by Batya Gur
“And what about the chemists?” asked the C.O. matter-of-factly, his outburst forgotten. “From what Dudai’s wife said, the tanks and all the diving gear were stored in the basement of their building. She’s got a key, but from what it says here, the door was often left open, and anyone could have tampered with the tanks, and as I understand it, Dudai didn’t have any connections with chemistry laboratories and he didn’t know anything about gases. Not that I think we should do their work for them as far as Dudai’s concerned, let them break their heads over there in the Negev, but still, we’ve decided the two cases are linked, and in the meantime we haven’t come up with anyone else in connection with the diving tanks.”
“Aharonovitz,” said Eli Bahar.
“What about him?” asked Michael.
“He wanted to be the head of the department, and Tirosh was against it; they had a special faculty meeting about it on Friday morning. But Aharonovitz told me that he had said at the beginning of the meeting that he had to be home at one o’clock. He kept saying it. I asked him why and in what connection and so on, but he wouldn’t tell me. Finally he said his wife was sick. So I went around to his address—he lives in Kiryat Haovel, on Rabinovitz Street, where they’ve got those villas—and I spoke to the neighbors. He’s got a wife and two grown kids, the son’s okay, studying medicine and all that. The daughter’s a mental case; she’s been hospitalized for years in Ezrat Nashim, and they bring her home on weekends. I thought, from the way he looks, that he would live in a dump, but . . . ” Eli’s voice trailed away, and he dropped his gaze. “Never mind, it’s not important,” he said hesitantly.
“Go on,” said Balilty.
“No, it’s nothing. Just that he’s got a nice house, with a garden that his wife cares for herself, and she’s like refined looking. You couldn’t call her beautiful—she’s over fifty—but a real lady.”
“Well?” said Balilty. “What’s the point?”
“Somehow”—Bahar ignored Balilty and spoke directly to Michael—“I never had the time to tell you, but it changed my whole perception of him. And he’s no fool either.”
“Nobody said he was a fool; the question is if he’s a suspect,” said Ariyeh Levy suspiciously.
“I don’t know, but after the meeting on Friday he went to the hospital to bring his daughter home for the weekend. We checked. It’s only that he really hated Tirosh. Boy, did he hate him!”
“But could he have been in Tirosh’s office before that or not?” asked Levy impatiently.
“I don’t know what to tell you. At the hospital, they said he arrived at about one, that he always gets there around one. He doesn’t have a car. He says that he took two buses—he’s against taxis. It doesn’t look to me as if he had the time.”
“Did you ask him about the notepad on Tirosh’s desk—the impression of those words?” Michael asked Eli Bahar.
Eli nodded.
“Well?” asked Balilty.
Eli ignored Balilty. “He said that the first word had to be read with the old Ashkenazi pronunciation rather than the way we talk now. So it’s not shira, poetry; it’s Shira, a woman’s name. And then . . . ” Eli blushed and reached for his coffee cup.
“What’s all that rubbish? What does it mean?” Balilty asked.
“He said: ‘Young man, it doesn’t hurt to learn something. Go and see what Agnon changed in Shira.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
There was an uneasy silence in the room. Ariyeh Levy drummed his fingers on the table. Michael stared at the wall opposite him.
“So what’s it all about?” Levy finally barked in Michael’s direction. “Perhaps our educated colleagues can tell us?”
Michael said unwillingly: “It’s a novel by S. Y. Agnon, published after he died. It isn’t finished. I seem to remember that the last chapter is missing.”
“Did you ask him what Tirosh was getting at, in his opinion?” Ariyeh Levy asked Eli.
“He said something about leprosy and corruption. Half the time I didn’t even understand him. I really don’t know what to tell you,” said Eh in embarrassment.
“Is there anything there about leprosy? Corruption? Do you know the book?” Levy asked with increasing haste, and looked at Michael.
“I don’t remember, but he did write one story about leprosy,” replied Michael thoughtfully.
