"How's it going?" Daniel asked. Math was her worst subject. Usually he had to help her.

"Fine, Abba." She bit her pencil and screwed up her face. Thought a while and put down an answer. The correct one.

"Excellent, Shosh. Where's Eema?"

"Painting." Absently.

"Have fun."

"Uh huh."

The door to the studio was closed. From under it seeped the smell of turpentine. He knocked, entered, saw Laura in a blue smock, working on a new canvas under a bright artist's lamp. A cityscape of Bethlehem in umbers, ochers, and beige, softly lit by a low winter sun, a lavender wash of hillside in the background.

"Beautiful."

"Oh, hi, Daniel." She remained on her stool, leaned over for a kiss. Half a dozen snapshots of Bethlehem were tacked to the easel. Pictures he'd taken during last year's Nature Conservancy hayride.

"You ate already," he said.

"Yes." She picked up the brush, laid in a line of shadow long the steeple of the Antonio Belloni church. "I didn't now if you were coming home."

He looked at his watch. "Six thirty-six. I thought it would be early enough."

She put the brush down, wiped her hands on a rag, and turned to him. "I had no way of knowing, Daniel."

she said in a level tone of voice. "I'm sorry. There's an extra hamburger in the fridge. Do you want me to heat it up for you?"

"It's all right. I'll heat it up myself."

"Thanks. I'm right in the middle of this-want to finish a fer more buildings before quitting."

"Beautiful," he repeated.

"It's for Gene and Luanne. A going-away present."

"How are they doing?"

"Fine." Dab, blend, wipe. "They're up in Haifa, touring the northern coast. Nahariya, Acre, Rosh Hanikra."

"When are they coming back down?"

"Few days-I'm really not sure." 'Are: they having a good time?"

"Seem to be." She got off the stool. For a moment Daniel thought she was going to embrace him. But instead she stepped back from the canvas, measured perspective, re-turned to her seat, and began blocking in ocher rectan-gles.

He waited a few seconds, then left to make himself dinner. By the time he'd eaten and cleaned up, the boys had busied themselves again with the Stars Wars videotape. Eyes filled with wonderment, they declined his offer to wrestle.

Stacks of newspaper clippings covered Laufer's desk. The deputy commander began fanning them out like oversized playing cards.

"Garbage-sifting time," he said. "Read."

Daniel picked up a clipping, put it down immediately after realizing it was one he'd already seen. Ha'aretz was his paper; he liked the independence, the sober tone-and the reporting on the murders was typical: factual, concise, no thrill for ghouls.

The party-affiliated papers were another story. The government organ gave the crimes short shrift on a back page, an almost casual downplay, as if hiding the story would make it go away.

The opposition paper played a shrill counterpoint, using Daniel's name to segue into the Lippmann case, offering a blow-by-blow rehash of the scandal, making much of the fact that prior to his assassination the late, discredited warden had been a darling of the ruling party. Implying, not so subtly, that any rise in violent crime was the government's fault: Failure to raise police salaries had led to continued corruption and ineptitude; a poorly administered Health Ministry had failed to handle the issue of dangerous mental patients; the psychological frustration caused by the ruling party's economic and social policies engendered "deep-rooted alienation and concomitant hostile impulses in the general populace. Impulses that are at risk for spilling over into bloodshed."

The usual partisan nonsense. Daniel wondered if anyone took it seriously.

Haolam Hazeh and the other tabloids had done their heavy-breathing bit: lurid headlines and hints of perverted sex in high places. Gory-detail crime stories fighting for space with photos of naked women. Daniel put them down on the desk.

"Why the rehash? It's been two weeks since Juliet."

"Go on, go on, you're not through," Laufer said, drum-ming his fingers on the desk. He picked up a thick batch of clippings and shoved it at Daniel.

These excerpts were all in Arabic: Al Fajr, Al Sha'ab, other locals at the top of the pile, foreign stuff on the bottom.

Arabic, thought Daniel, was an expansive, poetic lan-guage. lending itself to hyperbole, and this morning the

Arab journalists had been in fine hyperbolic form: Fatma and Juliet restored to virginity and transformed to political martyrs victimized by a racist conspiracy-abducted, defiled, and executed by some night-stalking Zionist cabal.

The local publications called for "hardening of resolve"

and "continuation of the struggle, so that our sisters have not perished in vain," stopping just short of a call for re-venge-saying it outright could have brought down the heavy hand of security censorship.

But the foreign Arab press screamed it out: officially sactioned editorials from Amman, Damascus, Riyadh, the Gulf stlates, brimming with hate and lusting for vengeance, accompanied by crude cartoons featuring the usual anti-Jewish archetypes-stars of David dripping blood; hooknosed, slavering men wearing kipot and side curls, pressing long-bladed knives to the throats of veiled, doe-eyed beau-ties wrapped in the PLO flag. The kipot emblazoned with swastikas-the Arabs loved to co-opt the Nazi stuff, spit it back at their cousins. The Syrians went so far as to link the murders to some occult Jewish ritual of human sacrifice-a harvest ceremony that the writer had invented.

Vile stuff, thought Daniel, reminiscent of the DerSt?rmer exhibit he'd seen at the Holocaust Memorial, the Black Book Ben David had shown him. But not unusual.

"The typical madness," he told Laufer.

"Pure shit. This is what stirred it up."

He gave Daniel an article in English, a cutting from his morning's international Herald Tribune.

It was a two-column wire service piece bearing no byline and entitled "Is a New Jack the Ripper Stalking the Streets of Jerusalem?" Subtitle: "Brutal Slayings Stymie Israeli Police. Political Motives Suggested."