Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Yoram Beinisch snorted, but the snort was truncated when his mother said: “What is this? I don’t understand what this is, Yoram. Is this thing yours? Are you dabbling in magic? Oy, I feel terrible,” she whispered, and laid her hand on her chest. “I feel so terrible.”

  Yair poured some water from the bottle at her feet and handed her the cup, but her hand was shaking so hard she couldn’t hold it. Without hesitating, the sergeant brought the cup to her lips, and with his left hand he tilted her head back. “Drink, Mrs. Beinisch. It’s from the anxiety. You get dehydrated. It’s common.”

  He moistened her lips, and then she said: “I’m not afraid that Yoram did something wrong. I’m just afraid that you’re going to believe those people, who want to eliminate us.”

  “You don’t understand. They hate us only because we’re Ashkenazim,” said her son. “From the moment my parents came they hated us. They hated us because my parents are white and speak Hungarian.”

  “Not only that,” said his mother, who had raised her head as if she had been filled with new strength. “Also because they want the land.”

  “If we were Yemenites, it wouldn’t bother them so much, the land,” said her son. They’re envious and that’s all. They’re envious of everything. They . . . The envy eats them up, because we’re advanced and they’re primitives, and they know this very well. It’s very good that they know that we are better than they are. Even with their son the professor, who built that synagogue. Do you think he isn’t primitive? It all comes from the home, from the mother’s milk.”

  “Is he also envious?” inquired Balilty. “Does he also wish you ill?”

  “Of course,” declared Clara Beinisch. “Because of his parents, nothing will do him any good—bad blood. All those blacks shouldn’t have been let in. They’re like the Arabs. Worse.”

  “So let’s get back to the little girl,” said Michael.

  “The girl,” said Yoram Beinisch. “She . . . You . . . He,” he said, pointing to Yair. “He says that she’s unconscious, so wait till she comes to and her. Ask her if I ever touched her . . .”

  “We certainly will ask her, buddy, you can be sure of that,” said Balilty. He looked at his watch and examined his fingers with interest. “But not everything needs to be asked. There are things that are plain to the eye—for example, that note inside this nut. This explains it.” He moved over to the desk and pointed to the scroll. “We didn’t have to break the shell. It’s all written down there, and it’s in your car. How do you explain that?”

  “Somebody put it there,” said Yoram Beinisch. “Maybe even you,” he said to Balilty. “How should I know? I don’t do black magic.”

  “This isn’t black magic,” said Michael. “It’s a Yemenite amulet and it was in your car. There are two possibilities—either you got it out of the little girl somehow, or . . .”

  A tense silence hung in the room. Clara Beinisch felt the locks of her hair, which was disheveled, and then touched the wet front of her blouse, her fingers curling around its edge. “Or? Or what?” she burst out, as if unable to bear the silence.

  “Or Zahara Bashari made it especially for him,” Balilty explained to her. “She wanted to exorcise the spell that you cast on him, that’s what we think.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, a grown man talking such nonsense! I’m his mother,” Clara Beinisch cried, and half rose from her chair. But her trembling legs brought her back down.

  “Yes,” agreed Balilty, “and that’s just the point—he couldn’t be with Zahara because his mother didn’t let him.”

  “It’s obvious you don’t know anything,” dismissed Clara Beinisch with a flap of her hand.” Don’t you know he has a fiancée? A wonderful girl whose parents—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Balilty as if bored. “We’re well aware that you love this fiancée, Michelle Pierce. We also know that her parents are well-to-do and all the rest, but he,” Balilty said, and put his small hand on Yoram Beinisch’s shoulder, from which Yoram Beinisch immediately shook it off, “didn’t want Michelle. Do you know who he wanted, Mrs. Beinisch? He wanted his neighbor. Not Nessia. He wanted the Yemenite beauty, the black girl, the girl next door on the other side of the fence. She’s the one he wanted. At first, at least. It was with her and not with his fiancée that he met at the Cliff Hotel.”

  Yoram Beinisch’s eyes widened in obvious fear. “What’s the Cliff Hotel?” he whispered.

