Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  After Nita had fed Ido, who woke up as soon as the van Geldens arrived, she buried her face in her son’s neck. She smiled at him as she changed his diaper. Michael had offered to do it for her, but she only shook her head stubbornly. She had laid her face on Ido’s chubby chest and murmured to him. At last she put him in his crib, and she down on the sofa, where she remained quietly, hugging her knees to her body. For Michael, staying here now with her and her brothers was the most natural thing in the world. He had spent many hours of his life with people mourning murder victims, had listened to their conversations, asked them questions. But this time it was different. Not only because he couldn’t ask about anything, but also because Nita was so very close and yet so far away.

  “It’s not certain that it was an ordinary robbery,” Gabriel corrected his brother. “It could have been somebody only after the painting. You heard what that policeman said.”

  Michael wanted to ask what the policeman had said, but there was no need to, because Theo, who couldn’t stop talking, just as he couldn’t stop pacing from wall to wall, stopped at the French windows and looked outside at the mist-covered hills and muttered: “I heard what he said. But that’s only speculation. They stole all the money, all the dollars and the guilder that are missing from where he kept them. And they turned the whole house upside down and took all the papers and jewelry. How does he know, that policeman, that man who asked us, us where we were before the concert.”

  “Do me a favor, Theo,” said Gabriel, “put those keys away. I can’t stand the noise anymore.”

  Theo took his hand out of his pocket and threw down the small bunch of keys he had been incessantly rattling. The conductor was still wearing his tuxedo trousers, but he had taken off the jacket. His gold-rimmed mother-of-pearl cuff links gleamed as he stood under the lamp and waved his hand. He resumed his pacing in the corridor, glanced into Ido’s room, and said something about how lucky babies were to sleep through everything. Then he continued to pace in the living room.

  “It’s not just speculation. The woman from the forensics laboratory said that whoever removed the canvas from the frame was an experienced professional,” said Gabriel. He put his hand on his right eyelid, which was twitching uncontrollably. The green stone set in the last coil of his gold ring glittered. Only now, looking closely, did Michael recognize the shape of a snake.

  “So it was all because of that painting. I’ve always hated it,” declared Theo, and again stared out though the French windows. “At least you’ve got a good view here in this stupid place!” he said to Nita, who sat curled up in the corner of the sofa and didn’t say a word. “I’ve always hated it because, in the first place, I don’t like all that Vanitas business with those skulls. They’re always making a fuss about that memento mori of theirs, as if anyone can forget that we’re going to die. I hate that symbolism, even though the picture itself is a fine one.” He took off his glasses and put them down on the copper serving table. Nita leaned her face on her raised knees. “Remember how we all flew to Amsterdam for Gabi’s bar mitzvah,” Theo said, “and saw the big version in the Rijksmuseum?”

  Gabriel rubbed his eyes, tugged at his beard, buried his face in his hands, and was silent. Nita raised her head and stared as if nothing had been said. “You don’t remember any of it, you were only three,” Gabi now said gently to her.

  Again Michael wondered why he remained standing here at the kitchen door. If he wasn’t superfluous here now, with all of them here together? Having seen Nita taking care of Ido, he knew he could safely leave. In a few hours the babysitter would come, and then he would leave the baby here and routinely go to work at police headquarters in the Russian Compound. Once he was there he would be able to find out from Tzilla how much Balilty already knew. He quickly put a stop to this train of thought, reminding himself that it was Nita he had to worry about now, if only because he was obliged to her. As for the baby, he’d have to wait and see. Twice he had asked her quietly—as they were standing side by side at the changing table in Ido’s room and he was watching her hands stroking Ido’s body and her fingers fluttering over his face—if she wanted him to stay or if she preferred that he leave. In that dead, hollow voice, she twice said that she would like him to stay. “If you can,” she added in a panic in case she had demanded too much. It was this panic that, if only for a moment, had brought her voice to life. Michael again saw that her regard for the convenience of others, the need to take it into consideration, which was the main sign of life in her as well as the only way to take her out of herself, was exhausting. It was too soon to insist on anything now.

