by Batya Gur
Michael ran down the two flights of stairs, and even though he knew that there were people working in many of the rooms, the sound of his footsteps had a terribly lonely ring in his ears.
Eli Bahar looked at him apologetically and happily. “Sorry I didn’t come upstairs to you. I called you without thinking, as soon as I saw the beginning.”
“Where was it?” asked Michael again.
“In these papers here,” said Alfandari in his pleasant voice, handing him a stiff cardboard file containing thin printed pages. Michael looked through them, smiled, and said: “Nice work.”
“The National Bank,” said Alfandari.
“What’s the time?” asked Bahar.
“After three,” replied Michael thoughtfully. “It’ll take two hours to get the court order. Where’s Balilty?” he asked them.
“Why? Who wants to know?” asked Balilty, smiling triumphantly as he appeared in the doorway.
Michael handed him the safe-deposit box ownership documents.
After a whistle of admiration, and with a rare serious expression on his face, Balilty asked. “You want me to get a court order?”
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll be back in an hour. Who’s the judge on duty today?”
They didn’t know.
“Okay, never mind. Should we wake the bank officer or wait till morning?”
“We’ll wait till morning,” Michael decided.
14
At six in the morning—after spending the last working hours of the previous day with Balilty, who had kept compulsively humming the tune of the popular song “The Answer to the Riddle”—Michael Ohayon stood in clean clothes in front of his bathroom mirror, carefully scraping a razor over his face. Again and again he thought of Ariyeh Klein’s words, which he had replayed over and over on the little recording device lying on the table between Balilty and himself, and as he wiped his cheeks with a towel, he came to a decision.
“Tell me, do you know what the time is?” complained Avigdor, the head of the Criminal Identification Division, answering the phone in a sleepy voice. “Can’t it wait for a more civilized hour?”
“Look, it doesn’t have to be a big tank; there’s something called a laboratory bottle, a little cylinder like a miniature soda siphon, which contains two hundred grams, but. . . .”
“Yes, I know. I used to use laboratory bottles when I taught chemistry at the university. Nobody woke me up at home at six in the morning then. . . . Ohayon, how many years have I been in charge of Forensics in Jerusalem? Why don’t you trust me? I’ve already told you a thousand times that it doesn’t make sense—it’s an insane idea. The thing’s quite simple. You could go into your garage, seal it, turn on the car engine—and you’ve got CO. In my humble opinion, you won’t find anything that way. . . . Ye-es, there’s something in what you say”—for the first time, there was a note of hesitation in Avigdor’s voice—“but your man would have to know some chemistry. Altogether he’d have to know some chemistry for the whole business: to think of the gas in the first place and to think about the fact that if he filled it up in the garage it would smell. It’s true what you say, that it’s only when it’s produced in a laboratory that the gas is odorless. You don’t need to look for a diver, you need to look for a chemist, but the idea of chemical suppliers is absurd. Any laboratory—”
“I’ve checked the laboratories at the university and in the hospitals,” said Michael wearily. “I want to examine all the orders over the past month. How many cylinders like that would you need?”
“Five, six; not many. But believe me—”
“I’m sending someone to you this morning. Give him a list of the places and he can check them out. After all, what have we got to lose?” asked Michael, looking at the empty vase next to the telephone, and thanking Avigdor before he replaced the receiver.
He glared at his watch and waited for the hands to move: when they finally reached half past six, he permitted himself to dial Emanuel Shorer’s number.
“Where?” asked Shorer in a wide-awake voice.
“The Café Atara; it’s around the corner from the bank,” said Michael.
At half past seven, the two of them were sitting silently in the Atara, next to the big window that overlooked the side alley, as the waitress, chatting in Hungarian to an old woman sitting beside the center aisle, placed their breakfast before them: omelets, rolls, little cubes of butter, saucers of jam, and orange juice.
“Did I wake you?” asked Michael, staring at his omelet.
“Nonsense,” said Shorer, and asked: “When did you get the court order?”
