by Batya Gur
“Because other people are involved too,” said Klein as if he had read his thoughts. “It’s not only me.”
Michael nodded but said nothing. Again he felt his confusion, his contradictory wishes. What could Klein’s secret be? He was dying to know.
“I met a woman I had to meet,” said Klein at last, clenching his lips. Then he added, almost in a whisper: “And that’s the reason I asked my mother to lie. I didn’t tell her what it was about.”
That’s all? You too? You old lecher, thought Michael in disappointment as he saw the arms crossing on the chest again.
“I’ll assume that she’s married,” he said.
The thick eyebrows rose. “Why should you assume that? She’s not married.”
“So why the secrecy?” asked Michael, confused. “On your own account?”
Klein’s face was very pale; its expression resembled the one Michael had seen the day, an eternity ago, when they both sat on the bench, in the so-called square, next to the mailboxes, after the discovery of Tirosh’s body. Michael wanted to return to the fraternity, equality, the wordless sympathy he had felt then; he wanted to go back to the lunch they had eaten together in Klein’s kitchen.
“In the end, yes, on my own account, although there are a lot of other people along the way.”
“How long were you with her?” asked Michael carefully.
“Until Friday afternoon. I left Jerusalem at half past two.”
Michael lit a cigarette. “And you say that you went there from the airport and you were there until the next day?” he asked, looking at the charred match he then placed in the ashtray filled with butts.
“Do you have to know everything?” asked Klein.
“Were you there the whole time?” insisted Michael.
“Since you’ve already come so far, there doesn’t seem to be any point in hiding anything.” Klein sighed. “Yes, all the time except for the two hours I spent with Shaul Tirosh, on Thursday evening.”
I don’t believe it! said Michael Ohayon to himself. I don’t believe it! How could I have slipped up so badly?
“Where?” he asked aloud. “Where did you meet him?”
“In a restaurant,” replied Klein. His voice was calm, his arms, too, had relaxed. Now his forearms were flat on the desk. At first his fingers were parted, then gradually, they came together.
“What restaurant?” asked Michael.
“That’s part of the story,” said Klein slowly, “and as I’ve already told you, it’s got nothing to do with—”
“Professor Klein!” Michael’s voice rose in angry impatience.
And only then did Klein tell him the whole story. He told it not like a someone who had been broken but as a man who had come to a decision. There was no need to ask any questions; he told him everything, down to the last detail.
“Give me the name and address, please,” said Michael at the end, and he carefully wrote down the lady’s name and her address. It seemed to him that he heard a door open in the corridor. They were on their way to bring her in, he knew, and it was already after midnight.
“How can a person hide a story like that for twelve years!” Balilty stopped the tape player and whistled. “And in Jerusalem!” And then he added: “I swear that if you’d given me one more day I would have ferreted it out. How old’s the kid? Five? I don’t understand it—how could the guy have gotten in so deep? And with three daughters at home? Maybe he planned it on purpose, to have a son from the other one? And you thought he was such a saint! A saint with a mistress!” He gulped down the rest of his coffee, shook his head, and sighed loudly. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and exclaimed in excitement: “Wait a minute—isn’t ‘Malka’ Mali Arditi? Mali from the restaurant? I don’t believe it!”
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Michael impatiently. “Who’s Mali?”
“Who’s Mali?! What a devil, what a devil!”
“Who?” asked Michael, staring curiously at Balilty. “Who . . . what? Tell me slowly.”
“You remember that time when we went, after that guy what’s-his-name’s trial, to that restaurant over there, next to that bar in Nahalat Shiva?” Michael nodded. “And it was shut,” said Balilty, “and we went somewhere else—where, I don’t remember. Never mind, it doesn’t matter; what matters is where we ended up. What matters is if she’s the one I think she is, then I just don’t believe it—that woman’s so terrific that I just don’t know. Wait till you see her, how terrific she is, but not only terrific from the point of view of gorgeous—she can cook! Boy, can she cook! You’ve never tasted anything like it,” said Balilty, and he passed the tip of his tongue over his lips with an expression of extraordinary gluttony. “She stuffs a carrot so even the carrot’s mother wouldn’t recognize it, and the way she spices zucchini, and if you give her some meat, what she does with a piece of lamb! And she’s Klein’s mistress? I don’t believe it! So maybe it’s not her,” he said hopefully, and went back to listening to the tape.
