The Labyrinth of Osiris (20 page)

He produced a lighter and hovered it over the bowl, his lips making a dry popping sound as he puffed it into life, his face momentarily blurring behind a veil of blue-grey smoke.

‘First she decided she wanted to concentrate more on the human interest angle,’ he said. ‘Lose the wider socio-political context and focus on the girls themselves. Give them a voice. Let them tell their own stories. Then it started morphing into a big investigative thing about the actual mechanics of trafficking: how it’s organized, how the girls are moved around, who runs the industry. It was only supposed to be a thousand-worder, but it kept getting bigger and bigger and the deadline kept slipping.’

He shook his head, wafting a hand to dispel the smoke.

‘Typical Rivka. I remember right at the start of her career, when we were both working for a small arts magazine up in Haifa – that’s how we met, incidentally, back in the seventies – she got sent out to do a piece on Druze textile weavers. Ended up filing four thousand words on Golda Meir and the betrayal of Jewish feminism.’

He smiled and took another pull on his pipe.

‘That’s how she was. Always going off on tangents. And then tangents on tangents. One idea would lead to another and you’d end up with an article that was weeks late and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the original brief. That’s why she got the heave-ho from
Ha’aretz
.’

‘A contact of mine told me it was because she’d got a bit –’ Ben-Roi consulted his notes, looking for Tirat’s precise wording – ‘conspiracy-happy. Paranoid.’

Yaron grunted.

‘The way this country’s going, she was right to be. In my experience, when Rivka saw smoke, there was usually fire somewhere not too far away.’

He dropped his head back, puckered his lips and popped out a ragged smoke ring. Outside someone was shouting ‘
Shkadim!
Almonds!’ over and over, a street vendor trying to attract customers.

‘She
was
difficult,’ said Yaron after a pause. ‘More and more so as she got older. Exasperating at times, particularly if you were trying to edit her. But she was a bloody good journalist. You just had to handle her right. Which basically meant letting her get on with it and keeping your fingers crossed she’d deliver something eventually. Which to be fair she always did.’

‘And you don’t know details,’ said Ben-Roi, repeating his question of a moment earlier, drawing the conversation back to Kleinberg’s article. ‘What
exactly
she was writing? Who she was talking to?’

‘I know she did some interviews over in Petah Tikvah. There’s a shelter there for trafficked girls. Only one of its kind in the country, apparently. Other than that . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Like I say, I tended to just let her get on with it.’

‘Do you know the name of the shelter?’

‘Hofesh, I think. Yes, Hofesh. The Freedom Shelter.’

Ben-Roi scribbled a note.

‘Did Mrs Kleinberg intimate she’d received any threats as a result of this article? That she was in any danger?’

‘Not that she ever told me,’ said Yaron. ‘But then she didn’t tell me a lot. She tended to play her cards quite close to her chest.’

‘Did she
ever
get threats?’

He gave a humourless snort. ‘She probably would have if anybody actually bothered to read the magazine. Before Rabin got shot we were selling 180,000 copies a month. Now we’re down to 2,000. We can’t give them away. No one’s interested any more. Rest in Peace the Left. Rest in Peace the whole bloody country.’

He took another long draw on his pipe, sending melancholy curlicues of smoke drifting from the corners of his mouth. Outside the cries of the almond vendor had been joined by those of someone selling grapes and dates: ‘
Anavim! Tamar!
’ Ben-Roi slurped his coffee, which tasted less bad the more of it he drank.

‘When did you last see Mrs Kleinberg?’ he asked.

‘
Saw
her about six weeks back. She came down to Tel-Aviv and we had lunch. Little Palestinian-owned restaurant over in Dakar. Lovely place. I last
spoke
to her eight days ago when she called to ask for another deadline extension. Said she’d turned up something interesting and needed a bit more time to look into it.’

Ben-Roi’s eyes narrowed. ‘Did she say what it was?’

‘Well, usually when Rivka said she’d turned up something interesting it was shorthand for “I’m about to take the article in a completely different direction”. I would have asked more about it, but our daughter had just gone into labour and I had other things on my mind. Obviously if I’d known that was the last time we’d speak, I’d have paid a bit more attention.’

