Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Dedication

  To Ariel

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  More about the Michael Ohayan Series

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Batya Gur

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  There comes a moment in a person’s life when he fully realizes that if he does not throw himself into action, if he does not stop being afraid to gamble, and if he does not follow the urgings of his heart that have been silent for many a year—he will never do it.

  Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon did not say these things aloud, but this is exactly what he thought as he listened to the grumblings of Danny Balilty, the deputy commander of the intelligence division, who grumbled incessantly while Ohayon leaned over the corpse. He knelt to get a better look at the silk fibers that dangled from the rip in the scarf around her neck, beneath the face that had been smashed into a pulp of blood and bone.

  Ada Efrati, who had called them, was waiting for them on the landing of the second floor, in front of the apartment she had bought. The moment they arrived Balilty had battered her with questions that he ultimately assured her would be pursued extensively the following day by Chief Superintendent Ohayon. He’d failed to notice the look of astonishment on Michael’s face as he climbed up the twisting external stairs behind him to the second, and top, floor of the building. Even then, when he first saw her in the twilight, Balilty had looked over his shoulder and wondered about her (“Is she worth it or not? What do you say?” and without waiting had answered himself: “She’s a tough one. She’s got pretty lips, but you see those two lines near her mouth? They say: Not interested. But did you see that body on her? And those nerves she has? Nerves of steel. We’ve seen ordinary people after they find a body and she—look how she stands there.”).

  Balilty kept up his grumbling as Dr. Solomon, the pathologist who had just come back from a monthlong special training course in the United States, leaned over the body. In intervals between murmuring to himself as he examined her, Solomon told them about the latest innovations in the field of DNA that he had brought back from America. He palpated the corpse’s feet and ran a fingernail over the skin of her arm as he recited data on body temperature into the little microphone of the recording device hanging around his neck. From time to time he looked over at his balding assistant, a new immigrant from Russia who followed his superior’s every move and kept wiping his damp hands on his light khaki pants.

  The two people from Forensics were also on the scene. Yaffa was taking photographs from various angles around the huge water tanks between which the body sprawled.

  “Get a load of this,” muttered Balilty as they climbed up the creaky wooden ladder to the narrow opening that led out to the attic under the tiled roof. “There’s still water here from the siege of Jerusalem in 1948.”

  Then Yaffa knelt down, and through a rip in her jeans peeped a bit of white skin as from close up she photographed the smashed face and then the skeletons of the pigeons and the desiccated dead cat that had been thrown on top of them. Alon from Forensics, who had been introduced to Michael as a chemistry student (“They say he’s some kind of genius, a prodigy, ab-so-lute-ly brilliant,” mocked Balilty skeptically; “What he wants with us, I don’t know”), shook the cramps out of his legs, rolled the white chalk between his fingers and ran his hand along the yellow marking tape. It was evident that he was waiting impatiently for the pathologist to finish and allow them to mark the scene.

  When the call from headquarters came in, Balilty and Michael had been in the car on their way to the Baka neighborhood to have a look at the apartment Michael had just bought. When they arrived in front of the building, just around the corner from Michael’s new place, Balilty looked at the rounded balcony and at the arched windows on either side of it, and with astonishment that he concealed behind pursed lips he said: “Is this a castle, this thing? And they’ve bought it now? Look at the size of it.” Then in the yard they floundered among wild sorrel and weeds and he pointed to a tree that spread large limbs up to the second floor and said: “That’s a dead tree. It should be uprooted.”

  Linda, the real estate agent, whom Michael had picked up in their car so she could show Balilty the apartment he had bought, gave him a dirty look. She stopped in front of the tree and stared at Balilty. “What are you talking about? This tree is the most beautiful tree in the neighborhood. It’s a wild pear that has simply shed its leaves for the winter.”

  But Balilty, who never liked to be corrected, hastened up the outside staircase where Ada Efrati was waiting for them at the top. Even before they reached the landing, she said in a shaky voice: “Up there on the roof, there’s a woman and she . . . she’s . . . she’s dead. They smashed her face in. It’s horrible . . . I’ve never seen . . . It’s awful . . . awful.”

  Balilty exchanged a few sentences with her and hurried into the apartment. He advanced through the spacious corridor into the large room from which the shaky wooden ladder led up to the space under the tile roof.

  “Have you called the ambulance?” asked Michael, who hadn’t meant to get into a conversation with Ada just then, but she said: “No, she’s dead. I saw that right away . . . I . . . I’ve seen dead people before. We realized we had to call the police immediately.”

  Then, as he lowered his head to the walkie-talkie and told headquarters to send out the Forensics people and the pathologist at once, Ada Efrati said: “Michael? Is that you, Michael?”

  She was standing under a lamp that was already lit even though it was not yet dark, and behind her stood a short, skinny woman clenching her arms around herself as if in an embrace. “This is my architect,” explained Ada Efrati.

