by Batya Gur
“Has something new happened?” asked Michael, and he turned his face to either side, thinking he heard footsteps. But there was no one there, and the music had stopped, too. Instead, from a nearby room he heard a loud voice speaking in English.
“A few things have happened. Eli will fill you in. I don’t want to go into it now. Not on the phone. But what I can tell you now is that we’ve found the Canadian woman. She denies being with him on that day. She admits she was in the country, at the Hilton or whatever it’s called now, but she wasn’t with him. You can get the details from Eli.”
“So she actually lied about that, too?”
“Who? Dalit?”
Michael said nothing.
“Yes,” said Balilty curtly.
“We’ll have to go over everything she touched with a fine-toothed comb,” warned Michael.
“It’s been done,” said Balilty without an argument. “We checked on the Canadian. I spoke to our man in New York myself. Dalit never talked to him at all. She made up the whole thing. I don’t want to hear another word about it now. The guy in New York, Shatz, knows you. He says he met you a few years ago. He’s sending me a fax of the transcript of the Canadian woman’s interrogation, and a cassette of it by express. It’ll be here tomorrow.”
“It’s hard to believe that somebody could . . . that things like that could . . .” muttered Michael. “It seems you can never tell what surprises are waiting for you where people are concerned.” Since Balilty remained silent, he added: “We all make mistakes.”
“You said it,” confirmed Balilty indifferently. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Is there anything else you want to tell me? How was your meeting with the old lady in Holon?”
“Very interesting,” said Michael. “And in the light of the facts, yours and mine, I want you to get a search warrant for the concert hall offices. The administrative director’s and the artistic director’s. And for Theo van Gelden’s apartment. Also the papers from Felix van Gelden’s safe—in short, everything. All the papers, Gabriel’s, too. I want to go through all of them.”
“Theo’s apartment too? Maybe he’ll agree without a warrant, like last time—”
“No, we can’t take anything for granted anymore,” said Michael severely
“Because of the Canadian woman?”
“That and some other things. What about the other woman?”
Balilty smacked his lips loudly. “We’re being very mysterious today,” he said mockingly.
“Only because of the telephone,” Michael apologized. “I’ll explain as soon as I see you. But what about the other woman? We have to talk to her again too, after—”
“She’s already here, waiting outside,” Balilty interrupted him. “I may make one or two mistakes, but my brain’s still working, you know. Get Eli to bring you up to date on the rest, because over the phone I don’t . . .”
Michael missed Balilty’s last words because of the young woman in the black pants suit who looked out of the entrance hall into the passageway where he was standing: “Are you the one the two men who came with Mr. van Gelden are waiting for? They told me to expect you.”
Into the receiver Michael said only, “I’ll phone again,” and paying no attention to the stream of new instructions Balilty began to issue, he hung up and turned to the young woman. He smiled back at her, declined the coffee she offered him, accepted a glass of cold water, and followed her into the big room. He made his way between rectangular tables covered with white tablecloths laid for lunch and an open grand piano, a floral armchair, and a footstool standing in the aisle, stumbled over the ragged corner of a Persian carpet, and glanced at the pair of black-bound music scores lying on a brass tray next to the piano. “I’m looking for Miss van Gelden,” he said to the young woman.
“She’s at Mr. van Gelden’s lecture.”
He almost asked her if she was sure, but he restrained himself and even lingered at the bookcase, fingering the volumes of an old-looking edition of Voltaire in French and then turning to a pamphlet in Hebrew about the settlers’ movement on the West Bank. Then he realized that the young woman was waiting for him. He apologized and followed her out through a side door. They went by a number of empty offices in one of which flies buzzed around an open jar of jam. Then they went outside and down the path where Yuval had disappeared from view.