  It was clear to him that her father’s death, and especially the manner of it, would sabotage what had seemed the beginning of a healing process. He felt he had brought it about by his presence, to his great satisfaction. A great fear threatened to engulf him again when he thought about her collapsing in the next few days. The shadow of Nurse Nehama’s all-knowing smile hovered over them as they stood at the changing table. But Michael pushed the threatening shadows roughly aside. He told himself firmly to take things as they came. He couldn’t do otherwise. It was said that a baby sensed its mother’s emotions in the womb. Did this baby girl already understand that Michael was the main figure in her life now? Could she sense how tenuous his world was? He held the baby tightly in his arms. She squirmed. He looked into the smooth face, pink with sleep. For a moment she looked to him utterly secure in his arms. He almost said to her, I won’t let anything happen to you. But the next moment, while she was still in his arms, he found himself engulfed by doubts.

  “That trip for your bar mitzvah was quite ghastly,” said Theo with a dreamy expression. “They dragged us from one museum to another, in Vienna and Amsterdam and Paris. Father did it for himself and for you. I wasn’t interested in such stuff then . . . and Nita was only a toddler.” He glanced at her, and she again buried her face in her knees.

  When she entered the apartment, over an hour ago, she had run straight to the babies’ room, stood next to Ido’s bed—Michael followed her and stood in the doorway—and then hurried to the bedroom, threw off her high-heeled shoes, shut the door behind her, and emerged in a wide, floral skirt and a black sweatshirt. Now the skirt was spread out around her, hiding the contours of her body. Only when she hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in them did her thinness become apparent again. Suddenly he longed to sit down next to her and put his arms around her. Only yesterday there had been a dimple in her cheek and a mischievous gleam in her eyes, and he had succeeded easily in making her laugh wholeheartedly. It seemed to him that he had made her really happy, and this thought had given him profound satisfaction in the past few days. Not many hours had passed since, on their way to the concert, he had said to her: “I’ve decided that I want you to be happy. I want you very much to be happy, and I know that you will be.” And she had given him an innocent, serious, trusting look.

  Jerusalem’s early-morning cold wind suddenly blew in through the French windows, giving rise to the illusion that autumn had already begun, although Michael could feel in his bones the heat still to come. “Oh, how miserable I was then!” Theo sighed. “And all because of Dora Zackheim, who wasn’t at all pleased with me, only with you, Gabi, remember? But it was because of her that we went on that trip. She said that we needed not only music but also more general knowledge and a bit of normal life. It was part of her philosophy, as if there was any chance of our having a normal life . . .” He stopped talking and took a deep, noisy breath. “And when we came back I didn’t go back to my violin lessons with her. It was only much later, years later, that I suspected that this had been her elegant way of getting me to quit. But even then I suspected, without knowing it, that she had given up on me. I don’t know myself why I left her. But you, Gabi, didn’t understand it. She really loved you.” Gabriel shifted in his wicker chair, as if he couldn’t find the right position, and he rubbed his eyes. “But I saw that painting in the Rijksmuseum,” continued Theo, �
��and I still remember it well, presumably because of the picture we had hanging at home.”

  Michael cleared his throat, which required it after his prolonged silence, and asked apologetically: “Was your painting a copy? I don’t understand, if it was in Amsterdam, how did your father come to have it?”

  “The painting in our father’s house,” said Gabriel, taking his hands away from his face, “was one of three preparatory studies van Steenwijk did for the big one in the Rijksmuseum. They’re also oils.”

  Theo, who had taken hardly any notice of Michael up to now, leaned against the bookshelf and looked out the French windows as he said: “I don’t know if you’re familiar with this genre of Vanitas still lifes. It was a popular subject with seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painters. Van Steenwijk was a contemporary of Vermeer’s. Not great like Vermeer, but great enough. The art experts rate him in the second or third rank below Vermeer. His paintings have something like the Vermeer light, that soft, yellowish light. Only Vermeer never painted a Vanitas.”

