The Theatre - Kellerman, Jonathan

"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.