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  “Then we’ll walk around here. I want to walk,” she insisted, and he said, “But there is nothing to see here, and nowhere to eat.”

  “You live here, don’t you?” she said. “So there must be something to see. I’m in a city I’ve never been to before. How could that be boring? By the way, what did you say its name was?”

  They walked through the streets of Holon.

  She studied the apartment buildings, the faces of the passersby and the clothes they were wearing, as if she had just arrived in New York or was on an undercover detective assignment. And she walked slowly in Holon. There was only one street they could not visit, and he led her far away from there. On the way back to his apartment, they passed by his parents’ home.

  “So when do I finally meet them?” she asked, and he said, “They’ll come to our wedding, you’ll see them there.”

  It was all so strange and different, as if they had just kept on walking through the streets of Brussels. They spoke in English, and Avraham thought to himself that this was the first time he was speaking a foreign language in the city where he had been born and had lived almost his entire life.

  “What happened with Guillaume?” he asked, and she said, “Nothing special. I knew I wasn’t in love with him after two weeks, but I couldn’t end it. It’s the second time I’ve made the mistake of going out with someone from work.”

  “And how did he take it?”

  She smiled. “He wasn’t in love with me, either. I think he’s secretly in love with Elise, Jean-Marc’s wife.”

  That made sense.

  It was while he was rummaging in his pocket for the keys at the entrance to his building that Marianka suddenly said, “I haven’t asked you about the case, not because I don’t want to but because I felt you don’t want me to. If you’re able to speak about what happened and what you are going through, I want to listen.”

  They ate tomatoes, yellow peppers, mangoes, grapes, watermelon, and thick slices of bread—because that’s all there was. And they watched a little TV because Marianka wanted to hear some Hebrew. Then they made plans for the rest of the week. Shortly after 10:00 p.m. Marianka took a shower and emerged from the bathroom in pajamas. She kissed his cheek, said goodnight, and went to her room. He washed the dishes in the kitchen. When he sat in the living room and started reading a book, something he hadn’t done in weeks, she came back and sat beside him, folding her legs and putting her bare feet on the sofa. She asked him, “Can I sit closer?” and his heart felt heavy with excitement when he told her, “Yes.”

  After that the wonderful struggle between them began.

  He didn’t always understand what she was asking of him. From time to time, she would withdraw, place a finger on his lips, and ask him to stop; there were moments when he felt her body drawing him in. He suggested they move to the bedroom, but she wanted to stay where they were, and asked him to turn out the light, searching for his eyes in the darkness even when he shut them. He wanted to keep them open so as not to stop seeing the hands that were touching him and the fragile body wrapped in his arms—but wasn’t always able to. He could not believe that such a miracle was happening inside him.

  They listened to David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners” in the dark living room, naked.

  “Just so it’s clear, I’m sleeping in my own room,” said Marianka, and Avraham didn’t fully comprehend that she really meant it.

  “Not that I’m complaining, but why did you do that?” he asked, and she said, “Because I wanted to, and also because I didn’t want to. And because it’s forbidden. And because now everything between us will be much easier than before. Though it was very easy already.”

  He slept in his bed, and when he woke the following morning and stepped out of his room, he saw her through the open bathroom door, brushing her teeth.

  Had it not still been so close to the conclusion of the investigation, it would probably have been the most beautiful week of his life. On Tuesday, they drove to Masada and the Dead Sea, and Avraham watched from the beach as Marianka hesitantly entered the dense water and rubbed mud on her cheeks and forehead. He hated the Dead Sea, from childhood. Early Wednesday morning, he drove her to East Jerusalem, from where she continued alone by taxi to Bethlehem. He regretted rejecting her pleas to come along, particularly when he found her so quiet and pensive when she returned. She touched his face and hands in a fuller way. She told him she had sat for over an hour in the Church of the Nativity and thought about her life. “What did you ask for?” he inquired, and she said, “I didn’t ask for anything. It’s not a wishing well, you know, it’s a church. I felt that I want to live differently and that I don’t know how.”

  Later that evening, she turned down his offer to take a walk along the beach in Tel Aviv, choosing instead to read in her room, and he fell asleep stricken with anxiety and despair. When he opened his eyes in the morning, she was sleeping beside him.

  Marianka wasn’t joking when she said she’d like to meet his parents, so he called his mother on Thursday and told her he had a guest from Belgium. “Would you like to come for dinner tomorrow?” his mother immediately suggested—and to her amazement, he didn’t refuse. She called twice that same day to ask what Belgians like to eat and if meatballs in a sauce would be sufficiently respectable. “What’s the problem?” came his father’s voice in the background. “Just prepare for her some rice and beans; I’m sure she isn’t familiar with that.” Marianka insisted that they could not arrive without a bottle of wine.

