"So what are you trying to tell me?"
Peretz hauled his legs up onto the swing, then lay down across the three seats and stared up at the sky. David could imagine the many seductions he must have engineered on this old, rusty, swinging outdoor bed.
"You see, Bar-Lev, I don't think they really wanted you dead. More like they wanted to scare you off. Or, since they probably know you're not the type who scares, wanted to let you know they know you're there and let you know that they're there too. Because those guys weren't amateurs. They were well-trained men. Elite military training. Could be veterans of a crack unit. Or Mossad. Or Shin Bet guys. Or even active IDF Intelligence Corps. So Big-Shot, ever think of that?"
Sunday at noon he drove down to Ben-Gurion Airport to meet Anna's plane from Brussels. He used his credentials to enter the customs hall, and then, when he saw her, he watched her a while, savoring his joy in her return.
Yosef spotted him first. "David!" Her head snapped up. She saw him and then she smiled, and when she did he knew he was a very lucky man.
"We got fabulous reviews," Yosef said, as they started the drive up to Jerusalem. "Anna's gotten very strong. She doesn't play anymore like a talented kid. There's a new confidence. The audiences picked up on it and the better they liked her the better she played."
Yosef was sitting in back with the cello. Anna sat beside David, her fingers resting gently on his arm.
"So is this true?" David asked.
She grinned, then shrugged.
"Now she's ready for America," Yosef said. "Last time she impressed them. This time she'll knock them dead."
Later, when he began the climb into Judea, she and Yosef turned quiet. The hills glittered tan and gold. A lone hawk riding the thermals circled in the distance.
Finally Anna spoke. "Oh how I missed this place!"
"It's home," David said.
She nodded.
"And no one will ever take it away from us," Yosef said. "We won't let them. Ever."
Late that afternoon, after she had hung her clothes, and set up her music stand, and placed her cello in the corner and her pearl necklace on the little table beside the bed, she came to him and they made love. Afterward she slept against him, her head pressed to his shoulder, her body molded to his flank. At eight o'clock, they went out to East Jerusalem to eat.
At the Ummayyah she gazed around, taking in the boisterous atmosphere. As always the place was alive, waiters rushing about with skewers of meat, journalists huddled in booths with Palestinian politicians, Israeli tourist guides exchanging gossip with Roman Catholic archaeologists.
"Welcome back," he said, "to the Middle East."
She asked him about his case. He told her everything, and when he got to the part about the zoo, she reached across the table and grasped his hand.
"No footprints. Or rather too many. The ground there's a mess. We found plenty of shells too-theirs, Peretz's, and mine. A few slugs. They didn't match the ones in the lovers' heads."
"This is too dangerous, David."
He nodded. "Dangerous maybe, but not 'too dangerous'-not yet." He was tempted then to tell her about Stephanie's warning, but decided he had better not. He didn't want to explain why he'd gone to see her, or bring up Stephanie's speculations about Anna's past. But then Anna surprised him. Without prompting, she told him that just before she'd called him from Paris, Titanov had phoned her at her hotel.
"From where?"
"Moscow. They won't let him travel. Not because they blame him for my defection, but to make an example of him, so that every musician understands he or she is responsible for the person he or she is sleeping with. But he didn't call to complain about that."
"Why did he call you?" David asked.
"To beg me to come back. For the good of the country, he said, but really, he said, because he still thought about me all the time." She shook her head. "I wasn't touched. I didn't believe a word of it. He's a selfish man. Still, he sounded desperate. I think he thinks that if he could persuade me to come back, they'd let him travel again."
"What did you tell him, Anna?"
"That I'm never coming back, that I never cared for him, and that I'm in love now with another man." She smiled. "He took it pretty well, said he knew all that but still he wanted me to come home. You see, he kept giving himself away. 'I want you, I need you,' never mind what I might want or need myself. He even asked me about you, seemed to know who you were. 'An Israeli cop,' he said, a little contemptuously, and then he asked how could I fall so low. 'You're not even Jewish,' he said. He was speechless when I told him I've been thinking I might convert."
"Is that true?"
"Could be." She gave him her best, most flashing smile. "One thing for sure-I'm going to start studying Hebrew seriously. Tomorrow I'm enrolling in a class."
"Susan Mills used a tourist photo shop, Samuelson's on King George next to that old German bookstore. They remember her well. She bought a hell of a lot of film." Micha spread out photocopies of the receipts on David's desk.
"They did her processing too," said Dov. "But when we add up the number of rolls she bought and the number she had developed, we come up twenty short. We found eight in her luggage and one in her camera. So there're still eleven unaccounted for."
"I doubt she came to Israel without film."
"Right. So at least eleven."
"Maybe she took them to another shop?"
"Doubt it. She was a creature of habit. Took the same bus from the Holyland every morning with a list of the places she wanted to see. Then she'd knock them off methodically, then she'd head downtown. She usually hit the photo shop at noon."
David nodded. "Okay-let's see what we've got. They know she has film on the accident, including shots of the guys in the van. They want that film. Their guy 'Hurwitz' has already quarreled with her about it. Now suppose someone new calls her up and apologizes, someone with a very sincere voice who speaks perfect English and claims he's Hurwitz's boss. She agrees-after all, she's a decent Christian lady only too glad to help out police when they're polite. This new guy drops by her hotel, picks her up, and takes her away to be tortured. But why torture her if she gave them what they wanted? No, that isn't how it went. They lured her out, she got suspicious, and when she figured out that they weren't cops, she didn't give them anything at all."
"So where's the film?"
"Maybe still at the shop?"
"It isn't. We checked."
"So maybe she did talk," Micha said.
"No. She didn't," Dov insisted.
David glanced at him, wondered if Dov's strong identification with Susan Mills was blinding him to real possibilities. David was all for the investigator immersing himself in the victim's life, so long as the immersion didn't prevent the investigator from facing unpleasant truths.
"Either way it doesn't matter," he finally said. "They took the film from her room, or, if it was still being developed, they found her receipt, took it back to the shop, and claimed the film as their own."
"They knew her at Samuelson's."
"Even when there's a name on the ticket they just look at the number. At least that's how they do it at the place I take my film."
"We'll go back there."
"This time make sure you talk to all the clerks. If someone else picked up those rolls, he wouldn't know she usually came by at noon. He'd probably go in late, around closing time when the staff is tired and gearing up for the bus ride home…"
"So then what did Gati say?" Avraham's eyes gleamed as he gnawed on a piece of chicken.
David glanced over at Anna and winked. It had been her idea to invite his father for dinner. She had prepared a feast of chicken Tapaka, using her clothes iron to weigh down the chicken on the griddle.