by Batya Gur
“But,” said Eli with a big question mark on his face, “poisoned how? By himself? By someone else?”
“He explained to me, Hirsh, that in our bodies . . . ,” and Michael began speaking slowly and patiently, as if explaining to himself, as well, that oxygen attaches itself to the red blood corpuscles, which contain hemoglobin. And hemoglobin contains an atom of iron, to which the oxygen we breathe attaches itself. When there’s carbon monoxide in the blood, the hemoglobin in the lungs can’t take hold of the oxygen and convey it to the tissues of the body. This gas, CO, attaches itself to iron even faster than oxygen, and anyone breathing it in quickly suffocates, loses consciousness without even feeling it. He stopped speaking and looked for a moment into Eli’s green eyes, which were narrowed in concentration.
“That’s why Dudai’s body looked the way it did: his face was completely pink, and all his internal organs were ruptured from the dive. Apparently he’d dived to a depth of thirty meters. His lips were completely blue. They call it—” Michael bent over the paper on which he had jotted down his notes—“cyanosis. They found a lethal amount of CO in the postmortem. A really lethal dose. Now I understand the sentence I heard there on the beach, next to the ambulance,” he said slowly.
Eli Bahar asked, his eyes wide: “But where did the gas come from?”
“I don’t know exactly how, but someone must have let compressed air out of the air tank and replaced it with CO. They sent both tanks to the Marine Medicine Institute for examination; I thought you talked to them.”
“There was no reply. It seems they go home sometimes. But I don’t understand,” Eli went on, “how anyone can introduce CO into an air tank. How’s it done?”
“It seems that’s not such a big problem, though you have to be a genius to think of it,” said Michael, and tapped his cigarette ash into the dregs of his coffee. “Every diving tank has a valve, and the CO cylinder has a valve too, or you can screw one onto it. So all you have to do is attach the valve of the compressed-air tank to something like a soda siphon containing the poison gas and squirt it in.”
“But”—Eli looked thoughtful—“couldn’t he tell, Dudai? The gas has a smell, no?”
“No,” replied Michael, and looked at the frown between Eli’s eyebrows. “There’s no smell. You suffocate gradually, without feeling a thing.”
“What is this?” exclaimed Eli Bahar in horror. “Are we dealing with a chemist here, or what?”
“All that’s needed is creative thinking. Anyone can get hold of CO; every chemical plant has cylinders of it, every decent lab. It’s not a problem. All you have to worry about is making sure that the tank isn’t lighter or heavier than it would be if it were full of compressed air.”
“And he died on Saturday,” said Eli, as if to himself.
“Ten past twelve on Saturday,” Michael specified.
“So now we’re looking for two murderers?” Eli sounded despairing.
“Or one murderer who murdered twice. And it’s not only us; the Dudai case belongs to Eilat, and they’re looking too.”
Danny Balilty burst into the room, puffing and panting, talking a mile a minute, but as usual his words were obscure, and nobody could make out where he had been. “Why don’t you offer a person a cup of coffee? And why are you sitting here as if a mountain just fell on top of you? What’s going on?”
Michael told him briefly.
“It’s getting complicated.” Balilty sighed.
“It is indeed,” said Michael. “Let’s take a break and have something to eat, then go over the list of people to question tomorrow. Or better still, let’s take the list to Meir’s and go over it there, and maybe we can pick up Tzilla on the way, if you have no objections.”
Eli Bahar looked at his watch and muttered that it was eleven o’clock, but he dialed anyway and whispered something into the phone. “We’ll pick her up on the way,” he said, replacing the receiver.
After they had left the room, Michael called home. He let the phone ring for a long time. Maya didn’t come, he thought with a mixture of sadness and relief. Yuval was at his mother’s, helping her prepare for her father’s seventieth birthday celebration tomorrow. And with the voice of Youzek, his ex-father-in-law, ringing in his ears with sentences such as: “It’s going to kill us, this divorce of yours,” Michael hurried to join Balilty and Bahar, who fell silent as soon as he got into the car and didn’t open their mouths until they reached the restaurant.
