by Batya Gur
“What does it matter? I had to—”
“What does it matter? What does it matter?” shouted Michael. Shorer put his hand on his arm again in a soothing gesture, and Michael quickly lowered his voice. “You know very well that it matters. I have to work with those people. If Eli or Tzilla came to tell you without telling me—”
“It wasn’t Eli or Tzilla.”
“Who was it, then? You can’t not tell me who. Did Ruth Mashiah come and talk to you?”
“I promised not to tell, I gave my word,” said Shorer, and for the first time a note of hesitation crept into his voice.
“I’m not interested in your promises,” said Michael severely. “Do you want me to leave? To resign from the force? I can’t work with people who stab me in the back. I understand that if you refuse to say who it was then it’s one of us. Maybe I’ve gone off my rocker, as you say, but I can still think.”
“This morning, after your meeting, that girl was here, what’s her name?” Shorer shifted uneasily in his seat. “Dalit?”
“The snake,” Michael heard himself say.
“An ambitious girl,” agreed Shorer. “Not a fool by any means. She was worried.”
Michael said nothing.
“It’s a delicate question, the question of loyalties,” muttered Shorer. “The fact is that neither Eli nor Tzilla nor Balilty said a word. They never talked to me,” he went on with increasing uneasiness, as if he had been caught conspiring in an act of treachery.
“You’re taking her off the case!” announced Michael.
Shorer kept quiet.
“Yes?” he insisted.
“We’ll see.” Shorer scratched his head.
“And because of her, of what she said, they came and took—”
“For the baby’s well-being,” said Shorer sharply. “Ruth Mashiah phoned me. They told her that we’re close, so she said, and she asked me to talk to you, to prepare you. When she phoned I already knew what it was all about.”
“Did Dalit speak to Ruth Mashiah, too?” asked Michael with grim astonishment.
“She said that she was concerned about the baby’s welfare and that you were away from home for hours at a time.” Shorer’s voice died away, embarrassed.
“Oh, the power of liberal sanctimoniousness. Especially when it’s a matter of the baby’s well-being, the good of the case.”
“But,” said Shorer carefully, “when you set personal feelings aside, there’s something to it. She wasn’t lying,” he added, looking quickly sideways. “You really are running around like . . . like when you’re working on a case and many things are going on at once. But I have a suggestion.”
Michael waited.
“My suggestion,” said Shorer, speaking slowly and deliberately, as if he were choosing his words very carefully, “is that you come to stay with me for a while. My wife will be with my daughter and her baby.” He glanced in the direction of the maternity ward. “I’ll be alone in the house. Move in for a few days. Until we know where we stand.”
“I’m not giving up the case,” warned Michael.
“We’ll see,” said Shorer. “We’ll see what happens. It all depends.”
Michael looked at the wall opposite him. At the patches of color in a pastel drawing of a Jerusalem landscape. I’m not giving up the baby, either, he said to himself. They won’t take her away from me so easily. He looked at Shorer.
“Ruth Mashiah told me that she warned you. She told you that the baby wasn’t yours, and they didn’t even take the baby away from your apartment. She was at Nita’s. It’s all for the little one’s own good. You must remember that. Loving someone means wanting what’s best for her. You yourself have explained that to me often enough,” said Shorer. “And they took her away for her own good. You’ll get over it, and you’ll give her up because you know very well that it’s the right thing to do.”
11
We’ve Never Had Anything Like This Before
The phone rang as soon as Shorer had locked the door from inside. Like someone fearing the worst, he paled and snatched up the receiver. After a moment his facial muscles relaxed. “He’s here,” Michael heard him say, letting out a deep breath. “We just came in. I thought it was the hospital,” he explained, beckoning Michael to the phone.
Because of Michael’s planned trip to see Dora Zackheim in Holon and to the music workshop at Beit-Daniel in Zichron Yaakov, they had scheduled the meeting for seven in the morning. Freshly shaved for the first time in days, Shorer got into the car saying: “We’ll have our second cup of coffee at the meeting.” And in fact, before he did anything else he bent over to examine the two black plastic jugs standing in the middle of the table.
