by Batya Gur
Michael interrupted him: “So you knew what I was talking about when I asked you today about that tape?”
Klein looked at him guiltily and dropped his eyes. “Well, I didn’t really know, but I didn’t not know either. Before, this afternoon, I got into a bit of a panic for a while. You have to understand that during the conversation with Tirosh I was very tense. . . .” His voice trailed away.
“You were tense,” Michael repeated in the most neutral tone his dry throat was capable of producing.
“Well, I was afraid that everything was going to explode. I was too nervous to think of all the implications, as you called them before. In any case, he brought up the business with Mali, and he said—this bit I remember vividly—‘You look after me, and I’ll look after you.’ I asked him what he was getting at—it’s not that I didn’t ask, even though I was in a panic—and he said: ‘When it’s necessary for you to know, you’ll know, I promise you, and if Iddo speaks to you, tell me.’”
“In other words,” said Michael Ohayon, “you weren’t exactly overcome with grief when you saw Tirosh dead.”
“You know,” said Klein hesitantly, “I don’t expect you to believe me, but that’s not quite the way it was. I mean, I wasn’t really afraid, I don’t know why, but I felt sure that if he ever did bring things out into the open, I would be able to cope with the consequences.” He looked at Michael, who remained silent.
Again Klein cleared his throat and said in embarrassment: “Perhaps I even wanted it to come out, who knows? A human being is such a complicated creature. . . .”
“And you maintain that you didn’t kill him?” Michael suddenly shot at him, and Klein looked at him and crossed his arms. He shook his head several times and said in a serious voice, weighing every word: “No, of course not. I saw him on Thursday, and on Friday he was still alive. Besides, I don’t believe that you really think I had enough of a reason to do such a thing.”
“It was you yourself who just said that he destroyed everything, no?” asked Michael with suppressed anger. “And as for your claim that you didn’t see him again, we’ll have to check the time that you arrived in Rosh Pinna on Friday afternoon.”
“But I told you . . .” Klein began to protest, then fell silent. “Okay, I can’t really expect you to, but believe me: I couldn’t have hidden away on Mount Scopus, and there’s no way of getting into the campus without being seen. I didn’t set foot in the university until Sunday.”
“Are you positive that Iddo never left you a cassette?” Michael suddenly asked, after a brief silence.
Klein shook his head. “Of course I’m positive. I couldn’t have any possible reason for hiding it, and I promise you that I don’t know the first thing about whatever Iddo was threatening Shaul with, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“I want to clarify this point again,” said Michael, as if they were dealing with some scientific problem. “Were you afraid that Tirosh would blackmail you? That he would use his information about your double life?”
Klein shook his head firmly. “No, I wasn’t afraid. If you’d known Shaul you would understand.”
Michael waited for an explanation; Klein looked as if he was trying to formulate, to his own satisfaction, what he wanted to say.
“Listen,” he said slowly, “Shaul—how should I put it?—felt humiliated in advance; there was something that was bothering him. Perhaps he even wanted my help, though of course he was unable to put it into words. He was always humiliated in advance, in spite of his confident appearance, and his arrogance, and the . . . the information he discovered about me apparently wasn’t intended for external use, you can forget about blackmail or any melodramatic nonsense along those lines. It was intended for one thing only: his feeling of triumph over me, that I wasn’t perfect either, that I, too, had some blot on my copybook, some weakness. So he would feel less humiliated. I don’t know if you can understand this, if you’ve known people like that.”
The sky was already pale when Michael took Klein back to the conference room, after preparing him for the polygraph test. Then he sat in his office and began listening to the recorded conversation. The team meeting was to take place at eight o’clock, and Tzilla had already typed and organized the material. Michael was beyond exhaustion, anxious and tense in anticipation of the meeting, of the remarks his C.O. would make. He still had no idea who was telling the truth and who was lying, and in the midst of his confusion and uncertainty, a new anger at himself began to well up. You idiot, he said to himself almost aloud, with your fantasies about integrity and perfection, you suddenly seem to have arrived at a new morality.
He buried his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. So what? the inner voice continued, just because a man leads two lives, suddenly he’s got no integrity? What are you, king of the bourgeoisie? And what about Maya? Nevertheless, he felt a grievance against Klein, although he didn’t know exactly what it was. He suspected that it had nothing to do with the murder, or with the lie. It was his own very private lament that even Klein did not live an impeccable life, that even he was touched by something not completely clean. Why couldn’t anyone be simple and right, the way a person was supposed to be? he asked himself. Why? Not even one single person? And then Tzilla came into the room, with a cup of coffee and a fresh roll on a tray in her hands, and a green file under her arm.
17
So tell them we’ve got prints—it won’t be the first time. See what they say, how they react. You want me to draw you a pictore?” said Ariyeh Levy impatiently. “And Klein’s not getting out of here, definitely not before the polygraph. Every day there’s another lead—it’s enough to drive you crazy.” The subdistrict commander took a sip of coffee and everyone waited silently.