Klein was put in the conference room, with Manny Ezra to watch him. Balilty listened to the tape again. They were waiting for Eli Bahar, who had gone to bring her in.
“First of all,” said Michael when she was sitting opposite him in his office, “I’d like the details.”
Mali Arditi looked at him with a smile that lit up the whole room, and then a clear, uninhibited laugh which shook her full, round shoulders—later described by Balilty with the words “There’s something to take hold of there”—and her large breasts. Then she pulled up a strap of her dress, a stringlike band that had slipped off her shoulder. “A strawberry-blond doll,” Balilty had said, and that was an understatement, thought Michael as he looked at the thick auburn curls, which she now gathered into a twist as she went on laughing. She belonged to the rare breed of redheads whose skin was free of freckles. The exposed skin at the top of her breasts and on her arms was smooth and dark—“mocha mousse,” said Balilty when he saw her at the end of the corridor. “That sonofabitch Klein, how did he do it?”
“I’m not angry anymore; it doesn’t last long with me, anger. Dragging a person out of bed at this hour of the night! . . . What do you mean, the details? You’ll have to tell me what you want, sugar.”
Michael was stunned. He tried to ignore the overt sexuality, which couldn’t be called vulgar. She looked at him with an amused expression and smoothed her cheek with a broad, white-nailed hand. He had the distinct impression that if they had met under different circumstances she would have made short work of him. In his wildest dreams he couldn’t imagine this woman waiting faithfully for Klein, crying into her pillow at night when he didn’t arrive, doing all the things done by his image of “the other woman.” This woman didn’t belong to anyone.
“When did he arrive at your place?”
“I’ll tell you exactly, just a minute.” He looked at her neck as she raised her head to the ceiling and knitted her arched eyebrows, which were a little too thin for the big face. Their color, too, was auburn, like her hair. Michael followed the movement of her hand, which came to rest on her ample décolletage. “It was on Thursday, Thursday at about four o’clock.”
“And when did he leave you?”
“He left on Friday. We went to get the kid from his friend’s house, and at half past two he brought us home and drove to his mother’s.” “And between Thursday and Friday he didn’t go out of the house?”
“You’re cute.” And again that pealing laughter, which sounded completely crazy in his office in the Russian Compound. She doesn’t belong here, he thought, but he looked at her poker-faced, or so, at any rate, he hoped. “So uptight. Why do you take everything so seriously?” And then her face grew grave, as if she had decided to “get down to business,” and her brown eyes, almond shaped and full of life, looked at him with a stern expression as she said: “He wasn’t out of my sight the whole day and night. And we didn’t coordinate our stories, if that’s what you think. He met somebody, but that was in the restaurant. I open
ed the restaurant for them and they sat there, the two of them, because I didn’t want the other guy in the house. My flat’s above the restaurant. You know where it is?”
“And who was the man?” asked Michael, and offered her his pack of cigarettes. She took a cigarette, looked at it absentmindedly, and leaned forward for him to light it.
“You’ll have to ask him that, sweetie; we don’t talk about each other’s lives. We never have and we’re not about to start now. You heard the man: he told me to tell you where he was, that’s all, not who he was with.”
Michael saw in his mind’s eye the scene that had shocked him earlier, the voluptuous redhead in the conference room, gazing at Klein with a look full of sympathy and understanding. “Tell him where I was,” Klein had said in his presence, and then she had smiled for the first time, an intimate, understanding smile, after raging all the way there, according to Eli Bahar.
