Kellerman, Jonathan - The Theatre

Daniel smiled at the Latam man, who smiled back pleasantly and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Weinroth had pressed him on the microphones-hi-tech types loved to use their toys. Codes and toys. But Daniel had judged the risk too high: If the killer/killers caught on to the surveillance, there'd be a pullback, stalemate. The madness had to end.

"Want me to videotape any of it?" asked Weinroth between puffs. "I can easily interface the recorder with the scope."

"Sure. Anything else? Any sign of Carter or Hauser?"

Weinroth shook his head, simulated snoring.

"Pleasant dreams," Daniel told him. By the time he reached the door, the Latam man was up and fiddling with latches on one of the equipment cases.

Sunday, eight P.M., and the old man was dead, Shmeltzer was sure of it. He could tell by the nurse's tone of voice over the phone, the failure resonating from every word, the angry way she'd refused to let him talk with Eva, insisted Mrs. Schlesinger was in no condition to speak with anyone. Telling him without telling him.

"She'll speak with me," he'd insisted.

"Are you family?"

"Yes, I'm her brother." Not really that much of a lie, considering what he and Eva had established between them.

When the goddamned nurse said nothing, he repeated: "Her brother-she'll want to speak with me."

"She's in no condition to speak with anyone. I'll tell her you called, Adon Schnitzer."

"Shmeltzer." Idiot.

Click.

He'd wanted to call the bitch back, scream: Don't you know me? I'm the shmuck always with her, every free moment I've got. The one waiting out in the hall while she kisses a cold cheek, wipes a cold brow.

But the nurse was just another pencil pusher, wouldn't give a damn. Rules!

He hung up the phone and cursed the injustice of it all. Since the first time they'd met, he'd stuck with Eva like paste on paper, absorbing her pain like some kind of human poultice. Holding, patting, drinking it in. So much crying on his shoulders, his bones felt permanently wet.

Faithful Nahum, playing big strong man. Rehearsing for the inevitable.

And now, now that it had finally happened, he was cut off. They were cut off from each other. Prisoners. She, chained to the goddamned deathbed. He, shackled to his assignment.

Keep an eye on the fucking sheikh and his fucking dog-faced girlfriend. Down from the hospital in his big green fucking Mercedes, a shopping trip at the best stores in East Jerusalem. Then watch them enjoy a late supper at their fucking sidewalk table at Chez Ali Baba.

Stuffing their bellies along with all the rich Arabs and tourists, ordering the waiters around as if they were a couple of monarchs.

Two tables away, the Latam couple got to eat too. Charcoal-broiled kebab and shishlik, baked lamb and stuffed lamb, platters of salads, pitchers of iced tea. A flower corsage for the lady

Meanwhile, Faithful Shmuck Nahum dresses as a beggar, wears false sores, and sits on the sidewalk just out of sniffing range from the restaurant. Sniffing garbage fumes from the restaurant's refuse bins, absorbing curses in Arabic, an occasional kick in the shins, a rare donation-but even the few goddamned coins he'd earned by looking pathetic would be returned to the department, cost him a half hour of paperwork logging the money.

Any other case, he'd say fuck it, time to retire. Run to Eva.

Not this one. These bastards were going to pay. For everything.

He turned his attention back to the restaurant.

Al Biyadi snapped his fingers at the waiter, barked an order when the man approached. When the waiter left, he looked at his watch. Big gold watch, same one as at the hospital-even from here Shmeltzer could see the gold. Bastard had been checking the time a lot during the last half hour. Something up?

The Latam couple ate on, didn't seem to notice, but that was their job, noticing without being noticed. Both were young, blond, good-looking, wearing high-priced imported clothes. Looking like a rich honeymoon couple absorbed in each other.

Would he and Eva ever have a honeymoon?

Would she have anything to do with him after being abandoned at the Crucial Moment? Or maybe he was sunk anyway-abandonment had nothing to do with it. She'd suffered with an old guy through terminal illness. Now that he was dead she'd be ready to put her life together-last thing she'd want was another old guy.

She was a fine-looking woman; those breasts were magnets designed to pull men in. Younger men, virile.

