The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  They escaped from the private concert before wine was served, a few minutes after the music was over. After ascertaining, in a café, what she called “the circumstances of his life,” she had asked him simply and directly why they shouldn’t go to his place. She was sure, she said, that he wanted her. “Are you married?” he asked then, looking at the ring on her finger. She nodded but refused to elaborate.

  That same evening she told him that her married life was irrelevant. “You won’t find the explanation there,” she said, and Michael didn’t press her. “But you should find the situation convenient and unthreatening,” she commented, and only the laugh that accompanied this remark reduced its aggressiveness.

  She left his apartment late that night, without anything having been said about their seeing each other again, but with a radiant smile, full of promise and confidence. When she phoned the next morning, he couldn’t understand how she had found the number.

  And now she sat in the blue armchair, her legs tucked up underneath her. She had not changed her position since he entered the room, and Michael looked at the curved knee and wanted to touch it, but didn’t dare. He thought about what Tzilla had said to him in Meir’s restaurant, about how he had no gift for detection outside the criminal situation, that in “life,” as she put it, he was actually rather naive.

  “Haven’t you got anything to say? Nothing at all?” asked Maya, and Michael heard the sob behind the harsh voice and replied that he was thinking what to say to her, how to put into words the confused torrent of emotions that made him seem unfeeling. “And also,” he said slowly, “I’m wondering whether breaking off relations with me is what you need now, and asking myself if I’m really incapable of helping you, but mainly I’m thinking about how for the past seven years you’ve hidden this from me, and I thought we were so close, and all the time you were keeping this terrible secret from me, and . . . ” Michael contemplated the irony of the picture he had built for himself of her glamorous social life, her harmonious existence, her superior husband, but of this he said nothing.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Maya after a long pause, and Michael replied: “If there’s an involvement, as you call it, between us, isn’t there anything I can do for you except to break it off?”

  “Only for the time being,” said Maya desperately, and Michael thought that multiple sclerosis could go on for twenty years, but about this, too, he said nothing.

  He looked at the exposed knee, at the slender hand resting on the arm of the chair, and suddenly he filled with rage, which he made no attempt to hide.

  “You’re shouting,” said Maya, half questioningly, half fearfully. “Why are you shouting at me?”

  “It’s a trap,” shouted Michael again. “What can I say in the face of your guilt? Naturally you make the rules—you always have—but you’ve never hurt me so much before, and you’ve still got the nerve to call me unspontaneous! Who gave you the right to say you loved me when all the time you were hiding a thing like this from me? What did you take me for? A baby? Did you think that I wouldn’t be able to ‘cope’? Another one of your favorite words. But what right have I to say anything? I’m not your husband, I’m only your lover, and I thought we were friends too, but now you suddenly throw something like this at me, and it turns out that for all these years I’ve been nothing but your playmate.”

  And Maya, after opening her mouth a few times and spreading her wide skirt over her knees, took advantage of the moment of silence to shout back: “You’re the famous detective; if you wanted to know you would have known; you think it’s a coincidence that all these years you’ve never dared to ask anything? Isn’t it you who always say that there’s no such thing as coincidence? How come you didn’t know?” And the tears that had choked her voice as she spoke began to flow, big and transparent, and the childish gesture with which she wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand pierced his heart, and despite the waves of anger again engulfing him, he stood up and went over to her, lifted her, sobbing, from the chair, embraced her with all his strength, and even wiped away her tears with his lips. But then she said: “Don’t make it hard for me, Michael, please don’t make it hard for me. Let me go and I’ll come back, you’ll see, I’ll come back.” And he no longer said anything, because the voices inside him clamored with anger and pity and love and hate, and especially the stinging sensation of having been deceived.

  He couldn’t fall asleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, a new wave of rage attacked him, followed by self-pity, and finally, when he saw that it was three in the morning, he gave up all attempts at sleep and returned to the armchair. (“What did you do all month?” Maya asked him once, after one of his attempts to break off with her. “I drowned myself in work,” he had said. He could still remember what she was wearing then.) Pulling the chain of the reading lamp, he leafed through the book by Anatoly Ferber that he had found on Tirosh’s bed, and stared at the black letters in the short lines. He remembered Iddo Dudai’s face as it had been in the television film, and as it had been on the beach in Eilat, and then he thought about Emanuel Shorer’s remark in the café, and he knew that the key lay in Dudai’s behavior at the departmental seminar, in the battle that had taken place on the screen. Again he looked at Tirosh’s introduction to the book by Ferber, the poet he had discovered and whose poems he had had published, and he remembered how Ruth Dudai and Ruchama Shai—and he himself—had reacted to the sight of Tirosh’s body. He felt a similar sensation now, and he said to himself aloud: “You’re in shock,” and the sound of his voice echoing in the room frightened him, and again he felt the helpless rage against Maya, and then a wave of pity for himself and for her and even for her husband, and he tried to pull himself together and rose from the chair. His body felt heavy. The sky was beginning to grow light, and he went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, and then he found himself in the shower, shaving slowly and staring at his face, which looked like the hard face of a stranger, and at the little lines next to his eyes. The kettle whistled, and again he thought that he should buy an electric kettle, which wouldn’t get on his nerves like this one, but he let it go on whistling until he had finished drying his face with the little towel, which was as hard as sandpaper, and he heard Maya’s voice lecturing him, “It’s impossible to launder anything in Jerusalem without a softener, the water’s so hard here,” and he tried to stop the tears as he made his strong black coffee and spooned sugar into the black liquid, his hand trembling. The clock on the kitchen wall, which Yuval had bought him on a trip the boy had taken with his grandfather to Switzerland, showed five; the sparrows started their chirping outside, and in one of the neighboring apartments a baby began to cry. Michael drank his coffee standing up, at one go, despite the searing sensation he felt on his palate and his tongue—he even welcomed it, at least it was a clear, sharp physical sensation—and then he washed the white cup, put it away in the little cupboard above the sink, and left the house.

