“Ya tik alaafia,” Captain Mustafa commanded Rania’s attention as soon as she entered the station. He used the greeting for someone who is working, so she tore her eyes from the coffee pot bubbling enticingly in the corner.

Every day, Rania told herself she would get up early enough to make an Arabic coffee before she left the house. But every morning when her alarm rang at half past five, she shut it off and did not get up until six. Then she was always rushing to reach the roadblock at Qarawat bani Hassan for the bus to Yasouf, where she would cross the roadblock and transfer to the other bus that would be waiting to take her to the small police headquarters at Salfit.

When she had first moved with her husband, Bassam, to his family’s compound in Mas’ha village, it had taken less than half an hour to reach Salfit. Since the Intifada, with the Israelis restricting Palestinian movement to a crawl, she often suggested they rent a little house in Salfit, for them and Khaled. But Bassam said he needed to keep a daily watch on his olive groves, adjacent to the Israeli settlement which was always trying to gobble up more land. She suspected he also did not want to sacrifice his place as the favored oldest son, center of his mother’s world, and let one of his brothers supplant him as head of the family.

Captain Mustafa cleared his throat. Suddenly self-conscious, Rania removed her head scarf. As soon as she did, the situation felt more comfortable. The men were still learning to accept her as a colleague. Traditionally, women were nurses, engineers and teachers, more recently a few were doctors. Women as police detectives was a new concept, which would take getting used to. Wearing the hijab made the men she worked with feel like they were talking to one of their sisters or cousins; taking it off made it possible for them to treat her like an equal. To her it was not important. Her belief in God, such as it was, did not rise or fall with her head covering. Growing up in Aida Camp, outside Bethlehem, few of the women she knew had worn it. Now she wore it diligently in the village and on the roads, where she might run into someone who knew Bassam and his family. In the city, and among men with whom she had a professional relationship, she took it off. Sometimes she told her friends, “I think more clearly without something between my brain and the sun,” but in fact, she felt the same, whether she was wearing it or not.

“There is a situation in Azzawiya,” said Captain Mustafa.

“What kind of situation?” asked Rania.

“One requiring great tact.”

Rania knew the captain well enough to take this as a warning, not a compliment. She was not known for her tact. There must be some other reason why he was sending her.

“A car is abandoned on top of the bridge,” Captain Mustafa said. Rania waited. An abandoned car on an Israeli road was not something the Palestinian police would normally concern themselves with. “The Yahud say that the car is stolen,” he continued. “The jesh have closed the road under the bridge and no one can pass on foot or by car.”

Rania understood now why she was being sent on this errand. If the Israeli army had closed the road between Mas’ha and Azzawiya, it would be necessary to find another way to approach, and she knew the land. She would also know many of the people who would be gathered on each side by now, waiting to see when they would be allowed to go. She would be able to tell at a glance if there was someone who did not belong there, whose actions should be scrutinized. A woman could surreptitiously gather information in such a situation, while a Palestinian man, even a policeman, who was moving around and asking questions would be perceived as a threat and treated as a suspect by the Israeli authorities. She tied the scarf around her hair again, grabbed her purse and removed a bag of supplies from her desk drawer.

“Tread lightly,” Captain Mustafa told her.

Rania didn’t bristle at the caution. It was his job to remind her of things she was likely to forget. On the other hand, she doubted his admonition would remain in her mind for more than thirty seconds once she left police headquarters.

She cast a longing look at the coffee pot on her way out.

* * *

She quickly found a service, or collective taxi, which took her on the winding hillside road through Iskaka and Yasouf to the roadblock. This drive was one of her favorites in Palestine, giving a spectacular view of beautifully groomed olive terraces, the stately buildings of the city visible in the distance. The best thing about the view of the hills was that there were no Israeli settlements in sight, though that was illusory. The monstrosity of Ariel, the largest colony in the northern West Bank, loomed just on the other side of the town, but for those few kilometers, which took about twenty minutes to pass, you could imagine that Palestine was as it had always been.

Today, she was too apprehensive about her assignment to enjoy the drive. She generally preferred to work further from home, and avoided cases which involved people she knew. There was of course no reason to assume that anyone from Bassam’s family or any of their friends would be involved in this incident, but she could end up having to do something that could be used by people wanting something to hold over her husband. And in turn, his family would use it against her, to prove, once again, that she was a bad wife and mother, that she should be home taking care of Khaled and making more babies to work in their olive groves and two dry goods stores.

Eventually, this argument would lead her to make the point no one wanted to hear � that with the Wall enclosing Mas’ha from the west, their olive groves would soon be theirs no longer, and if the planned Ariel Loop was built to the east, no one would be able to come from the nearby villages to shop at their stores. In this case, her income from the police might stand between her family and starvation, and it could be an advantage to have fewer mouths to feed.

She did not want to have this argument. She did not even want to have the thoughts. But she was someone who could not avoid facing reality when it slapped her in the face. That was a legacy of her childhood in the refugee camp. She had faced the reality that her brothers would go to prison, not to university. She had faced the reality that her sisters would have arranged marriages at seventeen, and that if she did not want to meet the same fate, she had better find her own way out. She had found it, she had worked hard for it, and she had been lucky to find Bassam, who loved her for her drive and independence (most of the time).

The van doors groaned open, and then the people groaned as they approached the roadblock and saw the army controlling their exit. She watched for a second before marching up to the front of the line. Two soldiers stood facing the line of about forty people, checking IDs, their guns hanging neglected around their necks. A third stood off to the left, where the cab drivers normally hung out, pointing his gun aimlessly at the crowd.

Though the soldiers were checking people’s IDs perfunctorily and letting most people through quickly, she swallowed an urge to snarl at them. If she made a problem for the army, they could make one for her and she could not afford that now. So she presented her ID and said nothing. The soldier waved her through without really looking at the ID, but after she walked through, he called her back.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked, pointing to the black leather bag in which she carried her work supplies.

“Things for work,” she answered.

He spoke English, for which she gave him credit. Most Palestinian men in the Salfit area spoke Hebrew, and the soldiers were used to barking orders at them in their own language. Most women understood the simple things soldiers said every day, but in a collective act of silent resistance, they pretended they didn’t.

“Work? What work?” asked the soldier, who hadn’t outgrown his teenage acne.

“I’m a policewoman,” she said reluctantly. Palestinian police were high on the Israeli army’s list of suspicious people. These soldiers might imagine she was armed and ready to start shooting at them any minute.

“A policewoman?” His high-pitched voice sounded incredulous. She might have said “Martian.” He apparently was one of those Israelis who believed that Palestinian women were kept barefoot and pregnant and home baking taboun bread all day.

“Yes.” She kept her voice even, without inflection.

“Open it.” He flicked his fingers toward the bag.

She unzipped it, but did not pull the sides apart so he could see. He did not glance inside; soldiers hardly ever did. He simply gestured to the next person to come forward. Rania rezipped her bag as she ran to climb into the service which was getting ready to depart. She did not find a service at Qarawa, so she took a private cab. They soon veered off the good paved road that led through Biddia to Mas’ha, onto a hard dirt track which went both ways around a circle. Inside the circle was a collection of old tires and car parts, as if people whose cars were damaged by the jutting stones simply ripped off the offending part and drove their crippled cars on until they stopped running altogether. After this circle was the bridge, really an underpass, where the Palestinian road went under the new Israeli road. When she could see the bridge, her taxi driver stopped and turned to her for payment.

About one hundred people and thirty or so cars, most of them eight-seat orange Mercedes or white Ford Transit vans, were parked pell mell on the Mas’ha side. Looking across to Azzawiya, Rania saw about the same number of people. Under the bridge itself, the army had set up a command center with four jeeps and two Hummers. Eight soldiers patrolled the dark underpass, fingers caressing the triggers of their M16s. On the dirt road between the bridge and the main Mas’ha road, two young soldiers drank Pepsi out of a bottle, smoked cigarettes and kicked a rock as if it were a soccer ball. She could barely make out their mirror images, on the other side heading toward Azzawiya, doing the same ritual dances.

She made her way to the demarcation line, where women sat on boulders, chatting while waiting for permission to cross. Many of them were people she knew, teachers and nurses on their way to work, students heading to the university. They uniformly wore the long dark jilbab and headscarf. Some wore sneakers or sandals, while others tottered around in high heels.

“Sabah al-kheir, ya banat,” she greeted them, good morning, girls.

“Sabah an-noor, Um Khaled,” they all murmured, using the nomenclature of respect for her as the mother of a son.

“Have you been here long?” she asked them.

“Seateen, sea w nos,” two hours or an hour and a half, a woman called Salma answered. That probably meant an hour, but no matter; the ball park would do. It matched her guess from the size of the crowds.

“Do you know what is happening?” Her sister-in-law Maryam pointed to the car up on the road, rolling her eyes. Rania supposed she deserved that.

Above the bridge, she saw the dark blue car parked on the side of the four-lane Israeli highway, Road 5. All four doors stood open, as did the trunk and the hood. A white car and a van, both with “POLICE” inscribed on the side in big blue English letters, were blocking part of the road. She could see many policemen, in their light blue shirts. One of them was running back and forth yelling at people. From her angle, his gun looked as tall as he was.

She could see the cars whizzing past them, carrying settlers to their jobs in Petakh Tikvah and Tel Aviv. It was a clear day, and she could almost make out the Mediterranean sea coast, a mere half hour’s drive away.

“Did the jesh say anything about the car?” she asked Intisar, Um Raad, from the nearby large town of Biddia. Um Raad worked at the Ministry of Prisoners in Salfit, and Rania often met her on the road in the mornings. If the soldiers had shared any information, she would be the most likely to hear it, because she had been in prison during the First Intifada and spoke fluent Hebrew.

“Walla kilme,” not a word, Um Raad said.

Boys of ten or twelve ran back and forth, selling coffee and tea from huge brass urns slung over their shoulders with leather straps. One of the taxi drivers gestured to one of the boys, who ran over to him. The man handed him a bill, and the boy ran off toward the village. A few minutes later he returned with a package of cigarettes, which the man proceeded to hand around to his friends.

Five years ago, no one in Mas’ha would have stooped to selling coffee at a checkpoint. Five years ago, Mas’ha was one of the most prosperous villages in all of Palestine. It was legendary in Israel for its furniture and marble fixtures, rugs, produce and cheap prices. On Saturdays, the influx of non-religious Jews and Palestinian Israelis turned the narrow streets of Mas’ha into a parking lot. The multilingual din of haggling, Arabic, Hebrew, Russian and English, one louder than the next, made the town a mini-Tower of Babel. The Intifada and the closure had changed all that, and now the kids were even trying to make a few extra shekels by selling it to the army guys.

“Do they say when the road will be open?” she asked the women.

Salma shrugged. “They said an hour, but it has been more than that.”

“Hey,” Rania called out to the soldiers, who looked in her direction. “It’s been an hour.”

“It will be a little longer,” one of them called back in a cheerful singsong.

“We have to get to work,” she complained.

“Yes, but we have to make sure it is safe. You see that car?” he pointed in the direction of the blue car. “There might be a bomb in it. If it blew up while you were walking under it…” he waved his arms in an exploding motion.

Rania inched closer to him. “What makes you think there could be a bomb in it?”

He shrugged muscled shoulders, sending his gun bobbing up and down, and smiled a little. “They don’t tell me that. They just tell me to keep everyone off the road.”

That was indeed the problem in dealing with the army. The guys on the street seldom had much information, and what they did have was usually fabricated, to make them feel like they were doing something important.

She turned away from the soldiers and started to walk toward the taxi drivers, usually the best informed people in any situation. A sharp cracking sound made her spin around. She didn’t see the stone, but she saw the look in the soldier’s eyes. He thrust the clip of live bullets into his gun and tore off up the hill.

“Atah tamut hayom,” he yelled suddenly, at no one she could see. Rania jumped into action, moving toward him with no clear goal. “You are going to die today,” he had said. Young men from the village nearby must be engaging in their favorite pastime: throwing stones at the army.

This was not the same animal who had just spoken to her so mildly. He reminded her of the feral cats who used to troll the alleys of Aida Camp. Some of them would nuzzle against her leg, sit on her lap and purr, but the sight of a lizard or bird would turn them into tiny lions, hissing and arching their backs.

“Do you really want to kill a child?” she asked him, trying not to pant as she ran beside him up the hill.

He made a gesture with his thumb and fingers that meant “Wait,” and aimed his gun at the kids. She stayed near him, weighing the options. Standing in between a soldier and the stone-thrower he was bent on murdering would not fall under Captain Mustafa’s definition of treading lightly. Plus she didn’t want to get shot. On the other hand, she could not simply move and give him a clear shot at the kids who, presumably, were the targets of his fury.

“You know you’re on film,” a clear voice rang out in English. Rania’s legs almost buckled with relief. The foreign woman who owned the voice was striding over to where the soldier crouched by a jeep, video camera pointed straight at his face. Rania quickened her step so they arrived at the spot in the same moment. Her eyes quickly took in the woman’s unkempt dark curls, black jeans faded in the knees and baggy gray t-shirt. The soldier didn’t respond, but a minute later, he unloaded the gun and strolled back to his post, as if nothing had happened.

“Good timing,” Rania said to the other woman.

“Thanks,” the woman responded with half smile. There was an openness about her that pulled Rania a step closer. Close up, she was older than she had appeared. There were lines around the corners of her eyes, and flecks of gray in her chestnut hair. Yahudia, a Jew, Rania thought. Maybe one of the Israeli women she had heard about, who watched at the checkpoints and helped the people pick their olives. But she had spoken English to the soldier, not Hebrew.