He sighed, lifted the lighter and started to run the flame over the pipe bowl again. Ben-Roi looked down at his notes. He was thinking about the newspaper articles Kleinberg had been researching six days before her murder. Those had been a different direction.

‘Does the word
vosgi
mean anything to you?’ he asked. ‘It’s the Armenian word for gold.’

Yaron pondered, then shook his head.

‘Barren Corporation?’

‘I’ve heard the name. Some American multinational, isn’t it?’

‘Mrs Kleinberg seemed to be interested in them. In a gold mine they were operating in Romania.’

Yaron raised his eyebrows. It was clearly news to him.

‘Did she mention
anything
about gold or gold-mining?’

‘Not that I recall.’

‘What about Egypt? The night she died she was booked on a return flight to Alexandria.’

Again the editor’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘She certainly never said anything to me. She did a piece on smugglers’ tunnels a while back – you know, Palestinians breaking the Gaza blockade, sneaking supplies in from Sinai. But that was over a year ago.’

‘Could she have been going there on holiday?’

‘Rivka? To Egypt? I sincerely doubt it. She wasn’t really the holidaying kind. And anyway, she never had any money.’

Ben-Roi tapped his pen on the pad. ‘Samuel Pinsker?’ he tried. ‘Have you ever heard of him?’

‘Leon Pinsker I’ve heard of. The nineteenth-century Zionist?’

‘
Samuel
Pinsker. British mining engineer.’

‘Him I don’t know.’

‘The Armenian community? Did she ever discuss that?’

No.

‘The Armenian compound? The St James Cathedral?’

No and No.

‘What about the anti-capitalist movement? Did that interest her?’

Yaron gave him an ‘is-that-a-serious-question’ look. ‘Of course it did. It interests all of us. Capitalism’s screwed the world. How can you
not
be anti a system that leaves two and a half billion people living on less than $2 a day and concentrates 85 per cent of global wealth—’

‘The Nemesis Agenda?’ cut in Ben-Roi, not wanting to get dragged into a political lecture. ‘Did that name ever crop up? They’re an anticapitalist group, go around breaking into offices, hacking into—’

‘Computers,’ said Yaron, cutting Ben-Roi off in his turn. ‘Yes, I know them.’ He paused, examining his pipe, then added: ‘And yes, the name did crop up.’

Ben-Roi sat forward. Finally, a bite. ‘Recently?’

Yaron shook his head. ‘Two, three years ago, when Rivka first started writing for us. She suggested doing a piece on them. Said she had an in with the group, might be able to wangle an interview with one of their people. Which would have been quite a scoop, given that so far as I’m aware they’ve never talked to the press.’

He sat a moment. Then, leaning over, he typed something into the Toshiba laptop sitting on the desk beside him, his plump, wrinkled fingers clattering over the keypad with surprising speed and dexterity. When he was done he turned the screen and beckoned Ben-Roi over to take a look.

‘Interesting crowd,’ he said as the detective stood and crossed the room. ‘Sort of an extreme form of these whistle-blowing websites. Wikileaks with menaces. They’ve certainly had an impact. The multinationals are shitting themselves, apparently.’

Ben-Roi rested his palms on the table and leant down, looking at the screen. It carried the homepage of a website titled www. thenemesisagenda.org. Functional rather than stylish, it was topped with the headline: ‘The Nemesis Agenda – Working to expose the crimes of global capitalism.’ The A of ‘Agenda’ had been manipulated to resemble a skull. There was an e-mail address – tellus @nemesisagenda – a menu-bar with click-through options such as Targets, Archive, Video, News, Take Action, Who Are We? and various black-and-white images of devastated landscapes, emaciated children, scarred bodies and weeping women. The centre of the page was dominated by a video player, stilled on the badly swollen face of a man in a bloodied towelling robe. The accompanying title read: ‘Monsieur Semblaire’s Congo Confession.’

Ben-Roi took all this in at a glance, then dragged the cursor up to ‘Who Are We?’ and clicked. A new page loaded, blank save for five words:
Wouldn’t you like to know
. He only just had time to read it before the letters seemed to burst into flames. There was a fierce crackling sound and the screen blazed red before abruptly reverting to the homepage. He looked up. Yaron’s eyes were twinkling mischievously.

