I was sipping my coffee one morning when a small headline in an inside page of the newspaper caught my eye. "An Israeli journalist found dead in a Frankfurt alley." I felt a sudden tug in my stomach, like an old debt from the past come back to haunt me. I knew immediately who it was.

They say great journalists have one story, a story of once in a lifetime. It isn't always the most important story they'd ever written, but it's the story that made them, the story they would tell their grandchildren. "And then grandfather threw the bottle from the burning ship to the Cypriot fisherman's boat, a moment before the shell hit the deck he was on. 'Get that to Reuters' office in Nicosia,' he wrote on the rolled-up page he had inserted into the bottle. On the page he had written the battle story in tiny handwriting. The story reached Reuters, and from there The New York Times and the BBC. The rest is history."

I knew a journalist like that once. I used to listen to his stories in the bar across the road from the newspaper. And there's another kind of journalist, who is the story himself. Gidi belonged to the second kind. I continued sipping the coffee, but my eyes were glued to the headline in the paper. It had been more than 10 years since Ze'ira from Haaretz called me and told me the news. "Have you heard the news about Gidi?" he asked. "No, what about him?" I asked. "You won't believe it! He's working for the Zonensteins."

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"What? How is that possible? I knew he left the paper but ... no, there must be some mistake."

"It's not a mistake. I crossed my sources," Ze'ira said dryly.

Ze'ira was the most veteran police reporter and had spent more time at stakeouts and crime scenes than anyone else I knew. He told me that Gidi had entered the Zonenstein crime family's debt-collecting business after leaving his newspaper. Moshe Zonenstein, the head of the family, had been arrested and now the police were looking for Gidi.

"They have serious suspicions against him," Ze'ira said. "But the clever bastard scarpered. Skipped the country a moment before they laid hands on him. Just like in his stories, always one step ahead of the police."

Gidi had left my apartment a few months earlier. I did not want to remember him. The memories were not sweet. But that did not concern the media. Less than two hours after Ze'ira called me, my phone started ringing nonstop. Every journalist in the country, it seemed, especially the female ones, suddenly wanted to write a story on Gidi, the police reporter who crossed the line. They all wanted to know what he was like, what it was like living with him and when did I start feeling that something weird was going on.

They even wanted to know what he was like in bed. Because sleeping with someone from the world of crime was clearly much more exciting than having sex with a mere sports page editor, for example.

"So tell me, what was he like as a boyfriend?" "Er....all right, I guess..." "Didn't you see any signs?" "Signs?" My mind went blank. "That he had, you know, tendencies toward the other side?" "You mean that he was gay?" "No, that he was about to join the mafia." "Oh, that! No. What kind of signs was I supposed to see?" "Didn't you feel anything unusual about his behavior? That he needed a father figure, for example?" "Ummm...no. Perhaps a mother figure, come to think of it." "So there was no hint or sign or anything strange to give you an inkling of what he was going to do?" "I don't think so. No. He was the same as usual."

The reporter from La'isha was close to despair. "OK, well," she tried a different tack. "How how would you describe him as a person?" "Oh, he was totally addicted to his work. Compulsive, actually. And he was a most devoted son. Always helping his parents," I said, feeling like a retard.

Gidi was a weird act, all right, but what man wasn't? My friend Phyllis used to say all men are full of shit. The only question was what shit you could live with and what you couldn't. Women over 37 had more chances of getting caught in a terrorist attack than getting married, the latest New York Times study said. That was long before 9/11 or even the intifada. There was no way I was going to pass over an available man, over 30, with a steady job, just because he liked Middle Eastern music and lived with his parents.

I attributed Gidi's outlandishness to his being an only son to parents who had fled from Germany in the '30s. His parents were elderly and filled with fears. He had dinner with them every Friday night, even after moving out, and visited them every Saturday afternoon and on holidays. He attended every family affair. I thought at first that he was dependent, even nerdy, for still living with his parents at his age. But I shut myself up. Hadn't I remained single for so long because of my excessive pickiness? Just because I had left home immediately after the army, it didn't mean everyone else had to.