  “Nu, that hotel in Netanya, as you know very well, where the two of you would meet,” said Balilty indifferently. “Out of town, far from Mommy’s eyes.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” said Yoram Beinisch angrily. “I wanted her?! Zahara Bashari? Why should I want her? And anyway, if I wanted her so much in your opinion, why would I kill her?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re waiting for you to explain to us,” said Balilty. “That and the matter of the little girl, Nessia.”

  “I never touched that little girl,” replied Yoram Beinisch, and a disgusted expression spread over his face. “I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.”

  “And that treasure that was buried under the tree in your part of the garden?” said Yair. “Was that a coincidence?”

  “Of course it was coincidence,” shouted Yoram Beinisch. “It’s that little girl, who was always wandering around the yard under the windows and she . . . It’s things she collected. Am I to blame for that, too?”

  “There are indications in the car that you were there, at the place . . . at that kiosk,” said Sergeant Yair, “and that the dog was in your car. You put the dog in your car, and that was a big mistake . . .”

  “Who says?!” demanded Yoram Beinisch. “Where did you get that from?”

  “We found all kinds of other slips of paper there too, like this one,” said Michael, “and I just wanted to know if you’d ever seen them. Do you understand what’s written in them? Give me that envelope, please,” he said to Balilty, “the one with the photocopies.”

  “It’s there in the drawer, where you’re sitting,” said the intelligence officer.

  Michael moved back and opened the drawer, in which another recorder was spinning in addition to the one that was in plain sight on the desk. From the depths of the drawer he extracted a large envelope and took a number of pages out of it. “We have here a number of photocopies of the slips of paper we found,” he explained, “and I want you to look at them and see if you can identify anything.”

  “After all this,” exploded Yoram Beinisch, “you still want me to help you? In another minute you’ll ask me to . . .” Deep anger flamed in his pale eyes.

  “Here,” Michael said, handing him one of the pages. “It says here: ‘To find favor in the eyes of kings and ministers: Write the name ‘Gotel’ and put it under your tongue.’ You’ve probably heard that from Zahara, right?”

  “Tell me,” said Yoram Beinisch, with aggressive tiredness. “Is this going to go on forever? Because I don’t have to be here and listen to all this talk of yours. I haven’t done anything and you don’t have any proof. This is all . . . It’s all a collection of circumstances, the aftershave and the slips of paper and this thing”—he pointed to the nut—“that you planted in my car and . . . We’re going home, Mother.” He rose from his chair, went up to her and held her arm. “They can’t hold us here forever. They don’t have . . . Let them arrest us if they want to, but like this? Absolutely not. I’m not—”

  Clara Beinisch rose from her chair and looked around hesitatingly. Balilty, who had gone back to lean on the wall by the door, looked at the handle and as if in answer to his look it moved and the door opened. In the doorway stood Tzilla, signaling something with her fingers.

  “What’s happening?” Michael asked, and saw with some discomfort the smile that was spreading over Balilty’s face.

  “The girl has woken up,” proclaimed Tzilla, and Michael, who was afraid no one would believe her because of the forced way she’d just spoken, was surprised to see Yora
m Beinisch stop in his tracks. His mother, whose arm he was holding, stopped with him on the way to the door, and both of them looked at Tzilla.

  “Nu, has she said anything?” asked Yoram Beinisch indifferently.

  Tzilla looked hesitantly at Balilty, who now had his hand on the door handle. He blinked as if he had been dazzled by a sudden flash of light.

  “You can speak freely,” Balilty said to Tzilla. “You can tell the whole truth, because we have no secrets here, right, friends?”

  Clara Beinisch looked at him with obvious disgust. Balilty’s problem, mused Michael, is that sometimes his tricks cross the line, and sometimes, like now, it turns out that they are totally unnecessary. One look at Yoram Beinisch’s face showed that he wouldn’t fall into this trap.

  “Has she said anything?” asked Yoram Beinisch again.

  “She’s talking now. She’s just begun,” answered Tzilla.

  “You can go anywhere you want,” said Balilty to the mother and her son, “but it won’t pay. It won’t help. The girl has regained consciousness, and now she’s going to talk and no one is going to silence her.”