‘The times certainly are a-changing,’ he chuckled. ‘In my day, if you wanted to protest you went on a march or distributed some leaflets. Maybe staged a sit-in or sprayed some graffiti if you were feeling really angry. These people, they’re more like Mossad. They abseil into offices, hack into computers, interrogate executives at gunpoint, film it, then post it all on the web. Radicalism for the twenty-first century.’

He laid his pipe in an ashtray and sat back.

‘And good for them, I say. These multinationals get away with murder. Literally. They steal, exploit, dump, pollute, cheat, tax evade, cosy up to some of the most grotesque regimes on the planet. There’s nothing they wouldn’t do to turn a profit, no abuse too immoral, no trick too dirty. And because most of it goes on in countries that are too weak or poor or corrupt to stand up to them, they’re never held accountable. But the moment their grubby little secrets are exposed on the internet –’ he waved a hand at the laptop. ‘The web’s not just the great democratizer of our time, it’s the great court of justice. The information gets picked up by the public, goes . . . what’s the word . . . virulent?’

‘Viral.’

‘Exactly. Suddenly the whole world knows what they’re doing and all hell breaks loose. Their offices get picketed, their executives harassed, their computer systems are targeted by other hackers, their image goes into freefall, their share price collapses . . .’ He gave a satisfied nod. ‘I’ve never been one for mob rule, but you can’t help but feel a certain schadenfreude when you see the bastards getting a bit of their own medicine. The name says it all – Nemesis, Goddess of Vengeance. Take a look round the site. It speaks for itself.’

He retrieved his pipe and puffed it into life again. Ben-Roi was staring at the swollen-faced man in the video box, wondering how on earth any of this fitted in with Rivka Kleinberg’s murder.

‘They’re Israeli, this group?’ he asked.

‘My understanding is they have different cells in different countries. That’s how these sort of organizations tend to work – a loose collective rather than a single homogenous entity. To be honest, I don’t know a great deal about them. I don’t think anyone does. That’s why it was such a coup to get an interview with one of their people. Or would have been if it had actually come off.’

‘It didn’t?’

‘Rivka’s contact got cold feet at the last minute. It was all set up, apparently, but when she went to do the interview –’ he made a slicing motion with his hand. ‘I have to confess, part of me did wonder if she actually
had
a contact. I mean, these Nemesis people have never spoken to anyone else so why the hell they should suddenly decide to open up to a no-circulation outfit like ours . . .’

He blew another smoke ring and folded his arms.

‘She wouldn’t admit it, but getting the sack from
Ha’aretz
really hit Rivka, knocked her confidence. The thought did cross my mind that maybe she was just trying to . . . you know . . . prove she still had it in her. Could still get the big stories. She didn’t have to prove anything to
me
, but perhaps she needed to make
herself
think . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe I’m being unfair. She certainly didn’t make a big song and dance about it. Just said she had an in with the group, might be able to get one of them to talk, but when she went down to Mitzpe Ramon for the meeting . . .’

Ben-Roi’s attention had been starting to drift. At the mention of Mitzpe Ramon his head jerked up. The destination on the bus ticket Kleinberg had used four days before her murder. For the first time since the interview had started he felt a buzz of adrenaline. The buzz he always got when he thought he might be on to something.

‘Do you know who this contact was?’ he asked, leaning forward over the table.

‘I seem to remember Rivka saying it was some old friend,’ replied Yaron, eyes registering surprise at the sudden urgency in Ben-Roi’s voice. ‘Apart from that . . .’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘Rivka was notoriously protective of her sources. All I know is that she schlepped all the way down into the Negev only for the contact to tell her they didn’t want to do the interview after all. And that was the end of the matter.’

Ben-Roi’s mind was clicking, like a switchboard trying to make connections. ‘Did Mrs Kleinberg mention this person recently?’

‘Not to me. Why?’

Ben-Roi told him about the bus ticket. Yaron could provide no explanation.

‘Any idea why she might have wanted to get back in touch with them?’

‘None whatsoever.’

‘Did she know anyone else in Mitzpe Ramon?’

‘God knows. I don’t think so. But then she didn’t tell me everything.’

‘What about the Nemesis Agenda? Did that ever come up again?’ Yaron shook his head.

‘Did she say anything about them breaking into an office in Tel-Aviv?’

Another shake.

‘Barren Corporation?’

And another.