by Batya Gur
“What crisis?” Balilty had argued. “It’s some little disagreement you’re trying to blow up out of all proportion to provide a lead.”
Eli had puffed out his cheeks and expelled his breath noisily. This was enough for Balilty to explode and say: “Get used to the idea that I’m in charge of this investigation now, and I do things differently from his majesty.” He had jerked his head toward Michael, who said nothing.
“The difficulty here,” Michael now reflected aloud, after pushing aside the remains of his roll and—despite all his resolutions to cut down—lighting another cigarette, “is really the size of the sum. It’s hard for us to accept the idea that the theft of the painting might be just a diversion. That Felix van Gelden was deliberately murdered for some other reason.”
Balilty gave him a long look. “That’s how you see it?” he asked with a serious, concentrated expression.
“It’s a possibility we have to take into account, even, or especially, if it was someone close, on the inside.”
“I don’t believe it!” cried Dalit.
“Nobody asked you,” muttered Tzilla, looking down at the table.
“I can’t see any other explanation for the fact that the break-in, which had to be well planned, professional, with much inside information, took place precisely when he was at home. Not to mention the fact that they suffocated him first.”
“But there could be another explanation for that!” Zippo protested. “Maybe he surprised them in the act.”
“Maybe,” said Michael, making a face.
“You, in any event, insist on seeing a connection between the two cases, meaning that the old man’s death was deliberate murder too,” said Balilty.
“And you?” retorted Michael. “Can you really ignore the connection between the two cases? Do you have a better explanation?” He saw Balilty’s eyes narrowing even further, as if he was well aware of what lay behind Michael’s emphasis on the word “really,” as if he could hear him thinking that if only he, Balilty, hadn’t made that stupid mistake, he too would have insisted on the connection.
“If that’s so, the two sons are in the clear,” mused Balilty aloud. “They seem to have alibis for the time when the old man was murdered.” He gave Michael a sharp look. “And as for her,” he said, gazing at the window opposite, “she was at the hairdresser’s. You can relax.”
“I’m not at all sure that they’re in the clear. Anyway, that’s not the reason I see a connection,” Michael said angrily, propping his elbow on the table and resting his cheek on his hand so as to hide the involuntary tightening of his mouth, the painful clenching of his jaws. “And I ask again: What about the strings?”
Balilty sighed. “She doesn’t remember if she had two or three strings, as you know, and what I think is—I already thought so yesterday—is that we should simply go after all those who don’t have a spare thin string . . . I can’t remember the name, what do they call it again?”
“The A string. But we have to wait for a reply from Forensics,” said Michael, and suddenly he felt the blood stopping in his veins and his heart beating wildly. He had left her with the baby. But she wasn’t alone, he reminded himself. And anyway, he scolded himself, she didn’t do it.
“We have the answer from Forensics. I got it at five o’clock this morning. It was the thinnest cello string.” Balilty shot out the words. “They’re comparing it to her strings now. She uses a special kind on her cello.”
Only the sound of Zippo’s chewing broke the silence around the table.
“So,” said Michael thoughtfully. He felt a great void within him. What if she did it? If she did it, nothing matters anymore.
“The A string from a cello,” said Balilty again, staring at Michael, “is the string that was in the piano, and it’s the murder weapon. Besides Nita, there were eight cellists there yesterday. And it turns out—it’s lucky we had the sense to check the exact kind of string when we questioned them—that only two of them had spare strings of that thin kind.” He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. “A strings. I checked it out in Tzilla’s notes at six o’clock this morning. Well done, Tzilla. But they all declared that they had the same number of strings as when they left home. So who knows?”
“The polygraph? How about getting all of them to take a polygraph test?”
Balilty sighed. “Yeah, yeah, later. First of all we had to hear from Forensics that it was really the murder weapon, because, thank God, as your friend Kestenbaum says,” he shot a look at Michael, “’Every contact leaves a trace.’ Cells, skin, I don’t know what. The main thing is that they confirm it.”
