Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Then he told her that if he happened to meet a boy or a girl like that, especially a girl who knows how to observe things and remembers everything she sees and hears and in addition to that understands the significance of things, he would do everything he could so that this child would talk to him and be his friend, like—and here he hesitated a moment—“like you and Peter.”

  Someone tried to open the locked door and gave up. Michael looked at the small fingers that drummed once on the sheet, and did not know whether she was signaling him to continue or objecting to the comparison to Peter, but nevertheless he risked saying that if by any chance the treasures that a boy or girl like that had secretly collected were to come into his hands, he would not show them to anyone, nor would he tell anyone about them. He wouldn’t say a word about them to a living soul—when he said that, the small fingers fluttered—and even if something in the treasure trove could help solve a murder, even then it would not occur to him to share this secret with a living soul.

  “Peter doesn’t know anything,” Nessia said, and her voice—for which he had been waiting for a very long time, though he had not imagined that he would hear it before she opened her eyes—was limp and weak.

  “And he won’t know, either, if you don’t want him to,” promised Michael solemnly.

  “He killed her,” whispered Nessia. “Handsome Yoram killed Zahara.” Only then did she open her golden brown eyes and look at him, as if her entire life depended on what she saw in his eyes.

  “Yes,” said Michael. “He killed her, but he will never kill anyone else again.”

  Her narrow eyes now regarded him suspiciously, and he repeated his promise in a low, calm voice that brooked no doubt.

  “He found me,” Nessia said, and coughed. “He found me in the shelter, and he also found the handbag.”

  “But you found that handbag before then,” said Michael. “You knew something even before then.”

  She rolled her head on the large pillow and licked her lips, and Michael dipped the gauze in the glass of water and handed her the swab. She examined it from top to bottom for a moment before she put it between her lips and sucked. “No, I didn’t know,” she said. “I only saw . . . I saw them once near the haunted house.”

  “The haunted house on Bethlehem Road?” Michael risked guessing.

  “They didn’t see me. No one saw me,” she said, and there was a glimmer of pride in her words. “I was in the yard,” she explained.

  He nodded without taking his eyes off her.

  “A girl like you,” said Michael with careful seriousness, “already knows that people, even grown-ups, do things the other way around from what they feel or want.”

  “The other way around? Like not showing that they love someone?”

  “That too,” agreed Michael.

  “Yes,” said Nessia, “but not Handsome Yoram. Why did he do it the other way around?”

  “Out of fear,” said Michael. “He was afraid.”

  “Do you mean he was afraid that she would tell his parents and her parents?” Nessia shut her eyes, and he saw the discharge that had accumulated in their corners.

  “And also he already had . . . he already had a relationship with another woman. He was engaged,” he explained to her.

  Nessia rolled onto her side, facing him and he quickly moved to the edge of the bed. “Because of the fiancée from America,” she whispered and frowned. “Because of her.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Michael in alarm.

  “No. Yes. A little, but . . . but right now,” she demanded, “first you tell me . . . explain everything to me . . . Because of the fiancée from America, the blonde. I saw her. Mrs. Jesselson told my mother that she’s rich.”

  “Yes,” said Michael. “His mother liked this fiancée. It’s like if you have a friend your mother doesn’t like and doesn’t agree that you can be her friend, and instead she prefers a different friend.”

  “All right,” said Nessia, and slowly and carefully she rolled over to lie on her back again. “But I don’t have any friends. They don’t like me, the girls in my class.”

  “Now everything will be different,” promised Michael. “Now you are a different person—you’ve been through things. I think that if someone learns what you have learned recently, he develops and his life doesn’t stay in the same place.”

  She gave him a long, searching look, and because of it he hastened to add with utter seriousness: “If someone, especially a young person, goes through such a difficult crisis like you have, and if he remains alive as luckily happened in your case”—now he dared to stroke her arm—“then he comes out of it stronger than before.”

  “My body is awfully weak,” said Nessia doubtfully. “I can’t lift my leg.”

  “Your body will get stronger,” Michael promised, and removed his hand from her arm, “but I was talking about you, about Nessia. You will look at the world differently, and also at yourself.”

  “But if I did have a friend like that, and I had to tell her that my mother didn’t allow me to be friends with her, I’d just tell her and that would be the end of it. Why would I have to kill her?” she wondered. “Isn’t it the same for grown-ups?”

  “Not exactly, not always. Most times it’s like you say, but . . . ,” said Michael. “In this case . . . There were more complicated things in this case.”’

  “Why?” demanded Nessia, and Michael looked at her helplessly. He did not know whether to tell her about the pregnancy. What does a girl of her age know about sexuality?

