Pressure Chamber, page 8
“Have you managed to be awake in a dream yet? What’s it called again?”
“Lucid dreaming. Not yet.” Daphne fills the kettle with water and turns it on, while Anna, who’s finished preparing a salad, washes the cutting board and places it on the countertop to dry.
“I’m surprised they haven’t called you into work yet.”
“Hmm?”
“Someone’s snatched a baby from Beilinson.”
Daphne freezes, holding the two coffee mugs she took out of the cupboard and staring at Anna. “What?!”
“Someone posed as a father and smuggled a baby out. I read about it earlier on Ynet. It’s strange that they haven’t called you. Maybe Nathan’s no longer in love with you.” Anna ducks just in time, and the kitchen towel that Daphne throws at her misses her head.
“I’ll check my mobile. It may be on silent.”
She goes back to her room and checks her phone. It’s dead. She’d connected it to the charger before she went to sleep, but the charger wasn’t plugged in. “Fuck!”
She returns to the kitchen and connects the charger with the phone to the socket above the marble countertop, and as she waits for it to come back to life they both sit down to a breakfast that includes a finely chopped salad, toast that Anna had made from slices of challah, cheese and coffee. She loves Saturday mornings like this, before Anna goes to visit her parents in Holon in the afternoon and they can hang out together in the apartment. It gives her a sense of family. It’s one thing to be alone, and another thing entirely to be alone on the weekend. She doesn’t have many friends, and she’s not the kind of person who finds it easy to make small talk and get close to new people. Anna’s the same. They’ve been sharing an apartment for almost two years now.
Her phone starts emitting a series of alerts. Text message pings, WhatsApp notifications, unanswered calls, the beep of a voicemail message. She gets up from the kitchen table and checks: All the messages are from Nathan.
Call urgently
Where have you disappeared to?
Answer your phone, Daph
Call!
“Holy crap! He’ll have my head on a platter.” Daphne forms an imaginary gun with her fingers and aims it at her temple, and Anna simply smiles in sympathy. She calls, and Nathan answers on the first ring.
“Where have you been? Everyone here is on the go and you’re nowhere to be found?!”
“My phone died. I only noticed now. What’s happened? Are you talking about the baby who was snatched? Is there someone at the scene already? Do you want me to get there?”
“Scenes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Four babies have disappeared.”
“What?”
“Four.”
“From Beilinson?”
“No. From four different hospitals. Beilinson, Ichilov, Mayanei Hayeshua and Tel HaShomer.”
“Where’s Mayanei Hayeshua?”
“Bnei Brak.”
“So all in a radius of a few kilometers.”
“And carried out over a period of less than two hours. One baby from each hospital. He simply walked in, left with a baby and disappeared.”
“How could that have happened?”
“That’s what we’re looking into now. They’ve set up a joint squad of investigators from the Dan and Yarkon Districts, and forensics teams from National Headquarters are examining the scenes. We got Beilinson. I’m here already. Get yourself over here. I’m in the Maternity Ward.”
He hangs up and she remains motionless, staring at the steam rising from her coffee cup, her phone still pressed to her ear.
“Mayanei Hayeshua? Ynet says Beilinson,” Anna says with a mouth full of salad.
“Both. Four babies have been snatched.” She’s trying to digest the horrible news.
“What?”
“From four hospitals. Four different scenes in all.” She pulls herself together and dashes to her room.
“Wow,” Anna calls from the kitchen. “Do you realize how crazy things are about to get?”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” Daphne yells in response.
She dresses as fast as she can, grabbing her uniform from the chair next to her bed. Anna comes and stands in the doorway to her room.
“It’s worse than any terror attack. Nothing’s more sensitive than this. Newborn babies. The media is going to have a field day and drive the public and the police insane. I can already see interviews with weeping mothers, and the police commissioner’s going to order a round-the-clock investigation. Should I lease your room to someone else in the meantime? Are you taking a sleeping bag?”
“Thanks for the encouragement,” Daphne responds, jamming her feet into her shoes.
“Could it be an act of terror?”
“I don’t think so. Too sophisticated. Well planned. Clean. Or so it seems from what I’ve been told; but I’ll find out when I get to the scene.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. I need it,” Daphne says, fixing her hair without using a mirror.
Anna turns around and is about to go back to her breakfast when her phone rings too.
“Hello.”
“What?”
“Now?”
“To the Tel Aviv District?”
“At noon?”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
She hangs up and takes one last sip of coffee. “Everyone’s being brought in. The IT Unit too. There’s a briefing with the commander in an hour.”
Daphne replies with a wide smile, “Are you taking a sleeping bag? Should I distribute your food in the fridge to the homeless? It would be a shame to let it rot.”
Anna sticks out her tongue and goes to her room to get dressed. Daphne leaves the apartment. She gets into her car and glances at the road and sidewalk in the rearview mirror. For the first time in months, she doesn’t see Anat Aharon lying on the road.
20.
One hour and forty-seven minutes.
That’s how much time he needed to take all four.