“This morning at half past four.”
“So what’s all the fuss about? You could have let people sleep.”
“That’s just what I did,” said Michael defensively.
“Well? What else is new?” said Shorer.
Michael summarized his conversation with Klein and described the discovery of the safe-deposit box. He wondered whether to say anything about Agnon’s Shira, but a vague dread prevented him from doing so. Besides, he didn’t know exactly what to say about it. Finally he summed up with the words: “And so I think there’s a new, different lead.”
“And what if he didn’t order it in Israel?” asked Shorer. “There are chemical suppliers all over the world. Are you thinking that he kept empty gas bottles or brochures from chemical suppliers in his safe-deposit box?”
Two men came into the café and sat at the counter. Michael glanced at their dark suits and narrow ties, and he straightened his shirt collar.
“Let’s think a minute,” said Shorer paternally, sipping the coffee the waitress had brought. “How can a literature professor get hold of carbon monoxide? How would you do it?”
Michael set his coffee cup down carefully in its saucer. “I told you, we checked with all the laboratories, and none of them reported anything missing. The only remaining avenue was the legal one: ordering it from a supplier, by phone or mail. But either way, somebody has to receive the parcel, somebody has to pay, the supplier has to know who paid, whom he has to send it to.”
“Yes,” agreed Shorer, crumbling the blackened matchstick Michael had put in the ashtray, “that’s exactly the problem. Why on earth would someone planning a murder so carefully take the trouble to leave tracks if he could get hold of a not very rare gas in other ways? And even if we’re talking about small containers, somebody has to receive them too, sign for them, and so on.”
“I’ve got an idea about that,” said Michael stubbornly. “But not now. First I want to see the safe-deposit box, and after that . . . You’ll agree that it won’t do any harm to look into it.”
Shorer beckoned the waitress and pointed to his empty cup. She called out “Café au lait” in the direction of the open kitchen door and returned a moment later with the coffee. “The problem with Tirosh,” said Shorer, “is that he lived completely alone. I understand that you have hopes for the bank box, but I have to say I’m pessimistic.”
“Up to now I haven’t found any clues,” Michael admitted. “No phone number of a chemical supplier, no brochure, no chemistry books. But still I’m sure; I can feel it in my bones. In any case, I intend to keep trying.” He looked again at the big clock, which said eight o’clock. Emanuel Shorer asked for the check and glared at Michael, who quickly put his wallet away. Shorer paid the waitress, and she rummaged in the leather pouch hanging from her waist and counted out the change, which was left on the table.
The two men in suits paid for their espresso, and Michael saw them walking down Ben Yehuda Street in the direction of Zion Square. There were only a few people about on the pedestrian mall; the shops were still shut. When they reached Zion Square, they saw Eli Bahar standing in front of the National Bank branch, talking tensely to the two men from the café. The shorter of the two, it turned out, was the bank manager. At the entrance, two women and a man formed a little queue, and the sight of the two men in suits sent a flicker of hope to
their eyes, which turned to disappointment when the manager opened the door and, with an expression of someone with important business awaiting him, pointed to his watch.
He locked the door behind him after Michael, Eli Bahar, and Shorer entered. With Shorer beside him, the bank manager studied the court order. He then led the three policemen to the safe deposit vault, lecturing them self-importantly about the security arrangements.
Shorer kept discreetly in the background as Michael and Eli Bahar bent over the box. The manager counted the bank notes it contained and scrupulously wrote down each item before returning it to its envelope. Only after Eli obediently signed the form placed before him were they permitted to empty the contents of the box into opaque plastic bags.
The manager held out his hand to receive one of the copies of the court order; the other Michael retained.
Michael checked the inside of the empty black safe-deposit box, then they filed out slowly through the bank’s back door. Eli carried the two plastic bags, and Michael kept his eyes fixed on his back.
In his office in the Russian Compound, Michael looked at the black cardboard file that Tzilla had brought back from the forensics lab. Then he looked at Shorer and Eli and finally at the envelopes.