  “Now you’re going to tell me that I’m too young to understand,” she challenged in a voice limp from weakness. “Now you’re probably going to tell me that when I grow up I’ll . . .” She gazed at the ceiling and peeped at him surreptitiously from the corner of her eyes without moving her face.

  “They . . .” Michael cleared his throat. “They had already . . . He had promised her and she . . . Zahara . . . He had promised to marry her and she wouldn’t have kept quiet . . .” Nessia looked at him suspiciously, and finally he said: “They had already been like man and wife. Zahara was pregnant.”

  “Ah,” said Nessia. “Now I understand. That is,” she continued without embarrassment, “it’s like in The Young and the Restless. I understand that. There was this woman there—do you know it?” He shook his head and intended to say something about how he didn’t have much leisure time. “Okay,” said Nessia without waiting for an explanation, “there’s this girl there, it doesn’t matter what her name is, and she’s pregnant from this man, because they had sex.” She looked at him to make sure that he was listening, or to see whether he was shocked by what she was saying, and as he looked straight back at her, she continued, weighing the syllables one by one: “The school nurse explained to us about sexual intercourse, and anyway I already knew about it. In The Young and the Restless the girl tells the man that she’s going to tell everyone. She’s really annoyed with him, and he says to her: ‘That’s blackmail. That’s what this is, blackmail.’ So Zahara also blackmailed him, Yoram?”

  “You could say so,” said Michael, “but we don’t exactly know this as yet.”

  “I . . . ,” Nessia said, and closed her eyes as if she was feeling very weak. “I once saw him run over a cat. He ran over it with his car and the cat was lying there on the street, completely crushed. And he, he got out of the car and looked at the tires, to see if they had gotten dirty, the tires on his car. He didn’t care about the cat at all. He left it lying like that in the middle of the street, like some . . . like a carcass.”

  “Did you go out with the dog, on the eve of the holiday?” he asked as if incidentally, and saw her fingers flutter.

  “You don’t want to tell me?” asked Michael.

  “Not now,” whispered Nessia, and her eyes, which had opened for a moment, shut again. “Some other time—maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll tell you.”

  Michael nodded. He thought that he should leave the room and let her rest, but when he began
to move Nessia looked at him and asked: “So he didn’t love her?”

  Michael sighed. There are people, he told her, who don’t know how and are unable to love anyone, because there is something in themselves that they hate so much.

  “But he was so handsome,” insisted Nessia. “How could anyone so good-looking not love himself?”

  “Beauty is inside, first of all,” said Michael, “and beauty begins from a person not thinking only bad things about himself.”

  “In your opinion,” whispered Nessia thoughtfully, “could it also be the other way around? That somebody who is ugly could think good things about himself?”

  Outside someone knocked on the door, at first gently and then with a whole hand.

  “That’s my mother,” said Nessia with a small, forgiving smile. “You can open the door for her now. She wants to see me.”

  Chapter 18

  Three times the small truck came around and drove away. And each time the workers piled on five water tanks they took out of the attic space. Ada and Michael stood by the window with its wrought-iron grille on the ground floor and watched them coming down the ladder, the one worker carrying the tank on his back and the other holding it from below, to ease the weight. Ada got alarmed a few times and asked whether the ladder was really steady, and then commented on how they were clearing out the scene of a murder and turning it into a bedroom. She didn’t say “my bedroom” or “our bedroom,” and before he had time to consider this she said: “Has the Rosensteins’ daughter arrived yet? Have they done the DNA test?”

  “She’s here. They’ve done it, but not within a day. It takes a few days for DNA.”

  “And did Zahara’s parents agree to compare . . . Are they cooperating with this?”

  “They agreed. In the end, they agreed.” Michael sighed as he remembered attorney Rosenstein’s pleading and the stern face of Naeema Bashari.

  “What do you want to bet that she’s not their daughter?” said Ada without smiling. “I just know that she’s not their daughter.”

  “I’m powerless to speak in the presence of such knowledge,” said Michael, “even if you’ve never seen her. Even if you’ve never seen any of them. Neither Naeema Bashari nor the Rosensteins nor Tali Rosenstein, so how exactly could you know?”

  “I know it, and it’s not mysticism,” said Ada. “You told me yourself about the difference in the dates. One was born in January and one was born in April. Right?”

  “I think,” said Michael pensively, “that what is bothering you is this order. It’s overdone—this closeness between the intersecting stories, as if everything were too contrived.”

  “So, is it coincidental in your opinion?”

