Silent Mercy by Linda Fairstein Page B

of kin. She listed you on the arrest papers.”
    “Naomi called me from jail,” he said with a half laugh, not intended to be funny. “I was the only family she had. She needed me to go to the bank and get some money, and agree to be her contact in the city, even though I’d been here only a few weeks less than she had.”
    “But you’d spoken to her not long before that?”
    “E-mailed. That’s mostly how we stayed in touch.” Daniel twisted his long hair into a knot at his neck, working his spindly fingers around one another while Mike wrote down both their e-mail addresses.
    “Is her mother still in Israel?” I asked.
    “Rachel?” Daniel put the glass down and looked at me. “She was blown to bits by a suicide bomber on a bus in East Jerusalem. Two, maybe three years ago.”
    I’d never thought of a possible terrorist angle to Naomi’s murder. When Daniel said that she had no one close to her, he wasn’t exaggerating.
    “Did Rachel live in one of the settlements?”
    “Yeah. Naomi gets all her activist energy from her mother. Lucky she was in London that time when the bomb went off.”
    “What do you know about your sister’s religious beliefs, Daniel ?” I asked. Now I wondered if there could be any kind of connection between her mother’s violent death and her own.
    “Very little.”
    “Your father—was he Jewish?” I asked.
    “Raised as a Jew. But my mother’s agnostic and so was he. That’s why Naomi and I didn’t talk about it much.”
    “But the arrests, Daniel, were they because of her religious beliefs?”
    He thought for a few seconds and reached into his back pocket for another cigarette. “Less religion than over her feminist views. That’s what all her preaching was about. Always rubbing certain people the wrong way.”
    Certain people. “Like your mother, for one?”
    “Yeah. You could say that.”
    “So why was she arrested?” I asked. “Do you know?”
    “I had to sit through the arraignment, so I heard most of the facts, and then Naomi told me more of it when they let her out.”
    “What’s the organization?”
    “It’s called Women of the Wall,” Daniel said. “It’s a group that Rachel helped start up twenty years ago, in Israel.”
    “For what?” Mike asked, moving the tiny bits of paper around like figures on a chessboard, trying to form words from the letters written on them.
    “Naomi said that ultra-Orthodox Jews didn’t allow women to pray at the Wailing Wall, didn’t allow them to dress in traditional prayer shawls. Stuff like that.”
    “You know anything about this, Coop?” Mike asked.
    Daniel walked across the room to take a matchbook from the pocket of a jacket he had thrown on one of the chairs.
    “A bit. Tallith—that’s the ritual prayer shawl. I know that some of the extreme factions of Judaism consider it wrong—arrogant, and against biblical commands—for women to wear these garments and pray publicly at places like the wall.”
    “Hear that, Daniel? We’ve come to the right place. Coop’s got all her feminist ducks in a row.”
    I turned my back as Daniel lit up and whispered to Mike, “Wrong time to make fun of it, Mike. You’ve got to look into this,” I said. “Discrimination against women sheltered under the wings of religion—every religion—is a really serious problem. It’s been that way for centuries. It’s excluded us from education and social opportunities, from positions of authority. You want me to go on?”
    “Later for that,” Mike said, cocking a finger at me like he was pointing a pistol. “After I calm you down with some Dewar’s.”
    “What else do you know about the demonstration?” I asked Daniel as he rejoined us.
    “That it was supposed to be a day of solidarity with the women in Jerusalem. Naomi said the first protest brought out some real animals. Guys who spit at her and threw things. Then their women actually joined in, too, doing the same.”
    That fact didn’t surprise me. Sadly, women