Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  Izzy Mashiah’s face turned pale. He stared blankly at the manuscript and quickly took his hands off the desk. “Gabi didn’t tell me anything about it,” he lamented again, shaking his head from side to side. “Not a single word. He couldn’t have wanted it to be mine. It isn’t mine if there’s nothing official registered about it anywhere. And maybe I really don’t deserve it, because I didn’t trust him and I accused him of . . .” His lips pouted in an aggrieved expression. “And if he didn’t intend me to have it, I don’t want it.”

  “How could he have intended you to have it?” said Balilty, almost with pity. “He thought he was going to publish it, he didn’t know that somebody was going to behead him because of it.”

  “Because of it?” Izzy Mashiah recoiled, and he looked around. “Because of it? Who?”

  “Theoretically it could have been you,” Balilty reminded him.

  Izzy Mashiah looked at him uncomprehendingly. “I didn’t even know that it existed! He didn’t tell me about it!”

  “Such things have happened before,” said Balilty sententiously. “And for far less than this.”

  “But I didn’t know anything about it!”

  Nobody spoke.

  “I don’t want to look at it anymore,” whispered Izzy Mashiah. “I don’t want to touch it.”

  Balilty put his head to one side. “I can promise you that you’ll get over it. A million is a million, after all. Anyway,” he said dryly, “can you attest in writing to everything you’ve just explained to us?”

  Izzy Mashiah nodded miserably. “I didn’t kill Gabriel,” he said as they were standing at the door. “I didn’t know anything about the manuscript. And I wasn’t in the concert hall building.”

  “You lied on the polygraph,” Balilty reminded him.

  “But I didn’t kill Gabi,” he pleaded.

  “If you didn’t kill him,” said Balilty, opening the door, “then we shouldn’t let you out of our sight. With what you know now, your life is in danger.”

  “And Nita? Is Nita involved in it, too?” Izzy Mashiah whispered, horrified, to Michael in the corridor.

  “And now I want to bring in a documents expert from Forensics,” said Balilty to Michael in the car. “Even if we find the Dutch authentication certificate. Was there nothing like that in the safe?”

  “It could have been put in a bank abroad,” said Michael.

  “But he hasn’t left the country since his father’s . . .” said Balilty, almost too late to catch himself in time.

  “Maybe the papers were left in Holland, and there hasn’t been time to retrieve them. What . . . ?” Michael turned around in his seat.

  Izzy Mashiah was looking at them as if he had suddenly realized something that made him say, with a tremulous voice: “Stop here quickly!” He covered his mouth with his hands. Sergeant Ya’ir quickly opened the back door, waving his hands and shaking his head at a woman who stopped to stare as Izzy Mashiah vomited onto the curb.

  “No forensic expert will want to touch it,” said Balilty, drumming on the car window. “They’ll be afraid to damage it. I know them. They’ll say that the examination might ruin it. We’ll be better off trying to get the authentication papers out of him.”

  “Go wash your face and have something to drink,” said Michael to Izzy Mashiah when they arrived at the parking lot in thé Russian Compound. “We’ve got a long night ahead of us,” he warned Balilty as the operator announced over the transmitter that Eli Bahar was looking for them.

  “Where is he?” asked Balilty.

  “On the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. In a traffic jam. There’s a demonstration, he’s trying to get onto the shoulder. He wants you to contact him on the cell phone, not the radio.”

  Izzy Mashiah looked at his face in the cracked mirror in the bathroom at police headquarters. Michael stood at the door with his arms crossed. “After you sign your statement,” he said, “I’ll explain to you what we want from you in connection with Theo.”

  Izzy Mashiah turned on the faucet. The water spurted out noisily. “Theo’s coming here? He’ll be here and I’ll have to see him?” he whispered with his head under the tap.

  “Not just yet. He’ll be brought here, but it’ll be a while, and until then we’ll have time to. . . .”

  Water streamed from Izzy Mashiah’s face and hair, and he passed the palms of his hands over his head. “I can’t see Theo now,” he said, and he sat down on the floor. He raised his knees and rested his head on them. His breath whistled. The faucet dripped. “I can’t,” he pleaded.

