The Missing File Read online

  “We didn’t think he really knew Ofer. We thought someone was harassing us—a lunatic,” she said quietly, echoing Shrapstein’s words, as if she had been listening in on the conversations of the team of investigators, not just the other way around.

  “I don’t believe you.” He continued to pace through the room—now in ever tighter circles, around the desk, and around her, such that some of his words were spoken behind her back. “I don’t believe that a mother whose son has been missing for three weeks gets a call from someone who says he knows where this child is and she doesn’t take it seriously. That would never happen. There’s no such mother in the world. All you had to do was call me and say, ‘Some lunatic just called us to say he knows where Ofer is. Make of it what you will.’ He said he’d call in the evening to tell you where Ofer is, didn’t he? And what if he really does know something? We’d be able to trace the call and locate him. Do you know a mother out there who would give up on a chance like that?”

  “He didn’t call,” she said, and he burst out: “But you didn’t know that then! No one could have known that. What am I supposed to think about what you’ve done? You’re either stupid—but really stupid—to think there was no need to report the call, or you don’t care what happened to Ofer, or you know what happened to him and that’s why the call didn’t seem important. Which do you choose? Which of those three options seems right to you?”

  He waited for Shrapstein in the old interrogation room at the far end of the corridor for five minutes—but Shrapstein didn’t come.

  They had agreed to meet up every half hour unless their interrogation reached a critical point. It was 10:04 a.m. Had Rafael Sharabi already crumpled, as Shrapstein had foreseen? And if so, what was exposed among the ruins?

  He was tenser than he had ever been during an interrogation. His exhaustion was a factor, of course. Perhaps he should have taken up Ilana’s offer to let her do the questioning of Hannah Sharabi in his stead.

  He asked one of the duty officers to tell Shrapstein he was outside if she saw him in the corridor, then lit a cigarette and sat down on the stairs leading up to the station. He still wasn’t sure how to tell Hannah Sharabi about what had been frightening him since the afternoon of the day before. He was about to reach the moment in the interrogation when, according to the plan, he would ask about something no one knew. Neither Shrapstein nor Ilana. And he had to ask—not to make her crumble, no, on the contrary—so that she would give him an answer that relieved him.

  He regretted his outburst. As he left the room, slamming the door behind him, Hannah Sharabi had stared at him, humiliated, overcome with hatred.

  Watching the videotape, he noticed a degree of hesitancy and anxiety in his stride as he returned to the room and slowly dragged his chair from its original position—across the desk from Hannah Sharabi’s seat—to its new one, at the corner of the desk, alongside her, just a whisper away. They were now sitting close to each other, just as they had on Ofer’s bed.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked, and he said, “One more thing, and then you can leave.”

  How he wanted to believe that.

  “I’d like to share with you one more problem that has been bothering me about Ofer’s disappearance, okay? From the first time you came into the station, you have been saying that Ofer left home that Wednesday at seven forty-five a.m. and was on his way to school, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you sure he was on his way to school? Did you know then or do you know now if he had other plans?”

  “I’ve already told you—no.”

  Did he see a glimmer of hope in the corner of her eye? Relief perhaps? He was back to inquiring about Ofer, about the morning of his disappearance, after all the questions about the letters and the phone call they had concealed. Her cheeks still shook.

  He reached over for the cardboard case file and withdrew a sheet of paper. “This is Ofer’s class schedule. I took it out of the drawer in his room, if you recall. In fact, we found it together. And yesterday evening I verified it with his homeroom teacher. According to the schedule for Wednesday, Ofer should have started the day with two hours of algebra, followed by an hour of English, an hour of PE, an hour of sociology, and an hour of literature.”

  He looked at her, expecting a response. She had no idea where he was going.

  He withdrew another sheet of paper from the case file. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not trying to trip you up. I want to help you.”

  She remained silent.

  “This is a list of the books that were found in Ofer’s bag. A civics book, a sociology book, a copy of Antigone—that must be for the literature class—and a grammar book. No algebra book, and no English book, despite the fact that his first three hours on a Wednesday were in algebra and English. That doesn’t sound like Ofer, does it? What do you make of it?”

  She didn’t reach for the page with the list of the items found in the bag. Her hands rested on her knees, just as they had almost throughout the interrogation.

  “To me,” he went on, “it means that if Ofer prepared the bag himself, he had no intention of going to school that Wednesday morning. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  Again she put her left hand on the desk, just as she had done earlier, when he surprised her with the question about the phone call. He was very close to her now, his face almost brushing against her left cheek and ear, where the ends of her black hair rested. Because of their proximity, she didn’t know where to look when she replied, in a broken voice, “So maybe he knew he wasn’t . . .”

  He cut in to her words. “That’s what I thought. But something confused me. You told me that Ofer was very organized. I saw it for myself when I was in his room, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “And that’s what confused me. Let’s assume he had no intention of going to school that Wednesday. If that’s the case, he would probably have left the books he returned home with from school on Tuesday in the bag, right?”

