by Batya Gur
“What exactly is the matter with her?”
“The doctor said it’s a virus,” said Ya’ir. “There’s one going around now, lots of people have it, with nausea and weakness. She suddenly had a high fever and she vomited. They tried to get her to lie down there, but she wouldn’t. The doctor . . .”
Balilty lifted his eyes from the computer printout, raised his eyebrows, and pushed his small reading glasses halfway down his nose. “Do you think that . . . Well, it’s not important. There’s another doctor at her place now. And Tzilla’s with her. She’s in good hands. Ya’ir says Theo put up a big fight about her leaving. I suggest we start with his office now, before he gets here.”
“Excuse me, I just want to help. What exactly are you looking for? I don’t quite understand,” the orchestra manager said nervously. He stood up from his seat behind the desk, hunched his shoulders, sank his narrow head between them, and rubbed his hands. “Not that I’m entitled to, of course. You certainly don’t owe me an explanation, perhaps you’re not at liberty to give me one, but I’d really like to help. If you’ll just tell me exactly what you’re looking for, I’m sure I could . . .” His eyes shifted from one to the other of the three policemen. None answered him, and he fell silent.
Balilty stood up with a heavy sigh, stretched his limbs carefully, and rested his hand on his hip. “There are another two men in the basement. There’s a room down there where they keep the music scores,” he said to Michael. “But you have to give me a more detailed description, so I can tell them exactly what to look for,” he said as he left the room with Michael behind him.
Izzy Mashiah followed them without a word. Ya’ir closed the office door behind him. But the manager quickly opened the door again and hurried after them. “I don’t want to make any demands,” he said. His eyes darted in all directions, deliberately avoiding theirs. “I understand your position, but the last time your men searched the premises they left such a mess that it took us two days to clean it up. I have to ask you, if possible—”
“Don’t worry, we’ll do what we can,” Balilty promised him. Then he waited for the manager to go back into his office and shut the door.
“What does an original manuscript of a Baroque score look like?” Michael asked Izzy, who was leaning against the corridor wall. In the fluorescent light his face had a yellowish tinge. He twisted his ring. The green stone glinted.
“It usually comes in the form of sheaves of paper, sometimes sewn together, sometimes not,” Izzy said hesitantly. “Large sheets folded in two and with music notation written on both sides. The paper is usually heavy and fibrous, and is often rust-stained.”
“Did you hear that?” Michael asked Balilty. “Tell them to look for something like that. But I don’t believe it’ll be in the storeroom with all the printed scores. Tell them to put everything in boxes,” he decided after some hesitation, “and we’ll do Theo’s office now.”
“You!” Balilty addressed Izzy Mashiah. “Wait outside! There’s either a bench at the door or we’ll bring a chair out for you. Wait outside and we’ll call you if we find anything!” he said with demonstrative skepticism.
Michael started to say something. “Don’t argue with me,” said Balilty. “I can’t work with people from outside getting underfoot. And besides,” he added when they were inside the room, “you keep telling me not to say anything to him about whose handwriting it’s about, to wait and see if he identifies it by himself, to see if it really is what it’s cracked up to be. So what do you need him in the room for?”
“You’re right,” Michael apologized.
“Not that I believe we’ll find anything here,” complained Balilty. He tucked the ends of his shirt under his broad belt and felt his back. “We already searched this room. For a whole day.”
“But then we were looking for a string,” Michael reminded him.
“Which we didn’t find here. And we also looked through the papers,” muttered Balilty.
“But we weren’t looking for a manuscript. You don’t find what you’re not looking for. How can you find something when you don’t even know that it exists?”
“Bullshit,” retorted Balilty. “All my life I’ve found what I wasn’t looking for. Most of the time exactly when I’m not looking for it. And you—who found a baby when he wasn’t looking for one?” he asked provocatively and immediately looked abashed and changed the subject. “Look, I’ve thrown my back out,” he said, making a face. “I hope to God it isn’t going to be like that time last year. . . . Why do you have to do everything yourself? Why are we the ones conducting this search?” he complained suddenly. “We could have put a few men in here to take the place apart. All you had to do was tell them what to look for.”