Michael was still tense because of the anticipated reactions to the business with Klein, but to his surprise, no one had made fun of him. But nobody knew about the lunch in his kitchen, he thought, about the feeling of friendship, the wish for closeness. Actually, he suddenly reminded himself, none of them would understand, anyway. The fact that he had a few sleepless nights behind him made him particularly vulnerable. Everything had surfaced during the meeting, including the heartbreak over Maya. “I want another meeting today, before you leave, and you can go and order the traveler’s checks now. The rest we can leave to Personnel. What do you say?” Michael said, and turned to Avidan, the departmental investigations officer, who nodded a few times.
At half past nine the same morning Ruchama Shai sat opposite him, blinking her eyes and looking belligerently at the tape recorder. “I’ve never heard it,” she said for the second time. “Never.”
“It’s a fact that we found your fingerprints on the cassette,” insisted Michael.
“Well,” she said, twisting her fingers, “I can’t explain it. I didn’t see Shaul after Thursday morning, and even then I only saw him in his office at the university, and I wasn’t with him in his car. I don’t know how to explain it.”
Michael removed the cassette from the tape player and put it on the desk in front of her.
A glint flickered in her eyes. “I’m not sure,” she said with a frightened look, “but I may have seen it before, I don’t remember where. Maybe in Shaul’s room, maybe at his house. I don’t remember. Maybe with Tuvia? No, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s the same cassette either, but it seems to me that I saw something like it—with Tuvia’s things perhaps, when I took the keys out of his briefcase? I saw a cassette somewhere, it did look like this one—it didn’t have anything written on it either.” She spoke in all innocence. Michael examined her face and realized that she herself didn’t understand the significance of what she was saying.
He asked himself how, if at all, the cassette had come into Tuvia Shai’s possession, and then, on a sudden hunch, he asked her: “Do you know when your husband met Iddo Dudai before he was murdered? Before the faculty meeting, I mean? Before Friday morning?”
Ruchama Shai examined her fingers, and then she said: “Well, they
met at the university too. They probably met every day.”
“Too?” Michael pounced. “What do you mean ‘too’?”
“After the departmental seminar on Wednesday night, Iddo came to our house. He wanted to talk to Tuvia, but I don’t know what they talked about, because I went to bed.” The words came out quickly, as if she refused to weigh their potential for help or harm.
Again Michael examined the childish face, the drooping mouth; he saw the puffiness under the eyes. He knew that she spent most of her time sleeping. All the fears, all the horrors of the past week were channeled into sleep. “To work and to sleep. No shopping, no cooking, no people, nothing! She behaves as if she’s very sick,” Alfandari had said, reporting the finding of the surveillance detail. “That’s how she’s been living for more than a week. Except for the sound of footsteps, you’d think there’s nobody alive in the house. They don’t talk to each other at all, and on the phone he only talks about work. Only he; nobody calls her up at all,” said Alfandari, describing what he had heard on tapes. Michael thought they were behaving like people who had lost the taste for life.
He remembered Ruchama’s words during one of the interrogations: “Once, before I met Shaul, I wasn’t even aware of the possibility of losing something. Now I know that I have nothing left to lose.”
Her face looked like an illustration of this statement: the face of a person without expectations, someone who had nothing left to lose.
After he dismissed her, Michael glanced at his diary. Sunday, the twenty-ninth of June. Tuvia Shai had asked for his “appointment” to be postponed to one o’clock. He had a conference hour, he explained politely to Tzilla.
Now Ruth Dudai was about to enter, and Michael had the distinct feeling that nothing was going to happen, that he had nothing more to learn about these people, with whose way of life, whose anxieties and miseries, he had become so familiar during the past week.
He could have predicted the nervous movement with which Ruth Dudai looked at her watch immediately, after entering the room. She complained, in the cultured tones he had come to know, that she was in a hurry, that she should have been at home already, that the sitter had to leave, that she hadn’t even been allowed to mourn properly.
Michael looked at the full face, the blue tricot dress exposing the round shoulders, the brown, intelligent, sad eyes behind the round glasses, and he remembered last Saturday, when he had knocked at her door with Uzi Rimon. The expression on her face had hardly changed during the days that had passed since she had been informed of her husband’s death. Her complexion was fresh. Despite the intelligent sadness in her eyes, there were no signs of sleeplessness. “I know you’ll say that not everybody reacts in the same way, that some people only break after a long time,” Balilty had commented doubtfully, “but that one is some tough cookie.” And at the team meeting he had reported on her surveillance: “There’s always some dame with a kid there; I think she’s moved in—some friend of hers from the army. Her parents have arrived in the country too; there are always people there. She’s never alone for a minute.”
Now she contemplated the cassette without touching it. She didn’t know, she said; it looked like the others. Iddo kept them with him; she couldn’t have touched it. She had no idea how her fingerprints came to be on it.
No, she didn’t know the voice that had quoted the line from Tirosh’s poem. “I told you,” she said wearily, “I’ve already told you a thousand times, that Iddo didn’t tell me anything about what he did in America. He came back completely crazy.”
She didn’t know what time, exactly, Iddo had come home after the departmental seminar. Late. She had awakened when he turned on the bedroom light.