  He waited for her to say something but she didn’t speak and he continued. Again he looked over the class schedule. “From eight to nine, Bible studies; from nine to ten, geometry; then two hours of English, an hour of geography, and an hour of history. You see? The same problem. Yesterday, your husband asked me on the phone if we had come across anything in the bag. So here’s the problem: the only conclusion we could possibly draw from Ofer’s bag is that he had no intention of going to school. Otherwise, he would have taken the right books with him. On the other hand, if he planned to run away from home, why take any schoolbooks? Assuming he went to school on Tuesday with the right books, we’re left with the following absurd scenario: on Tuesday, when Ofer prepared to run away or disappear, he removed the books he had taken to school that day and replaced them with others. Just any books. Does that make sense to you? Does it sound like something Ofer would do?”

  He pulled his face away from her, and his voice cracked when, for the first time, he spoke the sentence he hadn’t formulated in his mind ahead of their conversation. And he thought he could see tears in her eyes.

  “There’s one more possibility. That Ofer returned home on Tuesday, removed his schoolbooks from the bag, maybe did his homework, maybe placed his books on the shelf. And that someone else put the books we found into the bag—I’m not sure exactly when. But it wasn’t Ofer. It was someone who didn’t know Ofer’s schedule, or didn’t think about it, but simply stuffed some books in the bag before throwing it into the Dumpster.”

  He moved his face close to her cheek again, and waited.

  “Hannah,” he said, “there was a grammar book in the bag, and Ofer doesn’t do grammar anymore. You know that he took his final grammar exam last year.”

  She stared fiercely at the closed door once again. The muscles of her face clenched tight as if in an effort to prevent it from disintegrating. If she could, he t
hought, she’d let her face fall into her hands.

  Neither of them spoke. There was nothing more to say. His interrogation was finished.

  She suddenly said, “Get away from me,” and he asked, “What?”

  “Leave me alone. Don’t come close to me.”

  He pulled his face back and stood up.

  And then he paced again—this time not to trap her gaze, but to calm himself.

  He looked at her from time to time, and she seemed to have regained her composure. Her cheeks tightened. The intensity with which she fixed her eyes on the door handle frightened him.

  He couldn’t keep her in the interrogation room forever.

  And suddenly he was filled with hatred. He wanted to hit her, to grab her hair and smash her head into the wall, over and over again.

  The interrogation was being videotaped.

  The door opened and Shrapstein appeared. “Come here a moment, Avi,” he said, and Avraham replied, “Not now, I’m in the middle of something.”

  Shrapstein screamed at him. “Avi, I’m telling you to get the fuck out here already.”

  He stepped out—because of the scream.

  Shrapstein looked stunned. His eyes were void of even the slightest joy when he said, “That’s it. He confessed.”

  15

  Ilana was immediately summoned from Tel Aviv, and they shut themselves off in the conference room to carefully analyze each aspect of the father’s confession and its bearings on the remainder of the investigation. They had doubts about some of the details he had given them because he had taken all the blame and cleared his wife of any responsibility. Shrapstein thought they should break the mother too, root out the truth from both of them. Ilana wasn’t sure, but leaned toward making do with the father’s confession for the time being. They had enough to bring the parents up before a court and have them remanded to custody.

  Avraham stayed out of their conversation. Shrapstein’s words still echoed loud in his ears: “Get the fuck out here already.” And he was still seeing how the mother’s eyes locked in on him with terror as he left the room.

  She understood.

  Rafael Sharabi cracked after Shrapstein told him that the police were in possession of further incriminating evidence in addition to the information about the letters and the anonymous phone call. Perhaps even a body. Shrapstein’s interrogation tactics were entirely different from those of Avraham. He threatened, sent up smoke screens, referred frequently to the interrogation that was taking place in the adjacent room, and took the interview down the thin, blurred boundary of what the law permitted. And he never lost his nerve.

  Could Avraham also have broken the father?

  Just like his wife, Rafael Sharabi had lied to him in their interview. And he had believed him. He had continued to believe even after the team meeting where questions were raised about the parents’ statements. And he still believed during his interrogation of the mother, even when he lashed out at her, even when he was filled with the urge to smash her silence against the wall.

  He needed a cigarette but couldn’t leave the room. Shrapstein and Ilana sat glued to the small television screen. Ilana was stone-faced. She instructed him to call Ma’alul, who was on his way to the station, and ask him to inform the welfare authorities.

  Shrapstein too had been in possession of a trump card he hadn’t revealed, or hadn’t said anything about playing—the father’s fingerprints on the bag. The finding was insignificant; the father’s prints on the bag were expected. Even a novice lawyer, had there been one in the room at the time, would have crushed Shrapstein’s vague insinuations as easily as stamping out a cigarette butt. But that was the advantage of the strategy he had woven: the parents weren’t taken into custody for questioning—they were there willingly, alone, without legal representation.