“And Nita van Gelden? What spare strings does she have in her instrument case?” asked Eli Bahar with suspense.
“That’s it, she has neither a D nor an A. She only has . . .” Again he looked down at his piece of paper. “G and C, but she says that she thinks she remembers using her spare A a few days ago, and that you . . .” he waved at Michael, “were there when the string snapped.”
“But I don’t know,” said Michael, shifting in his chair, “if it was an A, D, G, or a C that snapped. I’m trying to remember now if she said anything then, but all I remember is that she asked me, ‘Is that a fifth?’ That’s all she said,” he announced, and he wondered if he was only imagining that he could see disbelief on their faces, or if it was really there. “I can’t even read music,” he said in a choked voice. “All those words don’t mean a thing to me. Even ‘fifth’—I don’t really know what it means.”
Balilty finally broke the oppressive silence: “There’s no need to jump to conclusions,” he said in a fatherly tone. “Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that it’s her string, from her cello case, not that I know how to prove it,” he said, swallowing, “but assuming that it really is hers, anyone could have . . .” He paused. “Especially anyone who was at her place, let’s say . . .”
“If you’re thinking of Theo,” said Michael, “he’s never alone in the house with her as a rule. I’ve spent most of my time there recently, and I know more or less who’s been in the apartment. Someone could have taken the string in the concert hall. This doesn’t mean that Theo’s completely in the clear—”
“We have to check the maestro’s story again.” Since the early morning, when the question of Theo’s passport and his unwillingness to hand it over to them had come up, Balilty had been calling him the maestro. (“Do you think,” Theo had protested to Balilty in Nita’s living room, “that I could even dream of going abroad at a time like this? I wouldn’t even go to Japan,” he added sullenly, again bringing up his commitments in the Far East.) “As for Gabriel van Gelden, we’ll never know.”
“What won’t we know?” asked Zippo.
“We’ll never know where he was when his father was murdered,” explained Dalit, her eyes darting alertly from Balilty’s face to Michael’s.
“We certainly will,” said Michael firmly. “We’ll know today.”
“How? How will we know?” asked Zippo, tugging at his mustache.
“His brother will tell us. Theo will know.”
“How the hell do you know?” asked the astounded Balilty.
Michael did not reply. He was trying to reconstruct the situation and the sounds he had heard when he was standing in the kitchen. He remembered clearly Theo imploring, “You can explain it to me, at least.” Again there was an oppressive silence. Balilty tapped the point of his yellow pencil on the table top in three-beat time. Then he looked at Michael doubtfully, banged his hand on the table, and said: “Let’s move on.”
Balilty ran the meeting as if it were a Passover seder. He delegated tasks, called on speakers, did everything by the book, and from time to time nodded to Dalit and said: “Did you take that down? Take it down!” She would return the nod eagerly. She would chew the end of her pen with a look of concentration on her face and then lean over to Balilty and whisper something in his ear. Her assiduous efforts to make herself indispensable seemed to be succeedi
ng. Already at the beginning of the meeting it had become clear to Michael that Balilty was becoming dependent on her. He had seen Balilty’s eyes sliding over her backside and down her legs as she raised herself on tiptoe to close the window when an uproar broke out below among the Arab women looking for detainees who had disappeared, while the bells of the Russian Orthodox Church began to peal. She remembered everything, and now, as Avram reported on the gloves, her pale narrow face was expressionless and her light eyes downcast as she diligently took down all the details. Under the prominent cheekbones her cheeks looked hollow, giving her an austere, almost ascetic look. This vanished, or at least became questionable, if you took into account her mouth, if you looked at those beautifully full lips, which lent something surprisingly sensual to her face. The sharp chin almost canceled out the sensuality, or at least gave it a certain coldness, and even cruelty. Michael roused himself and turned his attention to Avram. Dalit opened her eyes wide and took her hand away from her chin.
