The Missing File Read online

  “I’m Ofer’s uncle,” said the man at her side. “My brother called me at six this morning and told me what’s happening. Are you the policeman who spoke with her yesterday?”

  Avraham didn’t respond. He turned to Hannah Sharabi and asked, “You haven’t heard a thing?” But she remained silent, as if the presence of the uncle had made her presence unnecessary.

  “Nothing,” the uncle replied. “You told her that you would begin searches in the morning.”

  Avraham quickly ushered them to his room, without anyone noticing.

  They remained at the station until late in the morning. His hand hardly let go of the telephone. Again he made calls to the hospital emergency rooms, went through the reports and incidents from the night before, and received updates from the intelligence coordinators in the police district. He left the room a few times to try to get hold of Ilana, but her cell was switched off and the secretary at the Investigations Division told him that she was in meetings at the National Headquarters in Jerusalem. He wanted to consult with her, but mostly he wanted to be the first one to tell her the story.

  The mother was even quieter than she had been during their talk the day before. He asked her if she’d like something to drink, and she shook her head to say no. Even when he asked her direct questions about Ofer, the uncle answered instead. Only when he inquired about Ofer’s height and the uncle responded, “Five feet four inches,” did she intervene and say, “Five feet six inches.” He weighed around 130 pounds.

  With the help of the mother and uncle, he put together a brief announcement about the missing boy. They gave him permission to post it on the police website and Facebook page, and he explained that the same announcement would also appear in the media. The mother then placed a plastic sandwich bag on the table and took out six photographs of Ofer. That moment haunted him later that night, before he fell asleep. He hadn’t had time to examine the pictures, and knew that night that he had made a mistake. Could he have seen something in them? Perhaps. And even if not, she had wanted him to look at Ofer, to say something about him. He asked which was the most recent and took them all to be scanned. On his way back to his office, he remembered that Igor Kintiev was supposed to arrive at the station at 1:00 p.m. from the holding cells at the Abu Kabir facility and he called to cancel the interrogation. His remand was for another four days, and the questioning could wait.

  The thing that surprised him throughout the morning was that no one had blamed him for anything—neither the uncle nor the mother. They hadn’t attacked him for his decision not to begin a search, nor had they reminded him that the night before, there hadn’t been a policeman in Israel who knew of Ofer’s disappearance, apart from him. The fact that they hadn’t blamed him only seemed to heighten the sense of urgency. He managed to put together a temporary team around noon—five officers, including a young policewoman from the Traffic Division who had completed her shift and volunteered to stay for a few extra hours. They were also joined by an investigator from the IT Division who accompanied him on the short drive from the station to Histadrut Street.

  This must be the first time Hannah Sharabi has been in a police patrol car, Avraham thought to himself when they got in the car. He looked at her in the rearview mirror as she buckled up in the backseat.

  From then on, he felt that things were getting out of control, that he wasn’t able to manage his temporary team, his situation, the way he wanted to. And it was all Ilana’s fault—at least that’s how he felt at the time. Her absence prevented him from thinking things through, and he wasn’t quite sure why. In any event, it was scandalous—a Special Investigations Division officer disappearing in the middle of the day and impossible to get hold of.

  He tried nevertheless to begin the investigation in an orderly and rational manner. It was his hard-and-fast rule. He wanted to sit down for a quiet talk with Hannah Sharabi, but it was simply impossible. The apartment was a hive of activity. His officers came and went, neighbors came up, and the uncle brought over more relatives and didn’t leave the mother’s side for a moment, sticking to her like a bodyguard. And the telephones didn’t stop—a different ringtone every second, or the same ringtone and three or four people fumbling for their phones in their respective pockets, thinking the sound was coming from there. He instructed the traffic policewoman to restore some order and to stop anyone else from entering. He was sure that was the key. If he could only sit down with the mother for a few minutes and ask her a question he hadn’t yet asked and still wasn’t aware of, everything would become a lot clearer—a question that would evolve out of the conversation and elicit a piece of information she wasn’t aware of having. She’d remember something Ofer had said, a friend she had forgotten to mention, and they’d know where to begin looking. It had been only a little more than twenty-four hours since Ofer’s disappearance; anything was still possible.

  He sat in the car to think. A call from the station informed him that Igor Kintiev had arrived for questioning. And for the first time that day, he raised his voice, shouting that he had called two hours earlier to cancel the interrogation and giving instructions for Kintiev to be returned to the holding cells. A woman he had seen earlier in the apartment came over to his car and asked if she could put up posters along the street.

  He hung out around the building, smoking, trying again to get hold of Ilana. Rinat Pinto, who had been sent to carry out initial inquiries at Ofer’s school, returned empty-handed. They met up at the entrance to the building and she asked Avraham if she should question additional teachers and friends. And Ilana remained out of reach. The investigator from the IT Division presumed he had gone back to the station and called him from upstairs. His initial check through Ofer’s e-mails and text messages had revealed nothing of any importance, and he asked if he should get the family’s go-ahead to remove the computer’s hard drive for further examination. “Wait just a moment, I’m coming up,” Avraham replied, returning to the apartment and asking if it would be okay for him to smoke on the balcony.

