Dimiter (27 page)

I
mmediately after leaving Zui, Meral drove his police car up the Sheikh Garrah Quarter’s French Hill Road and then steeply downhill a little farther until he was in sight of the six-story beige-colored limestone cube that housed the National
Police Headquarters. Once past the electric gate and the guard station, he parked and soon was pushing on a steel revolving door that placed him in a cool and quiet lobby with mirror-shined white marble floors and a reception desk with uniformed men behind it. Just past them was a bomb display and a burglary prevention exhibit.

There is a tribe on Mount Elgon in East Africa who believe that men have two souls and that one of them exists because the other is dreaming it. In a dream of the night before, Meral thought that he might have encountered his dreamer. Standing in the burial chamber of Christ, Meral’s double was staring into his eyes while at the same time pointing at Mayo’s nephew Shlomo, who was frowning in concentration as he softly rapped his knuckles on the chamber’s stone wall, an ear pressed against it, listening intently, when a perfectly formed blue rose bloomed forth from the spot where he was rapping. Shlomo plucked it from the wall with a triumphant cry of “Aha!” Then a grating, rumbling sound filled the crypt as large sections of the wall slid away and out of sight to reveal a narrow secret room in which Moses Mayo stood staring out at Meral. Wrapped completely in white burial cloths underneath, Mayo wore a slouch hat and a belted trench coat that resembled Humphrey Bogart’s in the film
Casablanca
. He softly blew out cigarette smoke and drawled, “I know all different ways where there’d be no suspicion. Now you know why I never make plans that far ahead.” Then lifting an arm and pointing at Shlomo, Mayo uttered cryptically, “Follow the gazelle!”

There the dream ended.

“You’re here to see who, sir?”

“Inspector Shlomo Uris.”

“Six twenty-two. Go on up.”

F
rom the chair behind his desk, Mayo’s nephew looked up at his visitor. Tieless, his shirt collar open, he wore wide and aggressively red suspenders over a short-sleeved pale blue shirt. As Meral came in he had his feet up on his desk and was tossing balls of crumpled crime report forms at a green metal wastepaper basket set on top of a filing cabinet in a corner.

“Oh, hi, Meral! Three more shots and that’s it. Come on, sit down.”

Meral took a seat by the desk and looked around. A little of Mayo’s blood was showing: one wall of the office was totally covered with posters, most of rock concerts played all around the world, and all built around a super-sized poster in the center of the comic book superhero “Captain Marvel.”

“So.”

Meral turned his gaze back to Uris. Finished tossing balls of paper, he had now swung his feet to the floor and was intently leaning forward with his hands clasped in front of him on the desk in an effort to look sorrowful and grave. On the wall behind the desk there was a panoramic black-and-white photographic map of the Jerusalem Sub-District.

“My condolences,” said Meral.

“My condolences to
you
. You were so close to him. Like brothers.”

Meral’s gaze came to rest on a symbol on the side of the telephone on Uris’s desk. It was a leaping gazelle.

“Yes, like brothers,” Meral answered Uris softly.

“And so, what can I do for you today?”

Meral lifted his gaze back to Uris.

“Find the person who murdered your uncle.”

A
pattering of rain from a moody morning sky fell in dots on the dust of yellowed windowpanes looking out to a street in Brooklyn, New York. A series of trucks rumbled by over manhole covers with loud and clanging thumps that were barely heard by the elderly woman in a pale pink nightgown and brown woolly slippers. She picked up a photo from the little round table in her tiny living room where she was sitting with a friend, a woman slightly younger by perhaps a few years and whose flowered blue dress and cardigan sweater had the scent
and weary look of a thrift shop. “My little boy,” the older woman forlornly murmured. The photo was of a tall and brawny young man with blond hair in the garb of a Franciscan priest.

“Okay,” said the friend.

She was holding an ink-fed pen above a sheet of cheap stationery.

The older woman put the photo back down.

