The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  To his surprise, Tuvia Shai did not protest. He did not query the term “special relationship,” he did not demand clarifications and explanations. He was silent, but he raised his head and looked at Michael with a expression of contempt—for the simplemindedness of the human race in general and of this policeman in particular. His compressed lips twisted for a moment.

  “How did you feel about it?” repeated Michael. “Did you know that your wife was having an affair with Shaul Tirosh?”

  Tuvia Shai looked at him and nodded. In his eyes Michael read utter despair, in addition to the contempt that might have extended to the subject of his question.

  “And how did you feel about it?” he asked again.

  When there was no answer, he said quietly: “You know, that’s a common reason for murder, if we want to talk about motive.” Tuvia Shai looked at him and said nothing.

  “Dr. Shai,” said Michael Ohayon, “I suggest you answer my questions if you don’t want to remain here in detention. I’m telling you that you had a motive to murder Tirosh, and the opportunity too. You have no witnesses, you tell me you went to a movie, that you walked around the streets, that you didn’t meet anyone, that nobody knows you. The time has come for you to take this seriously. Or do you really want me to arrest you?”

  Tuvia Shai nodded as if to say: I understand.

  Michael waited. “How long did the affair between your wife and Tirosh go on?” he finally ventured, and Tuvia Shai replied: “A few years. I’d prefer that you not use the word ‘affair.’”

  “And when did you find out about it?” asked Michael, ignoring the last remark, which had made his anger flare up again. He felt that he didn’t understand anything about the man sitting opposite him.

  “I think I knew right from the beginning, although I only actually saw them together in that way two years ago.”

  “And what did you feel about it?”

  “My feelings were complicated, naturally, but they have nothing to do with his death.”

  “And whom did you talk to about it?” asked Michael.

  “I didn’t talk to anyone.”

  “Not even your wife?”

  “No.”

  “And Tirosh?”

  “No. I didn’t talk to anyone. It’s my own business.”

  “You’ll agree with me,” said Michael, wondering at the formal turn that the conversation was taking, “that such matters are commonly considered to have some bearing when a murder has occurred?” Tuvia nodded.

  “Dr. Shai,” said Michael in despair, feeling as if he were calling on a dead man to rise from his grave, “do you love your wife?” Shai nodded, not in affirmation, but to indicate that he understood the question.

  “These are more complex matters than the ones you commonly come across. We are not conventional people, apparently,” said Shai, and Michael stared at him in astonishment. At the moment when he was least expecting a detailed, voluntary answer, it was being voluntarily given.

  “I don’t expect you to understand. My wife and I never spoke about it to each other, and Shaul never said anything to me, but if I were a police investigator, I would ask myself: Why should he suddenly murder him, after all these years?”

  This time Michael was silent. He looked at the man opposite him and thought that in a newspaper article he would be presented as a nonentity, a wretched creature who accepted the “situation” for lack of any alternative, but Michael himself sensed the strength of the man, beyond the despair, beyond the silence. Get out of your mind-set, said Michael to himself during the silence; different laws apply here; try to see it from his point of view. If he accepted the fact that his wife was having an affair with Shaul Tirosh, what fact wouldn’t he have accepted? What would provoke him to murder?

  And aloud he asked: “Dr. Shai, you were probably aware of the fact that Tirosh had a special relationship with Ruth Dudai as well?”

  Tuvia Shai made no attempt to hide the anger that suddenly flared in his eyes as he said: “No, I didn’t know. But why are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you,” said Michael Ohayon, weighing every word, “because if the fact that Tirosh was your wife’s lover didn’t make you hate him, maybe the fact that he left her was too much for you to take. Maybe for you that was a motive for murder.”

  “And who says that he left her?” and Shai continued: “Shaul was capable of carrying on a number of relationships at once.”

  “Nevertheless, you’re angry,” Michael announced, and looked into Tuvia Shai’s eyes. He noted with satisfaction that the expression of contempt had vanished without a trace.