Meir’s was located in the heart of Machane Yehuda Market, in the “accursed house.” Years of work with Tzilla had accustomed Michael to seeing this restaurant as the only possible place for rest and recreation after the discovery of a body, after tensions at work, after watching an autopsy.
The three young men who acted as cooks, waiters, and cashiers always welcomed Tzilla like a long-lost sister. Michael they treated with such deference and respect that he once curiously asked Tzilla what she had told them about him. “I told them that you were from the fraud squad, that you worked hand-in-glove with the income tax authorities,” she replied with a wink, and ever since, Michael had felt awkward and embarrassed whenever they presented his check made out with an especially scrupulous correctness. He would raise his eyes to the wall above the cash register and contemplate the picture of the sainted Baba Sali, then he’d look over at that of Rabbi Sharabi, whom rumor credited with having recently laid a curse on the building. The picture over the register was intended to remove the curse from the restaurant.
Nobody knew which of the three who worked in the restaurant, sometimes wearing skullcaps and at other times bare-headed, was Meir. As always, they greeted Tzilla with enthusiasm, then quickly restrained themselves when they caught sight of the tall figure behind her.
To Balilty’s question “How’s business?” they replied: “Thank God.”
“And three portions of fries,” called Tzilla to the unshaven youth who was writing down the order. He smiled at her when she explained: “The khamsin’s over, and my appetite’s back.”
They sat in the inside room. Michael looked out through the plate-glass window into the dark, neglected yard. Rabbi Sharabi’s curse had emptied the building of its tenants, and Meir’s restaurant provided the only source of light in the ghostly darkness all around. For the first time he noticed the fern trailing down the wall opposite him, and he wondered how it stayed so green in the perpetual gloom. He remembered Nira’s many attempts to cultivate ferns in their student room after all the other plants had withered and died, leaving behind them only dry yellow stalks. Tzilla followed his eyes, and as if reading his thoughts, she said: “That fern is plastic, and so’s the other one,” and she pointed to the wall behind them. And when she saw his eyes following the direction of her finger, she said with a smile: “And how about this?” and she stretched out her hand to the wall of dark-red bricks at the right of her chair and delicately peeled off the corner of a brick, exposing the gray concrete underneath it. “It’s wallpaper, did you know?” and Michael, who felt sure that if anyone had asked him he would have said that the wall was whitewashed, was slightly embarrassed and raised his eyes to the wooden rafters on the ceiling and then looked at the caricature of Peres and Shamir, dressed as belly dancers, on the wall facing him and the big bull’s horns hanging next to it, and Tzilla laughed out loud and said: “You’ve been here a million times. And to think of the way not a single detail escapes you when it comes to a case! But here you’re off duty, right?” And Michael hastened to protest, claiming that he remembered the poster of Shamir and Peres very well, but Tzilla stood her ground: “My point is that you don’t see anything when you’re not on duty. Tell me, did you see the big picture at the entrance?” Michael nodded uncertainly, and she cocked her head and asked provocatively: “Can you describe it?” Michael started to turn his head, but she forbade him to look behind him. “Something with Bedouin, a biblical picture perhaps?” he said, and Tzilla laughed and said: “Now you can turn around and look.” Michael stood up
and walked into the front room, where he examined the huge, brightly colored picture from close up. It portrayed a palm tree and a tent in which a number of figures who looked like shepherds were crouching, with a campfire next to the tent. Michael studied them all and returned slowly to the table, where, sitting down, he listed all the features of the picture to her satisfaction, after which he added: “And there’s another plant there too, and it’s not plastic.” “Big deal, it’s a wandering jew,” said Tzilla contemptuously. “They grow anywhere, under any conditions,” and at this point the unshaven youth arrived and wiped the brown Formica surface with a wet cloth and asked if they wanted salads. They all nodded, and Balilty was the first to fall upon the Turkish salad and the Moroccan carrot salad. Tzilla sprinkled lemon juice on the finely chopped vegetable salad and delivered a speech on the art of making a proper salad. “You see, they don’t season the salad or put the lemon on it beforehand, so that it’ll stay like this, like it’s supposed to,” she explained to Balilty, who nodded and reached for the pitas and remarked with satisfaction that they had been warmed up. After that Balilty explained how healthy beets were for the digestion and tipped the little saucer of them onto his plate. Until the main courses arrived, while Balilty helped himself liberally to the salads and the pitas, Eli filled in his wife on the details of the case. Michael sipped his beer and watched the couple with enjoyment and also with a sadness he could not understand.