Gidi had a yellow nylon vest with holes in it, which was a crime to bring into one's home. But if lousy taste in clothes was a reason to suspect someone, then 90 percent of the men in the country would be undateable. He used to to drive like a maniac. Anyone who had been in the car with him, even for a short trip in town, would emerge from his car pale and trembling, usually nauseous. But it was hard to tell what was worse - his driving or the deafening Middle Eastern music blasting in his car. So from that I was supposed to deduce that he had criminal tendencies?

We met at a press conference called by the Tel Aviv police to announce the capture of "the Tel Aviv rapist," who had terrorized the city's women for over a year. "Gidi Kleiman, Inquirer," he said, holding out a huge hand with a broad smile. He was tall and stocky, with a straggly beard. His handshake was warm, but his cold eyes measured me like a snake eyeing its victim. He wore that yellow vest, which emphasized his belly, and green cargo pants over high turquoise Nike sneakers. The Inquirer was a lively, daring new paper, which shook the fossilized Israeli media and infused new breath into it. "Anat," I said, taking his hand. "Tel Aviv News." We went into the press conference together.

The rape suspect's name remained off the record "so as not to obstruct the investigation," the police spokesman announced. The commander of the central investigations unit would only say that he was from one of the villages in the Triangle. In the middle of the news conference, while the reporters were all busy stuffing their faces with Beit Sokolov's greasy burekas, Gidi suddenly got up and left the room, with the brisk, self-important air of one who had received an urgent beeper message and had to answer it ASAP.

At the end of the conference, the reporters huddled around the officers, trying to squeeze out more details about the rapist. When I left the room Gidi was standing at the door. He threw me a glance under drooping lids and said in a low voice: "Hey, coming to Umm al-Fahm?" "Umm al-Fahm?!" He said two phone calls had helped narrow down the search area to the whereabouts of the most crowded town in Wadi Ara. We drove there with alarming speed in the silver Subaru Gidi's father had bought him, as though an army of journalists were hot on our trail.

Gidi stopped with a screech in front of a large cafe in the center of Umm al-Fahm. Unshaved men with mustaches, sitting around tables sipping black coffee, lifted their gaze from their backgammon boards and stared at us indifferently. It took Gidi all of a few minutes to find out who had been arrested the night before and where he lived.

"Sabah el Heir!" he smiled at the young woman with the white head scarf who opened the door for us. "I'm Gidi Kleiman, POLICE reporter." The world "police" was louder than the rest. "It's about Abed. Are you his wife?" She nodded. "Have you been informed already of his arrest?" The woman burst into tears and let us in. She put water on to boil and brewed sweet, strong tea. Yes, they told her before dawn. It was a mistake, of course. Nobody was as hardworking and faithful a husband as Abed. "Ask the children. They haven't stopped crying since this morning. Didn't go to school. They're afraid. Abed good man, good husband. Brings money. Very good man."

The following day the Inquirer published an exclusive interview with the rapist's wife, smack on the front page, complete with photographs, the name of the wife and description of the suspect's family in Umm al-Fahm. The Tel Aviv police officers were furious. Dan Margalit called Gidi and invited him to appear on Erev Hadash. Journalists used to dream of appearing on this program. "Wear a tie," Margalit instructed.

"Coming?" he asked when we met at Beit Sokolov. "Do you have a tie?" I asked. "No, and I don't give a shit," said Gidi. "What, he won't interview me without a tie?" He was right, of course. In the studio, in the heat of the spotlight, Gidi beamed and flourished, explaining at length how he had cracked the rapist's identity and found his home without actually disclosing anyone who might have helped him. He usually did everything by himself anyway. After Erev Hadash, Gidi came home with me to listen to some jazz records, and didn't leave.

Excerpt from a story published in a recent anthology,"Haitonai shehatza et hakavim," (Modan) compiled and edited by Talma Admon. Michal Yudelman-O'Dwyer, who also translated the story into English, is a member of the Haaretz English Edition staff.