  The lamplight cast a glow on her face as her pupils contracted and emphasized the deep brown of her startled eyes. Her voice sounded familiar, like a weak echo. “I know her,” Michael said to himself, and gazed at her slim hawk nose, the delicate line of her lips and the pale tan skin against her white blouse. I certainly do know her, he said to himself in astonishment.

  “You don’t remember me,” she said with an embarrassed smile, and she twined her hands together as if trying to control her reactions.

  “Who says I don’t remember? How could I not remember you, Ada? Ada Levi. Of course I remember, and you have the same face . . . exactly the same . . . eyes.” He went silent and looked at the corner of her mouth, which twisted into a kind of smile that did not reach her eyes. Now, too, as they stood under the roof, for a brief moment the scene of the crime vanished, the voices of the people from Forensics vanished and everything was gone—except for a sharp memory of the smell of grapefruit, sore hands and a ladder with Ada Levi perched on top; he saw the smoothness of her arms and her shins, the olive skin that tanned in the sun, a sudden, stolen, hasty kiss at the bottom of the ladder. The taste of grapefruit. And then the nights at the kibbutz summer camp, his clumsy fingers, excited and stupid, faltering among the buttons of her blouse and into the tiny cups of a white brassiere. When they returned to the city, it was all over. He couldn’t remember the details exactly: She had a boyfriend, in the army, older than them.

  “Thirty
years,” he said to her. “You haven’t changed a bit. You have the same—”

  “Thirty-one,” she corrected.

  He looked at her questioningly.

  “Thirty-one. It was the summer work camp after eleventh grade. We were seventeen. In fact I was sixteen and a half and you were almost eighteen. Already . . . they said that you . . . they said things . . . and I was . . . well, how should I say it.”

  “Naïve,” suggested Michael. “You were naïve.”

  “Even then you were a gentleman.” She smiled. “Thirty-one years . . . I remember exactly . . . I’ve always been good at remembering dates . . .”

  “Ohayon!” yelled Balilty from above. “Come, come see. Are you coming up or not?”

  “I’ll wait here,” said the architect, who was standing at the foot of the shaky ladder. “I can’t go up and see . . .” And she immediately moved away from the ladder toward the large window that looked out over the neglected front yard.

  “I knew that you were in the police force,” whispered Ada as she followed him into the apartment. “I even thought of looking for you, a long time ago, but not now, because when you find . . . when you find someone dead like that, you don’t think anymore. I came with the architect and with the renovations contractor to see . . . to take measurements . . . Never mind . . . I knew that you were important—that is, that you had a high position in the police force. When I called the police it didn’t occur to me that they would send someone like you . . .”

  “I was in the neighborhood, nearby,” he heard himself apologizing. “Sometimes it happens that if you’re right in the neighborhood, and especially if you’re the duty officer . . .” He wanted to ask her what she meant by thinking of looking him up, but then he heard the Forensics laboratory vehicle pull up on the sidewalk in front of the house and directed the two Forensics people into the apartment.

  “Don’t you even have a good word to say about how quickly we got here?” asked Yaffa as she climbed the stairs.

  “Good for you, really,” said Michael as he gazed after the long stride of Alon from Forensics, who followed Yaffa and stared skeptically at the old ladder that creaked when he placed his foot on it.

  “I haven’t seen an ambulance,” said Yaffa without looking back at him. “Did you call us first?”

  “Dr. Solomon is on his way here. He’s been at headquarters for a meeting about that boy from Kfar Saba,” Michael assured her.

  “Ada Levi,” he said slowly and contemplatively. “Small world.”

  “Efrati,” she corrected. “I got married right after the army.”

  “Are you coming up, or what?” yelled Balilty from above.

  “The contractor is waiting in the car outside,” said Ada. “He . . . He . . . We were here, the three of us. We didn’t know what to do. He’s not . . . He’s Arab, Palestinian,” she finally blurted. “We thought . . . he didn’t want to get involved . . . Does he have to stay here?”

  “Yes, he has to,” said Michael, holding on tight to the ladder. “Everyone who was here has to stay now. Wait down here. We’ll talk later.”

  He climbed the ladder. She remained standing on the ground floor, with the architect.

  During the forensic examination, between Balilty’s talk and Yaffa’s reports and the questions they asked him, Michael asked himself why he hadn’t seen Ada since that work camp in eleventh grade, and why he hadn’t tried to find her or asked any of their acquaintances about her—even though long afterward he would sometimes recollect her face, her lips, the sweetness of the scents of the grove, the softness of her skin and her shy smile. He vaguely remembered that at the end of that year she left the boarding school they attended in Jerusalem, but he couldn’t remember where she went, and in any case she had a boyfriend. And then she got married. Of course she got married—everyone got married. Even he, and many people also got divorced, like him, and now she has a husband and most probably children, too. Maybe even grandchildren. If there was a husband, where was he now? She had said: “I bought this apartment,” and not “We bought.”

