Kellerman, Jonathan - The Theatre

But Daoud's surveillance had revealed no new facts about the American monk. Roselli took walks at night; he turned back after a few minutes, returned to Saint Saviour's. Strange, but nothing murderous. And phone calls to Seattle had turned up nothing more ominous than a couple of arrests for civil disobedience-demonstrations against the Vietnam War during Roselli's social-worker days.

Ben David had raised the issue of politics and murder, but if there was some connection there, Daniel couldn't see it.

During the daylight hours Roselli stayed within the confines of the monastery, and Daniel alternated with the Chinaman and a couple of patrol officers in looking out for him. It freed the Arab detective for other assignments, the latest of which had nearly ended in disaster.

Daoud had been circulating in the Gaza marketplace, asking questions about Aljuni, the wife-stabber, when a friend of the suspect had recognized him, pointing a finger and shouting "Police! Traitor!" for all to hear. Despite the unshaven face, the kaffiyah and grimy robe, the crook remembered him as "that green-eyed devil" who had busted him the year before on a drug charge. Gaza was rife with assassins; Daniel feared for his man's life. Aljuni had never been a strong possibility anyway, and according to Daoud, he stayed at home, screaming at his wife, never venturing out for night games. Daniel arranged for the army to keep a loose watch on Aljuni, requested notification if he traveled. Daoud said nothing about being pulled off the assignment, but his face told it all. Daniel assured him that he hadn't screwed up. that it happened to everyone; told him to reinterview local villagers regarding both victims, and save his energies for Roselli.

If it bothered Daoud's Christian conscience to be tailing a man of the cloth, his face didn't show it.

Malkovsky, the other paragon of religious virtue, was under the surveillance of Avi Cohen. Cohen was perfect for the assignment: His BMW, fancy clothes, and North Tel

Aviv face blended in well at the Wolfson complex; he could wear tennis clothes, carry a racquet, and no one would give it a second thought.

He was turning out to be an okay kid, had done a good job on Yalom and on Brickner and Gribetz-avoiding discovery by the slimy pair, making detailed tapes and doing the same for Malkovsky.

But despite the details, the tapes made for boring lis-tening The day after Daniel confronted him, the child raper spent hours traipsing around the neighborhood with four of his kids, tearing handbills off walls, throwing the scraps in paper bags, careful not even to litter.

According to Cohen, he was rough on the kids, yelling at them. ordering them around like a slavemaster, but not mistreating them sexually.

Once the handbills were taken care of, his days became predictable: Early each morning he went to shaharit minyan at the Prosnitzer rebbe's yeshiva just outside Mea She'arim, driving a little Subaru that he could barely fit into, staying within the walls of the yeshiva building until lunchtime. A couple of times Avi had seen him walking with the rebbe, looking ill at ease as the old man wagged his finger at him and berated him for some lapse of attention or observance. At noon he came home for lunch, emerged with food stains on his shirt, pacing the halls and wringing his hands.

"Nervous, antsy," Avi said into the recorder. "Like he's fighting with his impulses."

A couple more minutes of pacing, then back into the Subaru; the rest of the day spent hunched over a lectern. Returning home after dark, right after the ma'ariv minyan, no stop-offs for mischief.

Burying himself in study, or faking it, thought Daniel.

He'd asked the juvenile officers to look into possible child abuse at home. Tried to find out who was protecting Malkovsky and had met with official silence.

Time to call Laufer for the tenth time.

Men of God.

He arrived home at six-thirty, ready for a family dinner, but found that they'd all eater*-felafel and American-style hamburgers picked up at a food stand on King George.

Dayan barked a greeting and the boys jumped on him. He kissed their soft cheeks, promised to be with them in a minute. Instead of persisting, they ran off cuffing each other. Shoshi was doing her homework at the dining room table. She smiled at him, hugged and kissed him, then returned to her assignment, a page of algebra equations-she'd completed half.

"How's it going?" Daniel asked. Math was her worst subject. Usually he had to help her.

"Fine, Abba." She bit her pencil and screwed up her face. Thought a while and put down an answer. The correct one.