  Shrapstein presented the father with the letters, and then slammed him with the phone call, finally telling him repeatedly that his prints would prove that he had been the last person to touch the bag, not Ofer. And Rafael Sharabi was indeed terrified. From the start, far more than his wife. Avraham studied the father’s face, the sunken cheeks covered by a silvery beard. He was dressed in jeans, a white polo shirt, and white sneakers. His features were deepened with pain. He looked like a man who was starving himself. Gone was the softness Avraham had seen in him when they first met. He was afraid of Shrapstein, perhaps because he had not met him before, and perhaps because until the moment of confession Shrapstein was scorchingly firm. It was clear from the moment the father sat down in front of him that the interrogation would culminate in the revelation of what he was hiding.

  “Don’t you understand why you have to talk to me?” Shrapstein said. “Your wife is being questioned in the adjacent room, and you know she won’t be able to take it. I’ve just come from there and have seen what she’s going through. It’s ugly. You don’t know Inspector Avi Avraham; he’ll get whatever he wants out of her, no matter how. Tell me the truth and you’ll spare your wife and yourself a lot of suffering, believe me. Do you realize he wanted us to arrest you both yesterday and send you off to the Abu Kabir detention center? Is that where you want to end up? Is that where you want her to end up?”

  At this point Rafael Sharabi still tried to defend himself. He said, “Arrest us for what? For letters we didn’t get? We’ll get a lawyer,” and Shrapstein replied, “Go ahead, with pleasure. You know what that tells us, but no problem. What I can promise you is that it’s going to take some time for us to get you to a phone, and then some more for a lawyer to arrive; meanwhile, your wife in the other room will be screaming out whatever it is you’re hiding—not speaking it, screaming it. But whatever you want.”

  “I hope you didn’t at any time advise him not to speak to a lawyer,” Ilana said, looking over at Shrapstein.

  “Never,” Shrapstein quietly responded.

  The videotape showed Rafael Sharabi on the verge of making the hardest decision of his life. He clenched his fingers into a fist and rested the fist on the desk, almost exactly as his wife had done.

  The door to the conference room opened and Ma’alul entered. “I spoke to welfare. They’re sending someone,” he said to Ilana, and then touched Avraham’s shoulder, without saying a word, without explaining if the gesture was an expression of greeting or consolation.

  The digital clock at the bottom of the monitor raced forward. Rafael Sharabi sat in his chair, his back hunched, his head between his hands. Shrapstein towered over him. “Don’t you realize you’re finished?” he said. “Do you really not get it? The only way to help yourself and your wife, and Ofer too, is to tell the truth.”

  A whimper came from between the father’s hands.

  Shrapstein fired his final shot. He whispered in his ear, “Tell me, do you really not understand why you are here? Do you think we would have brought you only because of the phone call? I’ll be straight with you. We have the letters; we have the phone call; we have your prints to prove that no one touched the bag after you. And we have Ofer, too.”

  Rafael Sharabi withdrew his hands from his face and looked up at Shrapstein, who had gone silent. “Have you found him?” the father asked, and Shrapstein didn’t blink as he said, “Why do you think you are here?”

  And that was it.

  The wail burst forth from within him and Avraham couldn’t understand how he hadn’t heard it from next door.

  Ilana stood up. “Stop the tape for a moment,” she said. “I can’t bear to see it.”

  Ma’alul left the room.

  A full two hours went by before Avraham returned to the interrogation room in which he had left the mother. She followed his return with her eyes. He dragged his chair back to its original position and sat down opposite her. The chair games were unnecessary now.

  “That’s it, it’s all over,” he said, to which she didn’t respond.

  Her left hand re
sted on the desk. Before he returned to the room, Ilana had asked if he’d like her to stand in for him, or join him, for the remainder of the interrogation. He had said no. Now, faced with the frozen mother, he thought he may have made a mistake. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her—either out of hatred or pity, he couldn’t tell which.

  “I know what happened to Ofer—you don’t need to hide it anymore. And I don’t understand why you lied. You made a terrible mistake.”

  “Have you found Ofer?” she asked, and he responded without raising his voice: “Enough already. Hannah, your husband provided us with a detailed confession, and you and I are going to go through it now. I want you to consider every detail in his statement, and for the good of both you and your children, I want you to tell me the truth this time.”

  A sheet of paper with a summary of the father’s statement, arranged as a bulleted list, lay on the desk in front of him. “On Tuesday evening, May third, you and your husband went out to meet with friends. Can you recall the time?”

  “We’ve already told you—at around nine.” Her voice trembled.

  Avraham remembered the description of that day well. Ofer returned home from school at 2:00 p.m. His parents weren’t sure what he did, and didn’t ask. He ate lunch alone, played on the computer, watched TV, and did his homework in his room. Rafael Sharabi slept for a few hours in the bedroom and packed a suitcase for his trip when he woke. Hannah waited for her younger son and daughter to return from kindergarten and school. They sat down to have supper at 7:00 p.m. The father then bathed the small boy and put him to bed in the room he shared with Ofer. His wife bathed Danit and helped her with her nightdress and into bed. Ofer returned to his room after his younger brother had fallen asleep. He sat down in front of the computer without turning on the light.