No need for bony wet shoulders.

The waiter brought some sort of iced drink to Al Bayadi's table. Big, oversized brandy snifter filled with something green and frothy. Pistachio milk, probably.

Al Biyadi lifted the snifter, Cassidy hooked her arm around his, they laughed, drank, nuzzled like high school kids. Drank again and kissed.

He could have killed them both, right then and there.

At eleven P.M., Gabi Weinroth completed his shift at the top of the Law Building and was replaced by a short, gray-haired undercover man named Shimshon Katz. Katz had just been pulled off a three-month foot surveillance of the Mahane Yehuda market and sported a full Hassid's beard. Twelve weeks of playing rabbi and looking for suspicious parcels-he felt pleased that nothing had turned up but was drained by the boredom.

"This isn't likely to be any better," Weinroth assured him, gathering up his cigarettes and pointing at the telescope. "Mostly blank space, and if you see anything sexy, you broadcast it on the security band-the other guys take it from there."

Katz picked up a stack of photographs from the table and shuffled through it. "I'm supposed to commit all of these to memory?"

"These eight are the main ones," said Weinroth, taking the stack and pulling out the permanent Amelia Catherine staff members. He placed them faceup on the table. "The rest are volunteers.] haven't seen one of them come near the place yet."

Katz studied the seven, lingering on a candid of Walid Darousha, whom the camera had caught scowling.

"Nasty-looking character," he said.

"He's in Ramallah with his boyfriend, and according to Major Crimes, he's low priority. So don't play psychoanalyst -just look and log."

"Up yours," said Katz jovially. "Which ones are high priority?"

Weinroth jabbed the photos. "These, for what it's worth."

Katz stared at the pictures, drew a line across his forehead. "Etched permanently on my mind."

"For what that's worth," said Weinroth. "I'm off." He took two steps, turned, and leered. "You want me to look in on your wife and comfort her?"

"Sure, why not? Yours has already been taken care of."

Avi sat low in the unmarked car, strained his eyes, and watched the front door of Wilbur's apartment building on Rehov Alharizi. The moon was a low white crescent, the dark street blinded further by the hovering bulk of the tall buildings that rose from the east. The Chief Rabbinate, the Jewish Agency, Solel Boneh Builders, the Kings Hotel. Important buildings-official buildings.

As a child he'd spent plenty of summer days in official buildings, harbored dim memories of official visits perceived from a waist-high perspective: shiny belt buckles, rippling paunches, jokes he didn't understand. His father convulsing with laughter, his big hand tightening with amusement, threatening to crush Avi's small one

Forget that crap and concentrate.

The hum of an automobile engine, but no headlight flash, no movement up and down the block.

Nothing suspicious in the mailbox or at Wilbur's office at Beit Agron-the latter he could personally verify because he'd delivered the office mail himself, covered the entire press building. No one but the janitor had approached Wilbur's suite all day. At six the reporter left, in shirtsleeves, with no briefcase, and walked toward Fink's for his usual soak. By eight he hadn't returned, and, following the plan, Avi was relieved by one of two Latam men who'd been watching the reporter's flat. He drove to Alharizi and parked half a block down from Wilbur's building, a nicely kept, two-story fourplex. Then he waited.

And waited. For all he knew, the bastard wasn't even coming home tonight, had picked up some chick and was sacking out at her place.

The street was deserted, which meant none of his daytime identities-street cleaner, postman, sausage vendor, yeshiva boy-were of any use; the costume changes lay tangled and unused in the trunk of the unmarked car.

And what an unmarked! His own wheels were out of the question-the red BMW stood out like a fresh bloodstain. In it's place Latam had dredged up a terminally ill Volkswagen, oppressive little box, the gears protesting every nudge of the shift lever, stuffing coming out of the seats in rubbery tufts, the interior smelling of spoiled food, leaking petrol, and stale cigarette smoke.

Not that he could smoke-the glow would give him away. So he sat doing nothing, his only company a plastic two-liter Coke bottle to piss in. Each time he was through with it he emptied it in the gutter.

Sitting for almost four hours, his ass had fallen asleep; he had to pinch himself to get the feeling back.