“It used to be a finjan,” he grumbled as he struggled with a jug’s sophisticated lid. “They’d bring a big finjan of Turkish coffee and the smell of the cardamom alone was enough to wake you up. But that’s prehistory, before your time.” He finally opened the lid and breathed in the smell. “Instant,” he said with disgust. “Like in the hospital. Who drinks instant coffee here?” he complained to the room at large as he opened the second jug.
“I do,” said Tzilla from the doorway sleepily and rubbed her bleary eyes. She shook her head and her long silver earrings swayed. “Balilty will be here in a minute. He’s on his way from Forensics. He was there because of the painting. He wanted to bring it there himself. He wouldn’t let even the technicians carry it.” She spoke with ostentatious objectivity, as someone who had decided to refrain from judgment, not to betray her true feelings. She pushed her hand into the belt of her trousers. “I made two kinds of coffee because last night I slept only an hour and a half, here in the office.” Then, with sudden urgency, she asked Michael: “Do you know we found the painting? He said he’d call you. I told him where you were.”
“He phoned last night, the minute we got in,” Shorer reassured her.
Michael wondered how Shorer had succeeded last night in making him stay in the car after meekly putting the key to his apartment in Shorer’s outstretched hand. All Shorer had said was: “You’d better not go in at all, to avoid any conflicts and regrets. I suggest we go straight to my place from here.” There was no hint of suggestion in his voice, which carried the assurance of command. “I’ll go in and get you what you need for tonight and tomorrow, and later you can make a list and I’ll see to it that the things are brought to you.”
Michael had sat by himself in the dusty Ford Fiesta for a few minutes, struggling against the image of Nita’s lost face and thoughts of the empty cradle. He mourned the loss of the baby, feeling a sharp, heart-wrenching pain. “Here you are,” Shorer had suddenly said, erasing the image of the baby as he opened the car door and put two blue shirts and a bag containing underwear on Michael’s lap. “You can get toiletries at my place. I don’t have time for details,” he had said, sitting down behind the wheel.
Michael had looked at the white and pink room. Shorer had gathered up from his oldest daughter’s narrow childhood bed a little row of fluffy koala bears that had once belonged to her and placed them carefully next to the collection of miniature scent bottles standing on the shelf above. Then, with a sigh, he had opened the window and moved it to and fro to introduce some fresh air into the stuffy perfumed room. “This is the guest room now, not that we have so many guests. Children!” he said, savagely shutting the floral curtains. “One day they’re here, running around the house. Then the house is empty and next thing you know they’re having children of their own.”
It was clear to Michael that he wouldn’t sleep that night, but he fell asleep the minute he pulled the thin blanket over his head. He woke up in a panic, the vestiges of a nightmare still flickering in his mind. He had dreamed of a big house, gutted and open on all sides. He walked over smashed-in doors that partly barred his way, until he reached a back room, very big and empty, like a hall, at the far end of which stood a cradle. He went up to the empty cradle, and at its foot, in the corner of the room, lay a huddled, sh
riveled body, the tiny mummy of a baby. That was all he remembered. He turned on the bedside lamp, which had the figure of a red-capped gnome.
With trembling fingers he lit a cigarette and went over to the window. New streetlamps illuminated the remnants of orchards at the foot of the Bayit VeGan neighborhood. When Yuval was little they had often gone for walks in the abandoned orchards and climbed the hill to the Holy Land Hotel. Now the trees had been uprooted, and bulldozers had leveled the tops of the hills, erasing their gentle curves. The light of the lamps atop the silver poles revealed the frameworks of the houses the developers had begun to build on the land that had been snatched up the minute it came on the market. In the distance, in the midst of what had once been an apple orchard, there was already a four-story pseudo-Spanish castle with rounded balconies and stone columns. There’s no hope, he said to himself. He closed the window and went back to bed. He would have to learn that this baby would not be his. He would not change her life. Somebody else would. A foster family. An image of that family immediately came into his head, living in a house with a room like this one, overlooking a garden and with a red tiled roof. But the words “foster family” had a harsh, cruel ring to them. Maybe, however, nevertheless . . . , he thought stubbornly, but he ground out his cigarette in a saucer he had found and switched off the light. No, there is no however, no nevertheless, he thought as he turned from side to side. You really don’t find babies in the street. Nita’s face, shining, unhappy, lost, called to him until he fell asleep again.