Sitting on a white plastic chair on a neglected, yellowing lawn next to the gnarled, crooked trunk of a gray olive tree not far from an old iron bedstead someone had apparently abandoned there, was Eli Bahar. Behind him was a little porch leading to descending stairs, from beyond which came the sound of a piano accompanying a good-size chorus. The young woman in the black pants suit smiled pleasantly, asked if she could leave them to look after themselves from now on, and said that there would be places for them at lunch. It would be best, she said, if they were to go into the lecture separately so as not to disturb it.
“The master class on singing with cello accompaniment has been canceled, and instead Mr. van Gelden and the singers will be working with piano accompanists alone. And, at Mr. van Gelden’s request, Educational Television has also been canceled, and there will only be audiotaping,” she said as if the two men were among the regular participants. The word “police” was not mentioned. Michael wondered what she had been told about them.
Eli Bahar waited for her to leave, and with a lazy movement pulled up a second plastic chair, set it upright from the upside-down position in which it had been lying on the yellowing grass, and patted the seat. “I waited for you here outside, so we could talk. It’s impossible to talk in there, and nobody can do any harm while he’s lecturing,” said Eli. “There’s really no need to sit in there.”
Michael sat down and lit a cigarette.
“I’ve never been here before,” muttered Eli. “I didn’t even know such a place existed. It’s so beautiful here, but look how neglected it is.”
Michael tried to remember what Nita had told him about the Bentwich family, and he nodded.
“They began trying to renovate the place a few months ago,” Eli explained, “but that young woman, she’s the manager here, told me that they had to stop in the middle of it. The workmen put the old windows back in instead of putting in new ones, and look how the plaster’s crumbling and so on. It’s a shame, no?”
Michael nodded.
There was a patch of sunlight on the lawn in front of him. In his mind’s eye, he again spread a flowered blanket on the grass and laid the baby on it on her stomach. Who was carrying her around now? Who was breathing in the fragrance of her cheeks?
“They have concerts and things here. Have you ever been here?”
“Once, a long time ago,” murmured Michael, and he turned his head toward Beit-Lillian, the building not far off, where he had been with Avigail more than two years before, on an autumn evening during the Succoth holiday, a few months before they split up. They had played Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Avigail had stared straight ahead with a blank face half hidden by large sunglasses, immobile, unsmiling, showing no reaction to the music being played inside the hall. She had insisted on staying out on the lawn. It wasn’t true, as they said, that sorrow left no marks. The thought of Schubert’s joyful piece would always be linked in his mind with Avigail’s dejection and sorrow. She had refused to take off the sunglasses even after the sun had set. All that could be seen of her face was the narrowed pretty mouth and the dry lips. Her long white sleeves were fastened at her wrists. During the night, in the inn, she had wept. His love for her was helpless to save her.
“Where’s Nita?” he roused himself to ask Eli, who shrugged his shoulders and said: “Inside, in the lecture hall. Her body’s inside—: where her soul is, God knows. All the way from Jerusalem to Zichron Yaakov her brother talked and she didn’t say a word. Just looked out the window. And he never shut his mouth. He talked and talked to her, as if she were listening. I had the feeling she didn’t hear a word. Part of the way she slept. It looks to me a
s if they doped her up completely. And her baby—it wasn’t so easy to get her to agree to leave him! I don’t understand why she . . . But her brother insisted on her coming along. He put it into her head that they have to be together now. At least till the funeral. Now she’s inside. The manager woman told me that they canceled some master class Nita was supposed to give here. And they’re waiting for some big star, some singer.”
“Balilty said he’s sent a young guy here instead of Dalit.”
“He’s inside. I don’t know him, but he seems okay. He’s inexperienced, but at least he’s not a psychopath. His name’s Ya’ir. Tzilla worked with him on the Arbeli case. They’ve changed that whole team, so they transferred him to us, on Tzilla’s recommendation. He doesn’t have much experience, but at least he’s not a liar. And he hardly says a word.”
“I understand that the report on the Canadian woman was an invention, too,” said Michael.