His movements were slow, as always when he was excited.
In these brown envelopes Shaul Tirosh had kept all the important documents of his life: the papers pertaining to his purchase of the house in Yemin Moshe, his Ph.D. degree, the certificate awarding him the President’s Prize for poetry, medical records, yellowing letters and documents in a foreign language.
“Czech,” said Shorer, and knitted his brows in the effort to remember the name of a translator. Then, with a cry of triumph, he asked for the list of internal phone numbers, dialed, and urgently demanded to speak to Horowitz in the accounting office. A few minutes later, Horowitz hurried in, his pale face shy, a few gray wisps of hair surviving on his bald head. “Now you remember,” he said with a good-natured smile. “Two months before I retire, you take advantage of my language.” He translated aloud the matriculation certificates of Jan Schasky and Helena Radovensky, Tirosh’s parents. Then he looked carefully at another document and said: “This one isn’t Czech; it’s German—a list of grades from the medical school in Vienna, second year. In the name of Pavel Schasky; here, you can see for yourself,” and Shorer bent over the document.
When he raised his head, he saw Michael’s smile. “We couldn’t have asked for anything better. It’s all here but the gas itself—all the chemistry,” said Michael, and he sank down on his chair, feeling tired and weak.
In a brown paper bag and in white envelopes they found foreign currency: Swiss francs, dollars, pounds sterling, and even Jordanian dinars. From another envelope Michael drew a string of bluish pearls with a diamond-studded clasp and held it in his hand, together with a pair of matching earrings. For a moment he sat there looking at them, and then Eli Bahar cried triumphantly: “Here it is!”
The will, signed by a notary, was in a separate envelope. Michael read through the concise document a few times, held it out to Shorer, and then dialed the black telephone and asked Tzilla to come into the room.
She stared at the will for a moment or two and gave it back to Michael. Her cheeks were flushed.
“This doesn’t leave us any choice,” said Eli Bahar, pushing his hand into his hair. “She can bring a lawyer if she likes.” And in an aggrieved tone: “I told you from the beginning that I didn’t like the look of her.”
Michael nodded at Tzilla, and she looked at him questioningly.
“Okay,” he said. “We have to locate her and then bring her in. Are you ready?”
Tzilla nodded vigorously, opened the door, and bumped into Manny Ezra.
“Where are you going?” he asked nervously, and looked behind him.
She looked past his shoulder and smiled pleasantly at the thin, bespectacled young man who came forward and stood in the doorway next to Manny Ezra.
He was wearing a police uniform, with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. “Illan Muallem, sir,” he said to Michael Ohayon as he handed him a letter.
“Why is he in uniform?” Eli asked Manny, and Manny stifled a snicker and said: “He thought that maybe we were strict here in the big city.”
Illan Muallem shifted his weight from foot to foot. “He’s from the Ofakim police,” explained Manny. “He’s our assistance from the Southern District.”
“Lucky Balilty’s not here; he would have eaten him alive,” said Eli Bahar, taking hold of the sergeant’s arm. “Come on, kid; we’ll organize you coffee and something to eat,” and he led him out of the room.
Michael turned to Manny, explained briefly how to set about checking all the purchases of carbon monoxide over the past month, and asked him to make a list.
“With him? With that Muallem?” asked Manny incredulously.
“I assume he knows how to talk on the telephone,” said Michael coldly, feeling a pang of pity for the humble figure in the ironed uniform.
When they had all left the room, Michael opened the cardboard file that had arrived from the forensics lab and leafed through the flimsy sheets of paper on which the poems were typed. Then he lit a cigarette and studied the forensics report that Tzilla had laid on his desk. The report stated the make of typewriter on which the poems had been typed and the kind of paper: “rice paper,” Michael read in Pnina’s neat handwriting. There were also notes on the flaws in certain letters, on the kind of ink used by the typist to vowel-point the poems by hand. A special note reported that Tirosh’s fingerprints had been found on the poetry typescripts, along with other prints, which had been blurred due to “careless handling by forensic staff.”