“You don’t have to do it. I can do it with Ya’ir. And you—”
“Not on your life, my friend,” said Balilty, kneeling in front of the bookcase. “I’m not missing this, not that I really believe we’ll find anything. But for the two and a half percent chance that we will, I’m prepared to put up even with the pain in my back.”
“It’s going to rain,” said Ya’ir, sniffing the air after opening the big window. “I can feel it, there’ll be rain by this evening. Maybe that’s why your back hurts. On days like this my father’s leg hurts.”
Balilty gave him a wrathful look.
“I’m never wrong about things like this,” the sergeant insisted. “Just look at those clouds.”
“You know,” said Balilty as he pulled a pile of books from the bookcase and dumped them onto the floor, examined the bookcase’s exposed wooden back, and began to page through the books. “When I was busy with that painting I learned a lot about forgeries. Even if we find this music—which I don’t believe we will;—it’ll take ages before we get the authentication.”
“According to what Herzl Cohen said, I have the impression that they’ve already taken care of it,” said Michael. “That’s why Felix van Gelden flew to Amsterdam twice after Herzl brought it here. And not long ago Gabriel van Gelden flew there on the same matter.”
But Balilty, on his knees and with one hand supporting his back, was not ready to let it go at that. The expression of demonstrative concentration on his face, a kind of grimace that involved the narrowing of his small eyes, which were fixed on an invisible point in the distance, indicated that he was about to deliver a lecture.
“I still don’t believe that Zippo got him to talk,” said Balilty. “It shows you. Like my late mother used to say, in the end God finds a use for everyone. You can never know who’ll do what and where. Who’ll succeed at what and where. My back hurts like hell.”
“It’ll pass after it begins to rain,” promised Sergeant Ya’ir, who was still standing at the open window. “It’s going to start coming down in a few minutes. Do you want me to begin looking here?” he asked, and he crouched down beside a long alcove set into the wall under the window. Without waiting for a reply, he opened the thin white sliding wooden door and began to pull out music scores in black bindings with red labels stuck to the spines.
“The Malskat case, for instance,” said Balilty self-importantly, “is the most interesting. Have you ever heard of him?”
“No, I haven’t,” said Michael, and he emptied the top drawer of the desk onto the carpet, where he began going through every piece of paper and rummaging through photographs. In one of them Theo stood next to Leonard Bernstein among a group of people dressed in evening clothes, in another, an old black-and-white snapshot, he immediately recognized little Nita, with a smile exposing the gaps in her front teeth and dimpling her cheeks. She was holding a cello as big as she was. How sweet she looked, he thought with a sudden pang at the sight of her fair curls and bright, serious, innocent gaze. He put the snapshot into his shirt pocket. Among the key rings, matchboxes, a pack of toothpicks, aspirin, notes, and receipts, he found (and read) love letters, letters of complaint, clippings of concert reviews, old concert programs, greeting cards, and a document that turned out
to be a faded copy of a divorce agreement.
“It was in Germany. They were restoring an old church. A local restorer named Malskat worked on it for a whole year. He wouldn’t let anyone see what he was doing. He worked all by himself on a scaffold specially built for him. When he was finished he gathered everybody to see what he had found—pictures on the ceiling, incredible things from the thirteenth century. You like that period, don’t you?”
Michael grunted from the depths of the second drawer.
“But, like I’ve always said, the trouble with all these people—forgers, frauds, and also cold-blooded murderers—the trouble with them is that they don’t understand that no man can think of everything. You know what I think?” he said, paging through a music encyclopedia. “Have a look at this picture, just have a look,” he said, reading something with interest. “It’s Beethoven. Look at what he looked like.” He turned the pages rapidly and then set the book aside with the rest of the volumes he had already checked. “I think,” he said emphatically, “that fools are people who think the whole world is too stupid to see what’s really going on. Am I right or am I wrong?”