Now she signed a copy of her statement and agreed without any hesitation to undergo a polygraph test. Then she was taken home. Klein remained in the conference room.
“I know her,” said Manny Ezra. “She lives next door to my sister-in-law’s sister. She’s got a little restaurant in Nahalat Shiva; they specialize in stuffed vegetables; she inherited it from her parents. She’s a real character—doesn’t give a damn about anything. The check you get has nothing to do with the menu—she makes people pay whatever she feels like. And she opens the restaurant whenever she feels like. I’ve eaten there. What can I tell you? One thing’s sure—she knows how to cook. Where did he pick her up? And the kid, is it his?”
“Apparently,” said Michael thoughtfully.
“How did he do it? I want to understand, how did he do it?” protested Balilty.
“Wonders will never cease,” said Michael Ohayon, who was preoccupied by the very same question.
“Should I bring him here?” Manny asked, and glanced at his watch. “Eli’s talking to him now. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Do you want him now?”
“Yes,” said Michael. “Bring him here. I need the material for the meeting in the morning.”
The building was surrounded by silence. He stood at the window and stared into the darkness. There were lights on in all the offices, and he could hear a typewriter somewhere. The air now was damper, but it was still hot. Klein was led into the room and Manny closed the door behind him silently.
“Now you know,” said Klein gloomily.
“She didn’t want to talk, your lady friend, about the man you met, until you asked her to. Did she sit with you? Listen to your conversation?”
“Mali hears what she wants to hear and knows what she wants to know. The best thing about her is her total ability to live and let live. In exchange, all she asks is to be allowed to live too. I’ve no idea what she heard. She was in the kitchen. There’s a window between the kitchen and the restaurant. It was closed, I think, but if you make an effort you can hear,” said Klein.
“She’s coming in tomorrow to take a polygraph test. Are you prepared to tell her to talk about your meeting with Tirosh?”
“I’m prepared to ask her—you can’t exactly ‘tell her’ to do anything.”
“Let’s return to that meeting. Who initiated it?”
“I did,” said Klein hoarsely.
“I want to understand. You come back to the country after nearly a year abroad, you go to see your . . . son and his mother, and you make an appointment with Tirosh?” And tell me that it has nothing to do with the murder, thought Michael angrily.
Klein shook his head. “I’ll explain everything. But I want you to promise me that what I tell you won’t leave this building. Because I’ve already realized that it can’t remain just between the two of us.”
“If you had told me in the beginning, it could have; if you had told me of your own free will,” said Michael bitterly.
“You have to understand my side of it too,” pleaded Klein. “It’s not exactly the way you see it.” They both sat in silence, and Michael struggled between his tremendous curiosity to know how Klein had ended up in this situation, living this double life, and his knowledge that it had nothing to do with the investigation—not to mention his wish to let Klein go on stewing in his embarrassment, as well as his wish to be close to him and at the same time fulfill the need to keep his distance, to maintain his reserve and superiority.
“My relationship with Mali goes deep, and naturally I love her and the child. It’s not some little extracurricular affair.”
“How old is the boy?” asked Michael in a cold, businesslike tone.
“Five”—Klein sighed, averting his eyes—“and he has another family, which wouldn’t be able to accept the situation.”
Michael tilted his head to one side and looked at Klein, who shifted his weight uneasily in the chair and then said: “You’re ignoring the fact that all this could be extremely destructive. My wife’s not made to cope with this kind of thing; it would devastate her. She wouldn’t be able to understand that it’s possible to live two separate lives, without the one negating the other. There’s no need to see everything in such uncompromising colors,” said Klein despairingly.