“A leaf flew up / fell / on my white shirt / then into darkness / slipped / in silence,” Michael read, and then went on carefully turning the pages, seeking some detail that would reveal the identity of the poet, and as he read, his embarrassment grew. It was impossible, he thought, simply impossible that the writer had not been aware of their banality.
With a certain enjoyment, he noted the comments in Tirosh’s handwriting, which he had learned to recognize during the several days. “Closed metaphor,” he had written next to the line “I didn’t know if I’d locked the door after you’d gone.” Although Michael knew that literary theory distinguished between the writer and the speaker in a text, he decided that the poems had been written by a woman. Turning the flimsy pages, he saw more comments by Tirosh, with elongated question marks and the words “no” and “not like that” in narrow, elongated letters. On one of the pages, within quotation marks, Tirosh had written, in red ink: “Not thus and not of this is it fit to write,” and Michael wondered whom the poet-professor was quoting. He remembered Klein’s appreciative words about Tirosh’s critical abilities and realized their validity. He also assumed from the nature of the comments that Tirosh knew the poet he was criticizing.
Balilty entered the room, puffing and panting as usual. “It’s a pity Shorer’s left already,” he said. “I’ve got something interesting for him, and for you too.”
“There’s no such thing as coincidence,” muttered Michael as he put the file down on his desk. “If Tirosh kept the record of his safe-deposit box in a file of poems, there has to be a reason for it.”
“If you say so,” said Balilty, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m not saying it’s impossible to find out who wrote those poems, but at the same time, a person can put something somewhere if someone comes suddenly into the room, and he doesn’t know that he’s going to be murdered soon either. But I’ll find out for you, don’t worry.”
It cost Balilty a serious effort to concentrate on what Michael was saying and to listen until he was finished. He took the cardboard file and looked at his boss, who drummed his fingers on the desk. Balilty licked his lips and tucked his shirttail into his belt with a characteristic gesture.
Michael had the impression that he had gained weight over the past few days: his be
lly seemed to stick out more than usual and peeped through his shirt. “What did you want to say?” asked Michael.
Balilty smiled smugly. “What’s the time now?” he asked rhetorically as he looked at his watch. “Only half past ten; not bad for half past ten, but I have to tell you the truth, I’ve got connections, and I didn’t start working on it today either, I smelled something fishy at once, but after you played me the tape of that professor of yours, I was sure, and luckily I got onto the right man.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Michael tensely, his mind on carbon monoxide.
Smiling triumphantly, Balilty replied: “About the gynecologist of that porcelain doll, what’s her name, Eisenstein.”
“What about her gynecologist?” asked Michael on cue.
And Balilty began with his usual opening: “Ask and I’ll tell you,” and grew graver as his story progressed. He mentioned the name of the gynecologist, threw out a couple of hints regarding the tortuous methods he had adopted “in order to avoid getting involved in the bureaucratic problems of medical confidentiality,” and waxed lyrical in praise of the medical secretary of said gynecologist, whose private clinic happened to be situated “right next door to my sister-in-law, my wife’s little sister, Amalia, I introduced you to her once, maybe you’ve forgotten.”
Michael hadn’t forgotten. Friday dinner at Balilty’s: his fat wife, her shy smile, the intelligence officer in a patriarchal pose at the head of the table, the candles burning in the corner, the spotless children, the statement: “Eat, eat, nobody in the world makes kubbeh like my wife,” the heat in the room, the heavy food, and Balilty’s sister-in-law, Amalia, young and shy, with her dark ponytail, brown eyes, and sweet smile, whom Balilty had tried desperately to fix up with Michael Ohayon. He even remembered her shy voice when she said: “I’ve heard so much about you from Danny.”
“I don’t know if I can use it without a court order lifting medical confidentiality,” he reflected aloud when Balilty had concluded his exposition, and Balilty flushed and protested: “What’s the matter? Have I ever given you incorrect information?”