The door to the conference room flew open. “Well, what do you say now?” thundered Balilty’s voice, bursting with pride. He repeated what he had said to Michael on the phone: “I can’t get over how they could have done that! It’s worth half a million dollars! It was lying just rolled up in the kitchen cabinet. Wrapped in paper. That shiny white paper we used to line kitchen shelves with. If I hadn’t looked inside, behind the bottles and the cocoa, I would have thought it was just a roll of paper. I thought it would take months until we found it, if we ever did, and all of a sudden, out of the blue!” His eyes were red, and he kept blinking as if they hurt. Stubble a day or two old gave him the appearance of neglect. The striped shirt over his big belly was partly out of his trousers, covering his belt, and behind his broad back stood Dalit.
At the sight of her face Michael was filled with rage. He clenched his jaw and stared at Shorer, who sat next to him examining his coffee cup with great concentration, as if he had noticed neither her nor Michael’s look. For a moment Michael thought of getting up. He even imagined overturning his chair, leaving the conference room, slamming the door behind him, and not returning until that pale, shining face under the cropped fair hair had been banished. He dismissed this option and others that occurred to him at that moment as melodramatic and pointless, and chose instead to sink deeply into the padded chair, stretch out his legs, cross his ankles, give himself up to a feeling of hopelessness, watch the movement of the hands of the big clock on the wall opposite him, and then stubbornly rub his finger at a grease spot on the brown formica top of the pale wooden conference table.
Balilty sat down at its head and dished out compliments to himself, to Dalit, and also to Tzilla, and unwillingly added a remark about the good work done by Eli. Zippo looked at him with humble expectation, and lowered his eyes when it became clear that Balilty was not going to mention his name. It seemed to Michael that he could discern signs of relief on Eli’s and Tzilla’s faces at Shorer’s presence and at the apparent resolution of Michael’s situation. Tzilla’s eyes, when she sat down opposite him, avoided meeting his. Balilty directed his words to the corner of the table where Michael and Shorer were sitting. He devoted a few minutes to recapitulating the course of events “for the head of Criminal Investigations,” he said, looking at Shorer, “even though I know that he’s already been briefed by Ohayon last night.” He then described in detail the state of Herzl’s apartment. (‘A stinking basement in Beth HaKerem, four inches of dirt on the floor, your shoes stick to it when you walk, if you can find anywhere to put them down, it would take a trowel to scrape it all off. You wouldn’t believe what people collect. The guy’s under sixty years, and he’s got all kinds of stuff piled up. Including musical instruments. I know nothing about it, but it looks to me like there are some valuable ones lying around. The place is like a junkyard.”) He had taken the trouble to search the kitchen cabinet thoroughly despite the Forensic investigators’ doubts. Yet there the painting was, well hidden. (“Behind bottles of cheap red wine and medicinal brandy. Who drinks stuff like that nowadays? And ancient Dutch cocoa. It looked as if the cabinet hadn’t been opened for years, and yet its doors didn’t have a speck of dust on them. Whoever hid the painting had wiped them clean. And all this time I’d been talking to Interpol about those Frenchies we caught!”) He went on to tell in detail about how every handle of every door in that filthy apartment was clear of fingerprints, especially the kitchen, which was “completely different from the mess and dirt everywhere else, which tells us that it wasn’t Herzl who hid the painting there. Why should he wipe off his fingerprints? It’s his own place, his fingerprints have a right to be there,” he concluded thoughtfully.
“How do you know?” Eli Bahar argued. “Maybe they hid something else there. Maybe he put the picture there, and afterward someone else came in looking for something else, and that one wiped off the fingerprints.”
