The Missing File Read online

  Don’t matter? The details mattered, and how! The information didn’t appear earth-shattering, but it did show a different Ofer from the one he had been told about over the past few days, the one who never left the house, the one who didn’t discuss his life with anyone. All of a sudden, he’s visiting friends, he’s planning to go out to a movie, he’s caught someone’s fancy. Avraham hadn’t thought anyone liked him at all.

  “And did you speak to her?” he asked.

  “No, she goes to Kiryat Sharet High School; I’m on my way there. Besides all this, I didn’t know they had a handicapped daughter.”

  “Who has?” Avraham asked, wondering what Ma’alul was talking about.

  “Ofer’s parents. The friend told me that Ofer has a sister with Down’s syndrome.”

  Avraham had had no idea, and couldn’t decide whether to admit as much to Ma’alul. He had been telling himself since Friday that he was trying to hear a story and “get to know the characters,” yet five days of investigating had gone by and he was completely unaware of that detail, which certainly must have been of significance in Ofer’s life.

  “I didn’t know she had Down’s syndrome. I haven’t seen her,” Avraham said. “The brother and sister have been at the grandparents’ since Wednesday or Thursday. That explains why the mother couldn’t cope by herself with the children while the investigation was going on.”

  “It also explains Ofer’s introversion,” Ma’alul responded. “The friend said that he has never been to Ofer’s home. Ofer never invited him over, and that must have something to do with the sister.”

  Avraham hadn’t gone into the sister’s room when he was at the Sharabi home—neither on Thursday nor on Friday. The door to that room was closed and he had felt that Hannah Sharabi wanted to keep it that way. He hadn’t been in the master bedroom, either. He suddenly recalled the foolish thought he’d entertained that first evening, on his way home, after the mother’s visit to the police station—the age difference between the children. Two years after Ofer was born, Hannah Sharabi had a daughter with Down’s syndrome. After that, she and her husband didn’t want another child—for almost ten years.

  He thought for a moment and then asked, “But what does that give us?”

  “Some sort of direction, right? Maybe the girl Ofer was supposed to go out with has a boyfriend who wasn’t happy about it all? And it’s seeming more and more unlikely to me that he ran away. Does it make sense for him to decide to run away two days before he has a date with a girl for maybe the first time in his life? And who knows, maybe he said something to the girl. Perhaps he has been in contact with her since Wednesday. She may be the one person we have been looking for, the person whom Ofer has contacted and whom we have yet to come across.”

  “Why wouldn’t she tell anyone about it?”

  “Look, Avi, I really don’t know. I’m on my way to see her now. I’ll update you after I’ve spoken to her.”

  Five days, and he didn’t know—not about the girl Ofer had been in touch with, not about the sister. Bringing Ma’alul into the investigation was undoubtedly the right decision. He felt a burning desire to return to his office and get everything he possibly could out of the father about Ofer and his life, even if their conversation went on late into the night.

  Rafael Sharabi was nothing like what Avraham had expected. His stature, his tone of voice, his choice of words. Perhaps because he knew he was a sailor and a member of a workers’ union, he had been expecting a heavyset man, tough and loud. He had expected him to speak harshly, to complain about the delay in opening the investigation, to threaten. If he had understood Ilana’s hints correctly, a little pressure from Rafael Sharabi and the case would be handed over to a special investigation team under a higher-ranking officer, or to the Central Unit.

  “Sorry about that,” Avraham said. “It was an update from an investigator in the field.”

  “Anything new?” the father asked.

  “Nothing for now,” Avraham replied, shaking his head. “We’ll see a little later.”

  There was something soft about the father’s build and facial features. Almost feminine. He was a chubby man, in his midforties. Short, curly hair, silvery-black. He was only an inch or two taller than Avraham. There was gray stubble on his round face, as if he were in mourning. Avraham recalled the appearance of the apartment on the first day of the investigation: family members and friends, soda bottles and plates of snacks on the living room table. The father was on a ship bound for Trieste.

  Rafael Sharabi didn’t threaten, and he didn’t say a word about the delay in the start of the investigation. He quietly and patiently listened as Avraham brought him up to speed, then offered any help that would be needed. Colleagues from work had offered to help too, as well as other family members. Had his wife not told him about the delay? Perhaps she had been afraid that he would have thought it was her fault, but he didn’t look like a husband to be feared. When they first sat down in his office, after introducing themselves and shaking hands, Avraham had said that it must have been difficult for him to have been so far away, without the option of returning home immediately. “Yes, it was. But what could I do? I returned the moment we docked at the port,” Rafael Sharabi replied, as if he had been accused of something.

  Avraham thought about the sea—whether it was calm or stormy, whether the sailors spent the entire voyage belowdecks or whether they would go up on deck for a breath of fresh air when they had some free time, whether the sea itself was a presence in the lives of the sailors or if the ship was simply a regular workplace, an office tower of sorts that one never stepped out of. “The toughest part of the investigation for me so far is the sense that I don’t know enough about Ofer,” he said. “That’s really the help I need right now. It was difficult for your wife, and I understand that. But I’m having trouble building up a profile, and this complicates the process of establishing a line of inquiry, especially when we don’t have any physical evidence.”