  It was past three when Ilana eventually called. She sounded aloof. Her tone was official. He could hear sounds in the background, coming perhaps from a radio. Was there someone in the car with her? He went out onto the balcony to be alone while they spoke, and lit a cigarette, placing the lighter and pack on the open windowsill. The lighter fell down to the yard. He gave Ilana an update on the start of the investigation without mentioning the mother’s visit to the station the previous evening. She said he seemed to be doing all the right things at this stage in the investigation and didn’t see any cause for deviating from standard search procedures.

  “As far as I understand things, there’s no special urgency, right?” she added, and he wanted to roar back, “What do you mean, no special urgency? We have no idea at all where the boy spent the night,” but instead he just asked, “And what about tomorrow?” wondering if she could notice the tension in his voice.

  “What do you mean, what about tomorrow?”

  She hadn’t noticed.

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. If I want an extensive search, I’ll need to bring in personnel.”

  “Until you have a concrete lead to follow, Avi, there’s no point. And from what you’ve told me so far, you don’t have one for now, right?” He had already told her that he didn’t have one, and couldn’t understand why she was repeating and loudly stressing the question in the presence of the person sitting next to her. “The moment you have a lead, we’ll bring in more personnel; it won’t be a problem,” she said.

  “Will you be in the area today, by any chance?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so. I’m on my way back from Jerusalem and have meetings at district headquarters all afternoon. But call me if something urgent comes up. Keep me posted on your progress in the investigation, in the evening and over the weekend too if something new turns up. Okay?”

  She was speaking to him in that manner only because of the
person or persons sitting beside her. She was with someone important, he thought—the district commander perhaps, or maybe the deputy chief of police. This conversation with her had been useless.

  Only evening brought quiet to the building on Histadrut Street. Everyone had been released from duty or was done for the day. He asked Liat Mantsur to join him for some questioning of the neighbors. They went from one apartment to the next, but nothing significant came from any of their conversations. No one had heard a thing, no one knew Ofer Sharabi beyond polite small talk on the stairs—everyone apart from the neighbor who had asked his permission to put up posters in the street. She said she was “close to the family,” and that Ofer was a “wonderful boy”—and she cried.

  Avraham went up to the Sharabis’ apartment one last time before they all left the building. He knocked softly on the closed door, thinking in the few seconds that passed before it opened that every knock had the potential of driving the mother over the edge. “It’s Inspector Avraham,” he called out in a loud voice through the door. “Can you open for a moment?”

  A woman in her fifties opened the door—the uncle’s wife, ready for bed. She had assumed command of the situation. The mother was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room, a young girl of around Ofer’s age beside her. On the table in front of them were small plates of salted snacks, an open bottle of Diet Sprite, cups with the remains of coffee—like during the shivah after a funeral. The TV was on, Channel 2.

  Avraham stood in front of her in the living room, between the sofa and the television. “That’s it,” he said. “We’re done here for now and I’m going back to the station. You should get some sleep.”

  “In a little while,” the mother replied, but her eyes asked him if he really thought she was going to go to bed.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow morning,” Avraham continued. “And let me know at any time if something happens during the night. You have my cell number, right?”

  The aunt accompanied him to the door, whispering that she and her daughter would be spending the night.

  He dropped off Liat Mantsur at her place, but instead of heading home, he drove around for a while longer, aimlessly.

  He had no reason to return to the station.

  His failure of the night before had been compounded by another one. He hadn’t acted like the commander of an investigation. He hadn’t paused to think. He hadn’t looked. He hadn’t listened. Whatever happens with Ofer, wherever he may be, there was a story here that had started telling itself. And he hadn’t listened to the story. Not only did he not know how it would end; he couldn’t say how it had started, either. He didn’t have a clue who the characters were. That’s what he’d have to do tomorrow, to listen to the story—to get to know Ofer Sharabi, and also his mother and his father, who was on a cargo ship somewhere on the way to Trieste, as well as his brother and sister, whom he hadn’t yet seen.

  Slower, slowly, he whispered to himself again, just as he had done on the way home the night before.

  He drove up and down Sokolov, Holon’s main commercial street, his eyes on the crowds of young people who filled it. Thursday, 11:30 p.m.—the cafés were packed, with lines stretching outside. The street belonged to the adults during the day, the shopkeepers and the shoppers; but at night the youth ruled. He slowed down almost to a standstill. When he was young, there wasn’t a single café in Holon—only one or two ice cream parlors, a few small, failing pizza stands that opened, closed, then reopened under different names, and a confectionery store where he worked one summer. For now, he had no way of knowing whether the cafés or one of their customers were part of the story he needed to listen to.