Tzilla and Eli had been working with him for a number of years, and their courtship, slow, tortuous, and full of vicissitudes, had taken place before his eyes. Eli Bahar had turned thirty a year before his marriage to this determined young woman, who had fought for him with praiseworthy persistence. Michael had observed the stage at which she pretended to have given up, and he’d wondered whether Eli, who had often declared that he had no intention of tying himself to “any woman, never mind how I feel about her,” would break down and surrender his freedom. Now, seeing his tender gaze fixed on Tzilla as he described the latest developments to her, Michael felt gratified and at the same time suddenly old. They hadn’t confided in him. And he had never asked, only looked on with interest, as if he were watching two children reading a story whose ending he already knew. He was glad when they finally got married, even though he privately predicted that their life together would not be easy. Eli was withdrawn, and Tzilla bubbled over with life and tireless energy. Anyone who looked into her eyes, which were always wide open, light and clear, could see the secrets of her heart made manifest.
It had been a few weeks since he last saw her, and now he peered intently at her face, which was paler than usual, at the faint shadow of anxiety. He knew how much she wanted a child. For years she had kept her hair short, but in recent months she’d let it grow, and the brown waves now reached her shoulders. She had a fuller, more womanly appearance, even though the pregnancy was not yet evident except in her breasts, which swelled up out of the low, round neck of her dress.
He thought of the changes that had taken place in her, of the flimsy dress she was wearing instead of jeans, of the slender shoulders and arms, now rounded, and concluded to himself that she had indeed grown more attractive. He complimented her aloud on her hair.
“Yes, I knew you’d like it,” she said with a sigh, “but I feel as if all my thirty-two years are obvious to everybody,” and she lifted her slender legs onto the empty chair opposite her.
“A woman of thirty-two”—Michael smiled—“is only beginning her life. The only thing more attractive than a woman of thirty-two is a woman of thirty-three.”
“Oh, Michael, don’t start; I know your line. You can’t see a woman without saying something to her. And believe me, you don’t have to say a word, all you have to do is look—and stop with that smile already.”
The smile broadened and then died. Ever since her marriage, Tzilla, who always was a bit inhibited with him, had grown bolder, her remarks more and more personal, as if some threatening barrier between them had fallen. Sometimes he shrank from the sharpness of her tongue.
Thirty-two years old, thought Michael as the main course arrived, and his hunger vanished. He stared at the meat on the skewers: shashlik from prime beef done to a turn, piquantly flavored lamb kebabs, and to crown it all, muledjas, Tzilla and the waiter called something whose origin they refused to disclose. He longed for black bread and goat cheese, for onion—the foods that had whetted his appetite as a child reading books about poor peasants. Nevertheless he sampled the finely chopped salad and the fresh, golden fries, which Tzilla had over-salted, and finally, when Balilty remarked that you could taste the arak in which the meat had been marinated before it was grilled, he dipped a cube of shashlik in the tahina salad and chewed the soft meat. And as he chewed he turned Tzilla’s last sentences over and over in his mind. Thirty-two, thought Michael, a cruel age. The age when sobriety sets in and real knowlege of the virtue of compromise begins. He thought of Maya, about how he would have preferred to be with her now. Tzilla was not eating with her usual gusto. She, too, was picking at her food. Balilty did not say a word. All his attention was devoted to the meat, which he ate with steady concentration, and when he was finished he patted his stomach and grunted his appreciation of the quality of the food.
“Okay,” said Tzilla with the arrival of the coffee. “Am I on board or not?”