Michael grunted again. Out of the corner of his eye he observed how carefully Sergeant Ya’ir was taking the scores out and slowly turning the pages.
“So that’s what also happened to this Malskat. There were eight turkeys in his painting on the ceiling of that church. But in the thirteenth century there weren’t any turkeys in Germany, because Columbus only brought them to Europe from America at the end of the fifteenth century, understand?”
Michael contented himself with another grunt. In the third drawer there were only boxes of cigars and more concert programs. He moved on to the wardrobe.
“So what happened? It came out that Malskat had painted the picture on the ceiling himself. And because of the scandal all kinds of other things he did came to light as well. For example, the saints in the cathedral. Did you ever hear about that?”
“No.”
“When Lübeck was bombed during the Second World War, a Gothic cathedral was hit, and the plaster fell off its walls in layers. A restorer was called in, and he announced that under where the plaster had been there seemed to be frescoes from the Middle Ages. And in 1951, after three years of renovations, there was a gala reception in honor of this wall, which showed saints from the New Testament standing in a row, each one three meters high. There was nothing like it anywhere else in Germany. It caused a sensation. The German postal authorities even issued a series of stamps with the pictures on them. They must be worth a fortune today, those stamps,” he mused gloomily. “Are you listening?”
Michael grunted from inside the wardrobe, from which he removed some printed scores and rummaged mechanically and apathetically through the coats and tuxedo jackets, even going so far as to unfold a cashmere sweater, as if its folds could provide a hiding place.
“And everyone praised the restorer who had found and cleaned the paintings. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Later, when Malskat was exposed for painting the turkeys, it turned out that he had been the restorer’s assistant in the cathedral. He confessed that he had painted the saints and that for years he had also been making fake French Impressionist pictures. There are dozens of stories like this all over the world. The most famous forger was a Dutchman, van Meegeren. And even the most important art museum in the world, the Uffizi in Florence—have you ever been there?”
Again Michael contented himself with a grunt as he carefully examined a set of suitcases that had been stored in the wardrobe, while Sergeant Ya’ir raised his head from the alcove and said: “I’ve never been to Italy at all. Only to the United States, with a high school group.”
“Well, even the Uffizi bought a portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, and two hundred years later it turned out that da Vinci couldn’t have painted it because when they examined it with lasers they discovered that in every brush stroke the hairs on the right side of the brush sank deeper into the paint than the hairs on the left side. Do you get it?”
“No,” said Michael, who stuck his head out of the wardrobe and looked at Balilty with surprise.
“Then I’ve got news for you!” cried Balilty triumphantly. “Leonardo was left-handed! He didn’t paint with his right hand! You didn’t know that, did you?”
Michael meekly shook his head, and Balilty said to the sergeant: “Come here, young man. You’ve got nothing wrong with your back. Pick up this pile of papers, there’s nothing in them. And bring down what’s up there. You’ll have to climb up and open those glass doors. And see if there’s a lock, because my eyes aren’t what they used to be, either.” He sighed and watched the sergeant as he climbed carefully up onto the table and reached for the glass doors.
“They’re locked,” said Sergeant Ya’ir. “But that’s no problem,” he muttered. “Should I open them?” he asked. When Balilty nodded, he took a pin out of his pocket, leaned carefully against the glass doors, and after a few seconds pulled the door open. “I’ll pass the things down to you one by one. They’re heavy,” he warned.
“What have we here?” muttered Balilty as he looked at a big book.
“Let me see,” requested Michael. He glanced at it and said: “Just another printed score.”
“Look at the fancy binding. Black velvet, no less. What does it say here? I can’t read these letters at all.”
“Der Freischütz,” said Michael after examining the Gothic print. “It’s an opera by Weber. In Hebrew it’s called The Marksman.” His finger hovered over the elaborate letters.
“Weber, who’s he anyway?” Balilty felt the binding. “This isn’t an ordinary book, it’s something special. Take a look.”