“Okay, first tell them I did what they said and I still haven’t heard a damn word. They’re crazy. Don’t put that in the letter. Just—”

“Hold it.”

The older woman cupped a hand to her ear and said, “What?”

The letter writer raised her voice a notch, repeating, “Hold it!”

“Oh, ‘hold it.’ Okay.”

The scratching of the pen continued. And then stopped.

“Okay, what?”

“What?”

“Yes. What next?”

“Well, just say that it’s the third time I’ve written them about this.”

“Maybe I should call them, Mary. You want me to call them?

“Oh, would you?”

“Oh, well, anything for you. And for Dennis.”

At that moment in Jerusalem, a teletype machine in the Kishla Police Post communications room chattered out a photo line by line as Meral stood waiting for it, bored and impatient, his thoughts adrift, until finally the photo had come through and there was silence.

Meral lifted it out.

And decided he no longer was bored.

H
ands in the pockets of his cargo pants, Shlomo Uris paced restlessly about his office as he waited for the return of a telephone call. For a moment he paused at a long narrow side table under the window behind his desk where framed family photos were propped and arrayed. He picked one up. It was of Shlomo as a boy being held in the arms of his Uncle Moses. When the telephone rang he put the photo back down, turned around to his desk, and picked up the phone. “Hello, Uris. Yes? Yes, put it through for me,
please.” As Uris waited, he looked down at a letter on his desktop. Originally addressed to the American Ambassador in Tel Aviv, it had come from a woman in Brooklyn, New York, gone through channels, and eventually landed on his desk. He’d gone back through the record of Mayo’s incoming telephone calls beginning three days before the onset of his illness and up to the day he had first voiced complaints about the problem with his stomach. The origin of one of those calls was striking because of a linkage to the letter from New York.

“Hello, yes? Can you hear me clearly? Good. Look, my name is Shlomo Uris. I’m an Inspector of Police in the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem. Right. Oh, well, greetings to you, too. Look, I’m calling about one of your people over here. It’s rather urgent. I need to ask you to wire a photo of him. No, no, no! No, not anyone. A certain one. I believe you’ve had inquiries about him from his mother. What’s that? No telephone number was given. The mother is partially deaf and—”

Uris listened for a moment and then nodded his head.

“Yes, that’s him,” he confirmed. “Dennis Mooney.”

S
eated at the little round table in her kitchen, Samia made a careful notation in her diary. She set down “What is love really?” in blue ink in a small but rounded, graceful script. Tired and glum and still in nurse’s uniform except for the starched white hat, she had Mayo’s checked comforter draped around her shoulders. It was evening and chilly and something had gone wrong with the building’s central heating system. She looked up as she heard a gentle rapping at her door. The front doorbell wasn’t working either.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” she called out.

“It’s Meral.”

Samia’s eyes briefly widened, then relaxed.

She stood up, closed the diary, slipped it into a drawer and shut it.

“Okay!” she called out. “Be right there!”

The nurse hastily straightened her living room, then moved quickly to the door where she peered through a spy eye, then slipped back three separate security bolts before finally opening the door to Meral. His face emotionless, he was in uniform and gripped a black leather briefcase at his side.

“Oh, hi, Meral,” she said casually.

“Yes, hello, Samia. Sorry to disturb you. Do you mind if I come in for a moment?”

“Are you kidding?” she blurted. Then she caught herself. “I mean, sure, come on in,” she said. “Why not?”

Meral entered and Samia closed the door, sharply cutting off the sound of two laughing children running and playing in the hallway upstairs, their thumping steps an unpredictable, happy rhythm.

“Come, let’s sit in the kitchen,” said the nurse as she led Meral there with a loose forward flip of her hand. “It’s warmer from the oven and the burners on the stove. I’ve got them all turned on. The heating’s not working. Creepy landlord. It’s probably deliberate. Bet it’s working for those Jews upstairs. Come on, sit down. Come, take a seat here by the stove.”