THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (AS THEY WERE NICKNAMED IN police circles) barged without knocking into Baruch’s office. Azazel, wearing a heavy gold chain around his tanned neck and a white-on-white shirt unbuttoned down to a tanned navel, sank with an exasperated sigh onto a couch. Absalom, dressed in a custom-made pale mauve sports jacket and black trousers with knife-edge creases, planted himself in front of the desk and began reading the work order that Baruch had deposited in their in-basket.
“‘From: Baruch.’” Absalom lifted his moist eyes from the paper clutched in his carefully manicured fingers. “That’s you.”
“That’s him,” Azazel agreed coyly.
“‘To: The brothers Karamazov.’ That’s us.”
Baruch started to say something but Azazel, from the couch, whipped both hands over his head as if they were helicopter rotors. “Listen to Absalom,” he insisted shrilly. “Hear what he has to say.”
“‘Subject: Needle in a haystack.’” Absalom pouted. “Well, at least you got that part right.” He glanced down at the work order and continued reading in a voice dripping with irony: “‘Cancel all leaves, all hands on deck.’ Oh, my, Baruch, aren’t we being nautical today. ‘I want you and Azazel and your people to comb through the records of former Palestinian prisoners. The list is obviously long—’”
“He’s telling us that the list is long,” Azazel bitched from the couch. He rolled his eyes. “Oh, dear.”
Absalom plunged on. “‘—obviously long, and much of it is still not available on the Shin Bet’s main frame, which means you’ll have to wade through hundreds of dusty file cabinets in the basements—but when has that fazed the brothers Karamazov?’”
“Flattery,” Azazel sniffed from the couch, “would normally get you everywhere, but not today.”
“‘Here’s what we’re looking for.’” Absalom flashed a vinegary smirk in Azazel’s direction. “Here’s what he’s looking for.”
“He’s already said what he’s looking for,” Azazel fretted. “He’s looking for a needle in his haystack.”
Absalom cleared his throat. “‘A male Palestinian, age unknown but I’m guessing he is in his forties or fifties, who (1) is short and heavy set, (2) may have been arrested after being betrayed by one of the Shin Bet’s Palestinian assets, (3) probably served major time in Israeli prisons as a result of this denunciation, (4) was in all likelihood a devout Muslim with (5) seriously enough impaired eyesight so that someone could describe him as being nearly blind.”
“Forty or fifty,” Azazel blurted out. “Possibly betrayed. Maybe jailed. Probably devout. Nearly blind. Well, at least he’s sure we’re looking for the male of the species!”
The two former Russian rabbis, who had emigrated to Israel two decades earlier and now directed a small army of researchers working for the national police, batted their eyes in Baruch’s direction. Absalom and Azazel were the butt of countless office jokes, but Baruch took the position that what consenting adults did in their free time was their affair. All he cared about was that they were capable of tracking a Palestinian through the voluminous national police–Shin Bet archives on the skimpiest of leads. Only months before they had managed to identify a Nablus Arab who had thrown a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli patrol on the basis of a description limited to two details; the bomber had asthma and gnawed on his finger nails as he was waiting for the Israelis to pass.
Baruch settled back in his chair. “Look, I’m not stupid. I know there will be dozens of short, heavy male Palestinians who were devout and suffered from bad eyesight and wound up behind bars after being denounced by a collaborator.”
“Dozens!” Absalom corrected him. “Hundreds is more likely.”
“If there are hundreds,” Baruch said in his crisp no-room-for-argument tone, “bring me their names. By the time you’ve narrowed it down to hundreds, I hope we’ll have another detail or two so you can narrow the list down even further.”