Ariyeh Levy opened his mouth to say something, his face flushed and his expression ominous. “That’s not what I asked,” he said menacingly, “and I don’t want any lectures now.”
“I really don’t remember. The book is five hundred pages long,” protested Michael, looking at his sandals.
“So what’s it got to do with anything?” said Ariyeh Levy. “I don’t think there’s any connection.”
“Maybe he was busy writing an article about it,” said Michael without looking at anybody.
“And he left no notes? said Balilty doubtfully. “A person who’s writing something throws papers into the wastepaper basket, makes rough drafts and tears them up, stuff like that. No?” he asked Michael, who nodded in confirmation.
“So in the meantime, as far as I can make out, our educated colleagues haven’t got a clue either. It’s a good thing I never wasted a few years over there,” said the C.O. with ostentatious satisfaction.
“But the way he hated Tirosh . . . ” Eli looked around him uneasily, then he opened his mouth, had a second thought, and shut it again. Michael looked at him and said irritably: “Well, what is it?” and Eli said, slowly and hesitantly: “I don’t know, but just take a look at the photo of Tirosh’s storeroom; it’s not very clear . . .”
“Well?” Michael prodded him.
“It seems to me,” said Eli, “as if there’s something behind the tools that looks like a gas cylinder. I think we should go back there and see.”
“Didn’t you search the storeroom?” asked Ariyeh Levy threateningly, and Michael shrugged his shoulders and looked him in the eye as he said: “Perhaps we didn’t search it thoroughly enough.”
“So check it out today, if it’s not too much to ask,” snapped Levy, and Michael nodded.
“First make sure it’s not for an ordinary domestic gas balloon,” said Balilty. “That character with his Hungarian sausages,” he added with a sneer in what purported to be a Hungarian accent, “probably kept a gas balloon handy.”
Eli Bahar looked at him belligerently and said in a whisper: “I don’t take my orders from you.”
Then Michael said in a conciliatory tone: “Check it out this morning, please.”
“What can I tell them in the meantime?” inquired the spokesman, Gilly, desperately, wiping the perspiration underneath the fair hair that fell onto his forehead. Ariyeh Levy threw him an impatient “Just a minute” and turned his attention to Michael, who had begun outlining the tasks for the day. “They’re waiting outside; they’re getting fed up. There’s a foreign correspondent too; the guy was an international figure—have you seen the headlines in the past couple of days?” Gilly persisted.
“You bet I saw them,” replied Balilty, though it wasn’t he who had been asked. “‘Lethal Lit’—that was a good one!”
“Let them write more feature stories,” said Michael firmly. “In the meantime Tirosh’s books are selling like hotcakes—not that I know who’ll get the money.”
“The article ‘Serial Deaths in the Literature Department’ is more worrying,” said Eli. “They’re all shaking in their boots! Kalitzky asked for a bodyguard. Zellermaier said that she’s too frightened to sleep at night. It’s not funny—don’t you think one of them might really need guarding? Who’ll be next? That’s what they’re asking.”
There was a thoughtful silence, and as usual it was broken by Balilty. “There are some people,” he said reflectively, “who don’t believe they’ll ever die. Tell me how, with all that money, a man who was alone in the world didn’t leave a will.”
“You checked it out?” inquired Levy, and Eli Bahar mentioned the name
of Tirosh’s lawyer.
“So maybe someone else has it?” ventured Ariyeh Levy, but Eli said stubbornly: “I checked. There wasn’t any will in his papers either.”
“And there’s no family?” asked Levy disbelievingly.
“An old aunt in Zurich,” said Michael, and once more there was silence in the room.