“Where are you from?” Rania asked in English.

“The States,” the woman answered.

“Which state?”

“California. San Francisco, to be exact.”

Rania had only a vague idea what San Francisco was. A few times on television she had caught an old series called “The Streets of San Francisco.”

“Like Michael Douglas,” she said.

The curly-haired woman laughed. “Never met him. I’m Chloe.”

“Rania.” Chloe extended her hand for Rania to shake, but it felt a little formal for the moment. Rania raised herself on tiptoes and kissed the taller woman first on the left cheek, then the right and the left again. The end of her head scarf caught on something on the other woman’s shirt. She extricated it. The offending item was a little silver charm, two interlocked circles with crosses attached.

“Is it something religious?” Rania asked, fingering the little icon.

Chloe hesitated. “Something like that.”

Why so secretive? Rania wondered. But she had more important things to worry about.

Go to Chapter 2

“Avi, what is going on?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.” Avi said.

He moved slowly but deliberately, coming to stand right next to Chloe.  Rania remained a little bit behind them, her gun pointed down at the floor.

“Who is that?” Wilensky demanded, pointing at her with his chin.

“No one you need to worry about,” Avi answered.

“You should not be here,” Wilensky said to Avi.  “You don’t know what you are dealing with.”

“I know enough,” Avi said, maintaining direct eye contact.  He moved to stand in front of Chloe, blocking her with his body.  His chest was less than a foot from the barrel of the gun.

“Go ahead,” he said.  “Kill me just like you killed Nadya.”

This kid had guts, Rania had to concede.  She had never thought she would see an Israeli show that kind of courage, to stand unarmed facing a loaded gun.  They were so used to having weapons at their disposal.

The gesture moved Wilensky too.  Incongruously, fondness crept into his hard eyes.  He relaxed his death grip on the weapon, let it fall to his side.

“I couldn’t kill you, Avi,” he said.  “You’re like my own son.  Besides, it doesn’t matter if you accuse me of killing Nadya.  No one will believe you.”

“They’ll believe me,” Nir Gelenter said.

None of them had heard the car, but when Chloe looked outside the dim hangar, there it was, next to the one Wilensky had driven.

“Shaul Gabi called and said Chloe didn’t get on the plane,” he said to Wilensky.  “He said a colonel came and stopped her flight.”

“I never thought I’d be glad to see him,” Chloe whispered to Rania.

“Are you sure he’s here to help?” Rania cautioned.

The two men were focused on each other now, completely ignoring the rest of them.  The other three moved back, until they were nearly in the doorway.

“How did you know where to find me?” Chloe whispered to Rania.

“We found that captain, Shaul, and he told us an Air Force colonel took you away.  Avi said he knew where you would be.  He came here as a child, with his father and his uncle.”

“How could you do it, Yisrael?” Nir was asking Wilensky.

“She said someone had a copy of the letter,” Wilensky explained, gesturing toward Chloe.  “I needed to find out …”

“I meant Nadya,” Gelenter clarified.  “How could you kill her?  I loved her!”

“She didn’t love you,” Wilensky said.  “She betrayed you.”

“I know,” Gelenter said.  Rania almost felt sympathy for him.  “You told me you were going to pay her.”

“I did pay her,” Wilensky said.  “But she would not give me the paper.”

They were speaking in Hebrew.  Avi translated in a soft voice for Chloe and Rania.

“He says he didn’t mean to kill her.  The day before he left for Italy, she told him she had something that would destroy him.  She said if he didn’t give her ten thousand dollars, she would go to the police.  He told her to forget it.  But then after he was gone, he thought about it and decided the risk was too great.  He called her at the house and said he would pay.  But she said it was too late, she was selling it to someone else.  She said, ‘Tomorrow I destroy your life.’  So he came back to stop her.  He knew she met Fareed in the fields; he had followed her there once.  He waited there for her.  He saw her talking to Dmitri, and then he saw Dmitri walking away.  He intercepted him and demanded the document.  Dmitri said he didn’t buy it, her price was too high.

“He went after Nadya.  They sat in his car and argued.  He demanded she give him the document, but she wouldn’t.  He tried to grab her bag from her, and she ran from the car.  They struggled, and she fell down the embankment and hit her head on a rock.”

Nir was wavering, Rania could tell.  He wanted to believe it.

“Why did you steal the car?” Rania stepped out of the shadows.  She could see Gelenter’s steely eyes glinting in the dark.

“What are you doing here?” he asked through clenched teeth.

“Trying to learn the truth,” she said.  “And what you just heard is not the truth.”

“How do you know?”

“We found fragments of Nadya’s clothes scattered over the land in a lateral pattern.  There was blood on the grass from her head wound, but no rock with blood on it.  Someone dragged her along the creek bed.”

“We already know that the Palestinian kid moved her,” Gelenter objected.

How had he gotten access to the kid’s confession?  How could she imagine that he wouldn’t have?  It wasn’t that important, but it galled her.

“If you know that much, you know that he didn’t drag her, he carried her.”

“So he says.”

“The physical evidence confirmed it.”  She turned back to Wilensky. “If you paid her, what happened to the money?  She had no money when we found her.”

“So the Palestinian kid took it.”

Once again, Fareed was proving a convenient scapegoat.  “If she had fallen down the embankment, she would have dropped her bag and it would not have been next to her when Fareed found her.  I think she ran away, and you followed her, because you could not allow her to live with what she knew.”

“No.  It wasn’t that way.  It happened just as I said.”

“Did it?” she turned to Gelenter.  “Think about my question.  If he did not plan to kill her, why did he go in a stolen car, instead of his own?”

Logic, she could see, told him she was right.  Everything he believed told him not to take the word of a Palestinian woman over his oldest friend’s.

“Nir,” Wilensky said.

Gelenter cut him off with a wave of his hand.  He turned away from them all, wrestling with his own demons for a long few minutes.  When he turned back, he was in command again.

“Avi,” he said, “You cannot tell anyone about this.”

“Fareed is my friend,” Avi said.  “I won’t let him sit in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“You don’t know all the facts,” Gelenter insisted.  “Tell him,” to Wilensky.

“Tell me what?  What are you talking about?”  Chloe and Rania glanced at each other.

“How do you think I got back into Israel and back to Italy, with no one knowing?” Wilensky asked Avi.

Confusion played on the young man’s face.  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say,” he said.  His eyes scanned one face, then another, finally locking on Rania’s.

“It was your father,” she said.  “He took a plane from Hatserim.”

“My father?”  He looked around for confirmation from the others, and received it.

“You knew too?” he asked Chloe.

“She told me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We weren’t sure you didn’t know.”

He sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged, head in his hands.  Chloe stooped next to him, awkwardly patting his shoulder.

“We just didn’t know what to think,” she said softly.  “This country, it screws with your mind.”

“Yeah, well unfortunately it’s my country.”  He sat a few minutes longer, his fingers making designs in the dust.

“My father didn’t know what you were going to do,” he said weakly.

“Who can be sure?” Gelenter asked.  “In your father’s line of work, a person must be completely free from scandal.  Don’t you think this might cause difficulties for him?”

For a long moment, no one and nothing in the old hangar stirred.  Rania thought she could hear blades of grass blowing in the breeze outside.

“What about Fareed?” Avi said.

“If I get him out, will you let this go?” Gelenter asked.

“You will get him out?”

“I promise.”

Rania exhaled.  She was disappointed, but she shouldn’t have been.  People were who they were.  In his place, she would probably have done the same.  Gelenter seemed relaxed now that he had Avi’s agreement.  He wasn’t worried about her or Chloe at all, Rania thought.  It was like they didn’t even count.  But of course, in his world, they didn’t.

She and Chloe headed for the door and no one stopped them.  Avi followed, saying nothing to the two men who were huddled together, Gelenter with one arm across his friend’s shoulder.  They climbed back over the fence where she had cut her hand on the razor wire in the rush to save Chloe.  It took them ten minutes to walk to the place where Avi had stashed his parents’ car.  An hour earlier, they had run the distance in under half the time.

Avi wanted to go through Deir Balut checkpoint, or Azzun gate, to take her all the way to Mas’ha.  She insisted he drop her on the road.

“The checkpoints are closed,” she said.

“Not for a yellow-plated car,” he objected.

“I don’t want anyone asking where I’ve been.”

“Give me the gun,” he said as he stopped the car above Azzawiya bridge.

“Why?  It was my husband’s.”

“Because soldiers are going to be searching your house for it sometime soon.  It can’t be there when they do.”

She handed him the gun.  And thanked him, though it rankled to do it.  Then she ran down the embankment, praying she could find the place where she had left her clothes.  She wasn’t looking forward to explaining to Bassam how her trip to the store had worked out.

*****

The smell of fried cauliflower and fresh bread greeted Chloe before she reached Ahlam’s door.  She could hear lots of happy chatter inside.

It was a double party – Fareed’s homecoming and her leaving.  Rachel had managed to recover her passport, but she had to agree that Chloe would leave Israel within ten days.  The good news was that supposedly, the Ministry of Interior would not stop her from returning at another time.  Rachel didn’t know how good her chances actually were of getting in again, but she emphasized that they would be much better if Chloe left now as agreed.

The living room was full of children and young men, Fareed’s friends from school.  Chloe studied Fareed’s face.  He had already started to lose his prison pallor and gained back a little of the weight he had lost.  He looked older too.  He was telling prison stories now, surrounded by his friends and younger brothers.  Avi sat next to him, listening, not saying anything.  Everything seemed normal again, but Chloe suspected there would never be quite the same easy trust between them.  Nothing would ever be quite the same for Fareed.  He had been through a rite of passage.

Avi would be spending more time in the village in the coming days, so they would have plenty of time to work out their relationship.  The injunction against the construction on Abu Shaadi’s land had been lifted.  Avi had met with Jaber and Abu Shaadi and the mayor that afternoon to plan strategy.  Fareed had gone too.  Before his arrest, he had not had much interest in activism; he had been too busy with school.  The Israeli authorities had created one more radical, Chloe reflected.

Alaa ran to Chloe to be swept up in a hug.

“Imi fi matbach,” the little girl said, and obediently, Chloe followed her into the kitchen.  Ahlam kissed her twice on each cheek, murmuring “Hamdillila assalaam.”

“Allah ysalmik,” Chloe gave the ritual response, her eyes drifting to the figure peeling cucumbers at the sink.  She didn’t think she could stay in here.  She wanted to wrap her arms around those slender hips and plunge her hands places that she couldn’t see.  If she was going to kiss Tina, she didn’t want it to be on the cheeks.  She hoped her face didn’t show her flustration, but she wouldn’t have wanted to take bets.

She put a soft hand on Tina’s shoulder.  Even that little contact made her crazy.  “I’m going outside for a while.”

She made her way back through the mob and stood on the porch, breathing hard.  Shit, she needed to stop acting like a horny teenager.  She needed to stop feeling like a horny teenager.  How was this happening to her, and could the timing be any worse?  Hopefully, she would stop being obsessed with Tina when she was back in the States.  Otherwise, she was going to be buying a lot of batteries for her vibrator.

“Chloe!”  Dilal, the grocer, was walking toward the house with a young girl.  The girl was strangely dressed, in a long denim skirt and a long-sleeved turtleneck.  As they got nearer, Chloe realized it was Malkah.  She walked out into the road to intercept them.

“Shuftha fi tariq,” Dilal explained, I saw her on the road.

“Shukran,” she thanked Dilal and quickly ushered the girl up to her apartment.

“Malkah, it’s nice to see you, but you should have called first.”

“I brought your phone.”  Of course.  Nir’s phone had been taken from Chloe at the airport.  She had gotten a new one, but Malkah didn’t know the number.  Malkah produced Chloe’s old phone from her pocket and held it out.

“Thank you,” she told the girl.  “Why don’t you keep it?  I have a new one now.”

“Really?”

“Sure.  You don’t have to tell your dad.  It can be our secret.”

“Will you give me your new phone number?”  Malkah was already pressing the button to add a contact to her address book.

“Um, Malkah, I have to go back to the States for a while.  But I tell you what.  When I get home, I’ll send you a text message, and then you can text me back sometimes.  Okay?”

Beaming, Malkah carefully put the phone into the front pocket of her backpack.

“Is that the reason you came?” Chloe asked her.  “It was really nice of you, but you know, it’s not so safe for someone who looks like a settler to just walk into a village, with no one knowing they are coming.”

She swallowed her feelings of disloyalty.  Malkah was thirteen and on a learning curve – not so different from her own a few years back.  The girl wasn’t quite ready to understand that international law guarantees the right to resist occupation by force of arms.  She did need to understand that the daughter of a high Israeli military official could not go walking into Palestinian villages on her own.  She would be perfectly safe in Jaber’s house, but on the street, someone might see an opportunity.

“I know,” Malkah said, “but I needed to see you.  Since I met you in Tel Aviv, my father watches me all the time.  The only place he won’t find me is a Palestinian place.”

“That was very smart and very brave,” Chloe said.  “You must have something very important to tell me.”

Malkah opened her backpack and pulled out an envelope.

“After I told Nadya what the letter said, she used my father’s fax machine to make a copy,” she said.  “She asked me to keep for her.”

Chloe pulled out the letter.  “It’s in Hebrew,” she stated the obvious.  She had forgotten that she, like Nadya, wouldn’t be able to read it.

“It is from a soldier named Yuri Shabtai,” Malkah told her.  “It says, I cannot live with what I did.  I killed Arabs in Jenaan?” she looked at Chloe for confirmation.

“Jenin,” Chloe corrected.  “Killed them how?”