  “You loved Gabriel,” Michael reminded him, feeling as if he were talking to a child who at any moment might throw a tantrum.

  “He never told me anything about it,” moaned Izzy Mashiah from between his knees. “Not a word, not a hint, not a thing.”

  “Let’s go,” said Michael gently, helping him up. “We’ve made some tea with lemon for you.”

  15

  A Matter of the Dynamics

  Very carefully, and without his usual patronizing “Very nice, Zippo, good for you,” Balilty removed the cassette from the small tape recorder. The tape that Zippo had brought back from his conversations with Herzl Cohen was stopped at the point where the name of the Belgian expert Felix had met in Amsterdam was mentioned. Balilty’s face remained fixed and frozen. It had taken on the baffled expression of someone unable to accept that reality had refuted his prejudices. It was evident around the mouth and in the slackness of his lips, and it also dominated his eyes, which followed the mechanical tapping of the pencil in Michael’s hand. He was on the phone, speaking at length with Jean Bonaventure, a distinguished scholar of Baroque music and manuscripts, who had drawn up and signed, more than six months before in Brussels, the documents that confirmed Izzy Mashiah’s suppositions. To Michael, Bonaventure’s musical explanations—in French with a Belgian accent—sounded familiar. The Belgian gave reasons nearly identical to Izzy Mashiah’s for considering the work a torso of a requiem by Antonio Vivaldi. The musicologist added that, having promised Felix van Gelden to keep the discovery a secret and even signed a notarized statement to that effect, he was now disturbed over the delay in announcing the existence of the Vivaldi requiem and in performing and publishing it.

  It took the intervention of the first secretary at the Israeli embassy in Brussels (“A friend of mine from the army,” Balilty had said as he promised “to take care of the problem in no time”) to persuade Bonaventure to talk to the Jerusalem police and to sign a statement.

  Averting his face from Balilty in order to concentrate on the conversation, Michael sensed Balilty’s efforts to take down some of Michael’s hurried translation of the stream of French coming from the speakerphone. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Balilty diligently writing, licking his full lips as he did so, phrases like “dating the paper,” “age of the ink,” “different watermarks,” “fine Venetian paper,” and “techniques of . . .,” at which point Balilty touched Michael on the shoulder. “What was that word? Techniques of what?” he demanded.

  Michael apologized to the musicologist, switched off the speaker, and replied to Balilty: “Techniques of staff printing.” Balilty nodded and Michael switched the speaker on again. Once more the room resounded with the loud, hoarse voice of a suddenly awakened elderly man explaining that he had compared the handwriting in the newly discovered requiem with that in confirmed Vivaldi autograph manuscripts and that his examination clearly indicated that the manuscript in Felix van Gelden’s possession was the work of a copyist, all but some measures that had been added later by Vivaldi himself.

  “I still can’t believe what Zippo got out of Herzl Cohen!” said Balilty as he again listened to the tapes of the conversations with the Belgian musicologist and the copyright lawyer Meyuhas. “I should say something to him, no?” he added guiltily.

  “Are you ready to go in?” asked Michael. He was nervous, with a knot in his stomach and the feeling that fateful events were still in store. “They’ve be
en waiting for us for over two hours already.”

  “What am I doing, playing bridge?” said Balilty sulkily. “It’s better to get all this stuff wrapped up beforehand.”

  In the conference room Eli Bahar was standing behind Avram, who was sitting at the table looking at papers. Tzilla, who had come in after Michael and Balilty, said, breathing heavily: “I’ve brought Nita here. They’re waiting in separate rooms. I put her in your office, because of the sofa,” Tzilla said to Shorer. “She doesn’t know Theo’s already here. She’s lying down. She really is sick. And Theo,” she turned to Michael, “is waiting in your office. We thought we should put him in a small room. And, as you ordered, he’s not alone. The duty sergeant is with him. Theo doesn’t know anything yet either, including the fact that Nita’s here too. Izzy Mashiah is talking to the woman from the Forensics documents lab now. What’s her name?”

  “Sima?” asked Balilty. “The one with curly hair and big glasses?”

