by Batya Gur
“If you like, I’ll phone Spiegel,” said Gabriel, “and find out what the legal position is as far as . . .” Suddenly the doorbell rang. Gabriel fell silent.
“Is it the press?” asked Theo, alarmed. “Are the reporters descending on us now?”
“Why are you talking about reporters?” said Gabriel dismissively. “Nobody knows we’re here. That’s the reason we came here. Nita isn’t a media personality like you, or even like me.” Again the doorbell rang.
“Do you think they know already?” asked Theo, with the same alarm.
“What do I care? They won’t come here. And if they do, we won’t talk to them. They can’t force us. They wouldn’t expect even you to cooperate and be nice to them at a time like this,” Gabriel added bitterly.
Michael looked at Nita. She looked back at him imploringly. He went and opened the door to the babysitter and saw her wide face under the babushka as she looked around in confusion at the scene that greeted her eyes: Nita on the corner of the little sofa, Gabriel in the wicker armchair, and Theo, who had stopped pacing in the middle of the room, a sunbeam catching the black satin stripe on his trousers. Michael accompanied the babysitter to the babies’ room and told her what had happened. He looked at the stunned confusion on the woman’s face, and at her roughened fingers fumbling with her babushka. He waited for her to sigh and say: “Poor things. Poor things. Poor things.” Completely detached, he looked at her as she wiped her eyes, which were often inflamed. She was a simple woman whose face always lit up with joy when she held a baby in her arms. Now, too, as she bent over the cradle and peeped at the baby girl, her lips murmured unintelligible sounds that reminded him of his grandmother’s blessings and oaths, and a faint flush covered her cheeks. She rested her arms on the railing of Ido’s crib, her gold bangles tinkling. Ido opened his eyes. She held out her arms, and a moment later she was holding him fast against her broad bosom, her cheek against his and her face beaming. Michael asked her to stay overtime and to take Ido out for a longer time than usual. She nodded willingly, murmured “Poor things. Poor little things,” and laid Ido on the table to change his diaper. “Of course we won’t leave them alone. And the little one?” she asked as she stood over Ido, her reddened hand on his stomach as he kicked and tried to turn over. “What should I do with the little one?”
The phone rang a few times. Nita called to him. “Is it true?” asked Tzilla at the other end. “I heard it on the news. Nita says it’s so. Is it true?” Michael said it was. “How are you coping? What now?” she asked with reserve.
“We’re coping,” said Michael quietly, sensing three pairs of eyes fixed on his back. “I have to talk to you,” he added in a warning tone, and he looked at his watch. “I’ll be on my way in ten minutes.”
“Say something,” said Theo to Nita after Michael put the phone down. She shrugged her shoulders.
“It’s too soon, Theo,” said Gabriel.
“I feel responsible. Up to now Father’s supported her. The whole of this last year she hasn’t been teaching. And that schmuck isn’t going to suddenly start supporting her now, when the child’s . . . How old is he now, Nita?”
“Nearly six months,” said Gabriel. “You’ve got so many children of your own, you don’t know the first thing about your sister’s child.”
“That’s not true,” Theo flared up. “You have no right to say anything about my relationship with Nita and the child.”
“Gabi,” pleaded Nita, “stop it. He just hasn’t been in the country a lot in the past year, but he phoned often. I know that if I’d needed anything he would immediately have given me whatever I asked for. There are worse people than him, believe me.” Her lips tightened.
Theo’s eyes softened. “That goes for you, too,” said Nita to Gabriel, who now stood up. “Without the two of you and . . . without him,” she said, looking at Michael, “I wouldn’t have—”
“She doesn’t have many friends,” said Gabriel apologetically, looking into Michael’s eyes. “Nita didn’t grow up here in the normal way. She studied in New York, and her best friend lives in Paris. That’s how it goes with successful, gifted musicians. A lot of acquaintances, but not many close friends. It’s the same with my brother and me. We’re not really rooted here. We only look like local heroes,” he said with a chuckle. “We’re actually complete cosmopolitans. Ask Nita. When she was small, maybe about five, she already had a little cello. She longed to be like all the other children, but she never felt like one of them. And she was born here!”