“So what are you looking for now?” asked Levy, and Michael responded carefully: “We’re looking for someone who left Mount Scopus between two and six, with a small statue the length of a forearm, driving off in Tirosh’s Alfa Romeo. The statue doesn’t fit into Tuvia Shai’s briefcase, and he says he wasn’t even carrying a briefcase that morning. But the statue could fit into any biggish plastic bag, and there couldn’t have been a lot of blood on it. It could have been taken out in a plastic bag. We examined all his wife’s bags, Ruth Dudai’s, everyone’s; there wasn’t a trace of blood. The guard at the parking garage entrance doesn’t remember seeing the car leave, but it was hot, he was sitting inside his kiosk, and he could have raised the barrier without looking. In short, it’s not going to be easy, and as you read in the file, there are a lot of candidates, a lot of people would have liked to see him dead. Just thinking about his dramas in that café is enough,” he concluded sourly.
“What café?” asked Tzilla, who had been usually quiet this morning.
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Michael impatiently, then noticed her worried look. “For the past few years he had a kind of ritual. He would arrive at a café in Tel Aviv, called Rovall, I think—but it’s written down; you typed it yourself.”
“I didn’t do all the typing myself,” protested Tzilla.
“So what happened at the café?” asked Ariyeh Levy impatiently.
“Every Monday he would sit in the café between four and six in the afternoon, and young poets would bring him their manuscripts for criticism. He would just sit there with a cup of coffee, and read them one after the other, and decide on the spot—thumbs up or thumbs down.”
“What do you mean, thumbs up, thumbs down?” said Levy.
“He edited a very prestigous literary magazine—it’s called Directions—and there in the café he would decide whom he was going to publish in it.”
“But I told you, there were dozens of people there, and there wasn’t any discrimination—he humiliated them all; no one was special,” said Balilty sharply. “I’ve got a list, and we’re checking it; most of them were women, young girls, there were a few guys, but none of them would have had the strength even to pick up that statue.”
“I don’t understand,” said the C.O. to nobody in particular. “Why would anyone be prepared to let somebody do that to them? Nobody could have made me . . .”
Michael responded, “Well, it’s a different world, with different laws, the world of poets. They thought he was a first-rate poetry critic.” He looked into Ariyeh Levy’s eyes defiantly, but Levy kept quiet.
“They have different standards,” remarked Balilty venomously. “They think that we’re illiterate or something.”
“It’s important,” said Michael reflectively. “It’s important to us because it’s important to them. Just as you’d go and find out about diamonds if there was a murder about diamonds, you have to try to enter their world and—”
“I haven’t got any plans to start reading poetry magazines!” said Ariyeh Levy, banging his fist on the table. “You can get that out of your head!”
“The point is that for a poet to get published in a magazine like that means attention and recognition and respect and all the things that exist in other worlds too, and Tirosh had the last word on the subject,” explained Michael quietly.
“Okay, we get the point, and now I’m asking you again,” said Levy, passing a thick-fingered hand over the back of his neck, as they all got up to leave, “have you discarded the security aspect? The political background?”
“We have,” pronounced Balilty, and Levy looked at him doubtfully. At the door, Michael reminded them that by evening they should have the results of the polygraph tests.
“Where will you be all day?” asked Tzilla anxiously when they were outside the room.
“First on Mount Scopus,” said Michael, “with Tuvia Shai again, maybe we’ll come up with something new.” He hesitated and wiped his face as he said, “I’ll call you from there when I’m finished.”
“Will you take someone with you? To stay in the car and record the interrogation?”
“Come along, Alfandari,” Michael called to the far end of the corridor. “You’re coming with me.”
Alfandari drove the station wagon, which was equipped with remote, wireless recording equipment. “Why don’t they put air-conditioning in here? Do they want this delicate equipment to be damaged?” he asked rhetorically as they settled into the stifling car. Michael, whose eyes were hurting in the glaring light, said nothing. For the thousandth time he contemplated the majestic entrance to the Russian Compound and wondered at the mixture: the facade of the Russian palace, whose interior was partitioned by thin walls into offices, and opposite it, glittering silently in the sun, the Russian church. On Sundays the voices of the Orthodox nuns would rise from it, and sometimes he would hear them singing as he walked or drove past. The sound always moved him, and it would take him a few minutes to realize that it was Sunday. Sometimes he would be next to the guardhouse when he heard the singing and would note with satisfaction the expression of wonder on the faces of others, before they shook themselves and went back to their business. He looked now at the big barrels fencing off the parking lot, at the wooden guardhouse, and at the green domed roof of the church, shining in the sun, and saw opposite him the hostel that Prince Sergei of the house of Romanov had built for the Russian Orthodox pilgrims, a building that now housed the office of the Society for the Protection of Nature and a department of the Agriculture Ministry. He glanced around the whole of the Compound, at the large, splendid Russian palaces that had been adapted without too much effort to the needs of the Israeli bureaucracy, and the conjunction of the offices with the vision of Prince Sergei made him marvel yet again at people’s ability to lead prosaic, day-to-day, taken-for-granted existences in Jerusalem.