“I killed women and children, not terrorists,” Malkah translated.  “I did it on Colonel Wilensky’s orders.  Then I lied to the Knesset and said the Arabs shot the women and babies.”

Malkah’s voice was wobbly.  Chloe thought maybe it would be good for her to cry, but she didn’t want her to be embarrassed.

“Thank you, Malkah.  It was right for you to give me this.  Is there something else?” she asked.  Malkah still seemed close to tears.

“If Nadya died because of this letter,” Malkah struggled, “my father must have killed her because Uncle Israel was in Italy.”

Chloe mentally smacked herself for not realizing long ago that that was Malkah’s big fear.  But what could she say now?

“Malkah,” she said.  “Your father did not kill Nadya.”

“You know that for sure?”

“I know it for positive.”  The girl’s face broke into a happy, toothy smile.  Chloe put an arm around her shoulder.

“Chloe?”  Someone was banging on her door.  She opened it to Tina and Rania.

“Dinner’s ready,” Tina said.  “Everyone’s waiting for you.”

“Tina, this is my friend Malkah.  Malkah, Tina’s phone number is in my phone, and if you need something sometime, something important, you can call her.  Right?”

She could see Tina’s hesitation.  An Israeli settler girl wasn’t her idea of a suitable protégée.  But Chloe was confident that when Tina learned what Malkah had done, she would be happy to be her friend.  As it was, she was too polite to hurt a kid’s feelings.

“Of course,” she answered.

“Hello, Malkah.  It’s nice to see you.” Rania held out a hand for Malkah to shake.

“We’d better find Malkah some transportation,” Chloe said.

Avi drove Malkah home in his parents’ car, and returned just in time to drive Chloe to the airport.  Rania walked to the car with her and Tina.  Rania’s handsome, serious husband watched from the porch while their son ran constantly back and forth from one to the other.  Chloe tried to gauge if Rania understood her relationship to Tina, and if so, what she thought about it.

“I wish I could have gotten to know you better,” Chloe said.

“Inshalla when you return,” Rania said.  She kissed Chloe twice on each cheek.  The one extra kiss meant they were really friends, Chloe decided.

*  *  *

Rania entered the police station and headed straight for the coffee pot.  Cup in hand, she made her way to her desk.  Abdelhakim’s chair was empty, his desk devoid of any traces of occupancy.

“Where is Abdelhakim?” she asked the men who sat nearby.

“Don’t know,” one answered.

“Haven’t seen him today,” said the other.

Captain Mustafa emerged from his office and joined them.  “I suggested to Abu Ziyad that Abdelhakim might be happier working in his office,” he said.

She tried not to look too happy.  She could gloat later, at home with Bassam.  The captain handed her a manila envelope.

“Benny asked me to give you this.”

She waited for him to walk away before she opened it.  She withdrew a folded sheet of paper containing two newspaper clippings.  “Thought you would be interested,” the note read.

The first article was several columns long, from the English edition of the left-wing Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.  It said that an anonymous source had uncovered a letter written by the soldier, Yuri Shabtai, before he committed suicide in April 2003.  The letter, the article continued, charged that Col. Israel Wilensky (Ret.) of the Air Force had ordered his unit to fire on unarmed civilians during the Battle of Jenin.  Wilensky, of course, denied the allegations.

“‘These are very serious charges.  The Ministry of Defense will investigate them thoroughly,’ said Deputy Minister Nir Gelenter.”

The other clipping was barely one inch high, cut from a bottom corner of the Jerusalem Post.

“The murder of Uzbekistan national Nadya Kim remains unsolved, three weeks after her body was discovered in an abandoned olive grove near Elkana.  According to police spokesman Benny Lazar, there are no suspects and no clues as to why the young woman was killed.  ‘Kim was one of thousands of Uzbek and Moldovan women who fall prey to the criminal consortiums bringing women to Israel against their will,’ said Lazar.  Israel’s immigration police have vowed to increase their efforts to locate and repatriate trafficked women.”

“Hello?” Tina’s voice was faint against a background of loud music.

“I love you,” Chloe said at once.  There, at least she wouldn’t go home without having said it.

“Sorry?  I can’t hear well.  Who is this?”

Chloe couldn’t remember being so crushed.  “Chloe,” she said.

“What?  Wait, I have to go outside.  The reception here is terrible.”

Chloe heard crackling, and the line went dead.  Shit!  They were almost at the airport now.  She saw the highrise hotels on her right, and cargo terminals loomed just ahead.

Her phone rang.  Shit, she had forgotten to turn off the ringer.  She quickly pressed the answer key and pushed it to her face.  It was too late.  David was turning around, and yelling to Shaul, “Yesh la pelephone.”

“I love you,” she said again into the phone.

“… too,” she heard just as the phone was torn out of her hand.

The van stopped next to a beige sandstone building that looked like a prison.  Shaul left David and her in the van and went inside, the motor still running.  A few minutes later, he returned and opened her door.

“Get out.”

She sat.

“Come on!”

It wasn’t going to take much to get him to use violence.  Chloe ordered her heart to stop racing and her breath to stop coming short and quick.  She stared straight ahead, resolutely not looking at Shaul or David.  She scooted over until she was square in the middle of the wide seat, so that in order to pull her out, one of them would have to lie halfway across the seat.  Not a dignified position from which to exercise authority.

“If you do not come now, I will use force,” Shaul said in the ritual words that so often preceded an ugly episode.

Chloe counted the wrinkles on her hands, one, two, three.

Her head smashed against the top of the door as he hauled her from the van like a sack of potatoes.  Each policeman took an arm and they dragged her unceremoniously up the stone steps.  They deposited her smack in the middle of a big room full of men, women, armed guards and luggage.  Shaul delivered a kick for good measure before stomping out.

The eyes of forty or more people from every continent made her self-conscious.  She doubted she made an attractive picture, sprawled out there on the floor.  With as much dignity as she could muster, she stood up, straightened her t-shirt, combed her hair with her fingers, and looked around for a place to sit.  There was not a vacant chair in the room.  In fact, people were standing, three deep, smoking, chatting in fifty languages, drinking from small plastic cups that came out of the coffee machine in the corner.  A clump of Africans over here, a cluster of Filipinas there, Russian speakers occupying the center.  On one wall was a small barred window, behind which a uniformed woman exchanged Israeli money for the currencies people would need back home.

Chloe made her way to the corner furthest from the door and hunkered down, squatting on her haunches.  The room cleared mercifully quickly.  One group of ten or twenty names after another was called, and the people moved out with their suitcases, presumably to be searched and get on their flights.  Soon enough there were plenty of chairs.

Her name was called after she had fidgeted for an hour and a half.  What should she do?  Sit still, keep silent, and hope to delay long enough to miss her flight?  Or go and argue with the people that she wasn’t supposed to be deported yet, and hope that one of the officials was reasonable?  When in doubt, do nothing, she decided.  She ignored the voices calling her name again and again, and it seemed to work.  Another hour passed.  Who knew?  Maybe she would pass years in this room.  There was a guy she had heard about, a Palestinian, who had been living in the Paris airport for five years because no country would accept him.

She heard her name again.  Trying to be surreptitious, she glanced up and saw Shaul standing in the doorway with two armed guards, whose uniforms were different from his.  He saw her and pointed, and the three of them marched over to her, menace in their gait.  Had he driven back to Hadera, and then turned around and come back in order to identify her?  If so, she was sure it had done nothing to improve his temper.  Hadn’t she missed whatever flight they were planning to get her on?

The two khaki-clad men with rifles slung over their chests yanked her out of her chair.  One twisted her arm crazily behind her back.  She gritted her teeth, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of crying out.  When they started to walk, she could not resist walking with them; the pain was too intense.  She was not cut out for torture.  Well, who was?  Maybe, if what you had to protect was worth it.  Most people who withstood torture, she had heard, did so because they didn’t know anything they could use to stop the pain.

They half-carried, half-dragged her out of the building, to the El Al terminal, where the contents of her bags were placed methodically in bins and run through X-ray machines batch by batch.  A woman ran that black wand over her clothes, that they used to check for metal, then set up a screen around Chloe and yanked her pants down to her ankles.  They took everything from her things with Arabic writing on it and super-x‑rayed it again.  Chloe wondered, did they imagine that you could hide a bomb in the little pamphlet she had gotten from Addameer about Palestinian prisoners?  More, did they really think that’s where you would put the bomb, if somehow you had managed to get one into the prison and then the police van and then the airport?

Then Shaul was grabbing her arm and trying to make her run.

“Hurry, hurry,” he urged.  “We don’t have time.”

“We have plenty of time because I’m not going anywhere,” Chloe told him for the fifteenth time.

They carried/dragged her back through the terminal and piled with her into the van.  They drove in what seemed like smaller and smaller concentric circles until they were sitting on the tarmac, next to a Continental jet with its engine running.  Its light was whirling on top and she could see the coolant discharging to eat away at the ozone layer.  A flight attendant stood on the top step, waving to them frantically.

“We have been waiting for you,” she said to the police accusingly.  “We are late.”

“She is a problem,” Shaul said briefly.

Chloe called on every reserve of fight and contrariness she had been saving up for the last ten months.  She curled into a tight ball on the seat, squirming out of their grasp when they tried to grab her.  She rolled off the seat and onto the floor, smacking her head on the floor of the van.

Once they succeeded in hauling her out, she lay on the ground, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“I am being deported illegally,” she yelled in the general direction of the chagrined stewardess.

The neatly pressed woman reached up and rubbed her temple.  What ever happened to simple problems, like not enough champagne glasses for first class?

“I REFUSE TO GET ON THIS AIRPLANE!” Chloe shouted.  “IF I AM FORCED TO I WILL NOT OBEY ANY OF YOUR RULES.  I WILL NOT BUCKLE MY SEAT BELT.  I WILL SING LOUDLY DURING THE SAFETY PRESENTATION. I WILL DISABLE THE SMOKE DETECTORS IN THE BATHROOM.”

“If you do not shut up,” Shaul hissed, “I will sedate you and take you in chains.”  At least that’s what she thought he was saying.  She didn’t understand the Hebrew words, except for “shut up” and “take you” but his gestures spoke volumes.

She continued screaming.  Two of the armed guards went to talk with the flight attendant.  Then they were ushered into the plane, presumably to talk to the captain.  She saw passengers staring out the window, trying to get a view of whatever the commotion was.  She had no idea if they could hear or see her or not.  Now someone else was running toward them, from the direction of the terminal, waving his hands.  She hoped it was not the vet with a hypodermic.

The man who ran up was wearing fatigues and had a rifle over his shoulder.  He came straight to Shaul.  “Mah koreh,” he demanded, what’s going on?

Shaul looked surprised, but answered at length, with expansive gestures.

“No, no, no,” the man said.  “We do not do this.”

Was this for real?  Was the untimely end to her sojourn here about to be averted by a deus ex machina in enemy’s clothing?  It looked that way.  The man was showing Shaul a sheet of paper, and Shaul was taking out his cellphone.

Rachel’s fax! Chloe thought.  Avi had come through for her after all.  He had called the lawyer and she had sent a fax showing that Chloe’s three-day hold was still in effect.  She started to breathe a little easier.

Shaul didn’t reach whoever he was calling.  He disconnected and tried another number.  The stewardess kept waving at him, wanting to know what was going on.  He made the wait signal with his hand.  She pointed at her watch – the flight was very late already, come on, we have to get going.  After ten minutes that felt to Chloe like ten hours, Shaul gave a bye bye wave, and the doors of the jet slowly slid shut.  Not until the wheels started to move back did Chloe’s heart stop playing the William Tell Overture.  She was suddenly exhausted.  She could fall asleep right here on the tarmac.  She supposed she would be going back to Hadera tonight.  If so, it would be hours before she got to a bed.

Shaul was arguing with the soldier.  Whatever the argument was about, Shaul lost.  The olive-garbed man came over to where she sat and stretched out a hand to help her up.

“Come with me,” he said in a pleasant but commanding tone.  “I have a few questions to ask you.”

“What kind of questions?” she asked, suddenly wary.  She was in no mood to answer any questions.

“Don’t worry, they won’t be difficult questions.  Just a formality,” he said.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said to Shaul over his shoulder as he led her away.  They walked past the van in which Shaul had driven her here, past several other planes waiting for clearance to take off.  The man did not keep his hand on her.  He didn’t seem worried that she would run away, but indeed, where would she go?

“Who are you?” she asked him.

“I’m the Army.”  Thanks for nothing.

“I can see that, but what are you doing here?  I mean, the army doesn’t usually get involved in deportation cases, right?”

“This is a special case.”

Fear tugged at the edges of her brain.  To whom was her case special?  Wilensky?  Gelenter?  But why would either of them want to stop her from being put on the plane?  Presumably, it was one of them who had arranged this eleventh hour flight in the first place.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Adam,” he answered.

He walked her all the way around the terminal, to the front of the line of cars dropping off passengers, and helped her into the front seat of a dark blue sedan.  That seemed odd too; army guys usually came in jeeps.  She figured it wouldn’t do any good to ask about the car, so she did as she was told.  He drove fast, following the signs pointing to “Exit Airport”.  While he drove, she memorized his face, for whatever good it might do her if there was something to complain about later.  He looked to be about forty-five, stocky and muscular.  Although it was pitch dark out, he wore shades.  He was also wearing a crocheted kippa over his thinning hair.  His most distinguishing feature was a nose that closely resembled a squashed potato.

“Where are we going?” she shouted over the radio and the noise of the engine.

“My office,” he shouted back.

“Is it far?”

“No, very near.”