“Nita’s told us about your baby,” said Theo. “It’s a strange story.” He looked at him curiously. “It’s like a fairy tale . . . Strange, a baby. My children are grown.”
Gabriel gave him a skeptical look.
“It’s true that their mothers brought them up,” he said apologetically. “But it’s a nice story. Nita’s told us about the way the two of you have arranged things,” he said, coughing with embarrassment. “Gabi doesn’t have any children,” he suddenly announced, as if this explained something. “He’s more attached to Nita’s baby than I am,” he admitted with effort. Nita stood close to the door that opened into the living room. “Nita is the common denominator,” added Theo with a half smile. “Our father, too, he loved Nita more than the rest of us, except maybe for our mother. And Gabi, too.” He kept pacing as he talked. Now he was standing close to Nita, and he looked at her affectionately and rumpled her hair. “Are you going to work now?” he asked Michael.
Michael nodded and seized the door handle. “Do you want the little one to stay here with Aliza?” Michael asked Nita. “I could take Aliza and the babies to her house, if that would suit you better.”
“Whatever you say. You decide.”
“Maybe you could talk to that—what’s his name, Balilty?” asked Theo.
“Leave him alone, Theo. It’s better if they don’t know about my connection with him,” said Nita warningly.
“Whatever you say,” said Theo, raising his arms and spreading them. “What will be, will be.”
4
The Way of the World Makes Sense
What, you’ve never been on a case like this?” said Balilty, surprised. “I was sure you were on the case of the clocks that were stolen from the Islamic Museum. Never mind, look at this.” He picked up a padded yellow envelope and took out some photographs, shuffled through them rapidly as if they were a deck of cards, and put two before Michael Ohayon, who examined the façade of a large, imposing apartment building with bronze handles on its great doors and a broad sidewalk in front of it. “That’s somewhere abroad, in Europe,” he guessed. “Switzerland?”
“Zurich,” said Balilty. The other photograph was of an interior, showing mailboxes, and a row of doorbells with the names of the tenants visible. One name was circled in red.
Balilty breathed heavily as he leaned over the photograph from the other side of the desk, pushing his paunch against the metal frame. They were in the small office that until recently had been used by the secretary of Emanuel Shorer, chief of the Department of Investigations and Crime Fighting, an office that had once been Michael’s. A plastered wall separated this room, now Balilty’s, from the one allocated to Michael on his return from his study leave. Michael wondered how he would ever be able to keep anything from Intelligence Office Balilty’s sharp senses at such close quarters. Although the wall provided good insulation against noise, and Michael couldn’t even hear Balilty’s telephone ringing, the physical proximity increased his sense of being besieged, that his life would now be an open book and that Balilty, and after him everyone else, would be able to rummage in it whenever he felt like it.
“Here, a place like this for instance, what do you think is in there?” asked Balilty, leaning back in his chair. “On the face of it, what do we have here? An art gallery. Solid, respectable, legal, a corporation representing artists and agents. Do you want to look at paintings you might buy? All you have to do is phone and make an appointment. Nobody gets in here w
ithout an appointment. They seat you in a big, empty room. Maybe it has a chair and an armchair and a large easel to hold the painting on view. You sit down in comfort, maybe they even give you a cup of tea or coffee, or a drink, and, just like that, you’re a client.” He took a toothpick out of his shirt pocket, stuck it between his teeth, and took it out again as he went on talking: “But there are clients and clients, and paintings and paintings. Over the counter and under the counter.”