  “Yes,” said Shai, as if surprised at his own reaction, “but not because of what you’re hinting at.”

  “Perhaps you can tell me what I’m hinting at?” said Michael, leaning forward on the table.

  “You think that I identified so strongly with Ruchama that I would have murdered him if, as you say, he had left her. That’s an interesting view, even a profound one, I’d say, but not correct.” And again the interest faded from his eyes and his face resumed its dead expression, and again he bowed his head.

  “So would you mind telling me what you are angry about?” prodded Michael, and Tuvia Shai shrugged his shoulders and replied: “I’m not sure. I was very close to Shaul.”

  Michael noted that Shai had failed to connect the closeness to the anger, and he asked: “But?”

  “There aren’t any buts. Shaul Tirosh was beyond good and evil, to use a Nietzschean term. But I don’t think you’ll understand what I’m talking about.”

  “Dr. Shai,” said Michael deliberately, “are you prepared to take a polygraph test today?”

  Tuvia Shai nodded. He didn’t look threatened.

  Michael asked him to wait in the next room and switched off the tape recorder.

  It was almost four o’clock when he passed Tuvia Shai on to Eli Bahar for further questioning and asked Eli to brief Shai on the polygraph test. “If we give him twenty-four hours to stew about it, he’ll be ripe for the polygraph tomorrow afternoon, I hope,” he said, trying to overcome his feeling of impotence. He sensed that Tuvia Shai was telling him the truth but at the same time that he, Michael, had failed fully to understand the truth he was being told.

  Knowing that there would be a polygraph test brought a measure of consolation. He had been well aware, when he asked Shai if he would be ready to take the test that same day, that it required coaching: the SIT prepared the suspect for the subjects on which he would be questioned, and the person giving the test prepared him again, making certain that the questions were understood.

  “Tzilla’s got a sandwich for you. You must be dying of hunger, no?” asked Eli Bahar, passing his hand over his dark curls.

  Michael replied that yes, he was hungry, and added that again he wouldn’t find time to pay his electricity bill. “They’ll cut me off,” he said. “I never seem to make it to the bank.”

  Eli Bahar clucked sympathetically and lifted the receiver of the black phone, which was ringing. “Yes, he’s here. You want him?” he asked. Looking at Michael, he listened for a few seconds and then replaced the receiver.

  “They’ve brought in Ruchama Shai, Dr. Shai’s wife, as you asked. Tzilla says she’s waiting in the conference room.”

  Michael looked at his watch; it said one minute past four, and like a video on “Fast forward,” there rushed through his mind electricity bills; Yuval, who was waiting for him at home; Maya, who hadn’t called or come over for several days now—“life outside,” as Tzilla called it when they were in the midst of an investigation. The world outside the building made him feel a pang of longing, as if it were a world to which he had no connection, a world remote and inaccessible. Since this morning, he thought, he had met four new people and come to know them quite intimately, ascertained their views and their habits. And now he had to confront one more side of this complex geometrical figure.

  There were two hours until his anticipated meeting with Shorer in a
café. Aloud he said: “I’ll begin interviewing her, and please send Raffi along later to check if I need him to continue the questioning.”

  “Tzilla said to tell you that she’s arranged for the film to be screened at ten. Do you want us all to see it?”

  Michael nodded. “If you’ve still got the strength after the autopsy,” he said, aware of the note of guilt that had crept into his voice. Eli Bahar did not respond directly. He began a lengthy description of the results of the pathological examination, summed up by confirming what Hirsh had told Michael over the phone, and went on to describe the results of the analysis of the stomach contents. “They never found any poison,” he said, answering the question that had been troubling Michael. “So should we pick you up a bit before ten?” he ended by asking.

  “No, I’ll get there under my own steam,” said Michael, aware of the fact that the despair he had sensed in Tuvia Shai had infected him too, along with apathy and extreme fatigue. Words seemed superfluous to him as he returned to his office and asked Tzilla on the internal line to bring in Ruchama Shai, wondering as he did so where he was going to find the mental energy to question her.