Just before the exit to the terminal, he hooked a sharp right.  Now they were on some kind of private access road.  Adam opened a gate with a magnetic card and pulled to a stop in front of a long, low building made of olive-colored prefab slabs.  It was surrounded by short brown grass, and behind it she could see a chain link fence sporting white signs with red hands, the danger sign, every few feet.

Adam was examining his keys, hunting for the right one.  The metal door had three locks, a deadbolt, a regular door lock and a padlock.  Whatever this building was, it couldn’t be used that much.  Adam certainly didn’t use it much, because he wasn’t sure which keys to use.  He tried one in the padlock, but it didn’t budge.  He attacked the deadbolt next, and coaxed it open.  It didn’t sound like it had been opened in a long time.  He finally found the right keys, and the door swung open.  Adam indicated that Chloe should precede him inside.

Her eyes could make out nothing at first.  The building was one long room, nearly empty, with walls made of concrete.  It looked like a warehouse of some kind.  It had no windows, just a tiny slatted opening near the ceiling.  Adam didn’t turn on any lights, if there were any to turn on.  Instead, he walked halfway across the cement floor and came back dragging something beside him.  He set two chairs down facing one another.

“Sit,” he said.

Not a gracious invitation, but she took it.  The sooner she did, the sooner she would find out what this was all about, and the sooner she would get back to – well, where?  Somewhere she wanted to be, which included Hadera at this point.

He took the gun off of his chest and sat down opposite her.  He gave her a smile, which didn’t reach his watery eyes.  “All right, Chloe,” he said in a tired voice.  “Who has the document?”

She went cold all over.  “What document?”

“Do not play games with me.”  Icicles would not have melted in his mouth.

“How do you know about that?  Who are you, anyway?”

“Do you need to ask?”

“It’s you!” she breathed.  How could she have been so stupid?  She had just been so relieved not to be on the plane.  Adam, he had called himself.  The generic Hebrew word for “man.”  “But you’re in Italy,” she said.

“I was in Italy.  Now I am here.”

“But how did you get here so fast?”

“Wonderful things, airplanes.  Now where is the document?”

“I don’t know – there isn’t one.”

Wait, that wasn’t right.  He needed to believe there was a document.  He would have killed her already, except he wanted to know who had it.  If she could keep him believing she knew, maybe he would leave her alive, but for how long?  Not long enough for anyone to find her here.  Not long enough to escape.  If he left her alive in here and locked the door, she would starve to death unless he let her out.  You couldn’t believe in mystery novel endings, where the heroes always found a way out of every iron trap.  In real life, the odds were against you when you were up against someone like this, who had killed with impunity for years.  She needed to distract him, give herself time to think.

“So what’s in the document?” she asked.

“That is none of your concern.”

“Maybe not, but what would it hurt you to satisfy my curiosity?  You’re going to kill me anyway.”

He gaped at her.  “You think I am going to kill you?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Chlooooeeeee, Chloooooeeee.  How can you say this about me?  I am not a killer.”

It was her turn to gape.  The man was both a professional killer and an amateur.  Why should he care what she thought?  Then she understood the distinction he was making.  He had killed Palestinians, probably he had killed an Uzbek prostitute, but these were not people.  She was another story.  As despicable as she was, as big a threat to his reputation, she was a Jew.

“Well, if you’re not planning to kill me, why did you bring me here?”

“I brought you here so we could talk undisturbed.”

He looped the gun over his shoulder once more and stood up.  He crossed to her chair, and reached out a hand.  She screamed.  She wasn’t sure where the pain had come from, but her entire body rattled with it.  She thought about what Avi had reported from his conversation with Dmitri.  One of the men was a little kinky, but the other was called The Butcher.

He had returned to his seat and was contemplating her with faint amusement around his lips.  He enjoyed hurting people, that was clear.  That tiny encounter had been an espresso bean for his libido.  He wasn’t going to get any more out of her.  She would make him shoot her before she would be his play toy.

“Are you ready to tell me who has the document?” he asked placidly.  Like he had all day, which presumably he did.

Who could she name?  Not Fareed, not Malkah.  Avi?  Would he believe that?  But if Avi was on his side, he wouldn’t care.

“Dmitri,” she said at last.  He leaned toward her, as if he found what she said fascinating.  She sat on her hands, to keep them from shaking.

“Dmitri who sold Nadya to us?”  She nodded.  “You lie.  He told me he did not take it from her.”  Wilensky was moving toward her again.  She bolted for the door.  A shot rang out.  The bullet flew past her shoulder and smashed against the concrete wall.  She whirled.

“You said you wouldn’t kill me.”

“Bullets can do a lot of things besides kill.”

She didn’t doubt it.  What was she going to do?  She couldn’t leave, and she couldn’t stay.

“I lied,” she said finally.  “There’s no copy.  At least not that I know of.”

“Why did you tell me there is a copy?”

Why indeed?  It had seemed like a good move in a theoretical chess game.

“To see what you would do, to find out if you really killed her.”

“That was clever,” he said, lifting the gun and aiming it straight at her.  Her knees were foam rubber.  Her face was hot.  She thought she was having a stroke.

“Khara!” echoed from outside.  A stream of Arabic curses followed.  Wilensky swung around.  Chloe heard running.  She took steps toward the door, then stopped.  She was pretty sure she knew who was out there, but if she ran to them, even if she made it, he might kill them all.

Someone was shaking the door now.  “It’s locked,” Avi said.

“Get back,” a woman’s voice responded.  Chloe was between Wilensky and the door.  She turned to face him.  His gun was pointed directly at her, and at whoever was about to come through the door.

“We might as well let them in,” she said conversationally.

He hesitated.  Before he could move one way or the other, a shot like thunder shattered the deadbolt and the door swung open wide.  It took Chloe a minute to identify the settler woman in the peasant blouse standing there with the gun in her hand.

Go to Chapter 44

“Another story,” Khaled pleaded.

She didn’t bother resisting, because they both knew she would give in.  “A short one.”

“The Flying Duck.”

“No, that’s a long one.  The Little Red Train.”

“I want to go on a train.”

“We don’t have them in Palestine.  A long time ago, we had, but no more.  They have them in Jordan.  Some day soon, maybe we can go there on a holiday.”

She found the book, and he settled back into his pillow to listen.  When he looked up at her like that, her heart felt in danger of bursting.  She looked down at the book quickly, so she wouldn’t start to cry in his face.  Her phone’s song began for the third time.  Whoever it was, was persistent.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Khaled.

Book still in hand, she yanked the phone from the charger.  Chloe.

“What’s the matter?” she answered.

“They’re taking me to the airport.  We’re almost there.  I have to hurry.  If they see me on the phone, they’ll take it away.”  Chloe was whispering.

“You think they will try to put you on an airplane against your will?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t know what I can do to stop them,” Rania said.

“Do whatever you can,” Chloe said.  “I’m glad I met you.”  She hung up before Rania could even say, “I’m glad I met you too.”  Maybe she was afraid I wouldn’t say it, Rania thought.

What should she do?  What could she do?  Really, Chloe should have found someone better than her to turn to for help in a crisis.  Rania dialed Avi’s number.  He knew, he said.  He sounded breathless.  He had gotten a text message from Chloe.  He had called Rachel, the lawyer, who was on the phone with the police at the airport, trying to stop her flight.  He himself was already on his way to Ben Gurion.

“On the train?”

“No, I borrowed my parents’ car.”

Why had Chloe texted him and called her?  Because she believed he would act right away but figured Rania would have to be prodded?  Or because she didn’t know if he would help, but trusted Rania to do something?  Or maybe she didn’t believe Rania could help her, and just called to say goodbye.

She didn’t dare leave Chloe’s fate in Avi’s hands, not with all the questions they had about him.  She needed to think of a plan and fast.  Maybe she could call Benny.  She looked at the clock.  Surely he would still be up.  He was an Israeli asshole, but deep down, she thought he cared about what he considered justice.  He obviously had some sort of soft spot for Chloe, because he let her go when she was arrested without her passport.  Surely, he wouldn’t want to see her shoved onto a plane, just because she had pissed off some big shot in the army.

No.  She was sick of asking Israelis for favors.  If she called Benny, she would have to play some stupid word game for five or ten minutes before he would even say if he was or wasn’t going to help.

“Pick me up on the road,” she told Avi.

“No, it will take too long.  It’s better I go by myself.”

“I will meet you at Yarkon Junction in half an hour.”  She hung up before he could say anything else.

She took a scarf from her closet, unfolded it and wrapped it tightly over her hair, tying it in front and then tucking the knot under the rim, like the settler women did.  She rummaged among the hangers and came up with a long blue skirt and a white long-sleeved peasant blouse.

I look good, she thought, when she checked herself in the mirror.  She felt guiltily happy, wearing her old Bethlehem clothes out in public.  Actually, in those days, these had been her conservative clothes, she admitted, thinking longingly of tank tops and skin-tight vinyl skirts.

Her hand stretched into the depths of the closet until it closed on something steel.  She took out the pistol and looked at it.  It had been Bassam’s father’s, and Bassam refused to give it up when the call came for all Palestinians to turn in their weapons.  “Let the Israelis turn in their weapons first,” he had said.

Rania was entitled to carry a gun because she was police, but she had never done so.  Her job was about talking to people, not about guns.  She didn’t even know how to shoot a pistol.  She wondered if she could.  If she were caught carrying a gun into Israel, she would go to prison.  No question.  Khaled would grow up without his mother.

This is majnoon, said a voice in her head.  She didn’t know what she imagined doing with the gun.  She just knew that she was going to meet someone she couldn’t trust, who was connected with some dangerous people.  Those people were trying to get rid of Chloe, and if Rania got in their way, they wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of her.  They couldn’t put her on a plane.  They could only shoot her.  If they were going to shoot her, she would shoot them first, if she had the chance.

They can get away with shooting you much more easily if you have a gun, her practical side objected.  Shooting an armed Palestinian is no crime in Israel.  You get medals for it.  She tucked the gun into the waistband of her skirt, well hidden by the loose blouse.

Bassam was outside, smoking argila with his brothers.  Should she tell him where she was going?  He would never allow it.  But it wasn’t his to allow or not.  But she had no time to fight with him.  Guiltily, she looked at the little train book, still sitting on the nightstand next to the telephone charger.  She had completely forgotten about Khaled, waiting for her to return.  She peeked into his room and found him conked out, his head flopped over.  She pulled the quilt over him, though it was not chilly in the room.  Probably he would throw the covers off.  She kissed her fingers and laid them ever so softly against his cheek, afraid to wake him with a real kiss.  She prayed this would not be the last kiss she would give her son.  She switched off his light and went back to her room.  She buttoned a jilbab over her clothes and covered the settler scarf with a hijab.

“We are out of milk,” she told Bassam breezily.  “I am just going up to Abu Kushri’s.”

“Do you want me to go?” he asked between lazy rings of cherry-scented smoke.

“No, I can use the air.  Just listen for Khaled, in case he wakes up.”  She left the door slightly ajar, so he could hear.

When she reached the corner, he would still be able to see her from the porch, so she needed to turn left toward the main road, where Abu Kushri’s store was, and go another block before turning right toward the fields that led to Highway 5.  When she reached the fields, she broke into a trot.  She was not going fast enough.  She would never make it in time to help Chloe.  She kicked off her shoes and clutched them, momentarily thinking of Nadya’s loose shoe which had started her on this entire adventure.  She ran faster than she had run in twenty years.  She couldn’t sustain it.  Soon she doubled over, panting and clutching a stitch in her side.  She hid her clothes where she had left them when she went to Jalame with Maya, the last grove before the road.

Though it was late, there was plenty of traffic on the road.  A steady stream of yellow-plated cars zoomed past in both directions, filled with young people going and coming from the night life in Tel Aviv.  She saw a few service taxis, what the Israelis called sherut, white vans with Hebrew writing on the sides.  She held out her hand, palm down, not sure if they would stop along this road, even for a settler woman.  They didn’t.

Finally a car pulled up, its brakes squealing as it slowed quickly.  A woman, her head covering just like Rania’s, leaned out of the passenger’s window.

“L’an?” she asked

“Ramle.”

“We are going to Herzliya, but we can drop you at the Yarkon junction, where you can get a bus.”

“Todah rabah.”

“Maayfo atem?” she asked immediately upon settling into the back seat.  She needed to know where they were from, before they asked her.

“Anachnu?  Me-Itamar.”  Itamar, the most violent settlement in the north.  Recently, a young man from near Nablus had been killed in cold blood in front of many witnesses by a man from Itamar.  Yet here were these ordinary looking people, picking up a strange woman late at night, smiling at her.

“You shouldn’t be tramping” – “tramp” was Hebrew for hitchhiking – “on this road so late,” the woman said.  “It is very dangerous.”

“My car broke down about a mile back.”

“Yes,” the man said, “we saw a car.”  Did they, she wondered?  Or were they just suggestable?

“Do you want to go back and let Chaim look at it?” the woman asked.

“No, I am going to my cousins in Ramle and they will drive me back tomorrow.  My cousin Nimrod is a mechanic.”

“Oh, that’s good,” said the woman, who said her name was Ainat.

When Ainat asked where Rania was from, she said Elkana.  At least she knew a few streets, in case they asked where exactly.  They didn’t.

“Where did you grow up?” Ainat asked her instead.  They could tell from her poor Hebrew she was not Israeli.  What should she say?  Yemen?  Syria?  She knew a lot of Jews had moved to Israel from those countries more recently than from Iraq or Libya, but she didn’t know exactly when.

“Artzot Habrit,” she said finally.  At least she spoke English, and she was sure they had every kind of Jew in the States.  “I’ve only been in Israel a little over a year,” she added.

“Which state?” Chaim asked in English.