  The father nodded and remained silent. He may have still been far away at sea or struggling with the feeling that he hadn’t been at home when they needed him.

  “I understand you are absent from home for long periods,” Avraham continued. “Can you explain to me how that works? How long are you away for? How often do you travel?”

  “I usually do short routes—Cyprus, Turkey—trips of a few days. Once every few months I do longer runs, like Koper or Trieste. I spend at least a few days at home after each trip, sometimes up to two weeks. Every now and then there’s ship maintenance work to do at the port.”

  Where’s Koper? Avraham wondered to himself. Probably a port city on the Mediterranean or some other sea. Every time he came across an unfamiliar detail during an investigation, he felt he was on the right track. He was stepping outside of himself, going beyond his knowledge. And unlike the mother, the father appeared willing to talk, willing to open the door for him—even if, for the moment, it was just a ship’s door. When Avraham visited their apartment on Thursday and on Friday, the mother had accompanied him to Ofer’s room; she had opened closets and drawers with him, and had sat down beside him on Ofer’s bed, and yet he sensed her unwillingness to allow him into their home.

  “What’s your job title?” Avraham asked.

  “Chief engineering officer.”

  “Is that a senior position?”

  “Senior? I don’t know. It’s a position you reach after twenty years on the job.”

  “And how did you get into this line of work?”

  Rafael Sharabi looked at him in surprise, as if the answer was obvious. “I served in the navy. After my discharge, I did a course in mechanical engineering at the Naval Training Institute in Acre, and went to work for Zim from there.”

  “So you’re in command of the ship? Are you the captain?” Avraham asked. He was not certain that a ship even had a captain.

  “No, the
chief engineering officer is responsible only for the mechanical operation of the ship. A captain needs to go through a professional training course. He’s responsible for the entire ship, including the logistics of the cargo delivery, the loading and unloading.”

  “What type of ships do you work on?”

  “Mostly medium-range ships because I don’t do the long routes anymore. Small or medium-size feeder ships.”

  “What are those?”

  “Oh, you asked as if you were familiar with them,” Rafael apologized. “It’s a size class of container ships. Not the biggest. Ships that carry between a thousand and three thousand standard-size containers.”

  Avraham made notes on a sheet of paper like the one he had used on Wednesday evening. The day before he had looked for that particular sheet—with the terrible drawing he had unconsciously scribbled at the bottom—but could not find it. “Isn’t it a difficult job—I mean, with a family and all?” he asked, hoping not to sound accusatory, and the father replied drily, “It’s my profession.”

  Should he ask him how much a chief engineering officer earns in a month? Avraham wondered. Five thousand? Ten thousand? Thirty thousand? He had no idea. And that’s what he wanted to speak to him about—about things he didn’t know. That was always the key.

  “What did your wife think about it?” he asked. “How did you meet?” And Rafael Sharabi said, “She accepted it. She didn’t really have a choice, did she?”

  So there was something harsh concealed behind his soft roundness after all. The impatience of someone who wasn’t used to being asked personal questions and having to answer them. He was accustomed to issuing orders on his boats in a brusque, professional tone—and probably at home too.

  “And how did you meet?”

  “Hannah served in the navy too. During the tough times, after the children were born, I tried to spend more time at home. As I said, thanks to that job, I can sometimes be at home for two weeks in a row without having to work.”

  Was he surprised that the conversation was focused primarily on his work and his absence from home? Avraham hadn’t intended to take it in that direction. He had a feeling the father wanted to speak about it. “How old were you when you got married?” he asked.

  “How old? I was twenty-six and Hannah was twenty-one.”

  He pictured them at the wedding. He could imagine the father in his twenties—thinner, with a slightly more upright posture, yet still round and soft in appearance, just as he was today, only less confident. He couldn’t imagine Hannah as a twenty-one-year-old. It must have been in the early 1990s. “And when was Ofer born?” he asked.

  “I was busy with my apprenticeship when we got married. I was doing the long routes then and was sometimes away from home for more than a month, so we waited. We decided to have Ofer only after I had qualified and got the job with Zim. He was born so small.”

  “And how did he take it?”

  “Who?”

  “Ofer.”

  “How did he take what?”

  “The fact that you would often disappear.” Now Ofer’s disappeared, just like you, Avraham thought, but didn’t say it.

  The father’s hands were large and hairy, and he looked down at them as he placed them on Avraham’s desk.

  “It was hard for him when he was little,” he said. “One time I returned from a long trip and he didn’t remember me. He insisted I wasn’t his father and for several days called me ‘uncle.’ But it was okay once he grew up. He helps Hannah a lot when I’m not around. He stays at home, helps around the house. We’ve been waiting for him to turn seventeen and get his driver’s license. Hannah doesn’t drive. But maybe it wasn’t easy for him, after all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe we put too much on his shoulders, maybe he got fed up.” The father paused for a moment. “I grew up in a home with financial difficulties and went out to work at a very young age. I wanted my children to live well and to study, and Ofer was a good student. But we also expected a lot from him, to help around the house, to study hard. Maybe it was too much.”