  Chapter 15

  Well, what is there to say?” Ada said, and tossed aside the photocopied pages of the reporter’s article. “It’s simply disgusting, filth. I don’t want . . . How did she get her hands on all those details?” she asked in a throttled voice. “There’s a summary of your biography here, with all the stories about . . . those things. Everything. How did she know about all that? Did you speak to her?”

  “Not a word,” Michael said, and pushed aside the glass of wine that was in front of him. “I didn’t speak to her and I am not going to speak to her.”

  “So how did she know?” Ada blew gently on the dancing flame of the fat orange candle that illuminated the sitting area, which hinted at the way she had intended they spend the evening, and after the candle went out and smoked a bit, she moved the bottle of wine she had bought specially.

  “It’s true what they say, that filth sticks to whoever touches it.” The prolonged expectation of his coming and the late hour at which he finally arrived were what had caused the slight unhappiness in her voice. He examined her face again and made an effort to decipher her expression. The crease between the high arches of her eyebrows had grown deeper and the fine wrinkles at the corners of her mouth gave her small face a bitter look, and this made him anxious.

  When he’d told her about Orly Shushan after the encounter at the Basharis’ house and had jokingly mentioned the journalist’s wish to interview him, and the phrase “twin souls” she had used then, Ada had pressed her pretty lips together in the same way, and commented that the few times she had been compelled to be interviewed by journalists—“In order to sell, you have to do that sometimes,” she explained, “and even if it’s a film for the BBC the producer needs you to do this, and you yourself, if you want anyone to know about it”—the experience had often left her with a heavy sense of discomfort or in total embarrassment. “Not because of the exposure, because what have you got to hide,” she said, and her lips parted the tiniest bit, “but because of the vulgarity and sensationalism of all the things that get attention today. Sometimes,” she said when he first told her about Orly Shushan, “you can’t believe what you’re hearing. One day a while ago I had a phone call from some television producer. They’re doing a program on ‘how to be a successful blonde,’ she tells me, and they want me to be on it.”

  “Were you blonde?” asked Michael.

  “No, of course not. For years now I’ve been like this,” she said, and raked her fingers through her hair from forehead to nape, “and that’s what I told her. I said, ‘But I’m not even a blonde,’ and do you know what she answered?”

  Michael shook his head slowly. He did not know what the producer had said to her and he did not know what the moral of the story was supposed to be. “Without missing a beat she said to me: ‘Okay. I got it. So now we know you’re not a blonde, but you can represent the non-blonde who has always dreamed of being a blonde, or something.’ See what I mean? And then my cameraman gave me a long lecture and bawled me out for being such a drag and taking myself too seriously, because I didn’t agree. There’s a limit.”

  He then confirmed with a nod that he had understood.

  Now, he watched her as she crushed the candlewick between two fingers and stifled the last of its smoke.

  “Do you want me to leave?” Michael asked miserably, and stretched his arm out to the hassock to gather the pages that had been put down there. He crushed them into a ball, and in a theatrical movement that even he found repulsive, he threw the ball to the corner of the room and missed the mouth of the large ceramic vase that stood there. “I’m sorry that she dragged you into all this,” he said, and lowered his eyes, “but if you want me to—I’ll leave right now.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.” Ada laid her hand on his cheek. “I’ll get over it. It’s just froth, filth. It’ll pass. It’s just newsprint—tomorrow someone will wrap fish with it in the market. But there is something that does interest me, and I insist on talking about it,” she said pensively.

  “What? What interests you?” asked Michael, and since he was relieved to see that he wasn’t the one she was angry at, and grateful that she wasn’t fed up with him, he leaned over her and caressed her fingers.

  “How is it that if you didn’t speak to her . . . Don’t you think it’s strange that she found out all those details about you in such a short time? What kind of detective are you if you’re not thinking about this?”

  “Do you know how many strange things happened today?” said Michael evasively, and still he tried not to think about this thing that had been bothering him since that morning.