“I didn’t ask him anything about anything. If I asked him any questions, he would answer impatiently and irritably, and I felt so guilty.” At this she burst into tears. “I was so glad when he went off to scuba dive; I thought he would get to relax. I thought he would calm down, that he would be more pleasant afterward, and besides”—she sniffed and took off her glasses—“there was the question of Shaul.”
Michael understood her embarrassed silence. He could hardly expect a woman in her position to recount how she had arranged, joyfully, to meet her lover when her husband was away from home. “And I wanted Iddo out of the house,” she continued, “because he was simply unbearable. And now I feel so guilty!”
She laid her head on her arms, folded on the table, and sobbed. Michael looked at her arms and neck, at the locks of hair escaping from the thick rubber band encircling her ponytail, at her skin, fresh as a baby’s, and thought that it wouldn’t take more than a couple of years for her to find someone to console her, that she wouldn’t be alone for long. He was unable to find a drop of pity for her in his heart.
“In the matter of the air tanks,” he said slowly, “was Tirosh ever there again, in the basement?”
“I’ve already told you. How many times do you have to ask? How am I supposed to know? Anyone can go in and out of the basement. He certainly didn’t say anything to me about it. And anyway, what are you trying to imply? That he tampered with the oxygen? What do you think, that he wanted me so much he was prepared to get rid of my husband? That’s simply absurd,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Apart from which,” she continued in a flash of illumination, “he died before Iddo, so how could he have—” And suddenly she fell silent. Then she said hesitantly: “What are you trying to say—that he went into the basement and filled the tanks before that? Why? Why would he have? The basement was open, that’s true, but I don’t know, one of the neighbors could have seen him, and anyway, why would he do it? Tell me why?”
Michael was about to tell her that all the neighbors had been questioned and none of them had seen anything, when the black telephone, the internal line, rang.
“We’ve got the list. And before you see Shai, I want to show you something,” said Raffi. “There’s something very peculiar here.”
“I’ve finished here,” Michael replied. “You can come in now.” Before he could say anything to her, Ruth Dudai dropped her wet tissues into the wastepaper basket underneath his desk and rose heavily and uncertainly to her feet.
Michael accompanied her to the door and peered outside. Tuvia Shai was sitting in the same posture as on the previous occasions, staring in front of him with a dead, apathetic look. At the end of the corridor, Raffi appeared, holding a cup of coffee in each hand and a cardboard file under his arm. He stepped nimbly into the room, and Michael closed the door behind him and looked at the thin file folder.
“Just like I said at the meeting this morning, we were close. He’s a character, that Muallem.”
“What’s the peculiar thing you found?” asked Michael, as he looked at the long list inside the brown file.
“See for yourself—it’s really weird,” said Alfandari, and sipped his coffee.
Obediently Michael ran his finger down the list of all the orders of carbon monoxide for the last month. Alfandari had arranged the list alphabetically and marked all the orders from Jerusalem in red. There were a few suppliers in the Tel Aviv area and others in Haifa and its environs. Marked in red, Michael noted, were orders for large cylinders from a private medical laboratory and from Shaarei Tzedek Hospital, and for two small cylinders of carbon monoxide gas from “Professor A. Klein, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.”
Alongside the name of the supplier was the date of order; it had been placed two weeks before Iddo Dudai’s death, when Klein was still in New York.
“How was it paid for?” asked Michael, gripping his coffee cup tightly.
“I drove to Tel Aviv this morning, without Muallem, to see the supplier in person,” said Alfandari, pushing back the fair lock of hair that was falling, as usual, onto his forehead. “He told me that the order had been paid for in advance by cash in the mail. The secretary remembered exactly, because usually they send a bill and are paid by check. But this time the customer sent money inside the letter that ordered the gas.
It was all in an ordinary envelope.”
“Where was it sent to?” asked Michael, and Raffi Alfandari replied: “To Professor A. Klein, care of the Hebrew Literature Department, Hebrew University. And I’ve already checked: it was a rather small parcel but not small enough to fit into his mailbox, so what they do in that case, the university, is put a note in the person’s mailbox, that there’s a parcel for him at the campus post office, and he goes to get it. But he was out of the country, of course, so I went to the post office and checked for that date, and a parcel did come for him, and somebody took it. But search me, I don’t know who it was—the signature was illegible, some foreign language.”
“Didn’t you talk to the post office clerk? Try to find out?”
“Of course. The clerk at the counter doesn’t remember; the ID number’s there, but she admits that she isn’t too strict about asking for the card and checking and so on, because everyone she sees works at the university. Well, from now on she’ll check. The number written there doesn’t belong to any of the people concerned.”
Michael drummed his fingers on the desk and thought aloud: “Since Klein was abroad, who knew that he was supposed to get a parcel? Who took the note out of his mailbox? Who was responsible for emptying it?”
“I don’t know,” said Alfandari. “Not that I didn’t try to find out, but the department secretary wasn’t there, and nobody else could tell me.”
“What about the girl who helps her?” asked Michael impatiently.
“She’s on leave, studying for her exams somewhere, at home maybe. You want me to look for her?”