  “You didn’t answer his question,” Gabriel remarked. “He asked about the painting we had at home.”

  “The big painting, the one in the Rijksmuseum, is a still life, like all ‘Vanitas’ paintings. As far as I can remember, there’s a flute, books, fruit, a medallion, and—”

  “And a skull. There’s a skull on the pile of books,” continued Gabriel. “A skull instead of a fly or a worm.”

  “What fly?” said Theo, alarmed.

  “Well, in Vanitas paintings there’s often, let’s say, a bowl of perfect fruit, or a vase of flowers in all the colors of the rainbow, but there’s always a fly or two hovering, or a worm emerging from some perfect piece of fruit, so that you won’t forget that everything is about to rot, to die.”

  “I hate it,” said Theo with a shudder. “I hate it!” He shuddered again and hugged himself. “In any event,” he said, turning to Michael, his left arm still holding his right shoulder, “there are three paintings he did before the big one. Studies of details of the big painting. They’re smaller but also oils. It’s known that there are only these three, and that they form a series. Ours has been in the family for generations, since Father’s grandfather, I think. Father liked to tell us that it’s thanks to the sales logs they kept in those days that we know so much about Rembrandt’s and other painters’ financial situations. Thanks to that, too, we know that there were these three studies. And that all of them contained various details from the big painting, from different angles,” he explained, waving his arm in a sweeping gesture. “Two of them were bought by a Scottish nobleman on a buying trip in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In those days people would travel to Italy and Holland to buy up paintings from impoverished aristocratic families, all kinds of counts and dukes who didn’t have enough to eat. Our picture contains the bit with the flute on one side and the skull on the pile of books on the other. It’s quite a small painting.” Theo held his hands about twenty centimeters apart. “The other two are owned by a collector in Scotland,” he added. “Gabi loved that painting, didn’t you, Gabi? You felt the closest to it.” A gleam of intimacy appeared in Theo’s eyes as he looked at his brother.

  “They removed the picture from the frame,” said Gabriel dully, looking down at the carpet. To Michael it seemed that he was talking to him. “It was someone who knows about paintings, who knows how much it’s worth, who knew everything in advance. I just don’t understand why the break-in didn’t occur when he was out. Why did they have to do it precisely when he was at home? It could have been done while he was at the dentist.”

  “That character, that policeman, what’s his name, Bality?” said Theo, making a face.

  “Balilty,” Michael corrected him and, until he thought better of it, was about to explain the gap between Danny Balilty’s appearance and behavior and his talents. Why should he care what Theo thought about Danny?

  “I don’t want us to sit shiva,” said Theo suddenly. “I hate it, with all those condolence visitors, and I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to stop working now. They’re not going to force me to cancel engagements. What do you say?”

  Nita didn’t react. She didn’t even turn to look at him. But Gabriel raised his face, looked at Theo, and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t care,” he said finally. “What difference does it make?”

  “Father hated religion and the religious. He wouldn’t have wanted it. He was an atheist and he couldn’t stand all those rituals,” argued Theo.

  “But we sat shiva for Mother,” said Gabriel in a muffled voice through his hands, which again covered his face. He sniffled.

  Theo looked at him: “We sat shiva for Mother because she wasn’t so anti-religious. And in order to be together with Father, so he wouldn’t be alone.” There was a silence. Theo, who couldn’t tolerate it, looked at Nita, who continued to sit completely frozen in the corner of the sofa. “You should go and lie down for a bit, you’re completely exhausted,” he said. She shivered but shook her head. “You tell her, Gabi,” said Theo, “you’ve got more influence over her than I have.”