“Can you believe it?” Eli sat up in the plastic chair and turned the upper half of his body toward him. “When I said that to you this morning I was just talking, I didn’t really believe what I was saying. But by the time I returned to headquarters Balilty was already on the phone with our guy in New York. She hadn’t spoken to him at all!”
“Who?”
“Dalit, to our man in New York. She never contacted him at all. Can you understand it?”
“To tell the truth, no. I can’t understand it,” said Michael thoughtfully. He listened absently to the sound of the chorus rising from, the building. Another part of him concentrated on the signs of disintegration on the wall opposite him, where the paint was peeling. There were gray and yellow patches of sunlight on the tall, golden-yellow grass. “You can talk about an illness, but that doesn’t explain anything. It isn’t necessary or possible to understand everything in the world,” he said, reminding himself. “There’s a limit.”
“And then there’s the key. Dalit never talked to Izzy Mashiah at all, and there’s no key,” said Eli. “He knows nothing about a key to Herzl’s apartment. It really freaks me out, but one good thing came out of it.”
“Yes? What?”
“Balilty. He’s come off his ego trip a bit. He’s not so sure anymore that he’s the king of the world. And Shorer, who stayed on after you left, he’s the one who sent me here. He suspended Dalit on the spot. And he said something to her that sent her packing.”
“What, are they just going to let it go?” Michael was scandalized.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do about her, and it isn’t our business any longer,” said Eli Bahar, narrowing his eyes against the sun. “They sent her to Elroi. They always send people to the psychologist first. . . . But they’re sure to haul her over the coals. There’ll be an inquiry, disciplinary proceedings, and in any event, she’s finished. I thought that maybe she had the hots for Theo. Maybe that’s why she . . . But if that’s the reason, it doesn’t explain why she found Herzl and so on. She’s not only mad. There’s no method to her madness.”
“Yes, there is. The wild ambition to succeed. And to sabotage, no matter what. To obtain power and recognition, on the one hand, and to destroy herself and everything else on the other. And even to be punished for it, because she didn’t even try to cover her tracks. What did Theo say about the Canadian woman?”
“He hasn’t said a word to me about her. He still thinks he’s got an unbreakable alibi in her,” said Eli with satisfaction. “I leave that to you. We’ll be here with him all day, so what’s the hurry? He’s not going to run away. We can arrest him tomorrow.”
“We don’t have enough on him to arrest him. Not yet. First of all, there’s still the other woman. Second, we don’t have a motive. It’s not clear why, even if we say it’s for the inheritance, why precisely him and why precisely now. I always like to wrap things up tightly before making an arrest. If possible.”
Eli Bahar made a face. “I’ve never agreed with you about that. There always comes a moment when you drag things out too much. I’ve always told you that. Why can’t you arrest him and release him later if we’re wrong?”
“And I’ve always explained to you that there’s something to be gained by not arresting at this stage. He still trusts us, and I haven’t got enough from him yet,” contended Michael. “There are a lot of things we haven’t wrapped up yet. We don’t even know where the string comes from—”
“There are things that are impossible to wrap up,” said Eli Bahar philosophically. “Just as there are leads that don’t take you anywhere, that only waste your time. Like with that painting and all the experts Balilty had on it. He investigated the entire underworld, and it didn’t lead anywhere! Then it’s found in a kitchen cabinet behind the cocoa. And the whole thing might be—we don’t even know that for sure—a red herring. And Balilty was stuck for weeks with experts from here and there. Is there anything new at your end?”
“Maybe,” said Michael, and he hesitated. “But it’s still so up in the air, and so complicated and maybe even absurd, that it’s better not to discuss it yet.”
Eli Bahar maintained an expectant silence for a few seconds. His eyes followed Michael’s hand as he ground out his cigarette at the edge of the lawn, stood up, and went over to the wastebasket at the building entrance.
“As you like,” he said at last, rather sulkily. “When are you going to confront him about the Canadian woman?”
“Later,” said Michael. “He’s giving a lecture now, isn’t he?”