“I’m looking,” said Michael, and he carefully turned the heavy pages. “It looks like something historical, with pictures of the sets,” he said as if to himself.
Sergeant Ya’ir got off the table and placed another large volume bound in black velvet on the desk. “It’s heavy,” he said with a sigh, “and it’s so thick. It says here that it’s an opera.”
Michael turned his head and glanced at the volume. “It’s Les Troyens by Berlioz, I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen or heard it. It’s very rarely performed because right at the beginning you need a whole navy on the stage.”
Sergeant Ya’ir opened the book and began to leaf through it. He turned the pages carefully. This score, too, was a special illustrated edition. “We’re not in the public library here,” Balilty scolded him. But he rose from his crouching position and stood next to the sergeant, looking over his shoulder at precisely the moment when the young man turned a few pages at a time to reveal the large vertical rectangle that had been cut into the middle of the page they were looking at and all the pages below it.
For a few seconds the three men were silent. It was the first time, entirely by chance, that all three were standing together at the desk, Michael and Balilty on either side of Sergeant Ya’ir, looking at the same book. Balilty heaved a loud sigh and sat down.
Very carefully, Michael lifted a parcel wrapped in tissue paper from the hollowed-out space inside the book and laid it on the desk. He unwrapped it and revealed a bundle of heavy, stained pages. His hands trembled. “Millions,” whispered Balilty. “It’s worth millions, right?”
Sergeant Ya’ir cleared his throat. “It’s like a story,” he marveled. “In the Arbeli case all we found were a few fibers in the car, some of which belonged to the victim and some to persons unknown. And here—we look and look and in the end we find this.”
“Good for you,” said Balilty loudly, and he slapped the sergeant on the back. “Very nice work.”
The sergeant blushed, lowered his head, held it down for a few seconds, raised it again, sniffed the air, looked at the window, and cried: “I told you it was going to rain! And only two days ago we finished harvesting the cotton. What luck! Just before the first rain.”
And it really was raining, loud and heavy. “It’s coming down hard for the fi
rst rain of the year,” said Michael, hurrying to close the window. “All of a sudden, without any warning.”
“They said on the radio,” said Balilty as he looked at the bundle of paper, “that the first rain is always like this. It’s Succoth now, and there’s always a flood now. We had a few drops last week already. Why don’t you call him in, so he can look at it?”
“I’ll call him in a minute,” said Michael and he sank into a chair. “It’s just hit me, that it really could be. I just can’t take it all in,” he mumbled as he looked at the first page, at a spot of ink above a word between the staves that he couldn’t make out.
“Wait!” cried Balilty, alarmed. “Put these on!” He pulled a pair of thin gloves out of his trouser pocket, handed them to Michael, and watched him putting them on. “It’s just the way he said it would be,” he marveled. “Heavy, fibrous paper. Feel it, feel the corner! Right? We have to alert Forensics. Isn’t this something, life is really . . . I was sure we wouldn’t find anything here. Go and tell them to stop searching the basement,” he instructed Sergeant Ya’ir.
Izzy Mashiah was sitting on the chair in the same position they had left him in when they closed the door: his body bent over, his face buried in his hands, his fingers spread from halfway up his cheeks to the top of his forehead. He slowly lowered his hands and looked at Michael blankly.
“There’s something We’d like you to see,” said Michael casually with a tinge of reluctance, as if he were speaking of some tedious and insignificant matter someone had obliged him to deal with.
Izzy Mashiah rose heavily to his feet and followed him into the room. “Sit down,” said Michael, offering him the black executive armchair, “and take these.” He handed him the gloves he had stripped off his hands.
Izzy Mashiah looked at them with surprise.
“So as not to blur any existing fingerprints,” Michael explained. Izzy nodded, removed his gold ring, put it carefully down next to him, and pulled on the gloves. Behind him Michael heard Balilty moving heavily, and he knew that he was switching on his little tape recorder.