  “That’s right, Sima,” Tzilla confirmed.

  “She’s okay, she knows what she’s doing,” said Balilty, sitting down to the right of Shorer, who was absorbed in the pathologist’s report, going rapidly though the papers in front of him. At the far end of the table, his head also down, Sergeant Ya’ir, too, was absorbed in copies of the same papers. His finger hovered over the lines and he frowned in concentration, as if he didn’t want to miss a single word.

  “Great strength,” murmured Shorer. “Do you hear? It says here that whoever did it would have had to exert great strength. If it was a woman she would have had to be enormous. Look,” he said to no one in particular, “it says: ‘low probability.’” He took off his reading glasses.

  “So it really looks as if she’s out of the picture,” remarked Balilty. “If that’s so . . .” he said thoughtfully and fell silent.

  Michael looked at him anxiously, as if he were reading his mind, and quickly said: “Forget it.”

  “Forget what?” asked Balilty innocently.

  “Forget what you’re thinking. I can do it myself. I want to do it myself.”

  “Did you get her inside without the reporters noticing?” Eli asked Tzilla.

  “There was only one of them still waiting. All the rest have given up. He keeps nagging me about the Japanese knife.”

  “What Japanese knife?” asked Eli, surprised.

  “He got it into his head that Gabriel van Gelden’s throat was cut with a Japanese knife. You know what they’re like. If you don’t tell them anything they make up some nonsense and then—”

  “You can’t do that to her,” Michael warned Balilty.

  Shorer looked from one to the other and then asked impatiently what they were talking about.

  “He thinks he knows what I’m thinking. Now he’s a mind reader.” Balilty raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “We don’t have time for these games,” said Shorer with some irritation. “Tomorrow I have a meeting with the commissioner and the minister. It’s already one A.M. They want to transfer the case away from us. Please get to the point, Danny.”

  “Look,” said Balilty with ostentatious patience. “We have a serious problem here, which we’ve often had in the past. I’m not saying that nothing like this has ever happened before, but this time it’s particularly serious. You know it yourself, sir,” he said to Shorer. “We learned it from you, and from him, too,” he said, and nodded in Michael’s direction. “It’s a matter of the dynamics of the kind of interrogation awaiting us now. Almost everything we have in this case is circumstantial. I don’t believe we can break him.”

  “But he doesn’t even have an alibi!” cried Eli Bahar. “What do you mean, circumstantial? He lied about his alibi. We’ve talked to the Canadian woman and we’ve talked to the musician girl. He wasn’t with the first, and he wasn’t with the second at the right time! And we have a motive, too, now. And an opportunity. We have everything. It’s an open-and-shut case!”

  “We want a confession and a reenactment of the crime,” pronounced Balilty. He leaned forward, spreading his hands out on the table in front of him as if he were about to transfer his weight to them. “We’ve done a great job. We’ve even got the lawyer’s testimony about the meeting that was supposed to have taken place, and about Gabriel van Gelden’s visit to him. Not to mention the Belgian and the copies of the authentication documents that will arrive by express tomorrow. We’ve done a hell of a job. It would be a shame to throw it all away without trying to get a confession out of him. Otherwise it’ll drag out for months in court.”

  “What’s the problem?” asked Avram.

  “The esteemed maestro,” said Balilty slowly, “doesn’t give a damn about any of us. He has no respect for us, and no fear of us, either.”

  Only Zippo spoke. “Why do we need him to give a damn?” he asked, undeterred by the sour expression on Balilty’s face. “I want to understand,” he persevered. “How will I learn if I don’t ask?”

  Balilty looked around with the weary expression of someone asked to explain the obvious. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “it’s a matter of the dynamics of the interrogation.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Zippo with uncharacteristic determination. “Please explain it to me.”

  “You know how an interrogation like this is conducted,” said Balilty with a sigh. “It can take days, at least hours.”

  “Yes?”

  “And you know that there has to be some kind of relationship between the interrogator and the subject?”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know anything about this music,” Balilty said, squirming, “and even our friend Ohayon, who knows something about it, even if he knows a lot about it, this maestro with his international reputation and all doesn’t give a damn about him.”

