to lower him.

The detectives settled in a semicircle. The old man barked an order and Anwar crossed the room, opened the wooden door, and spoke into the opening. Two young women hurried out, dressed in dark robes, their hair covered, their feet bare. Averting their faces, they padded quickly to the cooking area and began a rapid ballet of pouring, scooping, and filling. Within moments the men were presented with demitasses of sweet, muddy coffee, platters laden with dishes of olives, almonds, sunflower seeds, and dried fruit.

Rashmawi waved his hand and the women danced away, disappearing into the room on the right. Another wave sent Anwar back with them. Almost immediately, an insectile buzz of conversation filtered through the thin wood of the door.

"Cigarette," said Rashmawi, holding out his pack. The Chinaman and Daoud accepted and lit up.

"You, sir?"

Daniel shook his head and said, "Thank you for your kind offer, but today is my Sabbath and I don't handle fire."

The old man looked at him, saw the kipah on his head, and nodded. He raised a dish of dried figs from the platter and waited until Daniel was chewing enthusiastically before settling back on the mattress.

"To what do I owe the honor of this visit?"

"We're here to talk about your daughter, sir," said Daniel.

"I have three daughters," said the old man casually. "Three sons as well, and many fat grandchildren."

One daughter less than Daoud had mentioned.

"Your daughter Fatma, sir."

Rashmawi's face went blank, the dry, well-formed features settling into paralytic stillness.

Daniel put down his demitasse, took out the picture, and showed it to Rashmawi, who ignored it.

"She was found yesterday," said Daniel, watching the old man's reaction.

Rashmawi made a tent of his fingers. Picked up his demi-tasse but put it down without drinking.

"I have three daughters," he said. "Sahar, Hadiya, and Salway. None are idle. Three sons as well."

The buzz behind the door had grown louder, solidifying into conversation-urgent, frightened female chatter. A tentative male response. Then a low moan rising steadily in pitch.