  He stopped off at Struma Square to buy a falafel, parking his car up on the pavement. Despite the late hour, there was a long line. A group of young boys and girls were crowded around a man whose face he thought he recognized from the sports section of the newspaper. He bought half a portion; it was late to be eating, and he didn’t want to spend all the cash he was carrying. He ate standing up, close to a group of young people who were leaning against a red BMW, trying to listen to their conversation. He was so much older than them. In fact, as it was past midnight already, he was exactly thirty-eight years old. How long had it been since he last went out at that time of night? He got back into his car and continued to drive, slowing down when he saw someone walking along the pavement alone, stopping alongside a parked car in which a couple were sitting in the dark.

  It all reminded him of a different time, and evoked a strange sense of duplicity. He was he, and also someone else that was no longer there. He parked his car below his building on Yom Kippur Street after 2:00 a.m. He turned on the light in the apartment, stared at the silent television set, and then went into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. Was this his way of celebrating? The thought amused him. It took him a long time to fall asleep.

  The buzz of the intercom was followed thirty minutes later by a phone call. By then, Avraham was dressed in civilian clothing—a clean pair of jeans and a wide mustard-colored polo shirt, one of the only ones in which he felt comfortable. “Are you up?” his mother asked, as if she was used to him sleeping at that time. “We wanted to say mazel tov. You do remember it’s your birthday, right? And that you’re coming to our place.”

  She didn’t mention the arrangement of lisianthus and gerberas. And he too said nothing, although he could have thanked her. She passed the phone to his father, and he wished him well with practically the very same words that were on the card, as if he were reading from a piece of paper: “We wish you only health, wherever life may lead you.”

  Did she know no one else would call to wish him happy birthday, and so she did so twice, once with the card and once by phone? Or perhaps she thought he’d get dozens of calls and messages and wanted to be the first?

  Before leaving the apartment, he placed the pink, white, and purple arrangement in a jar he had found in the kitchen and filled with water. He left the bouquet still wrapped in the noisy cellophane in which it had arrived.

  Unlike most of his colleagues, Avraham liked going into the station on Friday mornings. He had nothing else to do.

  The station was quiet, as it was every Friday. The morning shift’s duty sergeant, David Ezra, appeared cheerful. He was speaking to someone on the phone and moved the mouthpiece aside to whisper to Avraham, “Have you come in to work on the missing-persons case? Wait just a moment, then,” and he handed over a short list of calls that had come in overnight about the young boy, along with the names of the callers, their numbers, and a few words on the information they wished to pass on.

  “Is that all?” Avraham asked.

  Ezra nodded and continued his conversation.

  Because of the urgency and the presence of the mother and uncle in his office, he had forgotten to turn off his computer when they left for the building on Histadrut Street the previous day. It was still on. He went through the list of callers, marking a few with a blue asterisk. He then opened the missing-persons section on the police department’s Facebook page, and was surprised to see the very small number of responses to the report about Ofer’s disappearance. And they were all insignificant—good luck wishes to the police, two offers to help with the search, and one that linked the deteriorating state of the youth in general to the hallucinatory drugs that were being sold at late-night kiosks and the police’s inefficient handling of the matter.

  He didn’t know why he was at the station at all. He could have waited at home for some concrete information to come in. But he wanted to be active. The more time that went by since Ofer’s disappearance, the less chance they had of finding him. He sensed he needed to take the initiative, to make things right, to attack, that something would happen in the coming hours. He had promised himself the day before that he would start listening to the story. He jotted down a few questions he planned to ask Hannah Sharabi.

  He then called on
e of the telephone numbers. There was no reply. His fourth call was answered by a child.

  “Hello, this is Inspector Avraham Avraham from the police. You left a message regarding a missing boy, Ofer Sharabi,” he said.

  “Just a moment, I’ll call my mom,” replied the girl. Her childish voice was soon replaced by the deep voice of a man.

  Avraham repeated himself.

  “Good of you to call,” the man said. “My wife and I saw the missing boy yesterday evening.”

  The man went on to say that he and his wife had seen Ofer at a gas station on the road to Ashdod. They had stopped to fill up their tank and buy a cup of coffee at the adjacent convenience store. They had seen a young boy sitting alone at a table outside the store, smoking. The man and his wife had sat at the table next to him for almost ten minutes. The boy had looked familiar, but the man couldn’t place him and had simply stared at him until he got up and left. Only afterward, when they were back in the car, did he remember seeing a picture of the boy earlier that afternoon on the missing-persons page of the police website. Avraham didn’t ask him why he had opened the police website’s missing-persons page in the first place.

  “Was he carrying a black bag perhaps?”

  “A black bag?”

  “Yes. Did you happen to see if he had a black bag with him?”

  “I don’t remember seeing a bag.”

  “And do you remember what he was wearing?”

  “Uh, no, not really. A white shirt maybe? My wife would remember.”

  “Can you go to the Ashdod police station and make a more detailed statement?” Avraham asked, and the man said, “Ashdod? But we live in Modi’in. We were on our way to a wedding.”

  “To the Modi’in police, then.”

  “On a Friday? Will someone be there? Can’t we just do this over the phone?”

  “I’d like you to have a look at some photographs, but Sunday morning would be okay too,” Avraham said, knowing all too well that the man had no more information to share anyway. The important thing was that if he had seen Ofer and could positively identify him, that would be a sign of life.