  10

  And that’s all I think I know at present,” said Michael at the end of his summary to Emanuel Shorer, who stared at the ashtray full of butts and bits of matchsticks and now broke another match in half.

  They were sitting on the crowded garden terrace of the café in the Ticho House. Inside the building, which housed a gallery where the works of the Jerusalem artist Anna Ticho were on display, there were a number of tables on the ground floor, but despite the overcrowding, everybody sat on the terrace that overlooked the large garden, enjoying the cool evening air after a hot, dry day. Above the circular terrace the sky was dark and starless, and from where he was sitting Michael could see the tall cypresses and pines in the garden; they looked black and threatening. At the adjacent table, two middle-aged women were whispering and laughing unpleasantly, adding to his nervousness, the nervousness of a tired child who refuses to admit its fatigue and reacts to every well-intentioned gesture with furious protest.

  Emanuel Shorer gulped down the dregs of his beer, wiped his lips, and asked: “When, exactly, did he break up with Ruchama Shai?”

  “Thursday morning. Her fingerprints were in his office, on his desk. He couldn’t even wait to meet her somewhere else.”

  “Maybe he was afraid of a scene,” said Shorer, and Michael muttered that if Emanuel took a look at the woman for himself, he would know that it was impossible to imagine her making a scene. “That business with the air tanks,” Shorer continued. “Have you found out yet where you can get hold of pure carbon monoxide?”

  “I have. In any of the chemistry or physics labs at the university. And you can also easily order it from chemical suppliers.”

  “And there hasn’t been any breaking and entering in any of the labs recently?” asked Shorer, and while he was waiting for their young waitress to unload the coffee from her little tray, Michael remembered the café next to the Russian Compound, where the two of them had sat on scores of occasions, stirring hundreds of cups of coffee. Emanuel Shorer would pluck his thick mustache—he had shaved it off two years ago—and utter a few sentences or casual remarks whose importance Michael understood only later, when he was alone.

  He stirred the sugar round and round and replied that no burglaries had been reported as far as he knew. “But,” he said, leaning over the table, “nobody would call the security arrangements at the university foolproof. I spoke to one of the chemists in charge of the laboratories there; he told me that many people have keys, many people go in and out. I don’t think there would be any need to break in.”

  He spoke absentmindedly: part of him was still with Ruchama Shai. To keep up the conversation now, he was obliged to invest a tremendous effort, which seemed to exhaust his last reserves of strength. She hadn’t been frightened; her reactions were those of someone in shock, which prevented her from concentrating on the questions. There was no way of getting through to her, not in the first hour, anyway. Only when he referred for the fourth time to the “delicacy” of her husband’s position had she begun to blurt out, one after the other, answers to his questions, in a mechanical, laconic manner that reminded him of Shai himself. From her answers he understood that relations between her and Tirosh had been broken off. (“Whose initiative was it?” he had asked, and she had lowered her eyes and said “His.” And when he asked why, she had mentioned Ruth Dudai.) Then she told him that she had slept from Thursday morning to Sunday afternoon almost without a break. She didn’t know, she said, if Tuvia was at home during that time.

  Despite the shock, Michael sensed, she hadn’t been surprised to hear of Shaul Tirosh’s murder, as if there was some sort of logic behind it. When he asked her about it, she reacted with incomprehension; she didn’t know anything about it, she repeated stubbornly. He mentioned a polygraph test, and she shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” she said, and as with her husband, Michael had felt that she wasn’t there. He asked himself several times what a man like Shaul Tirosh could have seen in her. When she spoke, her hazel eyes were empty and expressionless. He looked at her thin arms, her slender neck, her drooping lower lip (almost like a a weeping clown’s), and her skin, which was smooth but so thin (almost transparent) that you could imagine it suddenly shriveling and peeling off, exposing another skin, lined and wrinkled, underneath it, and again he concluded, as he now told Emanuel Shorer, that some things were beyond his comprehension, and one of them was “the way of a man with a maid.”