  Gabriel looked at Nita, and Michael followed his look. Her face was very white and she was trembling incessantly in her folded legs and in the arms that hugged them tightly to her. The semicircles under her eyes were darker than usual. And her eyes were blurred-looking, as they had been the first time he met her. Her hair was mussed, as if she had stuck her fingers into her curls and pulled them sideways. How strange it was, the urge that never left him to sit down close to her and put his arms around her. But for the presence of her brothers, he would probably have done so. It wasn’t even two weeks since they had met, and he was already so enmeshed in her life. It was strange to be so close to a woman and yet so far from her.

  “She’ll collapse, and we’ve still got a long way to go,” Theo warned Gabi. “Aside from the concerts we’re not going to cancel, we’ll have to be talking to that policeman who keeps on remembering new things to ask about—”

  From Ido’s room there came a loud scream. The baby girl had awakened, and Michael got up to feed her. Ido stirred in his crib. Michael calculated how much longer he would go on sleeping. He wondered whether Nita would be able to take care of him. Soon the babysitter would arrive, and he would ask her to take the baby boy outside. But Nita wouldn’t be able to practice today in the fog of paralysis that had descended on her. He returned to the living room.

  “This wouldn’t have happened if he’d sold it to that crazy Scotsman five years ago. No one would have given him more for it,” Theo van Gelden was saying.

  “He didn’t need the money. It was property, an investment,” said Gabriel.

  Michael wanted to hear more about the Scotsman and about the offer for the painting, but he didn’t dare ask. He was trying to stay in the background, wanted, as much as possible, to erase the fact that he himself was a policeman. As if erasing that would also conceal the story of the baby. But suddenly Theo looked at him and, as if he had read his thoughts, said: “Nita says that you’re a big shot in the police. Maybe you can do something.”

  “Like what?” asked Michael carefully. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Do I know? Hurry up the investigation, get them off our backs, tell that guy to leave us alone. He wants me not to leave the country for the immediate future. I have three concerts with the Tokyo Philharmonic two weeks from now. Do you think he’ll let me go before then? How can I cancel something like that? Do you think the Japanese would understand? The engagement was scheduled two years ago. It’ll be my second appearance in Japan.”

  “Danny Balilty’s a good man,” said Michael. “You’re mistaken about him. He’s a serious person. Even if he talks a little too much,” he added quickly.

  “Who could have imagined it?” lamented Theo. “How many times did I tell him to sell to the Scotsman. And every time he said no way. That pitiful Scotsman never stopped phoning, and he came to see Father twice.” He turned to
Michael, as if he saw him as his only potential audience. “The Scotsman is a likable fellow. His great-great-grandfather bought the other two van Steenwijk studies in 1820, which is apparently when our own great-great-grandfather bought Father’s painting. So it’s been in our family for generations. The Scotsman has two of the three, and he wants to complete the series. He offered Father over half a million dollars, more than he was offered by the Stedelijk Museum in Leiden. But Father refused to sell.”

  “Why are we only talking about the painting?” asked Gabriel. “The money and the jewelry are also missing. Why are you so sure it was because of the painting?”

  “But you yourself said only a minute ago—”

  “So what?” Gabriel responded angrily. “I’ve had second thoughts. Not that it makes any difference.”

  “That guy—Balilty?” said Theo to Michael. “He said that the other stolen things seemed less important to him. But he doesn’t know how much money there was there, and neither do we know exactly. We only know where it was.” Again he looked at Michael and said: “Father didn’t believe in banks. Because of the Feuchtwanger bank’s failure. You remember that, don’t you?” Michael nodded faintly, and out of the corner of his eye glanced at Nita. She looked as if she hadn’t heard a word. He wouldn’t be able to count on her any longer. That was becoming increasingly clear, but he mustn’t panic. He would have to wait and see what happened. In the meantime he had better listen to what Theo was saying: “Because he lost all the money he had at Feuchtwanger, he began keeping foreign currency at home. He had a hiding place, more than one. It was a lot of money, and I knew where it was—he showed me. And Nita, too.” He turned to Gabriel. “What about you? Did he show you, too?”