  He had yet to say a word about the sister.

  “Would you say Ofer had a rough time at home?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it was hard for him. I thought it was natural. I hadn’t thought about it in this way until he disappeared, and he never said anything. Before starting high school, he asked if he could go to the Naval Officers Academy. It’s a boarding school in Acre. I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but Hannah didn’t want him to go. She wanted him at home.”

  “Do you have clear rules at home about when and with whom he’s allowed to go out?” Avraham cautiously asked, and the father said, “No, on the contrary. We were very flexible when it came to that. We encouraged him to go out at night, to do whatever he wanted with his friends. Hannah needs less help in the evenings, after the other children go to sleep. We just put too much responsibility on him. Especially when I wasn’t there.”

  Avraham was sure the father had no idea about Ofer’s plans to go out to a movie that Friday night with a girl who liked him—perhaps his first such date.

  And he was right.

  “What about friends? Girls?” he asked, and the father said, “I don’t think he went out with girls. But that’s pretty natural, no? I was shy too at his age. I’ve always thought the army would do for Ofer what it did for me, open him up.”

  “Did he talk about the army?”

  “He wanted to join the navy, and I encouraged him—although I wouldn’t want him to be a sailor after his military service. I can’t tell you how proud it made me to see him study, do his homework, work on the computer. He taught me how to surf the Internet.”

  They spoke in his office for four hours—from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. And as the time passed, Avraham became aware of just how important their conversation was to him. After Hannah Sharabi’s lengthy silences, he felt almost grateful to her husband for talking about himself and his family.

  At 1:30 p.m., he went out to order them each a tray of food from the cafeteria, along with two cups of coffee, and he smoked a cigarette in the parking lot while waiting for lunch to arrive. His cell phone rang. It was Ze’ev Avni. He didn’t recall leaving his number with the neighbor. Avraham asked if he could come into the station for an additional interview the following morning, and Avni replied that he had to be at home with his son then and invited Avraham to come to the apartment. Avraham hesitated but then suggested that Avni come to the station that afternoon, at around five. Avni agreed, asked how he would find him, and then said, “Okay, so, see you at five,” as if they were friends arranging to meet for coffee.

  Eliyahu Ma’alul’s cell phone was switched off. Perhaps he was busy speaking to the girl from Kiryat Sharet High School. Reluctantly, Avraham also called Shrapstein, who wasn’t in his office. He finally answered after ten rings and said he was “exploring an interesting direction.” Unlike Ma’alul, Shrapstein hadn’t called to update him, though Avraham was certain he had called Ilana.

  “What ‘direction’?” Avraham asked.

  “It’s not clear yet; I’ll update you if I get anything concrete,” Shrapstein replied. “In a nutshell, a resident of the neighborhood who has a history of sex crimes and violence involving youths is out on parole. It’s mostly harassment, but you know how these things escalate. For now, I’m collecting information, and we may bring him in to the station for questioning. Do you want to participate in the interrogation when he comes in?”

  Of course he wanted to. What a question.

  He considered calling Ilana, but decided to wait until he’d finished his meeting with the father. Shrapstein had again managed to irritate him, but overall he felt better. The investigation was moving forward, even if the direction it was taking remained unclear. The story was filling out with detail. The chronicle of Ofer’s life was no longer a blank page. It had a
wedding in it, at some point in the early 1990s, and a young father who had completed a course to become a chief engineering officer and was away from home for long periods; it had a sister with Down’s syndrome whom the family was too ashamed to mention; it had shipping lines that carried thousands of containers to ports in Cyprus and Koper. Owing to his father’s absences and the condition of his sister, Ofer was given a heavy load to carry, but the responsibility he was forced to assume wasn’t the kind that strengthened—on the contrary, perhaps. He was not asked to step into his father’s shoes during the absences. He was just asked to help. Outside the home, there was a friend called Yaniv Nesher, there were computer games, and a girl who liked Ofer. There was a date to see a movie. And there was the wish to leave home and live at a boarding school, to join the navy. The sea had become an inescapable backdrop to the story. Not the beach, with which Avraham was familiar, just like everyone else, and where he’d go sometimes on a Saturday in the summer, without removing his shirt. This was a different kind of sea, a sea that was also a place of work, a sea that was a distance between father and son, wife and husband. He wanted to look again at the photographs of Ofer that he had in his office, though not in the presence of the father.

  As he put out his second cigarette, Ze’ev Avni called again, asking if he needed to bring with him to the interview any form of identification or other documents. Avraham told him to bring his identity card, to which Avni replied, “My ID card is old and not up-to-date. I haven’t amended my residential address—it still says I live in Tel Aviv. Is that okay?”

  Avraham said it was fine and hung up, already beginning to regret the time he was going to waste in the company of the teacher. Perhaps he could dump Avni on Shrapstein? He smiled. It was an excellent idea.

  For the last hour, they spoke mostly about Tuesday. He asked Rafael Sharabi to reconstruct the twenty-four hours prior to Ofer’s disappearance, and to try to remember anything unusual.