"Excellent, Shosh. Where's Eema?"

"Painting." Absently.

"Have fun."

"Uh huh."

The door to the studio was closed. From under it seeped the smell of turpentine. He knocked, entered, saw Laura in a blue smock, working on a new canvas under a bright artist's lamp. A cityscape of Bethlehem in umbers, ochers, and beige, softly lit by a low winter sun, a lavender wash of hillside in the background.

"Beautiful."

"Oh, hi, Daniel." She remained on her stool, leaned over for a kiss. Half a dozen snapshots of Bethlehem were tacked to the easel. Pictures he'd taken during last year's Nature Conservancy hayride.

"You ate already," he said.

"Yes." She picked up the brush, laid in a line of shadow long the steeple of the Antonio Belloni church. "I didn't now if you were coming home."

He looked at his watch. "Six thirty-six. I thought it would be early enough."

She put the brush down, wiped her hands on a rag, and turned to him. "I had no way of knowing, Daniel."

she said in a level tone of voice. "I'm sorry. There's an extra hamburger in the fridge. Do you want me to heat it up for you?"

"It's all right. I'll heat it up myself."

"Thanks. I'm right in the middle of this-want to finish a fer more buildings before quitting."

"Beautiful," he repeated.

"It's for Gene and Luanne. A going-away present."

"How are they doing?"

"Fine." Dab, blend, wipe. "They're up in Haifa, touring the northern coast. Nahariya, Acre, Rosh Hanikra."

"When are they coming back down?"

"Few days-I'm really not sure." 'Are: they having a good time?"

"Seem to be." She got off the stool. For a moment Daniel thought she was going to embrace him. But instead she stepped back from the canvas, measured perspective, re-turned to her seat, and began blocking in ocher rectan-gles.

He waited a few seconds, then left to make himself dinner. By the time he'd eaten and cleaned up, the boys had busied themselves again with the Stars Wars videotape. Eyes filled with wonderment, they declined his offer to wrestle.

Stacks of newspaper clippings covered Laufer's desk. The deputy commander began fanning them out like oversized playing cards.

"Garbage-sifting time," he said. "Read."

Daniel picked up a clipping, put it down immediately after realizing it was one he'd already seen. Ha'aretz was his paper; he liked the independence, the sober tone-and the reporting on the murders was typical: factual, concise, no thrill for ghouls.

The party-affiliated papers were another story. The government organ gave the crimes short shrift on a back page, an almost casual downplay, as if hiding the story would make it go away.

The opposition paper played a shrill counterpoint, using Daniel's name to segue into the Lippmann case, offering a blow-by-blow rehash of the scandal, making much of the fact that prior to his assassination the late, discredited warden had been a darling of the ruling party. Implying, not so subtly, that any rise in violent crime was the government's fault: Failure to raise police salaries had led to continued corruption and ineptitude; a poorly administered Health Ministry had failed to handle the issue of dangerous mental patients; the psychological frustration caused by the ruling party's economic and social policies engendered "deep-rooted alienation and concomitant hostile impulses in the general populace. Impulses that are at risk for spilling over into bloodshed."

The usual partisan nonsense. Daniel wondered if anyone took it seriously.

Haolam Hazeh and the other tabloids had done their heavy-breathing bit: lurid headlines and hints of perverted sex in high places. Gory-detail crime stories fighting for space with photos of naked women. Daniel put them down on the desk.

"Why the rehash? It's been two weeks since Juliet."

"Go on, go on, you're not through," Laufer said, drum-ming his fingers on the desk. He picked up a thick batch of clippings and shoved it at Daniel.

These excerpts were all in Arabic: Al Fajr, Al Sha'ab, other locals at the top of the pile, foreign stuff on the bottom.

Arabic, thought Daniel, was an expansive, poetic lan-guage. lending itself to hyperbole, and this morning the

Arab journalists had been in fine hyperbolic form: Fatma and Juliet restored to virginity and transformed to political martyrs victimized by a racist conspiracy-abducted, defiled, and executed by some night-stalking Zionist cabal.