  The thought of driving to the television studio and viewing the film footage filled him with tension, and he tried to intensify it in order to overcome his fatigue.

  “You drink too much coffee,” Shorer scolded him, “and you also smoke too much. At your age it’s not a joke anymore; you have to look after yourself. Why don’t you stop smoking? Look at me: if you offered me a cigarette now, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it. I haven’t touched a cigarette in four years.”

  Michael smiled at him. Manifestations of Shorer’s paternal concern for him always went to his heart.

  “It’s true I’ve put on weight since I stopped smoking,” said Shorer plaintively, touching the tire of fat that encircled his waist, “but I’ll take it off again.” And he stuck a half-matchstick into his mouth and fell silent. Then he took it out and waved it at Michael like an admonitory finger as he said: “You know, it’s not so simple to let compressed air out of a tank and fill it with carbon monoxide to the same weight, and don’t forget we’re talking about two tanks here. I would look for someone who had access to a chemistry laboratory first, or who ordered carbon monoxide from a chemical supplier. You can worry about the motive later; the first problem is the execution.”

  “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve begun looking, but so far I can’t see that anyone had a connection to a chemistry lab; anyway, half the SIT’s busy on it right now. I do know one thing: Tirosh was at the Dudais’ house, and twice he went down to the basement—once when Iddo was abroad and once after he had come back. They had problems with the electricity, that’s what Ruth Dudai said, and he fixed it for them, and that’s where Dudai kept the air tanks and the rest of his diving equipment.”

  “The problem is,” said Shorer after a moment or two of silence, “that the cylinder could have been tampered with long ago, without any connection to times and alibis.”

  “It could even have been Tirosh,” said Michael suddenly.

  Shorer looked at him, and finally he smiled and said in a tone of rebuke: “Do you know something that you haven’t told me? Otherwise why the hell would Tirosh murder his star student? According to you, anyway.”

  “I don’t know; it just came out,” replied Michael absently.

  “It didn’t just come out. First you mentioned the basement, that he was in the basement,” protested Shorer, looking sorrowfully at his empty beer bottle.

  “I don’t k
now,” said Michael hesitantly, “but he’s the only one who we know was in the basement, apart from the people who live there. And besides . . . ” Michael fell silent.

  “And besides?” Shorer persisted.

  “It doesn’t matter. As you say, the question of motive can wait.”

  Shorer resumed his former line of questioning and asked again about Tirosh’s family and the women in his past. “You can never know if there wasn’t some marriage. You have to ask someone who knew him when he first arrived in the country. From the way you describe him, it figures that he would have married at the age of, say, twenty and then disappeared. Maybe there’s even a child, maybe an illegitimate child,” and he began scribbling lines on a paper napkin with a burnt match he had removed from the overflowing ashtray. Michael mentioned Ariyeh Klein and said that Aharonovitz, too, had known Tirosh from those early days, but they had never been on familiar terms. “I understand that Tirosh had a lot of respect for Klein, even reverence, and there was a time when he used to go to his house a lot and even eat meals there. But I haven’t yet spoken to Klein.”

  Shorer gave him a disapproving look. “Why haven’t you? Didn’t you say that you found out he returned to the country on Thursday, and not on Saturday, as they thought in the Literature Department?”

  “The fact that he notified them he was coming back on Saturday doesn’t mean a thing,” said Michael, smiling. He glanced at his watch: nine o’clock—they had been sitting there for three hours. “If you’d seen the way they jumped on him, you’d understand why he’d want to keep his time of arrival to himself. Are you coming with me to see the film?”

  “Now we can talk about Tirosh again, in the matter of the air tanks,” said Shorer as they left the television studio. The streets were dark, with only a few cars driving past the blinking yellow traffic lights. Michael stopped in front of Shorer’s house, and the two of them sat in silence.