“You could be right,” said Balilty, twisting his mouth contemptuously. “But I’m telling you that it happened the way I say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, ‘the way I say’?” Eli complained. He looked at Michael, who leaned his chin on his hand and said nothing.’
“I’m telling you,” stressed Balilty, “believe me.” He raised his arm and spread out his hand. “Those kitchen cabinets were wiped clean. Why waste time talking about it?” he said. He emphasized that there were no signs of a break-in, and that the handle of the front door, like all the other door handles in the apartment, had not a single fingerprint on it. “After all, Herzl lives there, and he doesn’t walk around with gloves on,” he summed up with satisfaction. “He doesn’t have to wipe off his own fingerprints, right?” He turned to Shorer expectantly.
Shorer cleared his throat and, after crumbling its head to powder over his empty coffee cup, put down the burned match he had taken from the glass ashtray. “It sounds that way,” he agreed unwillingly, and he listened attentively to Balilty’s vivid description of how he had awakened the art expert in the middle of the night in order to confirm the authenticity of the painting. “Because,” said Balilty importantly, “from what I understand from my conversations with Interpol and all kinds of experts, there are a lot of copies—fakes—on the market. We had to be sure that it was the real thing. You should have seen him. He flipped out.”
“Who?” Zippo spoke up for the first time.
“The expert, Professor Livnat. His hands shook when he held that painting. If you ask me, the painting’s nothing special. If I hadn’t been told it’s a big deal, seventeenth century and all that, I wouldn’t look at it twice.”
“In the photograph it looks beautiful,” said Tzilla hesitantly, “especially the woman’s face.”
“And what did Mister Theo van Gelden have to say about it?” asked Shorer.
“Well, the first thing we did was go and get him. Zippo picked him up at the psychiatric hospital and brought him to Herzl’s apartment. And by the way, before I forget: He and his sister will be going to Zichron Yaakov in a police car. We’re not taking any chances. We’re letting them think it’s for their own safety,” he said, and he looked at Michael. “I can’t arrest them, or hold them by force. I don’t tell them what I’m thinking, and they don’t ask,” he added thoughtfully.
“So Zippo brought him to Herzl’s place,” said Michael gloomily, “and you showed him the painting. What did he say?”
“He nearly fainted,” Balilty said chuckling. “Zippo didn’t prepare him for i
t, I asked him not to say anything.”
“What could I say to him?” mumbled Zippo, diligently polishing his lighter. “I didn’t know anything myself.”
For a moment Balilty looked confused. But he immediately recovered and ignored the interruption. “I took him into the kitchen and showed him the picture. He didn’t say a thing. I spread it out on a towel. Everything is so dirty there. And after all, half a million dollars! I asked him to identify it. He identified it. This was before the art expert arrived, and after the forensic examination. There were no fingerprints on it. Gloves. Only then did it turn out that van Gelden had a key to Herzl’s apartment,” Balilty said dramatically. “His father had one, too. I asked him why he didn’t tell us that before, and he said: ‘You didn’t ask me.’” Balilty paused deliberately for dramatic effect, and then he said: ‘And they’re not the only ones who had a key.”
“Who else?” asked Shorer when he saw that Balilty was waiting to be asked.
“Gabriel van Gelden had one, too,” said Balilty. “We didn’t know that before, either. You heard yourself,” he said, turning to Michael, “that Herzl was obsessed with his privacy. It didn’t even occur to me, but Dalit found it last night. The brothers got the key from their father. Apparently Herzl trusted the old man. And maybe the old man had it duplicated and gave copies to his sons. Maybe Gabriel had it duplicated. Theo van Gelden says he can’t remember who gave him the key. It was a long time ago.”
“I wouldn’t get excited about anything Theo van Gelden says,” grumbled Eli Bahar. “I wouldn’t take a single thing he says for a fact. Not a single thing.”
“Anyway, I asked his sister, too,” said Balilty. “And Dalit found that a key to Herzl’s place was at Gabriel’s—and so at Izzy Mashiah’s, too. She found it last night. All that in one night! What do you say to that?” he asked Michael triumphantly. “Nice, eh?”