Her and her great ideas.  What should she say?  Chicago.  No, that wasn’t a state, it was a city.

“California,” she said, thinking of Chloe.

“Los Angeles?” the man asked, just as she had.

“No, San Francisco,” feeling like she was reading from a script.

“Oh,” he sounded disappointed.  “I have family in Los Angeles.”

She had reached the end of her script, and they had reached the checkpoint.  One agony became another.

The soldier gave her a long long look.  She made herself gaze back at him without blinking.  Oh, God, she recognized him.  He was there under the bridge the day she found Nadya’s body.  He was the one who had been about to shoot at the kids when Chloe appeared.  Please, she prayed, don’t let him remember my face.  How could he?  Palestinians looked alike to Israelis.  In this garb he would never recognize her.

“Mi zot?” he asked Chaim, pointing at her with his chin.  Not a very polite way to ask someone who is in his back seat.  What if she was Chaim’s sister or cousin?  But she supposed some subtle difference in clothing or demeanor told him that she wasn’t.

“She lives in Elkana,” Chaim told the young soldier.

“You know her?”

“No,” Chaim admitted.  “Her car broke down and she is going to her cousins in Ramle.”

The soldier motioned to her to roll her window down.  She obeyed.

“You are going to Ramle?”

“Yes.”

“To visit?”

“To visit my cousins, yes.”  Did he think she would contradict what Chaim had told him?  Even if she was a liar, she wasn’t deaf.

“Where do they live in Ramle?”

Damn.  She had never been in Ramle in her life.

“Herzl Street,” she said, looking directly into his eyes.  “Near Weizmann.”  Every town in Israel has streets named Herzl and Weizmann, for the founders of their State.  Briefly, she wondered if Ainat and Chayim could have named even one man her people would name streets after.

“Nsiyah tovah,” good trip, the soldier said to Chaim, and seconds later, they were clear of the checkpoint.

Go to Chapter 43

Her phone rang.  Startled, she nearly answered it before she remembered that it was not really her phone.  She looked at the number.  It was Wilensky’s out of country number.  Her finger was pressing down on the connect button even as her mind was still considering whether it was a good idea.

“Hello?” she said.

There was silence on the other end.  She would have thought that he had hung up, except she could hear him breathing.  He didn’t breathe easily, there was a little wheeze; he must be or have been a smoker.

“Hello?” she said again.

“Malkah?” he guessed.

“No.”

“Mi at?  Ayfo Nir?”  In the midst of recovering his balance and asserting his accustomed authority, he must not have registered that she had spoken English.

“Hu lo po,” she said, before realizing that it didn’t make sense to start a conversation in Hebrew, since she would almost certainly not understand whatever he said next.  In English, “I’m a friend of his daughter’s.”

“What are you doing with his pelephone?”

“Um, he kind of lent it to me.  How is Italy?”

“How do you know who I am?”

“Nadya told me.”

He was silent for so long that she thought for a second he had hung up.  Then he said, “Nadya is there with you?”

She tried to parse his expression and the various possible meanings of his question.  He was shocked, but that in itself did not prove anything.  Was he trying to get her to confirm that Nadya was dead, fearing perhaps that he had not actually killed her?  Or did he really mean, “Is Nadya there with you?” and if she said, oh, yes, she’s right here, he would say, well let me talk to her?

“Allo?” she heard from the phone, and realized she herself had now been quiet a disconcertingly long time.  At least, she hoped it was disconcerting for him, and not simply annoying enough to make him hang up.

“I’m here,” she said.

“What do you know about Nadya?” he asked.

That was more what she expected to hear.  He wanted to know what she knew.  But what should she say?  Should she confront him directly with her knowledge of Nadya’s murder, or should she try to make him say it?  She tried for a middle ground.

“You’re the only one who really knows what happened to Nadya,” she said.  “Why don’t you tell me?”

“Look, whoever you are, I am going to tell Nir that you stole his phone.”

“If I had stolen his phone, don’t you think he would have figured that out by now?  You don’t know who I am.  What are you going to say, ‘Someone I don’t know took your phone, I don’t know how or when or why?’  That’s going to be very convincing.  It’ll probably get you another medal or two.  And you won’t even have had to murder any more people for it.”

“Who do you think you are talking to?”

“I know who I’m talking to.  The Butcher of Jenin.”

“Whore!” he spat out the Hebrew word, zonah.  “Shut up!  I’m going to have you arrested!”

“Well it might comfort you to know that I’m already arrested.”

He hung up on her, leaving her wondering if it was a good idea to tell him that.  In that case, obviously she was not with Malkah, or Nadya, or any other member of the Gelenter household, and moreover, it would probably make it easy for him to figure out who she was.  On the other hand, she was not the one with anything to hide.  She was trying to smoke him out, and if he decided to come after her, maybe she could set a trap for him – not that she had many resources to call on right now.

“Mishehu rotzeh hachutza?” Diana’s voice called.  Does anyone want to go outside?

Chloe jumped up and put on her shoes.  Half an hour wandering around a caged-in blacktop would not normally qualify as a major treat, but then, she wasn’t normally in prison.  She glanced outside and saw that it was a double treat – the canteen truck was here.  She made sure she had money in her pocket.  Now she could buy chocolate and instant coffee and milk.  Life was getting better by the second.  She bought enough to treat her newfound friends.

When they came back inside, she made coffee with milk for everyone, and they had it with the cookies she had bought.  It was like a little party.

“Where’s Ursula?” she asked, suddenly noticing that the one person who had been kind to her all along wasn’t here to share her paltry largesse.

On cue, Ursula appeared at her side.  There was another woman with her, and they were speaking a language Chloe didn’t recognize.  Uzbek, she assumed, though this woman looked nothing like either Ursula or Nadya.  With bright copper hair, hazel eyes and almond complexion, she could have been Irish or Hungarian.  Uzbekistan must be as much a melting pot as the U.S., Chloe thought.  She had barely heard of Uzbekistan before this.  When she got out of here, she would have to find a book about it.

“This is Lydia,” Ursula told her.  “She speak English.”

“Are you new?” Chloe asked Lydia.  Lydia shook her head, then patted her shining mane back into place, not that it needed it.

“I sleep in the other building.”  She pointed out the barred window, to another barracks barely visible across the courtyard.

“She is not supposed to be here,” Ursula giggled in Hebrew.

“After bachutz, when they call for Building 1, she whisper to me come,” Lydia explained.  “She say, there is girl here, speak only English.”

Chloe wondered why Lydia would take such a risk just to talk to her.  “What will they do if they find you?” she asked idly.

Lydia lifted one delectable shoulder.  “Nothing.  What can they do?”

What indeed? Chloe thought.  Unlike sentenced prisoners, the inmates here had little to lose.

“Why did you want to talk to me?” she wasn’t sure whether the question should be directed to Ursula or Lydia.

“They want to know about you,” Lydia said.

“About me?  What is there to know?”

“Why are you here?”

What should she answer?  I’m here because a military man thought I was trying to corrupt his daughter?  Or, I’m here because a friend of mine confessed to a murder, and I’m trying to prove he didn’t do it?  The latter route would be more likely to elicit useful information from them.  She told Lydia a compressed version of Nadya’s story.  It took her a long time to translate, but when she did, the others were spellbound.

“Such a story.  Did you know this Nadya?” they asked each other.

“I think … which one?”

“What did she look like?”

“No, that was another Nadya.”

“No, no, I don’t know her.”

“I know Dmitri,” Yelena announced.

Now they were getting somewhere.  Chloe mentally kissed Lidya’s feet.

“What do you know about him?”

“He sells women secrets about the men they work for.  A friend of mine, her boss stole money from his company.  Dmitri sold her a paper for five thousand shekels, and the man paid her ten thousand for it.  She sent that money home to Georgia, so her mother can build them a big house on the Black Sea.”

Chloe thought about whatever Nadya had taken from Gelenter’s office.  Could that have been why Dmitri sent her to work there in the first place?

“Where would a woman get five thousand shekels?” she wondered aloud.

Lydia translated for the others.  They were full of suggestions.

“You can save,” Maria said.

“Not if you don’t get paid,” Ursula interjected.

They all nodded vigorously at that.

“A Chinese girl in my building,” Lydia pointed.  “She didn’t get paid for two years.  Then when she asked for her money, her boss called the immigration.  The police, they beat her so bad, she was in the hospital two weeks.”

“Can’t she do anything?” Chloe asked.

Lydia shrugged.  “The Human Rights Hotline, they say they will help her.  A lawyer will come to take her story.  But until now, no one comes.”

“A Moldovan girl in Eilat,” Katya said, “She is pregnant.  She call the Hotline but they don’t answer the phone.  She leave a message.  Her boss hear her leave message and he take her down to a basement.  He chain her to a bed and keep her there seven months, until the baby born.”

Chloe stared at her.  The others did not look shocked at all.  They were nodding, like they had heard such things before.

“But that’s a horrible story,” she burst out.  “What happened to her then?”

“He take the baby,” Katya said.  “And sell it to another man from Moldova.”

“He sold the baby?”  Chloe couldn’t get her head around this.  It was like America in the seventeenth century, babies sold as slaves away from their mothers.  It occurred to her that if Nadya knew about such stories, she must have been terrified when she found out she was pregnant.  It seemed unlikely that Gelenter, evil as he was in his way, would chain her in a basement and sell her baby to a trafficker.  But what did she really know about what he would do?  Certainly he would not have wanted her bringing her baby into his house, especially if it looked like him.  He had no way of knowing he wasn’t the father.

“A lot of girls must get pregnant,” she speculated out loud.  “Do most of them have the babies?”

The others discussed it among themselves, in Russian.  Then Lydia delivered the consensus.

“No, most get rid of them.”

She had heard that abortion was easy to get in Israel, at least for citizens.  For illegal foreign workers, she didn’t know.  “Is it easy to get rid of them?”

“It is not hard,” Lydia said.  “You go to a doctor and he takes six hundred dollars.”

“But if you are more than three months, it is nine hundred,” Yelena added.

That explained why Nadya needed to get money right away.  It would also explain why she didn’t tell Fareed she was pregnant.  Perhaps she really was in love with Fareed, Chloe thought.  Maybe once she got rid of the unwanted pregnancy she meant to live with him, eventually marry and start their own family, just as he hoped.  It comforted her to believe that.

She thanked Lydia for her translation and went back to sit on her bed and think about all they had told her.  Dmitri had told Avi he got back whatever money Nadya stole from him.  But somewhere she had gotten a thousand dollars to send home.  Could she have held out on him in a previous blackmail scheme?  Or had he meant for her to find him something to use against Gelenter or Wilensky, and she double-crossed him?  Either way, he would have had a good motive for murder.

She needed to talk to Wilensky some more and get him to tell her what the precious document was.  She didn’t know how much credit was left on her phone.  She couldn’t waste any on a long distance call.  How could she get him to call her?

She typed out a text message.  “Did u know N gave someone copy of doc b4 u killed her?”

She pressed send, and went back to the road map she had been making.  With a felt pen she drew lines from Nadya to Nir, Wilensky and Fareed and wrote “sex” and “pregnancy.”  On the lines leading to Nir and Wilensky, she wrote “blackmail,” and on Dmitri’s, she added, “theft?”  She drew a line to nowhere and wrote “abortion?”  On the short line between Fareed and Radwan, she reluctantly wrote, “bombs.”  Okay, so she had all the possible reasons for someone or someones to kill Nadya, but how did it help?

“Efshar l’kanes?” she recognized Shaul’s boom, asking if it was okay to come in – not that he waited for an answer.  He strode over to her bunk, jabbing his index finger at her.

“Pack your things,” he ordered, “You’re leaving.”

“Where am I going?”

“I don’t have to tell you.  Yalla.  Kadima.”  Come on, in two languages.

“If you won’t tell me where you’re taking me, I won’t go.”

His steely eyes flashed.  “I’ll take you by force.”

He would enjoy that, she thought.  She got up, started to gather her few possessions.

“You have five minutes,” he growled and left, triple locking the door behind him.

She packed slowly.  Several of the others were crying.

“He will hurt you,” Yelena wailed from her bunk.

Funny, Chloe thought, yesterday you weren’t even speaking to me.  Now, the thought of someone hurting me makes you cry.  Aloud she said, “No, I’ll be okay.”

She hoped she was not lying.

She thought long and hard about what to do with the telephone.  If she put it in her pocket, there was a good chance someone would search her and take it away.  If she hid it among her things, maybe they wouldn’t find it, but would she be able to get to it when she needed it?  She got an idea.  With the tip of a pen, she made a small hole in her jacket pocket.  It wasn’t jacket weather, but she would just have to schvitz a little.  She typed out a text message, and without hitting send, pushed the phone through the little hole, and felt it settle in the hem just as the clacking of bolts announced it was time.

“America.  Yalla,” Shaul barked.

Chloe went to each roommate and hugged and kissed her.  Katya’s cheeks were wet as she covered Chloe’s face with kisses, yet they had barely said five words to each other.  Ursula held her the longest, until Shaul began to grumble.

“What’s your hurry?” Chloe asked him.  Just to annoy him, she walked around once more, asking each woman to write her home country address and telephone number in her book.  She wondered if she would ever write or call any of them.

“Your flowers,” Ursula said, bringing them.

Chloe smiled and reached for the flowers.  Seeing them brought Tina’s face into her mind, made her relax a little.  But then she thought, wherever she was headed, she probably would not be able to take flowers.

“You keep them,” she said to Ursula, bending once more to kiss her sweet face.