The procedure was replicated perfectly on each occasion. The locked toilet, the wristband, the coat. Nothing went wrong. Everything was executed exactly as planned. It was almost too easy to be true. He pinches the inside of his thigh the way she used to do when he was a small child. Out of love. That’s what she’d say. With the color of the bruise and length of time before it faded as testimony to the intensity of that love. When they were small, they both used to vie for her attention; and even after the bruises had become nothing more than a memory, he still missed that pain, which overshadowed all the rest. And he knows that an individual well-accustomed to receiving pain or love is also well-accustomed to dishing it out. The divide between the two is extremely thin. Sometimes, they’re one and the same.
He drives back to the address from which he’d borrowed the Hyundai early that morning.
The police scanner, this time, isn’t quiet at all. It booms and thunders, spitting out messages at a dizzying pace and creating the impression that the police force has emerged from its Saturday morning coma to become instantaneously hyperactive. Notifications about checkpoints along the roads leading away from the center of the country; a closure imposed on the West Bank and Gaza; reports about upcoming briefings; the apprehension of suspects at all four hospitals.
His Waze app notifies him of the build-up of traffic congestion at various points – as a result, he assumes, of police roadblocks; he chooses alternate routes.
The Four are sleeping soundly in the trunk of the car in their cardboard boxes. He made sure to feed them all with milk laced with a sleep aid that would knock them out but wouldn’t kill them. He can’t run the risk of having the sound of a crying baby coming from the trunk.
The street is quiet, with no one out and about on a rainy Saturday, and he parks the vehicle in the precise spot from where he’d taken it. He starts up his silver Suzuki, which is waiting for him nearby, and turns the heat up to seventy-nine degrees. He then removes ten large containers of bleach from the trunk and replaces them with the boxes containing the babies. The bags go onto the front passenger seat, and he connects the police radio scanner, which continues to rattle on at a furious rate:
“Attention! Attention, everyone! The perpetrator or perpetrators are driving white Hyundai Tucsons, license plate numbers 29-521-68 or 61-864-49 or 51-574-93 or 31-308-41. They’re all stolen plates. We may be dealing with one vehicle that’s had its plates replaced four times, or four vehicles with stolen plates. This is for all cars and all checkpoints: Stop every white Tucson you see and turn it inside out. The plate numbers are being sent to your terminals right now.”
So they’ve reviewed the footage from the hospitals’ security cameras. Wakey-wakey, Israel Police. He empties the bleach containers into the Hyundai. Gallons of chlorine on the seats, the windows, the dashboard, the floor and the trunk. Into the Tucson’s air vents too. He checks again to make sure he hasn’t left anything in the vehicle and then starts it up, cranking up the heat to the maximum and closing the doors. The contents of the last container of bleach goes over the car from the outside – the roof, hood, doors and handles.
He leaves the key in the running vehicle and locks it with the remote control. The engine should tick for about seventy hours before the fuel runs out. A quarter of a gallon per hour in neutral. The bleach steam bath will erase all traces of biological material.
He lingers for a moment longer alongside the running vehicle and looks up at the gray clouds. The rain is coming down again, wetting his face. The low sound of thunder rumbles in the distance.
He crushes the empty bleach containers, stuffs them into the trash bag and places the bag on the back seat of the Suzuki, then checks on the four infants sleeping in the cardboard boxes. The boxes are padded with sections of a comforter that he cut into four pieces. Had he purchased four baby blankets at once, from the same store, someone would have remembered it, and the police must already be questioning the managers of baby stores. In addition to the sections of the comforter, each infant is wrapped in its hospital blanket. They won’t find anything.
He checks: All the babies are breathing. They’ll wake up in an hour or two. He needs to get going. He covers the boxes with a thin sheet, gets into the car and drives off. On his way to the white place, the clean and tidy place, he passes through two police checkpoints, waving and smiling at the officers on the lookout for a white Hyundai Tucson.
He’ll add their pictures to the photo room. The four of them. He’ll hang them on the wall along with all the others. Transparent plastic sheets in black and white. Pictures from before the change. Before the connection. To serve as mementos. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, people standing close to the epicenter cast shadows onto the nearby buildings before they were vaporized, leaving white impressions of their souls on the burnt walls. It was a much slower process in Pompeii. There, they were buried under the ash of the volcano and decomposed over the years, leaving hollows in the hardened fallout. When wet plaster was cast into those spaces, the figures were reborn. Families curled up together on the floor. A man resting on his elbows. A sleeping baby.
Wet plaster that’s cast into a space will assume its perfect and smooth form once it has set. After removing the plaster cast from the arm of the Guardian, he didn’t throw it away. He kept it with the rest of the mementos. From time to time, he removes it from its vacuum-sealed packaging and breathes in the scent of her arm on the cast’s cotton lining. Dead skin cells. Dried sweat, fine and delicate strands of hair, almost transparent, pencil eraser debris.
21.