Michael looked at the other photographs lying outside the envelope, and put them down one after the other in front of him. He arranged them in a semicircle, from right to left. First an enlargement of a house door, with a red circle around the broken lock, and next to it a photograph of a room turned upside down. Then a photo of an empty armchair. He looked at the chalk outline drawn by the forensics people around this chair, in which the body of Felix van Gelden had been found. A piece of rope, with which they had apparently tied his hands, was still dangling from the slender wooden arm of the chair. He looked at photographs of a rumpled double bed and of a wardrobe before whose open doors lay piles of clothes, shoes, an old camera, and photograph albums. Next was a close-up of overturned drawers, and then a photograph of a heavy, ornate gilt frame. Emptied of its painting, it had been thrown into a corner of the room.
“A place like this is ideal for paintings that aren’t Rembrandts,” said Balilty knowledgeably as he waved the photo of the Zurich building. “There are people who come there with special requests. Let’s say, someone who wants a certain seventeenth-century Dutch painting owned by a certain van Gelden in Jerusalem who doesn’t want to sell. They can do something for him. He doesn’t have to go into detail, all he has to do is pay, a lot, to get what he wants. They get it for him and deliver it to him, and afterward he can keep it in some secret room, some cellar—what do I know? Until things cool off.”
“But no museum would buy it even after things cool off. The word must circulate among all the experts that the picture has been stolen,” said Michael.
“Don’t be so sure! The curator of the Tel Aviv Museum told me yesterday that even in museums they’re not all that fussy. They can buy a painting in pretended or in genuine innocence, and keep it in their basements. Museum curators are only human.” Balilty snickered. “They don’t want to miss the opportunity of a coup. They’re compulsive collectors, too, don’t forget. And with the legitimization of the public good on top of it. And the private collectors! That’s a world in itself. It’s not even as if they want to show the painting to anyone. They’re a breed apart. People who have to have something for it to be theirs. We’re talking about people who have castles in Switzerland or someplace like that, summer houses in the country, palaces. They’re a breed apart. They relate to these things like . . . I don’t know. . . . It’s not about money, or making an impression. . . . I don’t entirely understand it,” he confessed.
“It really is a strange business,” Michael murmured. “You have to think about it to understand it.”
“What’s there to understand?” protested Balilty. “Actually it’s quite simple. Covetousness, greed, lust for power—everything that holds for money or ordinary property applies here too,” he said contemptuously. “The fact that it’s about paintings, about art, makes you think that more noble impulses are involved, but that’s not so. It only seems that the motivation is more exalted. But it’s just plain covetousness and greed, in an area that we’re in awe of. All you have to do is substitute the word ‘painting’—and seventeenth-century besides—for the word, say, ‘diamonds,’ and you’ll know what’s what.”
“I don’t see it that way,” said Michael. “You yourself said that they don’t make a profit on it. It’s something more complex. It’s connected with a love of beauty, with a private communion with beauty, with the wish to be close to beauty, in immediate contact with it, almost to incorporate it. Precisely the secrecy is what makes ownership perfect. It’s really very complicated. I imagine the psychologists have a lot to say about it,” he said, his voice dying down.
Balilty looked skeptical. Michael lit a cigarette and sensed that the conversation was turning into a cautious dance around the subject they weren’t talking about, were avoiding talking about. Tzilla had met him at the entrance to the building. For the past two days they had been wondering what to do about Balilty. “We’re not going to be able to keep the secret,” she said. “I’ve already had calls. They want to know how Nita’s taking it. ‘At the Child Welfare Bureau we attach great importance to the foster mother’s mental health,’” she quoted sarcastically, making a face. “You’d better be prepared for more visits from them,” she warned. “They’re ‘at a loss,’ the whole thing is ‘unprecedented.’ That’s what they said.”
“Any news about the mother? Is there any progress?” he asked anxiously.
“Not a thing,” said Tzilla. “They don’t have any leads on the mother because the baby isn’t a newborn, and they don’t know where and when she was born. Trying to track her down through the past two months’ birth registrations all over the country is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But that’s what they’re doing now. Don’t underestimate Malka, she isn’t as backward as she looks. She’s very thorough.”