“Boi,” Shaul said, tugging on her arm.  He led the way to a white van and ushered her into the back.  David climbed in next to him and they took off at a roar.  The two policemen played the radio and chatted with each other, ignoring her.  Good.  She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket and felt for the phone, keeping two fingers touching it.  They were traveling south, but that didn’t tell her much.  Nearly the whole country was south of them.

After an hour or so, her worst fears were confirmed.  Shaul merged into the lane marked in Hebrew and English “Ben Gurion Airport.”  She wouldn’t wait to be absolutely sure.  She cast a studious look to the men in the front seat.  They seemed to be paying her no attention, but no doubt they could see her in the mirrors.  If they heard her moving around, they would surely look to see what she was doing.  She worked the phone into her hand and slowly, slowly eased it just out of the pocket, holding it in her palm and glancing down only quickly enough to find the address and hit the send key.  So far so good.

Go to Chapter 42

The door to the chicken coop was open.  She must have failed to close it firmly behind her the day before.  It had been dark when she got home, and her mind was occupied by seeing the light in her house, but her mother-in-law had been home all day.  Every day in the summer, she spent hours out in the garden.  Rania couldn’t imagine how she could have failed to notice the gate swinging wide open.  Could the old woman have opened the coop for some reason, and then gone to answer the phone or something?  There was no way to know.

She gathered the eggs and checked on all the chickens.  None of them seemed disturbed.  They wandered around clucking just like they always did.  Two of them were quietly perched together on a mound of straw in the corner.  She went to peer at them.  They seemed fine, just licking each other’s feathers.  She headed back to the house, but something made her go back and look more closely at the mound where the two love birds sat.

“Shoo,” she ordered, snapping her fingers.  They obligingly waddled off, only a little indignant at having been rousted so early.  Reaching into the straw, her fingers touched fabric.  She tore away the layers of straw.  There was a small canvas tote bag with leather top and handles.  What on earth was it doing in her chicken coop, and who had left it there?

She cradled the eggs carefully in one hand and carried the bag in the other.  Leaving the eggs on the counter, she opened the bag and dumped the contents out on the kitchen table.  Four thin blouses and two pairs of slacks, a pair of high-heeled sandals similar to the ones Nadya had been wearing.  A gilt double picture frame, one side holding a picture of Fareed, the other a chubby-cheeked girl, about three years old with dark hair.  A delicate golden filigree hamsa on a small chain, the right size for a child.

There were no papers, no name inside, but she didn’t need any to know whose things these were.  But who had left them in her chicken coop, and why?  She would worry about that at the office.  As much as she wanted to delve into the mystery right away, she would not squander this morning with her son.  For at least one day, she would act like someone who had learned something.  She fried the eggs with lots of olive oil and salt and put manaqish, flat bread spread with zaatar, in the oven to bake.  The smells brought her boys to the table just as she was pouring sweet tea into glasses with springs of mint.

She carried the heavy bag with her to the bus stop.

“Going on a trip?” said a voice behind her.  She spun around.

Abdelhakim.  What was he doing here?  He lived in Kufr Yunus, on the other side of Hares.  There was no reason for him to be at Qarawa this time of the morning.

“I spent the night at my aunt’s house, in Biddia,” he said, as if reading her mind.  Her eyes went to his shoes, vainly searching for fragments of straw.  Of course, if she had found any, it would have meant nothing.  Doubtless his aunt had chickens as well.  But as far as she could tell, his shiny dress loafers were spotless.

The bus pulled up and they boarded.  She took a seat next to Um Raad, and Abdelhakim moved toward the back where she heard him greeting several of the younger men heartily.

“I heard Bassam got back,” Um Raad said as the bus pulled away from the blocks.

It was six in the morning.  How could word have spread so quickly?  People two towns away must have known her husband was home before she did.

“Yes,” she said.  “He had a nice visit with his sister, but now he is home.  I am very happy.”

When she got to the office she went straight to Captain Mustafa’s office.  He was on the phone, but he hung up quickly when she entered.

“I found this in my chicken coop,” she said, placing the bag on top of his desk.  “It is the bag that Nadya was carrying the morning she was killed, the one Fareed took with him.”

He extracted a cigarette packet from his breast pocket and took his time lighting it.

“How did it get in with chickens?” he asked.

“I have no idea.  Someone obviously put it there.”

“Who would do such a thing?”

“I told you, I don’t know.  But the point is, what do I do with it?”

“Did you tell Benny?”

“No.  I wanted to talk to you first.  Do you think I should tell him?”

“What is in it?”

“Clothes.  A little jewelry.  Pictures.  I don’t think there is anything that helps or hurts Fareed.”

“Leave it here.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I am not sure.  If I give it to the Israelis, they might believe that you found it the first day and kept it all this time.  If the boy is going to plead guilty, perhaps they do not need it.”

“Do you think someone was trying to get me in trouble with the army?”

“I do not know.  It is possible.”

Who would do such a thing?  She looked out the glass window into the office.  Abdelhakim was at his desk, diligently going over files.  He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them.

“Go back to your work,” the captain said.  “I will think about this.”

As she walked toward her desk, the phone started to ring.  She rushed to answer it.

“Meet me outside,” said a low voice.  It sounded vaguely familiar.

“Who is this please?”

“At the fruit stand on the corner.”  He hung up.  At least she thought it was a man.  The person had spoken so low, she couldn’t be sure.

She saw Abdelhakim watching her as she took her purse and walked outside.  She looked around her carefully to make sure no one was following.  Of course, she couldn’t know who was watching from what windows.  Her conversation with Um Raad on the bus had reminded her how few secrets there were in this area.  But she had to know what was going on.

The little fruit shop was empty except for Abu Mahmoud, the shopkeeper.  She wondered where she should wait.  Why had the caller picked this little stand?  A bigger place would have given them more cover.  She picked up a handful of cherries, as if inspecting them.

“Come this way.”  The young man had not come from outside, but from a doorway in the back.  He indicated she should follow him back that way.

They mounted the stairs and she followed him through an open door into a pleasant apartment.  A woman a little older than her was peeling okra at the sink.

“Wajdi?” she asked the boy.  He looked stunned for a second, then arranged his features into a semblance of nonchalance.  With wavy black hair and thick lips, he reminded her of a Lebanese fashion model.

“This is my aunt, Um Mahmoud.”

Um Mahmoud turned one shoulder in her direction.  “Salaam aleikum,” they murmured in unison.

“You are Fareed’s friend.  The one he left the bag with.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you put it in my yard?”

“Someone told me to.”

“Who?”

“I cannot say.”

“So why are you telling me now?”

“The person who told me, he said to leave it where you would not find it.  But when I saw you come with it this morning, I did not want you to worry.”

“I am not sure I believe you.”

“It is the truth.”

“Did you tell the Israelis Fareed had left the bag with you?”

“No.  The Yahudi must have told them.”

The response was practiced and too fast.  Wajdi had no way to know that the Israelis knew about the bag at all, unless he had told them.  But she couldn’t be sure, and even if she were, what would she do?  To accuse a young man as a collaborator was a very serious, even deadly thing to do.  She was not ready to do that to Wajdi.  Time would tell what he was.

“You called me before,” she said.

“No, only this morning.”

“At home.  You called my house a few nights ago.  Who told you to?”

“No one.  I don’t know what you are talking about.”

He was lying.  She was not going to waste more time with him.  Probably she would never know why he had done any of it.  Someone must have intended to tip off the Israelis so they would search her yard and find the bag.  Someone wanted her to be afraid.  She didn’t know who and she didn’t know why.  She suspected some combination of Abu Ziyad and Abdelhakim, but she would not give them the satisfaction of accusing them, since they would only deny it.  She didn’t think Wajdi would be making any more problems for her.  Hopefully he would also not make any for himself or Fareed.

Go to Chapter 41

Women in Israeli immigration prison at Tsochar

Chloe had never been so bored.  When she had been arrested at protest actions at home, she had always been with busloads of other people like herself.  The only time she had actually spent several nights in jail, it had been like summer camp – forty or so women in a big dorm room, giving each other massages and having talent shows every night.  She had always thought that going to jail for real would be scary, like those B-movies about Babes Behind Bars.  She had never thought about how dull it would be, just to be left with nothing to do, nothing to read, and no one to talk to.

She wandered over to where Ursula was playing cards with a willowy blonde named Yelena and a brassy-haired older woman Chloe thought was called Katya.  She tried to make sense of their card game, or think of something to say in her few words of Russian, but couldn’t quite manage either.  She went back to her cot, wondering if she would start getting bed sores soon.

“America!” a man’s voice bellowed from the outer room.  “Boi!”

Well let them bellow.  Her name wasn’t America, and she didn’t answer to commands.  If they wanted something from her, they could come ask nicely.  She huddled under the blanket, pretending to sleep.  Soon Diana was pulling the blanket aside, her pixie face a study in irritation.

“Didn’t you hear us calling you?” Diana asked.

“No, I heard someone say ‘America,’ but that’s not my name.”

“Here, it is.  Come.”

She supposed she might as well find out what they wanted.  Maybe it was something good – maybe Rachel had found a way to get her out.  She followed Diana into the sitting room.

Two men stood there, chatting with some of the other women.  One was round and dark and balding.  His eyes darted from one person to another, and his face seemed to twitch with barely controlled hostility.  He reminded Chloe of a terrier.  The other man was tall and slim, with a gentle, amused expression.  He was the one who brought their food in the morning.

“HaAmerikait,” said Diana.

“Boi, tishvi,” come here, sit down, said the shorter man, pointing to one of the plastic chairs next to the table where they ate.  She squinted to read his name tag, which said “Shaul Gabi,” in Hebrew.  She had heard people say that Shaul was the captain here.  He didn’t introduce himself.

“Hello, how are you?” he began, in the slightly menacing tone guys like him are so good at.

She answered, “Fine.”

“Hakol bseder?  Ein b’ayot?”  No problems?

“No,” Chloe answered, “everything’s okay.  I mean, I’d rather not be here …”

“Why not?  You have a problem here?”

“No, it’s just, this isn’t what I planned on doing.”

He shoved a paper and a pen across the table at her.

“Sign this.”

“What is it?”

“Your deportation order.”

“No, I would rather not sign it.”

“You have no choice.  You are in prison.”

“I do have a choice, and I’m exercising it.”

“Mah he omeret?”  Shaul looked at David, who was apparently there as translator, though his English was not that great either.  David said something in Hebrew.  Chloe couldn’t tell if he got it right or not.

“You’re a prisoner.  If I tell you to sign something, you sign.”

The other women had turned off the television and gathered around.  Live entertainment, she supposed, was better than soap operas.

“I don’t know that much about Israeli law,” Chloe said, “But I know I don’t have to sign anything.  And I want to see a lawyer.  Are we done?”  She stood up and walked back toward her room.

“You are in my place,” Shaul said with carefully controlled violence.  “You can’t do whatever you want.  You can stand up when I say so.”

Chloe turned around.  Shaul was gripping the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles whitened.  The tension in the room was thicker than ketchup that won’t come out of the bottle.  She looked around at the twenty female eyes fixed on her and wondered whom they were rooting for.

She walked back and sat down, directly under Shaul’s nose.  He glared down at her.  What about her had aroused so much instant hatred in this guy?  It made no difference if she signed the paper or not.  If not signing a deportation order could stop anyone from being deported, few people ever would be.

“Do you think of yourself as a control freak?” she asked.

“What did she say?” Shaul asked David.

“I didn’t understand,” David admitted.

“What did you say?” Shaul demanded of Chloe.

“I wondered if you need to get your way all the time.”

“Mah?” to David.  David translated for him.  Shaul’s neck turned dark red and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.  His tie seemed to be choking him.  Chloe was afraid he was about to have a heart attack right in front of them.

“You’re not better than the others,” Shaul suddenly said in English.

“Which others?”

“The other prisoners here.”

Had she given the other women that impression?  Was that why they didn’t like her?  “I know I’m not.”

“When I tell them to do something, they do it.”

Oh, that.  “Well maybe they’re afraid of you, but I’m not.”

The competition was suddenly over.  He asked her once more, “You won’t sign?”

“No.”

“Ein b’ayah,” he said after a final long stare.

Well if it was no problem, then why all the drama?  She didn’t ask.  She also didn’t walk back into her room.  She stood, along with the other women who still watched silently as he took the massive set of keys from his belt loop, unlocked the cell door and ushered his entourage out.  When he was gone the room exploded like a popped balloon.

“Kol hakavod, Chloe,” said Yelena.  Good for you, that meant.  Everyone was laughing with each other and smiling at her.  Ursula kissed her hard on both cheeks.  Katya appeared with a chocolate bar and sectioned it out to celebrate.  She was one of them now.  But she still had no language to ask them what she wanted to know.  She smiled at them and turned the television set back on.  Soon enough, they were fixated on the screen instead of her.

Her phone was beeping at regular intervals, telling her there was a message.  Thankfully, she could get into Nir Gelenter’s voicemail without a password.  She listened to the message and texted Rania that she was available.  A minute later, her phone rang.

“Meron Levav?” Chloe gasped, when Rania finished her story.  “You’re sure?”

“That’s what Benny said was written in the log book.  Do you know him?”

“Not him,” Chloe said.  “His son.”

Go to Chapter 40

“I will talk to the Israeli police and see what they can do,” she told him, confident that the answer would be absolutely nothing.  “Meanwhile, you may want to spend more time with the sheep yourself.”  He muttered something about being too old to herd sheep, but thanked her and his wife produced the obligatory cup of coffee.

At least that gave her an excuse to call Benny, which she needed to do after talking to Chloe.  No problem, he said when she reached him.  She should stay there, and he would come meet her.  She told the farmer with some trepidation that an Israeli policeman was coming to talk to him, but he was pleased for the opportunity to rail against the settlers to one of their own officials.  Benny also saved her the trouble of working the conversation around to the Nadya murder.