“Tell them about the place,” she reminded Avram like a loving wife reminding her husband of an important point he had forgotten in a joke he was telling. “Tell them about her locker,” she reminded him when he was on his third sentence.
“I’m getting to it,” said Avram, blushing. As always when he blushed, tiny blue veins caught fire on his face, and one of them began to pulse on his temple, and he began, as usual when he was embarrassed, to stammer. Tzilla gave Dalit a quick, sharp, hostile look, as if she were making a mental note to include this image in the dossier she was compiling against her.
“But there’s no reason to think that Margot Fischer had anything to do with it,” said Avram, his blush subsiding. “As I said earlier, told you before, and it shows up in the polygraph tests too, everybody knew about the gloves. Somebody must have taken them.” At the beginning of the meeting they had talked a lot about this double bass player, Margot Fischer, who had arrived out of breath, confirmed that the gloves were hers, demanded to know why the police had them, and referred briefly to a chronic illness. “Raynaud’s disease, it’s called,” said Avram. “Her hands are always cold.” She told of the jokes about those deerskin gloves, which were part of the orchestra’s folklore. They were a gift from a colleague in a German radio orchestra, also a woman bass player who suffered from a circulatory problem. Margot Fischer was a short woman, and Michael remembered how she had nearly vanished behind her instrument, even though her arms were unusually long.
Avram spoke of her hands, which were large in proportion to her body. “But not as big as a man’s,” he observed, adding that the gloves were too big for her. “She kept her gloves in her locker,” he said, “and everybody knew it.” Then he spoke about the location of the lockers, next to the administration offices. “No,” he said, answering a question from Eli, “everyone has a key only to their own locker, but there’s a master key. She has no idea how the gloves got out of her locker, but when we pressed her she admitted she might have forgotten to lock it yesterday, because she was distracted,” he added.
The way Avram bent over his notes seemed to express a certain affection for Margot Fischer and trust in the story she had told him about the events of the day before. On the day of the murder, he related in her name, she hadn’t used the gloves. She had arrived late for the rehearsal and had no time to dawdle at the lockers. Theo van Gelden had no patience with latecomers, always having something harsh and insulting to say to them. So she had rushed onstage glove-less and struggled with her stiff fingers until they warmed up and she no longer needed gloves. “On bad days,” he said sympathetically, “she has to keep them on until the very moment she must begin to play.”
“There was no blood or fingerprints inside the gloves,” complained Balilty. “Forensics thinks that whoever it was wore thin plastic gloves or even a plastic bag inside the gloves. There was a scrap of plastic there, too small for a fingerprint, and it may just have been there by chance. It was only a scrap,” he said, staring out the window.
“But you haven’t said anything about Fischer’s relations with the victim,” said Zippo dramatically. He bit his lower lip with his big yellow teeth as he studied the notes in front of him.
“She doesn’t have much contact with the other musicians,” explained Avram. “She’s older than most of them. If you saw her you’d know that she’s not interested in having any relations with them. She’s . . . not like other people. She’s a bit weird. What people used to call an old maid. There’s actually something childish about her. She’s a kind of loner. Theo van Gelden called her Glenngoulda,” he said, embarrassed as if he were betraying a confidence in spite of himself. “She explained to me that it was because of some famous pianist who was always very careful of his hands and wore gloves. Black ones. He’s dead. She said that he went mad, but that his hands were insured for millions.”
“But we don’t know much about her,” remarked Tzilla. “The gloves are hers. All kinds of things happen in the world, she could have been somebody’s accomplice.”
“There’s nothing like that, I promise you,” said Avram.
“They didn’t find any prints inside,” Balilty reminded them. “But the string made two cuts in the leather. And there’s that scrap of plastic inside.”
“I talked to her,” said Eli Bahar. “I asked her about her relations with the van Gelden brothers. And I got the feeling that she’s not the type. You can see right away that there’s nothing complicated about her. She’s simple, like a kibbutznik. The kind of woman who lives alone with her sick old mother. That’s why she went to the airport, to pick up her mother’s brother, who comes from America to see her twice a year.”