The local publications called for "hardening of resolve"

and "continuation of the struggle, so that our sisters have not perished in vain," stopping just short of a call for re-venge-saying it outright could have brought down the heavy hand of security censorship.

But the foreign Arab press screamed it out: officially sactioned editorials from Amman, Damascus, Riyadh, the Gulf stlates, brimming with hate and lusting for vengeance, accompanied by crude cartoons featuring the usual anti-Jewish archetypes-stars of David dripping blood; hooknosed, slavering men wearing kipot and side curls, pressing long-bladed knives to the throats of veiled, doe-eyed beau-ties wrapped in the PLO flag. The kipot emblazoned with swastikas-the Arabs loved to co-opt the Nazi stuff, spit it back at their cousins. The Syrians went so far as to link the murders to some occult Jewish ritual of human sacrifice-a harvest ceremony that the writer had invented.

Vile stuff, thought Daniel, reminiscent of the DerSt?rmer exhibit he'd seen at the Holocaust Memorial, the Black Book Ben David had shown him. But not unusual.

"The typical madness," he told Laufer.

"Pure shit. This is what stirred it up."

He gave Daniel an article in English, a cutting from his morning's international Herald Tribune.

It was a two-column wire service piece bearing no byline and entitled "Is a New Jack the Ripper Stalking the Streets of Jerusalem?" Subtitle: "Brutal Slayings Stymie Israeli Police. Political Motives Suggested."

The anonymous journalist had given the killer a name- the Butcher-an American practice that Daniel had heard Gene decry ("Gives the bad guy the attention he craves, Danny Boy, and makes him larger than life, which scares the heck out of the civilians. Every day that goes by without a bust makes us look more and more like clods"). The actual information about the killings was sparse but suggestively spooky and followed by a review of the Gray Man case, using copious quotes from "sources who spoke on condition they would not be identified" to suggest that both serial killers were likely to remain at large because Israeli police officers were inept homicide investigators, poorly paid, and occupying "lowly status in a society where intellectual and military accomplishments are valued but domestic service is demeaned." Illustrating that with a rehash of the six-month-old story about new recruits having to apply for welfare, the wives' picket of the Knesset.

The Herald Tribune article went on to wallow in armchair sociology, pondering whether the murders were symptomatic of "a deeper malaise within Israeli society, a collective loss of innocence that marks the end of the old idealistic Zionist order." Quotes from political extremists were given equal weight with those from reasoned scholars, the end result a weird stew of statistics, speculation, and the regurgitated accusations of the Arab press. All of it delivered in a morose, contemplative tone that made it sound reasonable.

The final paragraph was saturated with pessimism that seemed almost gleeful: "Tourism has always constituted a vital part of the fragile Israeli economy and in light of current economic difficulties, Israeli officials have put forth especially strong efforts to negate their country's image as a dangerous place to live and visit. But given the recent handiwork of the

Gray Man and the Butcher, experts' predictions of increasing violence against both Arabs and Jews, and the subsequent inability of the Israeli police to cope with that violence, those efforts may be doomed to failure."

Daniel put the clipping down and said, "Who wrote this?"

"Wire service putz by the name of Wilbur. Replaced

Grabowski-the one who ignored cordons up in Bekaa and got his arm blown off. This one came over six months ago, spends most of his time at Fink's, drinking himself numb."

Daniel recalled a press conference he'd attended a few months ago. One of the faces had been new.

"Dark, puffy-looking, gray hair, bloodshot eyes?"

"That's him, a goddamned shikur-just what we need."

Laufer shoved aside papers and created a clearing in the middle of the desk top. "His last big story was a feature on the fig harvest-glorious Arab workers, bonded to the soil.

"Is he pro-PLO?"

"From what we can tell he has no political leanings one way or the other. Anti-work is what he is-gets his stuff secondhand and plays around with it in order to make it sound profound. All that shit about 'unnamed sources.'" The deputy commander sat down and glared at Daniel. "This time he stirred up the shitpile but good-puffs up a two-week-old story and gets every other hack hot to outdo him. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than feeling his ass under my boot, but we're stuck with him-free press and all that. We're the ultimate democracy, right? Out to prove to the goyim how righteous we are."