“How is your boy Fareed?” he asked as they walked away from the field where the sheep were grazing.

“What makes you think I know?” she asked.  He simply gave her that look, that said, I know what I know.

“He is tired of being in jail,” she said.  “And he should not be.”  She told him what Chloe had found out.  “I need to know if Wilensky was really in Italy at all, and if so, how he came back,” she said.

She had prepared elaborate arguments that stopped short of begging.  She was almost disappointed that for once, he wasn’t in the mood to make her jump through hoops.  It took him only a few phone calls to tell her that the Colonel had flown to Italy on Air Italia on Friday night, and had not returned on any commercial flight.

“Commercial flight?  What other kind – oh! you mean he came in a military plane?”

“It seems possible,” he said.  “You’d better call Mustafa and tell him we’re going to be a while.”

“I warn you,” Benny said as he started the car.  “You are making some very powerful enemies.”

“I’m a Palestinian,” she said.  “I’m accustomed to having powerful enemies.”

They drove for a long time, deep into the Nakab desert.  As they plunged deeper into the scorching heat, Benny loosened his tie and opened the neck of his blue policeman’s shirt.  After nearly three hours, they drove through a series of gates.  Benny got out of the car and shook hands with a blond young man who must have been nearly seven feet tall, wearing the special light-colored fatigues of the Air Force.  Nearby, a group of similarly dressed young men kicked around a soccer ball.  A tiny slip of a dog was playing goalie.

While Benny spoke to the airman, Rania took in the scene in the distance.  Military aircraft sat in neat rows, like toys or sheep, looking so harmless.  Yet she recognized the F-16s that terrorized her childhood in Aida, with the huge Stars of David painted on them in bright white paint.  After a long conversation with the blond giant, Benny climbed back into the car and revved the engine on the way into the bowels of the base.

“Where are we?” Rania asked.

“Hatserim,” he answered.  She knew the name Hatserim, mainly because of one incident, years ago, that had been widely reported in the Arab press.  Two planes had crashed in a training flight, a number of Israeli soldiers had been killed, and the Israeli Prime Minister had become ill when he came to look at the damage.  The Palestinians had loved the image of the head of Israel spilling his cookies all over the wreckage.

They were ushered into the captain’s office and served weak tea without enough sugar in it.  After the pleasantries, the captain called in two young men who stood before her with sullen condescension in their faces.  The captain introduced them as Uriel and Gadi.  They were draft age, but they were not just serving out their time until they could go to India and climb mountains.  They were Israel’s finest, the Baraks and Sharons and Wilenskys of the future – and worse, of Khaled’s future.  They were the ones she had nightmares about.

Benny did all the talking.  It irritated her, but there was nothing she could do about it.  She barely understood what they were doing here.  And, even if she knew what to ask, her chances of getting any information out of these arrogant officers was nonexistent.  So she sat in her chair and fidgeted as loudly as she dared.

“Tell me what happened the night of seven May,” Benny said.

“A reserve officer needed to take a plane out and return in a few hours,” said Uriel.

“Does this happen often?” Benny asked.

“Not often, no.”

“But sometimes.”

“Sure.”

“So when it does, what is the procedure?”

“We check their ID, we check the plane, and they have to sign the log.”

“So this man, who came here that night, signed the log?”

Uriel and Gadi exchanged glances.  “Of course,” Uriel said.

Rania could not contain herself any longer.  Finally, she was going to get her proof.  “May we see the log?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the captain answered.  “We have to call the commander of the base to get permission to show it to you.”

“Oh, come on,” she blurted out, “stop stalling.”

Benny flinched.  She saw he was about to touch her shoulder, but stopped his hand in mid-air, brushing his own head instead.

“Did you know the man?” he asked Uriel.

“I knew who he was.”

“What do you mean?  You knew him or you didn’t know him.”

Gadi said, “We had never met him, but when he came in, we knew who he was.”

“Well?”  Rania thanked Allah that Benny had asked the question, because she couldn’t have contained herself.  Even he seemed to be tiring of dragging information out of these soldiers’ mouths two words at a time.

They said the name.  It wasn’t Wilensky and it wasn’t Gelenter.  It was impossible.

“Let me see the log book,” she demanded.  All of them stared at her in astonishment, but apparently now that they’d said the name, they didn’t see the need to call anyone for authorization.  Gadi rummaged in a tall metal filing cabinet, which had a lock with a key hanging from it, and drew out a thick cloth-bound book.  He flipped the pages and found the one he was looking for and handed it to her open.  Of course, after all that, she couldn’t read the Hebrew words.  She showed it to Benny, who confirmed the name for her without drawing unnecessary attention.

“The name sounds familiar,” she said softly in English.  “Who is he?”

“Perhaps you have heard of him,” Benny said.  “He gives the news every evening on Israeli Channel 2.”  She supposed she might have heard of a popular Israeli newscaster.  She never really watched Israeli news programs, but you couldn’t avoid Channel 2.  But she still didn’t want to accept, couldn’t accept, that they hadn’t given her anything on Wilensky or Gelenter.

“You say he left and returned the same night?” she asked Uriel.

He nodded.

“And he didn’t say where he was going?”

“No.”  He was looking like she was more or less an idiot.  Obviously, conscripts, even Air Force ones, didn’t ask important older men where they were going or why.

“Did anyone come back with him?”

“Not that I saw,” Uriel answered.

“Not that you saw?” Benny said.  “Did you have some other reason to think …”

“No one was with him as far as we know,” Gadi amended.

Rania accepted it, because they obviously weren’t going to get anything else.  She was nearly silent on the long drive back.  It was fully dark when Benny dropped her at the Qarawa blocks.  She dialed Chloe’s number while she waited for a cab.  The phone rang and rang and then Nir’s voicemail came on.

When she opened the gate to the family compound, she saw lights on in her house.  Her first thought was the army.  But there were no jeeps, no sentries, no spotlights.  When the army came to your house, they didn’t come in secret.  She recalled the settler youths with their eggs and the dirty phone call a few days ago.  Was she being stalked?  She mentally flipped through the people who were angry with her – Nir Gelenter, Abu Ziyad, Abdelhakim.  Would any of them have been able to get someone into her own house?

She fished her phone out of her purse, wondering who she could call.  If it turned out to be nothing, who would not remind her of her foolishness for the next ten years?  The only person she could think of was miles away in Jericho.  She stole up to the front door and threw it open.  She could hear voices.

“Hello?”  Her voice came out as a little choking sound.  She was shaking.  She couldn’t be this scared, standing in her own doorway.

“Who’s here?” she managed to get out in a fairly authoritative voice.

“Rania?”  Her mother-in-law called from the kitchen.  Great, now that they were so chummy, Um Bassam was going to be breaking into her flat whenever she felt like it?  That wouldn’t do.  She would tell the old woman, kindly but firmly, to wait until she was invited to come downstairs.  Steeling herself, she took a few steps inside.

“Mama!”  A little ball of flesh flew through the air and then she was burying her face in Khaled’s wooly hair.  When she looked up, Bassam was standing in the living room doorway, smiling the lopsided smile that had made her love him that first day in college.

“Mama called,” he said.  “And Mustafa did too.  They said you seemed very lonely.”

Go to Chapter 39

“Not really my style,” she said to herself, turning again to contemplate the scarce contents of her backpack.  Crumpled up pamphlets, a few aged raisins, a bandana, a sanitary napkin – got it!  If only … yes, there it was, a seldom-used lipstick.  She made a few red marks on the sanitary napkin, pried open the cotton layers, tucked the phone between them, and then shoved the whole thing into place between her legs.  Now she was ready.  If anyone asked why she had a charger and no phone, she would just say she had forgotten the phone at home.

Soon a woman cop came and ushered her into another slightly larger dark concrete room, containing a table and two chairs.  She dumped everything out of the backpack onto the table, inspected it cursorily, set aside everything with Arabic writing on it and put the rest back, including the charger, which she had not even touched.

“Get undressed,” she said.  Chloe removed her shirt and jeans and then stood facing them in bra and underpants.

“Take off everything,” the policewoman ordered.

“This is enough,” Chloe said.  The woman seemed like she couldn’t quite decide what to do.  She hadn’t even glanced at the clothes she had taken off, so it certainly didn’t seem like she was too worried about what she might have hidden in or on them.  She was more interested in humiliating her, Chloe decided.  Well, she was pretty humiliated standing here in her underwear.

“Wait here,” the woman said.

She went out and came back a minute later with Snake Tattoo, who looked Chloe up and down coolly.  “Why won’t you take off your clothes?” he asked her.

“I did take off my clothes,” she said, indicating the pile sitting on the table.

“Why won’t you take off the rest?”

“I don’t like people looking at me naked ‑ unless I know them really well.”

To her surprise, he nodded and told the woman, “Zeh bseder.”  He left and the woman told her to get dressed.  Then she opened the door and Snake Tattoo returned.  He fingered the Arabic brochures the woman had taken from Chloe’s backpack and the scrap of bag from a bakery in East Jerusalem.  Then he sat down and let out a big sigh.

“Chloe, Chloe, Chloe.  What am I going to do with you?”

She hoped that was a rhetorical question.

“How do you know Nir Gelenter?” he asked.

“I don’t.  I just met him once at his office.”  That, she figured, was safe enough to say.  He knew she had been there; he had tried to arrest her there.

“Why did you lure his daughter to that café?”

“Lure her?”

“Why did you get her to meet you there?”

“I didn’t.  I just ran into her.”

She was prepared for many more questions, but they didn’t come.  The man made one call after another, some on a land line and some on his mobile.  At times he was talking on both of them at once.  Many hours later, three policemen led her into a waiting van bound for the immigration prison at Hadera.

It was nearly two a.m. when she saw the big metal sign proclaiming that they had reached the city of Hadera, halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa.  At least she would get to sleep now, she thought.  Not yet.  None of the police knew how to find the prison.  They drove up and back, around and down.  They made calls on their mobile phones and got very agitated.  Of course they would not stop to ask anyone.  Forty-five minutes passed before they turned into a massive complex with bars and curls of razor wire all around.  She had never been so glad to see the inside of a prison.

A policewoman showed her into a little sitting room, where four or five women were watching “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in Russian.  Apparently this was a prison with no lights-out policy.  Next to the window she saw a few open bags of white bread and bricks of margarine, with little packets of jelly and tea bags.  She was very hungry.  She had not eaten since she left Azzawiya.  The policewoman was impatiently indicating for her to continue into an inner room, where she found three sets of bunk beds.  She had to climb up onto the top one and arrange the scant bedding she found there, trying not to waken the woman snoring beneath her or the three who occupied other bunks.

She lay still, wondering what would happen now.  She couldn’t do anything to help herself right now.  She would get some sleep, and in the morning presumably she would get to eat, and then she would figure something out.  She turned onto her side and let Tina’s face creep into her mind’s eye.  Would she ever get to see her again, or would this be the last stop before she ended up on a plane?

The door to the little room opened and a small figure crept over to where she lay.

“At yeshenah?” the woman asked.

“Hmm?  No, I’m not sleeping.”

“You are hungry.”

The woman thrust a margarine and jelly sandwich into her hand and set a cup of tea on the ledge next to Chloe’s head.  She was gone before Chloe could thank her.  Chloe ate and drank and let sleep overtake her.

“Boker Tov, banot!”  Good morning, girls.  The false cheer of prison guards was the same in every language.  Why did they always have to wake you up at the crack of dawn, when you would have nothing to do all day?  At least, Chloe didn’t imagine there would be any work shifts in this jail.  She was right.  After the morning count, one or two women mopped the floors with a squeegie, which took only a few minutes in a space so small, and then most people went back to sleep until almost lunch time.

After some initial inquiries about where she was from and why she was here, her roommates showed no interest in her.  She managed to ask in Hebrew where they were from, how long they were here, and whether they wanted to go home.  They answered with a few words, and went back to their sole occupations ‑ watching television and talking on their mobile phones.

Only the dainty girl who had brought her supper the night before was friendly.  She had big chocolate fondue eyes and her face exploded in dimples when she smiled, which was often.  Her name was Ursula, she was from Uzbekistan, and she had appointed herself Chloe’s protector.  That morning, as the women crowded around the breakfast table, grabbing cartons of cottage cheese and slices of bread, Ursula plowed into the throng and emerged, thrusting a plate containing two hard-boiled eggs and two slices of bread into Chloe’s  hands.  She had fought so hard for them that Chloe couldn’t tell her she didn’t like eggs.

“Where were you living?” she asked Ursula.

“Eilat.”

Eilat!  And she was Uzbek.  But Ursula shook her head when she asked if she knew a Nadya or a Vicki.  She had heard of Dmitri, but not met him.  There were lots of men like him, she said.  Reluctantly, Chloe abandoned the subject.  Instead, she asked Ursula general questions about her life in Eilat.  She had liked it, Ursula said.  She had an Israeli boyfriend, who was going to come get her out of jail and marry her.  Chloe asked what his work was.

Ursula shrugged.  “He’s rich.”

Pretty Woman syndrome, Chloe thought.  Ursula didn’t seem that naïve.  Well, who was she to judge?  Maybe Ursula really did have a rich boyfriend who would come bail her out and take her home as his bride.  She was certainly beautiful enough for a trophy wife.

How had she gotten here? Chloe asked.  From Egypt, Ursula said.  It had taken many days.  There were thirty or more women, and they had to walk very fast.  She mimed being beaten.  Then she was done talking.  She wandered off, leaving Chloe to worry about her own situation.  How was she going to get out of here?  She was afraid to call her own mobile, the only number she knew by heart, because who knew where Malkah was?  She could only wait and hope that someone was doing something to help her.