  “He doesn’t?” said Zippo, surprised. Eli Bahar sighed loudly.

  “He thinks,” said Balilty, and he looked at Michael, “forgive me, but he thinks that we’re all stupid. Including you. Isn’t that so?”

  Michael lit a cigarette. His hand was trembling.

  “So what?” said Zippo. He polished his silver lighter with his thumb and smoothed his mustache. “You thought I was stupid, but that didn’t stop me from bringing you that Herzl Cohen cassette, right?”

  Balilty removed his hands from the table, wiped his brow, looked at Michael and Shorer with a helpless expression, and admitted uncomfortably: “That was a very nice bit of work. But it’s not the same kind of thing.”

  “If I’d been put in the picture from the beginning,” said Zippo mildly, “if he didn’t always prefer to work alone,” he said, nodding toward Michael, “I could have helped even more.”

  “Let’s stop wasting time,” said Shorer. “Just tell us what you think and why Michael’s opposed to it. We aren’t, as you can see, mind readers.”

  “He wants a confrontation with Nita,” Michael burst out. His face flamed. “He wants her to talk to Theo. For us to be behind the glass. She won’t be able to get through it. And anyway, she’ll never agree.”

  Shorer gave Balilty a questioning look, and Balilty nodded and blinked as if he was disappointed by Michael’s good guess, which prevented him from expounding his plan in full.

  A tense silence descended on the conference room. It was as if no one was prepared to reveal his position one way or the other. Sergeant Ya’ir folded his arms and examined everyone’s faces with a serious, interested look.

  “What do you say?” asked Shorer finally, looking at Tzilla. “You’ve been with her all these hours. What do you say? Can she get through it?”

  “She’s really sick,” said Tzilla doubtfully. “She’s delirious half the time. But she’s not so weak. Her body has been weakened, but she’s . . . I don’t know how to say it, but it’s as if she’s got some kind of strength. She’s not an ordinary person.”

  “What can we lose by trying?” demanded Balilty. “If everyone agrees, if we stage it properly, we can get a recorded confession out of him in no t
ime and then confront him with it. If not—if she doesn’t agree to participate, or if he doesn’t say anything to her—what have we lost? We can’t worry now about what’s good for her and what’s not.”

  “A recorded confession isn’t admissible in court. And if he recants afterward?” said Avram.

  “She won’t agree,” said Michael, his armpits becoming damp.

  “We don’t have to put it to her like that,” said Balilty sharply. “If you weren’t . . . If it were about a stranger, you wouldn’t have any problem with it. Where are we here? Have we sworn always to tell the truth during interrogations? You know that doing it is right for the dynamics.”

  “Of course, the dynamics,” muttered Michael. “The sacred dynamics.”

  Balilty gave him an accusing look. “You’re the one who introduced the term in the first place, and you didn’t have anything against it when it was a question of interrogating strangers,” he said maliciously. “But here? Here it’s about family.”

  Shorer coughed. “That’s enough, Danny, you’ve made your point,” he said, crumbling the burned match he had fished out of the ashtray in front of Michael.

  “Maybe . . .” Sergeant Ya’ir said, hesitating. Everyone turned to look at him with surprise, as if they had forgotten his presence. “Maybe we could come back to the point raised by the chief. I once heard Ohayon give a lecture on the dynamics of interrogation,” he said, gesturing toward Michael, “and I don’t understand why he can’t interrogate the suspect himself. She really does have fever and chills and nausea. She really isn’t in good shape. I personally think that she’s too weak for something like this.” His brown eyes met those of Michael, who suddenly noticed him as if for the first time, remembering Balilty’s mocking remark that Ya’ir reminded him of the Michael of twenty years ago.

  “You know as well as I do,” said Balilty impatiently, “that interrogating Theo van Gelden would take dozens of hours, without the dramas you see in the movies. It’s no secret that we have to get him on technical issues. The whole thing demands . . . a kind of chemistry with the suspect. You’re not going to get that kind of chemistry between Mr. Theo Van Gelden and any of us here.”