“She could have given birth at home. It doesn’t have to be at a hospital,” said Michael.
“Maybe,” said Tzilla doubtfully. “And maybe the mother has left Israel,” she added. “Maybe she’s a Bedouin or Arab woman who gave birth in her village. Sometimes their babies are very light-skinned. Maybe the father’s a Jew. Anyway, I wouldn’t try to keep it a secret from Balilty.”
“What does Eli say about it? Have you told him?” He presumed that she had told her husband. During the years the three of them had worked together, Michael had been a witness to the vicissitudes of their relationship, from Tzilla’s discreet and persistent courting of Eli to their marriage and the births of their two children. He wasn’t afraid of any disloyalty on Eli’s part. Only embarrassment, a kind of shame at the very wish to keep the baby, prevented him from speaking of it directly.
“He thinks so too,” said Tzilla, lowering her eyes.
“What?”
“That you should trust Balilty.”
“With his mouth,” Michael reflected aloud.
“I’ve seen him behave discreetly. Besides, you have no choice,” said Tzilla. “It’ll only complicate things for you. He’ll find out anyway. He always does in the end.”
Again he felt the knot in his stomach, a quivering knot for which there was no objective justification. Even if Balilty did find out about the baby and his setup with Nita, he would never go to the Child Welfare Bureau and tell them that the two of them weren’t really living together. What, then, was he afraid of? The mere fact of his knowing, he said to himself as he looked out the window and took a drag on the cigarette. Of a heavy boot intruding on his private vulnerabilities. Balilty would mock him for his sentimentality. Of being ridiculed, being thought a fool—that’s what you’re afraid of, he said to himself.
Suddenly he was overwhelmed with dread at the thought of the external world impinging on his privacy: the baby’s face, her cheeks that were filling out, her big eyes watching him as he fed her, held her up in the air. In the past couple of days he had even recognized something, a kind of spasm of the lips, which but for the fact that Nita insisted it was too early, he would have been sure was a smile. If it weren’t for the connection with Nita, he wouldn’t have had to expose himself like this. But without the connection with Nita, he wouldn’t have passed the foster family test. He would talk to Balilty, he decided as Tzilla patted his arm, looked over her shoulder, and said: “I have to run. They’ll kill me if I’m late.” She began striding rapidly, the rubber soles of her running shoes squeaking with every step. She was hurrying to an SIT meeting on a case that had been making headlines for the past six weeks. A couple found strangled in their car.
And now, tipping his ash into the dregs of his coffee, Mic
hael decided yet again to speak to Balilty, and maybe he would even enlist his help. In the end the mother would be found. It was impossible to hide the disappearance of a baby. Unless you left the country, died, or changed your name.
“Yes,” Balilty mused. “But it’s not a question of money, and they don’t even collect paintings as investments.” He suddenly roused himself. “So what are we talking about? The psychology of collectors? Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
Balilty’s face was expressionless, as if he were defending himself in advance against manipulation. There was no point in evading the issue any longer. Suddenly it was quite clear that he knew. Like the heads of two Bedouin clans putting off a decisive discussion with the help of traditional rituals, they sat on either side of the desk, the cups of coffee in front of them.
“You’re working with Interpol,” said Michael, trying to drag the moment out.
Balilty shrugged his shoulders. “There isn’t much we can do at this end. I need information from Europe, that’s quite obvious.”
“I haven’t seen you so pessimistic about a case in a long time,” remarked Michael. Their tone was relaxed, as if there was nothing urgent on the agenda.
“What can I do from here?” said Danny Balilty dismissively, turning the coffee cup in his big hand and examining its contents like a fortune teller intent on reading the dregs. “Obviously there are things that don’t make sense. Mainly the fact that they didn’t break in when van Gelden wasn’t home. That’s what sticks out most. He was a man with regular habits, they could have done it without killing him. It’s very rare for professionals of this kind to get involved with murder. And it’s not as if it was for a Picasso.”