 Just after lunch, a tiny, waiflike policewoman with a sleek black ponytail came to get her.  According to the badge she wore, her name was Diana.  Chloe heard one of the prisoners ask her if she had a good trip.

“Where did you go?” she asked as Diana led her downstairs and out into the courtyard.

“My country.”

“Where are you from?”

“Romania.”

“When did you come here?”

“Five years ago, at fifteen.”

Physically, she could be the sister of many of the women locked up here.  If she were not Jewish, she might well have been one of them.  Not long ago, Chloe reflected, being born Jewish in Romania would have been no one’s idea of good fortune.

Diana escorted her into a room where a man and a woman sat.  The woman sat behind a desk, and the man to her right.

“I’m Elisheva, and this is Yoav.  We’re from the United States Embassy.”

They asked if she was being treated okay, and if she had been beaten.  When she said no, Yoav leaned forward and asked, “Are you sure?”  She wondered, was it so rare that a U.S. citizen was arrested and not beaten?  She hated to disappoint them, but she had to confess that she had not been beaten.

That settled, Elisheva handed her a stack of papers, and then just in case she couldn’t read very well, told her what each of them said.  One said that they weren’t going to help her get out of jail, regardless of whether she had done what the Israeli authorities accused her of.  It told her what would happen when she was deported, making it all sound quite grim and inevitable.  The second was a list of lawyers.  At the top of the list was a disclaimer, saying that the embassy didn’t know if any of these lawyers were good.  They recommended you hire one of them, but mentioned that it probably wouldn’t do you any good.

Chloe decided that even the diversion of speaking English wasn’t worth prolonging this encounter.  She took the papers, thanked them for coming and called Diana to take her back to her room.

At least the papers were blank on one side, so now she had some scratch paper.  She was here because of Nadya’s death.  If she wanted to get out, she would have to figure out who had killed her and why.  She started making a list of everyone who knew Nadya.  Fareed, she wrote and drew a circle around his name.  Radwan, and she drew a line to Fareed’s circle.  Gelenter, in another circle.  Wilensky, linked to Gelenter.  Dmitri, down below, for Eilat, which was down below.  Vicki.  Malkah, she added, with a short line connecting her to Gelenter, who kept her on such a short leash.  Avi, she threw in.  After all, he had been part of the events that had led to Nadya’s getting killed.

When Diana came to get her a second time, she was absorbed in the chart.  Whatever Diana wanted this time, she wasn’t interested.  But there was no point in refusing.  Police didn’t go away because you told them you weren’t in the mood.  She put on her shoes and followed her to the administration building again.

In the same desk room where she had met Elisheva and Yoav, Avi and Tina were pacing.  Tina was as beautiful as she had been in Chloe’s fantasies.  Seeing Avi standing there grinning felt like having a brother show up.  She hugged them and hung on, hoping their scents would penetrate her body, so she could still smell them when they were gone.

“How’d you know I was here?” she asked.

“Rania called me,” Avi answered.  “The kid from Elkana called her.”  Chloe cheered for Malkah in her heart.  The girl must have thought to redial the last person Chloe had called.

“Rachel, the lawyer, is working on getting you bail,” Avi said.

“Why bail?  I haven’t done anything.”

“As a foreigner you don’t have too many rights.  They’ve canceled your visa and issued a deportation order against you.  You only have three days to challenge it, and then they can deport you, unless you can get out on bail.”

“I don’t know how I could pay any bail.  I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Tina said firmly.

How could she not worry about it?  She didn’t like the idea of Tina hitting up her family members for money, if they had any.  But she wasn’t going to tell Tina not to do whatever she was doing.  She was too afraid she wouldn’t ever hold her again.  She reached for Tina’s hand.  Their fingers felt like they belonged laced together.

The phone in Chloe’s pocket jingled.  She hastily hit the “reject call” button.  When she had been brought in the night before, they asked if she had a phone and she said no because she thought they would take it from her.  Now, she feared that they would take it away because she had lied.  But Diana didn’t seem to have noticed anything.  She wasn’t even looking at them; she was smoking and gossiping with another woman cop.

“Who was it?” Avi asked.  “I gave Rachel your number.”

Chloe clicked the “Recent Calls” button.  The last number began with “00.”

“It’s from out of the country,” she told Avi.

“Let me see it.”

Normally, she would have balked at his bossiness, but after two days of nonstop worrying, it felt nice to have someone else taking charge.  She handed him the phone.

“It’s Wilensky,” he said.  “He can use his Israeli phone from Italy.”

“Maybe I should have answered it,” Chloe joked.  “I haven’t been answering any calls ’cause I figured no one knew I had this phone.”

“I think Rania tried to call you, but you didn’t answer,” Tina said.  “Oh, I brought you some stuff.”  She went behind the desk and emerged with a small rucksack and a bouquet of flowers.

“Oh, they’re beautiful,” Chloe effused.  She opened the bag.  Three shirts, some new pairs of underwear.  She couldn’t restrain herself.  “No chocolate?  Or books?”

Tina looked apologetic.  “They told us we couldn’t bring any food.”  She held out one lone book.  “We had some others, but they said the captain had to approve them, because they’re ‘political,’ and he’s not here today.”

Chloe held out her hand for the one book.  Raymond Chandler short stories.  She didn’t even like short stories, but hey, they had tried.

“This is great,” she said.  She hoped Tina couldn’t hear her half-heartedness.

“Time to go,” Diana said.  Chloe put their numbers in her phone.  Then she hugged Avi and kissed Tina long and hard.

“See you soon,” Tina whispered.

“Inshalla,” Chloe whispered back.

As she followed Diana back to her cage, she felt lonelier than before they came.  She tried to read Raymond Chandler, but he was as dour as she remembered.  She turned back to her chart.  “Rania,” she wrote in one corner, even though Rania was not a player in the case, any more than she was herself.  That reminded her, Tina said Rania had tried to call her.  If she could figure out which number was hers, she could save it in the phone so next time, she would know to pick up.  She took out the phone and punched up the call list.  There was only one call from this morning, at about ten o’clock.  The number looked somewhat familiar.  She couldn’t be sure, but probably it was Rania’s.  Nir Gelenter must not use his cell phone very much, or maybe he had more than one.  There were calls on this one going back three weeks.  She scrolled through them.  One caught her eye.  She checked it, then checked again.  It didn’t make sense.  Avi had said Wilensky was out of the country when Nadya was killed.  He had gotten a post card from him, he had told her.  But here was his number, on that very Monday, in Nir Gelenter’s mobile phone without the “00” for out of the country.

Had Avi lied to her or had Wilensky snuck back into Israel that day?  Someone would need to find out.

“Call me.  C.” she spelled out and sent the message to the number she fervently hoped was Rania’s.

Go to Chapter 38

“I am forbidden to talk to you,” she hissed.  “You must go before someone sees us and tells my father.”

“Well where can we meet?  I have to ask you something,” Chloe insisted.

“I need to tell you something too,” Malkah said.  “Meet me on Wednesday, in Tel Aviv.  I can meet you instead of going to my skating lesson.”

“Won’t your dad find out if you miss your lesson?”

“I’ll call my teacher and say I am sick.”

“Where can we meet?”

“Anywhere not near the Kirya.”

They met at a small café Avi had recommended on Sderot Yerushalayim in Jaffa.  Chloe bought them coffee and they sat down.  Chloe was practically jumping out of her skin to know what Malkah had to tell her, but she knew she needed to let the girl spill it at her own tempo.

“How long have you been ice skating?” she asked.

“Since I was ten,” Malkah said proudly.

“Are you good?”  Chloe bit her tongue too late.  Why had she asked that?  She didn’t want Malkah to think she cared if she was a good skater.

“Not really,” Malkah said.  “I can do a single axel.”

“But that’s the hardest jump,” Chloe exclaimed.  “I’m impressed.”

Malkah looked pleased at the praise, and her body relaxed a little.  She put a cellphone down on the table while she sipped her coffee.

“That’s the same phone I have,” Chloe said, placing hers on the table next to Malkah’s.

“My father’s,” Malkah explained.  “He gives it to me when I come to Tel Aviv, in case something happens and I need to call him.”

“I’m sorry you got into trouble because of the books I brought you,” Chloe said.

“Bseder,” it’s okay, Malkah said.  “The girls in my class whisper about me, but they never liked me anyway.  Some girls I did not know before talk to me now.  They think it’s funny, what I said to the principal.”

“So you have some new friends?” Chloe asked.

“I don’t know if I want them for friends.  They are kind of bad kids,” Malkah commented.

“Sometimes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aren’t what you think they are,” Chloe said.  She had an uneasy feeling, like someone was watching her.  She glanced around the coffee shop.  There were only a few patrons, and the young man behind the counter, who was flirting with a pretty young woman.  She didn’t see anyone suspicious.  She was nervous, though, and didn’t want to make any more small talk.

“Malkah,” she said, “Nadya took something from your dad, didn’t she?  Something that could have gotten him into trouble?”

Malkah’s eyes widened, and she nodded slowly.  “I came from school and she was in the office,” the girl said.  “She told me she was looking for her passport and she didn’t find it.  Instead, she found this envelope inside a Tikkun.”

“What’s a Tikkun?” Chloe asked.  She didn’t know if it mattered, and hated wasting time if it didn’t, but she couldn’t know until Malkah told her.  She didn’t want to scare the girl by rushing the conversation.

“A special type of prayer book,” Malkah said.

“Then what happened?” Chloe prompted.

“Nadya looked in the envelope, and there was a letter.  She could not read Hebrew.  She asked me to tell her what it said.”

Chloe waited.  Malkah’s speech was getting more forced, the English words not coming as easily as when they had talked about skating and school.  She was breathing a little hard.

“And did you read the letter?” Chloe asked.

Another nod, this one even fainter.  Chloe was afraid to breathe, lest she say or do something to send Malkah flying out of the café.  She drank her coffee and reminded herself patience was a virtue.

Suddenly Malkah jumped up, her hands covering her mouth.  Chloe was sitting with her back to the door.  She twisted in her chair just in time to see Nir Gelenter point her out to the SHABAK guy with the snake tattoo who had tried to arrest her at the Kirya.  There were two other men with them, also wearing open-necked white shirts and dark slacks.  Malkah was crying as they bundled Chloe outside, pinching her hands together behind her back.

“How did you find me?” Chloe heard her ask.

“I thought I could trust you,” was her father’s reply.

*  *  *

Every Palestinian office had a book called the Passia Journal.  It was published by an organization in Jerusalem, and contained addresses and telephone numbers for all the governmental and nongovernmental agencies in the Occupied Territories.  It also had numbers for some Israeli officials, and one of them was Member of the Knesset, Gil Kalman.  Rania dialed the number.

“Mr. Kalman is not available,” said the curt woman who answered the phone.

“I need to speak with him,” Rania said in Hebrew.  “I am calling from the police.”  She prayed, don’t ask me which police.  The woman didn’t.  She put Rania on hold, and a loud Hebrew radio station played in her ear for a few minutes.  Then a man’s voice said, “Ken?”

There was no point pretending to be an Israeli; he would guess quickly that she was lying and then she would be doomed.  She had better hope that the fact that he was listed in Passia meant that he was sympathetic to Palestinians.  She explained in English what she wanted to know.

“Ah yes,” he said and she said a quick silent thanks to Allah.  “Yuri came to me and said that he wanted to change his testimony.  I started reinterviewing witnesses and found that there was enough doubt for new hearings.  But before we could schedule them, all the Palestinian witnesses pulled out.”

“What do you mean pulled out?”

“They all refused to testify.”

“At the same time?”

“More or less.”

“Was one of them a young man named Mohammed Omar?” she asked.

“Yes, he and his mother.”

“One more question,” she said.  “When was this?”

“Just before Yuri died,” he said.  Funny, she thought, how everyone said “died” rather than “killed himself.”  Perhaps in Israel suicide was reserved for Palestinian bombers.  But his answer confirmed her suspicions.  The Palestinians who planned to testify had been paid for their silence just before the young Israeli had killed himself.  It all fit together, but what did it have to do with Nadya?

Maybe Chloe had gotten information from Malkah which would supply the missing piece.  She tried the American’s number, but only got her voicemail.  It was hours before the return call came.

“Chloe, what happened?” she said as soon as she punched the talk button.

“Hello?  Who is this?” someone whispered.

“Chloe?  I can’t hear you.  Where are you?”

“I’m not Chloe – the police took her.”

“Police?  What police?  Who is this, please?”

“I’m Malkah.”

“Malkah?”  Rania was baffled.  What was Malkah doing with Chloe’s phone, and what did she mean about police?  “It’s me, Rania, the Palestinian policewoman who came to your house.  Where are you?”

“In the bathroom,” came the whispered reply.

“If you are in the bathroom, why do you have to whisper?”

“If my father hears me, he will take the phone.”

“How did you get Chloe’s mobile?” Rania asked.

“I put my father’s telephone on the table.  Hers looks just the same.  When the police came for her, she took my father’s phone instead of hers.”  Good move on Chloe’s part, Rania thought, but it would be a problem when Malkah’s father asked her for the phone.  She told Malkah to say she left the phone on the bus, and reminded her to turn off the ringer.

“You will help her, yes?” Malkah asked.  “My father says he will make them send her back to America.  I do not want her to be in trouble because she talked to me.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Rania told her.  “If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine.  I will not let them send her away.”  She hoped she could deliver on that promise.

Go to Chapter 37