The huge plaza was dotted with people -- perhaps a thousand in a space that on Holy Days could contain a hundred thousand or more. David watched them: black-suited Hasidim whirling, dancing; solitary old religious men, wearing tefilin, rocking rhythmically as they prayed. Tourists in shorts and T-shirts gawking. A group from Poland choking, weeping. A wedding party rushing about for the traditional photograph before the sky turned dark. Panhandlers, soldiers, mystics, crazies, Jews who longed for reconciliation and others who favored expansion of the Zionist State.
Nightfall was at hand; in minutes the sun would disappear. And then, from the minarets in the Valley of Shiloah, David heard the muezzin call the Arab faithful to prayer. The voices echoed, overlapped across the valley, haunting cries that God was Great. The murmuring of people below on the plaza, the cries from the valley, the bells tolling in the churches on the hills -- this, he recognized, was the Jerusalem of the guidebooks, the city where members of three great faiths lived together in perfect peace.
But it was not his Jerusalem. His was a very different city: tense and angry as a wound-up spring, inhabited by criminals, whores, dope dealers, sex-killers, filled as much with evil as with good. And the three great religions -- he knew about them too, how, beneath the facade of harmony, fanatical factions plotted to spill each other's blood, seize every shrine and stone, and then claim the city exclusively for themselves.
But still he loved the place.
Micha said it had to be Peretz, that his alibis had to be faked. "Too pat," Micha said. "It all suddenly ends the night we start watching him? Come on! Then he cruises the exact spot where Halil Ghemaiem was picked up. What a joke!"
"Go ahead. Punch a hole in it," Dov said. "Just one tiny little hole."
They'd been over it a dozen times. Peretz was on vacation in Egypt when Susan Mills and Ora Goshen had been killed. An airtight alibi. A group tour. A dozen witnesses. All Israeli and Egyptian borders closely watched. No way he could have slipped out of Cairo, then back in time for the Nile cruise. He didn't have alibis for Ghemaiem and Schneidrman, but the first night of Passover, when Yael Safir was picked up, he'd attended a seder at the home of friends.
But Micha was a chess player, his mind reeled with plots and schemes, and so he devised a theory of conspiracy, a second killer who murdered the women while Peretz killed the men.
"So who's the second killer?" Moshe Liederman asked.
"It's possible. It could work."
"Yeah, it could," David agreed, "if you could name both conspirators, show they knew each other, and then prove that they conspired."
"Say two freaks get together, they agree to use an identical method and arrange airtight alibis for the murders they don't commit."
Shoshana said that sounded like a movie she'd seen, Strangers on a Train.
"How do they get together? Answer an ad in the Jerusalem Post?"
"Great try, Micha."
"It was just an idea."
"So now what do we do?"
"Forget about Peretz. Start tracking down guys from his unit," David said.
"You didn't 'fail,' " Rafi said. Hard mid-morning light striped his office floor and walls. "The symposium idea was good. You developed a suspect. No break-ins, no wiretaps. From a technical point-of-view, your investigation was a model."
"He's crazy, Rafi. You know that. He could have done it. He's crazy enough."
"Maybe, but he didn't. So now-"
"Yeah. The investigation-must-go-on."
Rafi nodded. "Go back to it. Less pressure now since the killings stopped, and Horev-Isaacson hit the news."
Aaron Horev and Ruth Isaacson: adulterous lovers found murdered in their love nest. This new murder case, assigned by Rafi to his regular homicide team, had fascinated the public. People couldn't get enough of it; it rang true to them, was imaginable, a crime of passion, not crazy like the serial case.
David asked for a last meeting with Peretz, a final go at him before they sent him home. Rafi agreed. "But be gentle, David."
"Of course. What do you think? I'm going to hang him by his heels like a Turk?"
Rafi laughed. "Watching the two of you I got the feeling you didn't like each other very much."
"So we don't. So is that any reason we can't do a little business? He knows who was in his unit. I need a list. That way I don't have to track down every fuck-up who's ever been in a military prison."
The final go-around took place in a corner booth at Fink's, a small, cozy, dark, and very middle-European restaurant-bar, a hang-out for politicians and up-scale foreign journalists.
Waiting for their table, David and Peretz bantered lightly about who was going to be the guest of whom. They struck a bargain, Peretz would pay for the drinks and David would buy the dinner.
After they sat down and ordered goulash, Peretz planted his elbows aggressively on the table.
"You hate my guts."
"Hate may be too strong a word."
"Cut the crap. I don't even care."
"So why do you bring it up?"
"Ah, the analyst's son." A mocking smile.
"Should I be impressed you checked me out?"
"Didn't have to. I knew your brother. Quite the handsome fellow was Gideon Bar-Lev. He and I used to play tennis. Well-are you surprised?"
"Since you ask, I wouldn't have thought you'd have been quite each other's type."
"Oh, we were each other's type all right. He just had a lot of trouble admitting it."
David said nothing.
"What's the matter?"
"What are you driving at, Peretz?"
"How much do you know?"
"I don't know anything."
"Really?"
"Are you telling me you went for him and, poor you!, he didn't give in?"
"Who says he didn't?"
"Who cares?"
"You care all right. You hate the thought."
"Oh, I get it. Now that he's dead you can smirk around about how he was a queer." David shook his head. "You're fucking impossible to talk to, you know."
Peretz seemed to make an effort to calm himself. When he spoke again the hostile edge was gone. "Maybe you're right. Talking's not my thing. Fighting is. But now I can't do that anymore." He took a long swig of beer. "You know why they got rid of me?"
"Way I heard it, they thought you played a little rough."
Peretz shook his head. "Wasn't that. It was my…proclivity. They couldn't handle it. Not in their manly army." He laughed.
"So, you see yourself as quite the tragic figure."
"More like a first-rate officer who served his country well and then got screwed." Peretz shook his head again. "Know something, you're not like Gideon. You don't even look like him. He was delicate and you're kind of burly. The difference, I guess, between a pilot and a cop."
"Why are you so contemptuous, Peretz?"
"I'm not-at least not of everyone. But I am, I admit, contemptuous of you. You should be in the army not the police, out in the field where the real murderers are running loose." He made a sweeping motion. "Oh, I know what you think, that I'm some kind of psychopath, that we're all the same, terrorists and counter-terrorists, bunch of nuts running around blowing each other up. I know your type. Don't believe in reprisals. Think it's self-defeating. Think the way to end the cycle is to sit down, talk it out, nobody gets too little or too much. That's the kind of bullshit you hear in the soft elite circles where nobody puts anything on the line. 'We all have to live together here on this Holy Land, nod good morning to each other, be polite, ask after each other's wives, make the desert bloom, blah-blah, blah-blah.' Meanwhile, of course, we hate each other's guts. But never mind that, just share the blessings and respect each other's precious faiths. The old bullshit. See, we're enemies, Bar-Lev. I'm contemptuous of you, and now that you know my views I'm sure you feel the same." He started to eat. "Incidentally, a very attractive lady at the bar keeps looking over this way."