Michael sternly suppressed the urge to ask for an explanation of the “two separate lives.” He still didn’t know how he felt about Klein, he couldn’t isolate the sense of disappointment. Inside him there was a vortex of emotions, dominated by the suspicion that had come into being after the complete trust he had felt for Klein had been betrayed. He remembered that he had tried to ignore the results of Klein’s polygraph, and he felt like a fool. He didn’t really know him, he said to himself, nothing was what he had imagined, nothing apparently fitted his idea of the man. But only apparently, he knew in the depths of his heart; in fact everything fitted perfectly. What was it he had said, Klein, about integrity? Perfection? It was a long time ago, actually it was that very afternoon—what had he said? That people weren’t perfect? Only art attained perfection, that’s what he said, thought Michael, and what I have to do is stick to the matter at hand, to the facts, and to stop philosophizing. “What, exactly, happened with Tirosh?” he asked after strenuously silencing the inner voices.
“It’s quite simple to explain,” said Klein, “but it isn’t easy for me to expose myself. You understand,” he said, and leaned forward, “I’ve been keeping the affair with Mali a secret for years. Nobody knows, not even the child.” He looked around him in embarrassment. “He doesn’t know that I’m his father. I’ve never spoken about her; there are only a few people who know that there’s anything between us, and nobody knows the real nature of the relationship. My wife has never met her. There are people who go with me to eat at her restaurant sometimes. That’s how I met her. Tirosh took me there the first time, and later on he found out.”
“Found out?” repeated Michael. “When did he find out?”
“I don’t know when, and I don’t know how. All I can tell you is that he never spoke to Mali; he didn’t find out from her. It had to have been before I left for America. From what I understand today, he might even have used a private detective. He would have had his work cut out for him, because we don’t meet on a regular basis, Mali and I, and we’re always very careful. Or so I thought.”
“How do you know? How did you know?” asked Michael.
But Klein ignored the repeated question, as if he did not comprehend its significance. “Just before my return, I received a letter from him. To his credit, he sent it to the department, to Columbia University, and not to our home address. The letter hinted clearly that he knew. He was always looking for another side of me, for ‘subterranean currents,’ as he called them. You see, my way of life drove him wild, because it never occurred to him that there were any cracks in it; he imagined it as other than it really was.”
“Do you have the letter?” asked Michael, knowing in advance what the answer would be.
“No, of course not. I tore it to shreds as soon as I’d read it. You don’t keep such things.”
No, thought Michael. I wouldn’t have kept it either. And aloud he said: “But you remember what was written?”
“Of course I remember,” replied Klein, and wiped his brow. “It invited me, in a would-be witty vein, to meet him tête-à-tête as soon as I returned, ‘in view of information shedding a new light’ on my character. I remember the expression. Naturally, I was furious and also worried. Shaul wasn’t exactly the soul of discretion. But I hoped that nobody would believe his story if he told it.”
“What did he want of you?”
“I asked myself the same thing,” said Klein, his face twisting in anger. “When I read the letter I thought it was only jealousy, or a feeling of triumph over my bourgeois way of life, as he called it. But after we met, or during the conversation itself, I sensed that there was something else behind it.”
“Tell me again, from the beginning,” said Michael, not for the first time that night, though he couldn’t remember when he had said it first or to whom. “What did he say to you?”
Suddenly Klein looked very tired. On his full face Michael saw wrinkles he had not noticed before. His skin had a yellowish tinge, or perhaps it was the fluorescent light, thought Michael. He remembered the man’s confident, reassuring voice when he had spoken to his wife on the telephone a few hours earlier.
“Now I see again how he succeeded in destroying everything around him,” said Klein reflectively. “Destroying everything—he was always good at that. I have no idea what he wanted. As usual, he beat around the bush; he was an expert at innuendo. He talked about Iddo. He kept asking me what Iddo had said to me when he visited us in America. I told him that Iddo had undergone some kind of crisis, that something had happened to him, I didn’t know what it was. He kept coming back to it. Then he asked me if Iddo had left me anything in writing. I asked him what he meant by ‘left me anything’ and why he didn’t go to Iddo and ask him himself. But he spoke obscurely about ‘something for safekeeping,’ if Iddo had left me something for safekeeping, and then he asked me if I had seen the cassette—”