Lee is busy doing push-ups when the door opens with a click. Her arm has healed completely, and since he removed the cast with the help of sheet metal scissors, she has got into the strict habit of exercising at least two hours a day in the flannel pants and shirt, which she’s turned into a tank top by ripping off its sleeves. When the time to act was right, she’d be in good shape. She was using weights she’d fashioned out of various canned foods tied together with medical tape to work her arms, and lengthy and repeated sets of squats and step-ups onto the bed to strengthen her legs. She was familiar by now with every inch of her prison cell and had learned to make the best out of everything on hand.
She knows nothing about the conditions outside, since the room is always the same cool temperature maintained by the quiet central air-conditioning system. But the training warms her up, and the physical activity eases her mind and gives her hope.
He is standing in the doorway looking at her.
“The usual drill.”
He tosses the handcuffs to her and she shackles herself to the bed.
“Show me.”
She tugs her hand back to prove that the handcuffs are indeed secure.
He leaves the room and returns with the stainless-steel trolley bearing bundles wrapped in blankets. Lee watches him in silence as he places them one by one in four cribs. He does everything slowly, carefully, with reverence, his movements appearing almost ceremonial, like the careful action of a priest swinging a censer. She watches him in disbelief. She doesn’t believe it’s possible – that he’s placing real babies in the cribs. Maybe it’s some kind of a joke? Could they be dolls? Does he think she’s going to play with dolls? He’s out of his fucking mind. She has to get out of here. She remembers the cupboards with the bottles and baby food, and a wave of shock goes through her.
“What’s going on?”
“I’d like to congratulate you. From this moment on, your true destiny is about to begin. From today, you’ll be known as the Guardian.”
She stares at him dumbfounded, then forces herself to speak. “Are those real babies?!”
“Yes. And you’re going to look after them.”
She stares at him, squinting her eyes. Don’t lose your cool, be persuasive, she reminds herself. “I’m not the right person for this. I never had a baby. They would be better off with someone else taking care of them. You can still blindfold me and take me back. I have no idea where I am. Where I’ve been. I promise not to come looking for you afterwards.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence.”
He goes over to examine the contents of the cupboards and empties the laundry drawer. “I’m not afraid of anyone. You’re here on a full-time basis. You’re young and strong. You have a background in medicine. You’ll be able to take care of them even if they get sick, though the chances of that are slim. You’ve been here now for three months and can’t be carrying too many germs. And I shower and disinfect myself before coming in. The air in here is well filtered. The temperature is constant. Tomorrow, I’m going to install a light that simulates sunlight. Make sure you turn it on for thirty minutes a day while they’re in nothing but their diapers, to avoid Vitamin D deficiency.”
Any doubt she may have been harboring disappears instantly. He didn’t run her down simply because she was there at the time. He chose her. Followed her.
“And what if I’m not cut out for this? I hate babies.”
He loads the laundry bag onto the stainless-steel trolley and transfers clean clothes to the closet. “I’ve been nice to you and have taken good care of you until now. You don’t want for anything in terms of nutrition, medical care and hygiene. I replenish your food supply and make sure you have clothes to wear and fresh and conditioned air to breathe. There’s water in the showers and lighting in your room. All of that will change drastically if you fail to look after them. Your life and welfare depend on the life and welfare of the Four.”
He tosses the handcuff key to her and she frees herself, throwing the items back at him one after the other.
He turns towards her before leaving the room. “You can’t hate babies,” he says. “It’s not part of your genetic wiring. And stop ruining the clothes I give you. I’ll get you some exercise clothes.”
22.
Parked at the entrance to Beilinson Hospital are two patrol cars; more as a show of presence, to ward off curious onlookers and convey a sense of security, than an operational necessity. The crime has already been committed. The damage has been done. The gates to the hospital are closed, with only patients and their escorts allowed in following a stringent security check. It’s a cold, gloomy, rainy Saturday.
The security guard says, “Where to, please?”
“The Maternity Ward.”
“Sorry, no visitors allowed.”
Daphne flashes her police ID. “Forensics.”
He studies the ID and looks at her again. “I didn’t notice the uniform. Come in, please. And good luck. Hope you catch the piece of shit who’s done this.”
“We’ll most certainly try.”
The guard raises the barrier and she drives to the entrance to the Maternity Ward, where she parks and then places a sign on the dashboard under the front windshield: Police vehicle on duty. As she goes around to the back of her car to retrieve her kit from the trunk, she’s spotted by a group of news reporters who are waiting outside the door to the building, frustrated by the cold rain and the fact that they aren’t being allowed inside. They’re quick to pounce on her with their microphones and cameras.
“Any leads to speak of?”
“What about the rumor that it’s terror-related?”
“What can you tell us about…”
She ignores the microphones thrust in her face and walks purposefully towards the police officer stationed at the entrance, who promptly opens the door for her.
In the ward itself, things are relatively quiet. The nursery is empty now. All the cribs have been transferred to the rooms and pressed tight against the respective mothers’ beds. Despite the police presence, she can discern a distinct loss in all sense of security. Nurses are making their way through the rooms to make sure everything is in order or to take a baby to a check-up, in the company of both of its parents of course. No more leaving babies unattended. Not from today.