He found a pair of dark glasses in the glove compartment and mechanically followed their progress in the car.
They were standing in the corridor outside the department secretary’s office. Tuvia Shai wiped his forehead with one hand. In the other he was holding a thin booklet and a cardboard file. He said impatiently: “It’s the last class of the year and I can’t possibly cancel it.”
“Not even after everything that’s happened here? You cancel classes for far more trivial reasons—just take a look at the board.” Michael pointed to the bulletin board hanging on the wall just beyond the bend in the corridor and said: “Family reasons, or no reason at all. Why can’t you cancel it? What if you suddenly took ill?”
“Don’t say ‘you,’” said Shai angrily. “We’re not all the same, and I never cancel classes without a very good reason. The students weren’t notified in advance. Why should I suddenly start treating them with contempt?”
“Because two of your fellow teachers were murdered,” said Michael simply, and Tuvia Shai suppressed his anger and looked as if he had just remembered, as if he had been doused with a cold shower.
“Everything I’ve been talking about all year was supposed to be tied up today. I’ve been working toward this class all year,” said Shai. “So wait another hour and a half, that’s all it will take. You can talk to someone else in the meantime—why do you have to talk to me so urgently now? I spent all day yesterday talking to you.”
“You’re the last person who saw him alive,” Michael reminded him, and after a moment’s thought he added: “And you were also particularly close to him, as I never stop hearing from the others.”
Shai waved his hand; at last he said: “You can’t compel me to cancel my last seminar. Yesterday I canceled my poetry tutorial because of you.”
“What makes you think your students will turn up? They must be scared out of their wits too.”
“They phoned to ask me if there would be a class and I said yes. We decided not to cancel anything, neither classes nor exams. It’s the end of the year.”
Michael was silent for a few seconds and then said: “Okay, I’ll wait for you in the class, if you have no objections.”
“I can’t understand why you should want to sit in on a class where you have no idea of what’s going on. I’ve been trying to explain to you that I’ll be tying up the threads of something we’ve been examining for a whole year. Apart from which, we’ll be dealing with a particularly difficult text. . . . Well, do what you like.”
Michael followed him in silence. They descended to the floor below and walked along a corridor. Doors appeared at unexpected angles, and Michael imagined them leading into narrow labyrinths, but the door that Tuvia Shai opened led into a well-lit, pentagonal space, where a group of students were sitting and waiting. A buzz arose in the room when the door opened; the students stared at Michael curiously for a moment, and he thought that he could recognize fear on their faces.
Fifteen women, counted Michael, most of them young, two with the headscarves of the observant and one wearing the kind of turban (it had slipped slightly to one side) worn by ultra-Orthodox married women. There were two young men and an older man who looked very tired and supported his chin on his hand. The students were seated at rectangular tables arranged in a horseshoe, with booklets of typed texts and Bibles open in front of them. Michael sat next to the older man, who was in the second row, not at a table but on a chair with a writing arm. On the arm lay a closed booklet, on the cover of which Michael read the tide Elements of Lyric Poetry. When Tuvia Shai took his place at the teacher’s table, at the open end of the horseshoe, the man next to Michael roused himself, opened his booklet, then began paging through the Bible lying on his knees. Michael peeped into the booklet, read the words “Samson’s Hair,” then read the lines below the title.