  “Yes, I’ve understood that,” Ada said, and glanced at her watch. “A person goes out at six in the morning and comes back at two o’clock the next morning. It’s understandable. But even so, didn’t you have even a minute to ask yourself how she could have got all that information?”

  “I don’t want to think about it,” said Michael vaguely, weighing his words so as not to disclose the suspicion her remarks had aroused. “I don’t want to, but I . . . All day long I tried not to think about it, and I was so busy that it . . . Why aren’t you asking about Moshe Avital? He didn’t even object. He cooperated like a good boy, and that, in fact, is what’s strange. I find it strange that someone gives a blood sample for a DNA test, willingly and with no fear, and he doesn’t even have an alibi for the time the little girl disappeared, and he even knows the girl. I know types like that—types who cooperate willingly and tell you everything they know, supposedly, and afterward it turns out . . . Why aren’t you asking about the test, about the DNA? It’s more interesting, believe me, the way from a bloodstain or a hair or anything that has a human cell they can . . . They dissolve the membrane of the cell, and through a technique of cutting and duplication . . . In America they have a DNA database, like a fingerprint database, but here there’s no money—”

  “Fine,” interrupted Ada. “In my opinion you have no choice. But I’m not pressuring you. At your own pace.” For a moment a slight smile crossed her face, but it immediately faded. “Presumably it’s someone close to you who talked, right?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now,” replied Michael. “We’ll think about it later. Tomorrow, after tomorrow. Now I want . . .”

  “Now you want to get some sleep? To shower and go to sleep?” said Ada, looking at him with her dark brown eyes. “Is that what you want?”

  “To shower and lose consciousness,” Michael said, and with an effort extricated his body from the cushions of the small sofa into which he had sunk.

  Ada held out her hand to him, and he grasped it in order to rise. “Nu,” she said, “it’s a good thing she can’t see you now, that journalist. You would ruin all the glamour she arranged for you.”

  Under the stream of hot water he directed at his back, his speculation from the morning disturbed him
again, and he leaned his shoulder against the white ceramic tiles and listened to the running water. Among the events of the day that flowed together with the water—the embarrassment of the woman who was called in to confirm Avital’s alibi for the murder and the lilting French in which he spoke to his wife on the telephone; the uncontrollable trembling in Efraim Beinisch’s leg when he didn’t manage to walk to the door after he heard that his wife and son had left; Balilty’s clouded face after he had reprimanded him for his tricks in the matter of the little girl—among all these lingered Tzilla’s face and her expression at the sight of the cardboard box. It had been removed from the shelter of the building where the Hayoun family lived, and Tzilla looked at its contents and ran her fingers over every one of the objects, as if memorizing their texture. “Look at the treasures that this Nessia collected. It kills me, all these things,” she whispered to Michael in a strangled voice after she had fingered them all and gathered them together again. “I never told you, but when I was little . . . I was also . . . I was also quite an . . . I wasn’t a pretty child . . . That is, I was ugly.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, and then clasped her arm. “It’s impossible. What are you talking about? And the children, they look like you, not just Eli. Are they ugly, your children?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Tzilla. “There are girls like that . . . They think they’re ugly and they’re fat and even . . . maybe they even nurture that . . . or maybe sink into it, with a kind of contrariness—from so much despair, I suppose. If that’s the way others see them . . . If they don’t want me, then . . . You can’t understand this. You, you’ve always been so . . . oho . . . so popular and successful.”

  With a half-smile, he wound his arm around her shoulders. They had been working together since he first came to the police, and he could remember how he had listened for days on end to Eli Bachar’s litany about how he was doing “everything possible to avoid a serious relationship.” Then he had encouraged him and later he rejoiced at their wedding and was the godfather of her firstborn son, and though he never talked to her about his life he knew that she was concerned about him in her own quiet way. She never tried to pair him off with any of her girlfriends, and when she heard about the purchase of the apartment she congratulated him without a trace of criticism and dismissed Balilty’s complaints as “a collection of old women’s fears and especially now, when the market is completely dead and everyone is fleeing Jerusalem and there’s no better time to buy an apartment.” She was gentle with him, as if she knew what he was feeling at the many moments when he withdrew into himself.