  In the attic, Dr. Solomon the pathologist was working slowly and thoroughly, humming a tune to himself. Even though the main examination would be carried out at the Forensic Institute, there wasn’t an inch of the corpse he did not inspect, ignoring the rustle of the roll of yellow tape that Alon from Forensics was winding around his finger as if to hasten the process of the examination. Danny Balilty, the police intelligence officer who had arrived at the scene completely by chance, was deep in his own concerns, the same matter with which he had been so heatedly concerned previously.

  “I want to show you something,” Michael had said to him after they had eaten lunch together. “Don’t ask questions, just come with me.” He had intended to show him the apartment, and to tell him only afterward that he had bought it, but when they stopped at the traffic light at the corner of Bethlehem Road and Emek Refaim to pick up Linda the real estate agent (“Who? Who is it you need to pick up?” demanded Balilty as they’d approached the intersection), the police radio began to squawk. Thus, it was only as they were on their way to the scene that Michael had told Balilty, briefly, about the apartment he had bought.

  From that moment Balilty kept badgering him, and now, too, in Michael’s ears the complaining whisper buzzed (“Why didn’t you consult me? You know that you shouldn’t do things like that alone. Has Yuval seen it yet?”). Michael did not respond. He did not take his eyes off the corpse and suppressed a wave of nausea at the sight of the black and red pulp that had once been a face. Judging from the silk scarf that had not been ruined and the fine woolen dress that clung to her breasts and her slim hips, it was possible to conjecture that the face had been well cared for and perhaps even beautiful; her legs, which had already become rigid, were folded under her in a strange, crooked fashion.

  Now Balilty’s endless talk about the apartment embarrassed him. Even after years of standing at the scenes of murders and looking at corpses, he had not yet learned to take this equably; he could not manage to seal himself off from the fragility of the body and its temporariness, nor could he steel himself to the crude presence of death, which time after time made mockery of the illusion of the permanence of the soul, of the very thought of the existence of the soul. Each time he stood over a corpse, as he was standing now among the water tanks beneath the exposed roof tiles, he imagined he felt every bone of his body and his skull laughing derisively beneath his flesh. He thought about his own death, and he thought about it with curiosity, and about how this death would render superfluous all his efforts to change his life. It took time for these thoughts to change, from a strong acknowledgment of the force that destroys and changes decisively—even though this was not formulated clearly—to continued action. This urge to act arose in him in reaction to the impotence that attacked him whenever he saw a corpse at a murder scene.

  Over the years he learned that in the first moments his face froze. His expression then would not reveal his feelings even in the slightest, and the people around him would interpret this freezing as anger that he restrained with effort and his slow movements and his silence as signs of concentration. He was always embarrassed by the thought of the special powers of concentration attributed to him, which he himself did not recognize.

  The dozens of times Danny Balilty had stood beside him at a murder scene had not blunted the embarrassment that attacked Michael when he heard him talk there (and usually about things having to do with life, which had nothing to do with the case they had been called to investigate). Balilty would look at the murder victim’s corpse as if at a slaughtered steer. Sometimes Michael felt as if the dead had imposed on him the responsibility for preserving their dignity, and then he would withdraw into silence and pretend to be listening; sometimes he revolted and tried to silence Balilty. This time, there was the additional burden of the matter that Balilty refused to stop chattering about, as he had long taken upon himself the role of Michael’s quasi-patron.

&nbs
p; The soles of Linda O’Brian’s clogs clattered on the gray ceramic tiles of the first floor, and he listened to the clicks as he stared at the dead doves that had been trapped in the space under the roof and at the cigarette butts that had been tossed among the scraps of paper and the burnt matches and a dry orange peel, which Yaffa collected carefully into a small plastic bag.

  “I’m coming up,” called Linda from the bottom of the ladder. Michael shrank when he felt the touch of her finger on the back of his shoulder. He turned around and saw the long cigarette she offered him with a typical placating gesture. Even though he usually refused them because of the menthol taste he loathed, he took it this time because his senses were dulled by the musty air. Linda the real estate agent, who knew Michael as a hesitant but impetuous client, leaned toward him, and while taking care not to look at the corpse she lit the cigarette that was decorated at its tip with a stripe of gold.

  “It would be better if you waited below,” said Michael. “Are you also connected to this building?”

  She shook her head. “I know it, but they gave it to a large agency, in town,” she whispered.

  “You can go now, and I’ll call you later.”

  She nodded obediently, taking care to turn her head away from the corpse, and went down the ladder.

  Balilty’s harangue about his hurt feelings echoed in the space enclosed by the tile roof. It was possible to stand upright only in the center of the attic; any step away from the center meant having to hang your head so it would not bump into the sloped ceiling. Motes of dust floated in the beam cast by the spotlight, one of the three that the Forensics people had positioned in the corners of the attic to illuminate the scene and the corpse lying there. Balilty gave Michael respite only in those moments when something attracted his attention. Then he would come back and stand beside him and mutter sentences like the one he was uttering now: “People go and buy houses! You see, here’s a case. This woman bought a house and found a corpse.”

  “Are you done?” the pathologist asked Alon from Forensics.