  11

  They’re all here,” said Tzilla with a worried expression. “He wanted details about the film footage we saw last night and said that today’s Wednesday already and moved everyone into his office. I told him you were on your way, but he’s in a mood, and now he’s reading the file.” They were standing at the door to Michael’s office, and the tension in her voice and movements made him quicken his step and hurry after her in the direction of the C.O.’s office. The little anteroom was empty, the typewriter covered, and Tzilla went straight through.

  “Here goes,” Michael said aloud, in a voice that betrayed his depression, and stepped into Ariyeh Levy’s office.

  Again they were all at the morning conference, again they pored in silent concentration over the detailed file prepared by Tzilla—the pathologist’s report, the photographs, the comments by Forensics, the list of questions to be asked in the polygraph tests, the typed copies of the interrogations, the signed statements of the witnesses.

  Raffi Alfandari put down the paper he was holding
and looked intently at the photograph of Tirosh’s body, then at a photograph of the Indian statuette, which had been found in the Alfa Romeo. “What’s this statue?” he asked, and took a long gulp from the paper cup in his hand.

  “It’s the god Shiva,” said Michael, “and Forensics say there aren’t any prints on it. It’s completely clean. But someone brought it from Tirosh’s office to the car, a very strange thing to do, as if to give us a clue, to tell us that it was the murder weapon. And if you read the pathologist’s report carefully, you saw that traces of metal were found on the facial skin and that he was, indeed, apparently beaten with it. There are no prints in the car either, but the office itself is full of them. They’ve all been checked out. They’re mainly Tuvia Shai’s, but also Yael Eisenberg’s—she claims she wasn’t there that day and may in fact have left them the day before—and the cleaner’s, the guy we spoke to yesterday—”

  “You mean the Arab? The one Bahar questioned?” asked Balilty suspiciously, and Michael nodded and went on: “But I think we should talk about Ariyeh Klein now.”

  “It’s a bit pornographic to keep in an office, no?” remarked Balilty, raising his eyes from the photograph of the statuette and looking at Tzilla, who did not react to the sly twinkle in his eyes.

  “I don’t know what’s pornographic and what isn’t, but it’s certainly literary—meaningful, as they say,” said Michael, and he grimaced.

  Ariyeh Levy, the Jerusalem Subdistrict commander, raised his eyes from the file he was studying and took off his reading glasses, but his disapproving look was wasted on the air, and he replaced the glasses with a sigh and again immersed himself in the contents of the file. Michael thought of the coundess hours he had spent with these people in similar circumstances and asked himself why he was not deriving his usual comfort from the very fact of their intimacy, their familiar gestures, their predictable reactions. This morning everything irritated him. Perhaps, he thought, it was because of the absence of Emanuel Shorer, who had always acted as a buffer between himself and Ariyeh Levy, but he knew that this morning not even Emanuel could have saved him from his feeling of loneliness. He looked deliberately at his watch, and Balilty, surprisingly, registered his mood and mumbled: “It’s only eight o’clock in the morning, Ohayon.” Tzilla fanned herself with the copy of the report in her hand.

  In spite of the early hour, it was hot and stifling in the large room, whose windows overlooked the main entrance, and the dusty ivy covering the facade of the building and creeping in through the window created only the illusion of shade.

  Gilly, the Jerusalem police spokesman, asked hoarsely if he could “release the photograph to the press,” and Michael replied “Not yet,” quietly but with a firmness that brooked no argument. Balilty sighed and Raffi began to brief them on his questioning of Ariyeh Klein. The C.O. put the file down on the table with a thud and looked around him silently. His eyes came to rest on Michael, and his expression soured. He dropped his reading glasses to his chin and began nibbling the earpiece.

  Raffi Alfandari went on talking: “If you look at the copy of his statement, you’ll see that he came back on Thursday night and decided not to let anyone outside his family know. He rented a car at the airport and drove straight to Rosh Pinna, where his elderly mother lives. He returned to Jerusalem on Saturday night, after picking up his wife and three daughters at the airport. They came back Saturday night; we checked. So I think he’s out of the picture.”

  “How did you check it?” asked Ariyeh Levy.