  Much to his surprise, the meal didn’t end in disaster. His parents had dressed up for the occasion, and his father even wore shoes. They had set the table in the living room and his mother had placed a green vase with a nice bouquet of white lilies in the center. Marianka wore a black dress, and he saw her putting makeup on for the first time. His parents didn’t ask about the nature of their relationship, and he and Marianka didn’t offer any explanations. His mother grilled Marianka about the origin of her name, and she told them she was born in Slovenia and had immigrated to Brussels with her family.

  “Oh, so you’re not really from Belgium,” his mother said, clearly disappointed.

  “So what?” his father said. “And we’re from here? My parents were born in Iraq. And where do you think she was born? In Hungary!” And his mother hissed at him in Hebrew, “What are you talking nonsense for? You think she cares where I come from?”

  He felt Marianka’s fingers climbing up his thigh under the table. His mother cleared the dishes from the first course and he followed her into the kitchen to help.

  “She’s charming,” his mother whispered, “and very pretty. Where did you meet her?” and he said, “We met in Belgium,” adding nothing more. Marianka stayed at the table. He saw from the kitchen that she fixed her serious eyes on his father. She really was so beautiful, and he wondered whether in Belgian or Slovenian terms he, for his part, could be considered a handsome man.

  The conversation in English proved difficult for his father, who made an effort at first but then switched to Hebrew and waited for someone to translate what he said, until he grew weary of that and went silent. He buried his gaze in his plate and still drew the food to his mouth with careful movements after everyone had finished eating. Avraham had told Marianka of his condition before dinner, and she listened to his father patiently, even when he mumbled unintelligible words in Hebrew. Toward the end of the meal, his father suddenly whispered, as if to himself, “It’s good that you’re leaving the country. There’s nothing for you here,” and then addressed Marianka in slow Hebrew, saying, “I will miss him very much. Do you know how much I love him?”

  The next day they went to Jerusalem. It was Saturday, the last day.

  They began their tour in the western part of the city and he took her first to the old Nahlaot neighborhood. They walked among the alleyways where his grandfather had once lived and where he himself had rented
an apartment for a year during his studies, a long time ago. The city was empty and still. The air was stifling and hard to breathe, laden with the sorrow of their parting.

  Ever since she arrived, Marianka had been asking him to take her to the Mount of Olives. Her father, who had visited Israel many years earlier, had told her of the sacredness of the mountain and the spectacular view of Jerusalem from its peak. Avraham struggled at first to find his way along the new roads leading to the eastern part of the city. It was animated and noisy there, and the higher they climbed, the more the commotion of the tourists grew. They sat on a wooden bench and looked out over the city that lay spread out before them, flat and stony. Cameras clicked around them and the golden Dome of the Rock blazed. Avraham spoke less and less and Marianka tried to comfort him. A distance had opened up between them even before her plane left the ground.

  “Do you know that that’s the gate through which the Messiah will one day enter Jerusalem?” she asked, pointing toward the Old City.

  “No doubt,” he said.

  “You don’t believe that? The Jews also believe that the resurrection of the dead will begin from the Mount of Olives. I think the prophet Elijah is supposed to blow a shofar from here,” she said seriously, and he replied, “I don’t think it will be heard in Holon. And where do you know all of that from?”

  “My father,” she said. “He didn’t just teach me karate.”

  They both went silent for a long time before Avraham could no longer hold back the sadness within him and said, “The worst thing is that sometimes I think he’s better off dead. I am so angry at him without even knowing him.”

  “Who?” Marianka asked.

  “Ofer. The teenager who went missing. The boy we were looking for.”

  And for the first time since leaving the station that night, he spoke about what had happened. He told her about his interrogation of Hannah Sharabi and her refusal to speak, her blind refusal to admit to what had happened in Danit’s room, the room whose door was shut to him. That was why they had hidden the daughter from him to begin with. “I am really so angry that I thought a few times that it was good that he died the way he did. And I am frightened by the thought.” Marianka let go of his hand.

  “I don’t understand how you can be so sure that he assaulted her,” she said as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t believe that’s what happened.”

  That wasn’t a question of belief.

  “Are you listening to me, Avi? I don’t understand why you choose to believe the father and not the mother. Did you not consider the possibility that she had been telling the truth? That she found him in his own room, as she said? That Ofer didn’t hurt his sister?”