“Right,” said Avram quickly, “we checked that, too. She left as soon as the rehearsal was over, because she was late to meet the plane. That is, she thought she was late. It didn’t arrive till the middle of the night. There was an engine malfunction. The time of arrival and the passenger list both check out.”
“She even thought of dropping in on her mother after the rehearsal to see how she was, but she gave up on that because she was running late,” added Eli Bahar. “You can see that she’s not the type to be mixed up in anything. She’s a responsible person,” he explained.
Balilty’s eyes darted from one speaker to the other. “Have you got the hots for her, or what?” he said brusquely. “You’re talking like teenagers, both of you. What’s going on here? Everyone falls in love with the person he’s investigating.” He glanced quickly at Michael and turned away. “She didn’t come back till late at night, and she left her old mother stuck there and us, too.”
“She was stuck herself!” protested Eli Bahar. “What happened with her,” he explained in an offended tone, “is that she had to stay at the airport till her uncle’s plane landed. She was there for hours, and she didn’t know when she would be able to get back. When she finally got back home we were waiting outside the door, in a police car, and she was alarmed that something had happened to her mother, who’d been alone for so many hours. I saw her myself, she doesn’t know anything,” he promised.
“And then, when we told her,” continued Avram, “you could see that she was shocked, you could see that it was the first she had heard about Gabriel van Gelden’s murder.”
“She liked and admired him very much, and she agreed to a polygraph on the spot,” Eli interrupted him. “We’re wasting our time on her, believe me. You could see that she didn’t know anything about it and that she was upset. She has no motive. She’d even been accepted into that ensemble, that new one, that Baroque you talked about,” he explained to Michael. “Here you are, here’s her statement, you can see what she says.” He bent over the papers in front of him and rummaged through them. “Where is it? It was right here.”
“His early music orientation is very interesting and attractive to me,”’ Tzilla read from the copy in front of her. “‘And I regarded it as an honor to work under Gabriel van Gelden as director and conductor.’” Tzilla raised her eyes and l
ooked around. “What exactly does she mean by ‘early music orientation’?” she asked with her eyes on Michael.
“He can explain it to us later,” said Balilty coldly. “It’s something in music, some kind of theory. What’s important now is that you took her passport.”
“We have to see if the gloves fit someone,” Tzilla reflected aloud.
“We’re not talking about shoes here. They’re big gloves, they’d fit anyone,” said Avram.
“We don’t have the slightest reason to suspect her,” said Eli Bahar.
“But you have to take into account that people who look as if they’ve given up on life and everything suddenly do things,” said Dalit, stretching her arms. Her small breasts rose under the tight T-shirt.
“What things?” asked Tzilla, and her hostile expression showed a sign of something close to curiosity.
“There are desires that people bury for years, and insults they swallow, and suddenly they break out,” explained Dalit with a dreamy look. “We once had a neighbor . . . Suddenly, one day, out of the blue, after you’d forgotten to even think about her as a human being, when all she did all day was cook and clean and in the evening sit in front of the TV mending clothes, one day she got up and—”
“When are you seeing Shorer?” Balilty asked Michael, who shook his head and with an inaudible sigh said: “Later, if his daughter doesn’t give birth today. Or if she’s given birth and everything is okay. I have to phone him.”
“We have to find that partner in the music shop, the one you told us about,” said Tzilla.”
Michael nodded. “He wasn’t a partner, he was an employee,” he said, and he gave Balilty a questioning look.
“What did she do, that neighbor of yours?” Tzilla asked Dalit.
“She ran away from home,” said Dalit, quickly swallowing the end of her roll, “with all their savings. Her husband searched for her for years.”
“We’re looking for him,” said Balilty, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s not easy to find someone who lives alone and doesn’t talk to his neighbors. Everybody in this case is weird, different. Artists!” He swelled his cheeks. “But this old guy isn’t even an artist. His apartment is locked, as if nobody’s been there for years.”