  “Well, we asked his mother, one of those old pioneers from way back; you can see on her face that she wouldn’t tell a lie. Anyway, that’s what she said.” He pushed an invisible lock of hair off his forehead, lowered his eyes uneasily, and went on: “The interesting thing—we’ve only got it on tape so far—is that he met Dudai in America twice—once when Dudai arrived and once just before he left. And what he told me is that Dudai was in a very bad mood before he came back to Israel.”

  Balilty looked at Raffi Alfandari and said with a smile: “That’s the longest speech I’ve heard from you all year.”

  Michael ignored Balilty and asked: “Why?” and Raffi, who since the day he had begun working on Michael’s team had demonstrated unbounded admiration and loyalty toward him and maintained, as it were, a dialogue with him alone, said in embarrassment, which gave him a youthful and innocent air: “Klein said that Dudai was having a serious crisis about his doctorate, but he didn’t want to go into details; he asked if he could talk to you about it.”

  Levy laid his reading glasses on the cover of the file.

  “What is this, a cafeteria? Everyone can order what he feels like?” protested Balilty, but Michael cut his protest short and asked if Klein, too, had been invited to take the polygraph test today.

  Tzilla nodded her head vigorously and said: “Yes, at four. And he asked if you would be here then, and I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  “I don’t know if will be here,” said Michael, “but you can tell him that I’ll contact him.”

  Ariyeh Levy rested his hands on the table and raised his eyebrows, as if he couldn’t take any more of this nonsense. Michael picked up the signals and knew that an outburst was on its way, but he chose to ignore it, saying to himself: This isn’t your day for sitting with the team; you’d better get out of here; you sound as pompous as Ariyeh Levy and about as agreeable.

  But then Balilty suddenly asked: “And have I told you that he was once married?” and looked triumphantly around the table until his eyes fell on Michael’s furious face, when he said in a serious, businesslike voice: “In 1971, Professor Tirosh went on a sabbatical to Canada. He was apparently very lonely there, because a month later he was joined by Miss Yael Eisenstein, who was then aged eighteen and a half, and I want to remind you”—here he smiled lasciviously—“that he himself was then forty-one, and when she got there he married her, even if it was only a civil ceremony, without a rabbi. And exactly six months later he divorced her.”

  Levy looked at both of them, first at Balilty and then at Michael, with an expression of satisfaction, as if to say: Even you can’t control him, and returned his attention to the file. “Get in touch with Forensics and tell them to add it to her polygraph,” said Michael to Tzilla.

  “But what does it mean?” Eli Bahar spoke up for the first time that morning. “So what if he was married to her a thousand years ago? Why should she suddenly wake up now?”

  “It’s a fact that her fingerprints were in his office, and the Arab had cleaned on Thursday because of course he’s off Fridays,” said Balilty. “Who says that relationships end with a divorce? The world is full of all kinds of things, and the main thing here is that there was an unusual relationship between them, and nobody knew about it, and we have to talk to her about it.”

  “But I checked her story after Raffi questioned her, and she really did take a cab from the university at half past twelve on Friday, and she doesn’t have a driver’s license,” said Eli Bahar aggressively, and Balilty retorted, “How do you know?” and again there was a silence, which was broken by Ariyeh Levy, who said paternally: “If we didn’t know they had been married, there might be other things we don’t know about too, like a Canadian driver’s license, and people can take a cab and go back later.” Eli Bahar opened his mouth to speak, but Levy stopped him with a raised hand: “I’m sure you checked—never mind the details; just check again in the light of what we’ve just heard. Remember the case of Dina Silver, who claimed she didn’t know how to shoot, and then it came out that she’d won first prize in a sharp-shooting contest abroad. Some people think that anything they do outside the country’s a secret. Obviously it has to be rechecked. And in general, you’re dragging your feet and treating them with kid gloves!” His voice rose and the paternal note disappeared. “I don’t understand why you don’t arrest Tuvia Shai and his wife; in my opinion, they were in it together. There are cases like that, with rich, lonely people. And I don’t know about you
”—he glanced mockingly at Michael—“but from where I stand, Tirosh was a rich man, and this couple, the Shais, got their hands on him through her, the wife, for the money, and then Tirosh kicks her out and spoils their plans.”

  Michael remarked that the Shais had not benefited financially from Tirosh’s death, apart from which, he added, there was nothing in the C.O.’s theory to explain the death of Dudai. As he spoke, he saw the glint of anger in Levy’s eyes, and he knew what the C.O.’s next words would be. “This isn’t a university here, whatever some people think!” roared Ariyeh Levy, banging his fist on the table, and no one dared to smile. “And the only reason I’m not ordering you to arrest them right now is that you haven’t got any proof, because any judge would see the fact that he was screwing his wife as a good enough motive, and he had plenty of opportunity too—his alibi’s useless.”

  “I intend to talk to him again today,” said Michael.

  “How are you going to get him in here? He’s teaching all day; I’ve got it written down here,” said Tzilla.

  “Mount Scopus isn’t on the moon,” said Balilty, “and so what if he’s teaching? What’s the big deal if he doesn’t teach for a couple of hours? Would it be better for him if we arrested him? If he didn’t teach for the rest of his life?”