  He suspended his dimmed gaze on her. “What do you mean?”

  “That Ofer’s father lied. After all, he clearly has a motive to do so. The story he told you about Ofer and his sister will surely influence the sentence he receives, right?”

  “Yes—and rightly so, don’t you think?”

  “So you agree, then, that if the fight between them broke out over something else, you’d be treating him differently? What if he came up with the story to give himself a justifiable motive and extenuating circumstances and all of you were drawn into it and failed to listen to what the mother was trying to tell you?”

  Shrapstein had been absolutely sure that Rafael Sharabi had cracked to pieces and had told the truth, and that Hannah Sharabi had kept on lying. And everyone had accepted his position.

  “I’m telling you, I don’t believe that the mother lied,” Marianka insisted. “Ofer’s mother told you the truth. You’ve already confirmed that she didn’t lie when she told you she returned home after the father, right? And didn’t you wonder about the fact that the father returned home early? This is mere conjecture, but perhaps he was the one who assaulted the daughter? Perhaps he thought that Ofer was sleeping and went into her room, and maybe Ofer was awake or was waked by noise coming from the girl’s room and found his father there? That would explain not only why the father killed him but also why it was so important for him to conceal what really happened, to come up with the story of Ofer’s disappearance. Did it never occur to any of you that Ofer may have been trying to protect his sister?”

  Marianka’s words shocked him. “I would never hurt my children—no matter who asks me to do that,” Hannah Sharabi had said to him during the interrogation. And he recalled Ilana’s description of the reconstruction in which the father had pushed Ma’alul first against one wall and then against another.

  “But why would she not have told us explicitly that her husband was lying?” he asked.

  “She said she was afraid of him, didn’t she? And she did tell you explicitly. You told me she kept insisting that she found Ofer in his own room and that he hadn’t harmed his sister. You simply decided to believe the father’s version of events and not what the mother told you.”

  Ilana didn’t answer his call.

  He left her a message, asking her to call him, insisting that it was urgent. His whole world was spinning around him. He wanted to get back into the car and go to the station right then and there; he wanted to open the file and watch the video recordings again; he wanted to get Rafael Sharabi back into an interrogation room and question him himself. And he wasn’t willing to let go of Marianka. He stood facing her, his back to the old city.

  “You can’t go,” he whispered, and she said, “I have to be back at work on Monday.”

  “So quit your job.”

  “And then what?”

  Or he could quit. He didn’t really want to go back anyway. Leaving the station that night, he had told himself that it had probably been his final case.

  “You can’t quit,” Marianka said. “Don’t you remember saying that even when you aren’t a policeman you’re a policeman?”

  But maybe now he could? He sat beside her on the bench again.

  “Don’t let a single case break you,” she said. “And I understand how difficult it was. Besides, the investigation isn’t over. Didn’t you tell me how you can always prove the detective wrong? Didn’t you say that the true solution is always different from the one that’s given? See? It’s happened to you too.”

  “It doesn’t happen in real life—only in detective novels,” he said, but he hoped that he was wrong.

  He saw Ofer again, putting his backpack on the park bench and resting his head on it.

  He closed his eyes.

  The skies darkened.

  They stopped by his apartment to collect Marianka’s suitcase, then drove to the airport.

  Avraham promised to try to extend his vacation and to come to her, perhaps even in two or three days.

  They held each other as if they would never meet again, but that was not true.

  They met.

  To be continued . . .

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Claire Wachtel, my editor at HarperCollins, for her insightful reading of The Missing File and her meticulous work on preparing the American edition of the novel, and thanks to all the great Harper team members for their exceptional care. I could not have imagined Avraham Avraham in better hands.

  To Ronit Zafran, Marianne Fritch, Marc Koralnik, and Eva Koralnik at the Liepman Literary Agency I owe the fact that Avraham speaks English now, along with many other languages that I do not.

  Special thanks to my editor and dear friend, Shira Hadad, the most sensitive and encouraging reader a writer can hope for.

  About the Author

  D. A. MISHANI is the editor of Israeli fiction and crime literature at Keter Books in Israel and is a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature. The Missing File is his first novel and the first in a series featuring the police inspector Avraham Avraham.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
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br />   Credits

  Cover photograph © James Walker/Trevillion Images

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE MISSING FILE. Copyright © 2013 by Dror Mishani. English translation © 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Originally published as Tik Needar in Israel in 2011 by Keter Books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN 978-0-06-219537-1

  EPub Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN: 9780062195395

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