Nash, the Latam guy at the back of the building, had the better deal: run a dry mop up and down the hallway, then stake out the alley. Fresh air, at least. Exercise.

Every half hour the two of them checked in with each other. The last check had been ten minutes ago.

Aleph, here..

Bet, here. Grunt.

Not a very social guy, Nash, but he supposed most undercover types weren't picked for their conversational skills. The opposite, even: They were to be seen and hot heard.

He checked his watch. Eleven-forty. Reached for the Coke bottle.

Midnight, Talbieh, the Sharavi household was silent, the women and children all asleep.

Rather than return to the hotel alone, Luanne had chosen to stay for the night, sleeping in the master bedroom, on Daniel's side of the bed. She and Laura came into the studio, nightgowned and cold-creamed-the borrowed gown half a foot too short on Luanne-and gave their husbands quick kisses before trundling off together. Daniel heard little-girl giggles, conspiratorial whispers through the thin bedroom door before they fell asleep.

A pajama party. Good for them. He was glad they were coping by keeping occupied, had never seen Laura so busy: museum outings, shopping trips to the boutiques on Dizengoff Circle and Jaffa flea-market stalls, lectures, late movies-now that was a change. She'd never been much of a cinema buff, rarely stayed up past ten.

Changes.

And why not? No reason for her to give up her life because the case had turned him into a phantom. Still, a small, selfish part of him wanted her to be more dependent. Need him more.

He finished chewing one of Shoshi's chicken sandwiches- dry, but an architectural masterpiece, so lovingly prepared: the bread trimmed, the pickles quartered and individually wrapped. He'd felt guilty biting into it.

He wiped his mouth.

"Whoa," said Gene. "Whoa, look at this."

Daniel got up and walked to the black man's side. Next to three sandwich wrappers and the Sumbok roster was the newly arrived homicide file on Lilah "Nightwing" Shehadeh, spread out on the table/desk, opened to one of the back pages. The file was thick, stretching the limits of the metal fasteners that bound it to the manila folder, and anchored to the desk top by Gene's large thumb.

"What do you have? Daniel leaned over, saw a page of photocopied murder photos one side, a poorly typed report on the other. The quality of the photocopy was poor, the pictures dark and blurred, some of the printed text swirling and bleeding out to white.

Gene tapped the report. "Hollywood Division never figured it for a serial because there was no follow-up murder. Their working assumption was that it was a phony sex-killing aimed at covering up a power struggle between Shehadeh's pimp and a competitor. The pimp, guy named Bowmont Alvin Johnson, was murdered a few months before Shehadeh; bunch of other fancy boys were interviewed-all had supposed alibis. Shehadeh and Johnson had split up before he was killed, but the same detectives handled both cases and they remembered finding a purse at his apartment that his other girls identified as once belonging to Shehadeh. The purse was stored in the evidence room; after she turned up dead, they took that with her when she left-but the next-best thing: some scraps of paper with names that they figured to be either her dope suppliers or customers. Twenty names. Eight were never identified. One of them was a D.

Terrif. There were also several D.T.'s. Now the punch line. Look at this."

He lowered his index finger to a spot at the center of the Sumbok page.

Terrif, D.D.

Daniel remembered the name. One of the three he'd thought might be Arabic.

His hands were trembling. He put one on Gene's shoulder, said, "Finally."

"Bingo." Gene smiled. "That's American for 'we done good.'"

A Latam detective named Avram Comfortes sat in the soft mulch beneath the orange trees that surrounded Walid Darousha's large, graceful Ramallah villa, inhaling citrus fragrance, shooing away mice and the night moths that alighted upon the trees and sucked nectar from the flowers.

At fifteen minutes past midnight, the metal shutters to Darousha's bedroom window craoked open. They'd been sealed shut for an hour, since Darousha and the watchman had finished a late supper, the doctor cooking, the watchman eating.

An hour. Comfortes had a good idea what had been going on inside, was glad he didn't have to look at it.

The window was small, square, laced with grillwork-the old-fashioned kind, ornate enough for a mosque. Framed inside was a clear view of the doctor's bedroom. A large room, painted blue, the ceiling white.