“Yes, for about another hour, and then there’s lunch. Maybe that would be a good time . . .” he said hopefully.
“Maybe,” Michael agreed. “I want to go inside. Are you staying out here?”
“There’s nothing for me in there,” said Eli glumly. “I’ll wait here. I had a long night.” He put on a pair of sunglasses. “Wake me up if I fall asleep.”
“Hand me a fresh cassette. I’ve pretty much filled up the one in my recorder,” said Michael.
He opened the door into a room smaller than he had expected. Exactly across from him, at the other side of it, in front of French windows opening onto a flagstone porch, sat Nita in a deep, shabby brocade armchair. Her limp body slumped into the chair as if it would be an enormous effort to raise her limbs up again. Her eyes met his. He felt a great sense of relief at seeing her alive. A warm wave of feeling overcame him, a great urge to touch her, to hear her voice, to be at her side. For a brief moment she looked at him, her eyes dull and expressionless. A flicker of shock passed over their blue-green depths, and then they narrowed and almost closed. Her face was very pale. She didn’t move. And not only did she not smile at him, but she also tightened her lips and turned her head to look at her brother. There were about fifteen young musicians, boys and girls, in the room, all with their eyes fixed eagerly on Theo, who was sitting in front of them on the bench at an open baby grand piano, his legs crossed, and talking. When Michael closed the door behind him and sat down on one of the chairs at the back of the room, Theo looked at him, surprised, nodded his head, and went on speaking with the same relaxed voice as before. Maybe the hint of a blush crept onto his cheeks. His eyes glittered, their deep green emphasized by the dark circles beneath. He folded his hands but could not hide their trembling. He leaned against the piano. Instrument cases lay at the feet of some of the youngsters. Yuval was sitting not far from Nita next to a swarthy young man who was sitting erect with his arms crossed, and who, Michael was sure, was the new man on the team.
“A precise definition of all the aspects of the Classical style—that is, the style brought to its maturity by Haydn and Mozart,” said Theo with a small, forced smile, “is impossible.” The young faces looked at him with anxious expectation. The boy sitting close to the piano on its other side monitored the big tape recorder on the floor next to him.
Michael looked at the slats of the torn blind beside the French windows and at the vestiges of masking tape, remnants of the Gulf War, still stuck to the glass.
“Because
, like everything else,” said Theo reflectively as he looked outside, “such a definition would not be restricted to the music alone, but finally also to its social surroundings—the way people, rich and poor, lived from day to day. Just as it’s impossible to understand rock music without knowing about the world we live in, it’s impossible fully to understand the Classical style in music without a sense of the context.”
Michael looked at Yuval’s face. The boy was listening intently as he leaned forward on his hard chair. A single sunbeam lit up the fair down on his cheek and then glinted on the silver flute lying in the lap of a girl playing with a lock of her straight hair. Nita’s eyes were closed. Michael felt that she was bearing a grudge against him, that she was ostracizing him, that she regarded him as her enemy.
“We’re dealing here, as you already know, with the second half, more or less, of the eighteenth century,” said Theo, “and the Classical style seems to be the most orderly, most restrained musical style that has ever existed. To us, in this century of ours, it sounds mainly charming,” he said sardonically. “Sometimes too charming. Charming unto idiocy.” He suddenly started to whistle the beginning of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, broke off, and said: “Sometimes we ask ourselves: What are they so happy about?” Again he whistled sharply and clearly. “There’s an incomprehensible gaiety here, and where it isn’t cheerful, there’s a beauty that can sound exaggerated, a beauty too beautiful. I know people who abhor the Classical style because this makes it seem false, like a museum of wallpaper from a world that is dead and gone.”
Yuval smiled at these words, and the girl with the flute burst into loud laughter, which stopped abruptly. Michael had noticed the ingenuous and somewhat theatrical tone with which Theo spoke, as if he were constructing a convincing argument only in order to refute it.