“You’re on board,” said Michael, ignoring Eli’s worried look, “on condition that you do exactly what you’re told and don’t initiate any activities outside the building, unless specifically requested to do so. I want to become a godfather. And this time you can’t complain that you’re only the coordinator, because there are good medical reasons for it.” He looked at Eli out of the corner of his eye and then handed her the list of teachers in the Literature Department. From their testimony, he told her, they would get a picture of Tirosh’s way of life. “And perhaps,” he said hesitantly, “of Dudai’s too. I feel that the two cases are connected, as if it’s all staring us in the face and I can’t see the picture.”
“It’s too early to see the picture,” said Balilty, and belched.
And in the end they mapped out their schedule. Balilty would get on with his intelligence work—“and don’t disappear for three days,” warned Tzilla. “Tomorrow you’ll call in at the end of the day and make contact with me.” They agreed on which of the people on the list to question first in the morning, and Michael and Eli divided them up between them.
“So we’ll only meet the day after tomorrow?” said Tzilla an hour after midnight, when the restaurant was about to close. Michael remarked that they would have to schedule a meeting late the next day, “even if it’s late at night, to plan for Wednesday interrogations according to the information we collect tomorrow.” And after he had dropped Eli and Tzilla at the entrance to their small apartment in Nachlaot, he drove home to Givat Mordechai.
The apartment smelled of dust. He opened the windows wide and breathed in the cool air after the heat of the week-long khamsin. He calculated that he would have only four hours’ sleep and recalled the face, the dead eyes, of Tuvia Shai, whom he was to meet the next morning. There were still faint traces of Maya’s smell in his bed, but it was the form of Adina Lipkin, the department secretary, that appeared before his eyes, and her voice that echoed in his ears, although the words did not suit her at all: “Thirty-two years under Your heavens are enough for an intelligent person to judge the quality of Your mercy,” were the words Michael Ohayon heard before he fell asleep.
7
Racheli looked at the dark man sitting opposite her; at his long, restless fingers playing with his pen and cigarette pack, at his smooth-shaven cheeks and his jutting cheekbones, and, finally gathering her courage, straight into the dark, deep eyes that never left her face. But only for a second, after which she again glanced at the bare room—the old wooden desk, the two chairs, the metal cupboard, the window overlooking a backyard in the Russian Compound—and then peered once more into the dark-brown eyes gazing at he
r steadily.
She had a profound sense of being preferred. Out of them all, she had been chosen to be first. He had called her, this tall man whose dark hair had threads of silver in it, out of the whole group, and she didn’t know why.
Adina Lipkin had paled and almost protested when Racheli was invited to go inside, but he had pretended not to notice her anger. Dr. Shai had not stirred, his expression had not changed. When Racheli arrived, obeying a telephoned request of the night before, at the Criminal Investigations Division in the Russian Compound a bit before eight o’clock in the morning, Tuvia and Adina were already sitting in the anteroom, on shaky wooden chairs. Like patients outside a doctor’s office, thought Racheli, or students waiting for the results of some fateful exam. Tuvia Shai looked as if he had resigned himself to the worst.
She succeeded in glancing at her watch without the man opposite her noticing. She had been sitting in the room only a minute, during which nothing had been said, and suddenly she was seized by a terrible fear that she was going to be accused, like Kafka’s Joseph K., and by a feeling of uncertainty: perhaps she really had done something wrong. The tall man proffered the pack of cigarettes, and she shook her head. Her throat grew even dryer, and her hands trembled.
Then he began to talk. His voice was soft, quiet. First he asked about her job in the department secretary’s office, about what she did outside the office, about her family.
She found herself responding in order to please him. Again she stole a glance at her watch; five minutes had passed, and he already knew everything. About her studying psychology, about her flat in Bnei Brith Street, about her roommate, about her ex-boyfriend, and even about her parents’ wishes to see her happily married at her “advanced age.” He smiled at the expression and nodded as if his parents had been the same. She asked herself if he was married. He wasn’t wearing a ring, but Racheli already knew, at twenty-four, that not all married men wore rings.