  “That’s not the point,” he replied to her. “I just want to tell you that even if all the coincidences came together at once, it wouldn’t mean that there’s ‘the hand of God’ here or anything. Even what looks like order is disorder, and even what looks like regularity is chaos. She could be the Basharis’ daughter and even that wouldn’t mean anything.”

  She regarded him with interest, shook her head and touched his arm. “How long can it take before the Americans extradite him?” she asked.

  “It could take months,” said Michael, “but maybe his father’s visit there, in Baltimore, and his conversation with Michelle’s parents will speed it up. Maybe his father will have a confrontation with him, for once in his life, really confront him. Stand in front of him and . . .”

  “The main trouble,” said Ada without taking her eyes off the worker who had now arrived on the sidewalk carrying the rusted tank by himself, with careful steps and a bent head, “the main trouble is the fear.” She ran her slender fingers through her soft, cropped dark hair. “Because there are parents who are afraid of their children, from the beginning, when they’re babies, and they transmit this fear in the way they touch their children. Parents who are afraid of their children are even more dangerous than parents who neglect them. In my opinion, at any rate. Were you afraid of your child?”

  “Sometimes,” admitted Michael. “When he was little, after I got divorced and when I would bring him to my place when . . . Sometimes he would cry and I . . . I would get scared, but I got over it.”

  “He was afraid of him and he spoiled him, Efraim Beinisch. He spoiled his only son. He corrupted him.”

  “He didn’t do it alone,” said Michael. “He was even more afraid of his wife. She was the main spoiler there, and I don’t know whether she was afraid of him or simply refused to see what kind of child she was raising.”

  “I can’t think of anything more horrible,” Ada said, and shivered. “I can’t imagine what a person feels like when he finds himself turning his son in to the police, and even more I can’t imagine what a person feels when he knows—and it doesn’t matter whether it’s an only child or one of three—that his son is a cold-blooded murderer. But I can’t stop asking myself whether . . . What I would have done if . . .”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Michael said, and lit a cigarette. The high wooden ladder stood in the center of the big room, leaning on the edges of the hole they had torn in the ceiling, and the workers walked past them before climbing up into the space under the tile roof. The older worker, who was already on his way to the ladder, looked at Michael’s hand, and Michael extended the cigarette packet to him. “Would you like one?” he asked, and the man smiled and very carefully pulled out one cigarette, thanked him with his eyes and waited for Michael to light it. Then he took a long, hungry drag, coughed, cleared his throat and paused for a moment before he began to climb the ladder.

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. It wouldn’t have mattered, because in any case there were the DNA results and in any case it turned out that fetus was his and it was already clear that his alibi was . . . that he didn’t have an alibi.”

  “And that story with his mother, and the fiancée and all that,” said Ada. “She didn’t even wait for the trial, the mother. Nothing.”

  “That’s how it goes,” said Michael. “The father said he would put a bullet through his head, that he would drive his car off a cliff, and in the end it was she. You should know that the one who keeps quiet, that’s usually the one who . . . What should I have done? Put a watch on her? It didn’t even occur to me . . .”

  “Do you think that it was because she knew?” asked Ada. “Because she couldn’t live with that knowledge?”

  “Who knows,” said Michael. “She didn’t leave anything, not a note and not a letter. But I think something else. I’m thinking . . .” He looked out the window. “There are birds on that carob tree,” he muttered.

  “What are you thinking? You said you were thinking something. Don’t stop now,” demanded Ada.

  “It’s just a thought.” He hesitated. “I think she could have managed with that knowledge if she were the only one who knew and no one else discovered it. I think that she realized that her husband also knew and she knew or felt that he wouldn’t just pretend he didn’t know. She realized that Efraim Beinisch would talk, and even if he didn’t talk, I think the fact of the knowledge that her husband knew, and knew that she knew, would have been enough. She wouldn’t have been able to live with this shame if anyone shared it. You asked what I’m thinking? Here’s what I’m thinking: How much longer do we have to wait for that contractor?”

  “He’ll be here in a minute,” Ada promised, and patted his arm. “You’ve got dirty from the whitewash.” She patted his shirt again and then stood on her toes and ran her finger along his cheek and looked into his soft brown eyes. “Why? Are you in a hurry?”

  “No. I’m not in a hurry,” said Michael. “Just terribly hungry. For two days I’ve been eating at the hospital cafeteria, and the time has come for a serious meal, no? Do you have any wishes?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Ada said, and lowered her eyes, “but it will delay the meal for a while.”

  He crushed the cigarette with his heel. “What? Tell
me exactly what you want,” he said, and looked at her, smiling.

  “It’s not what you think.” She laughed. “You’re not even warm,” and both of them looked for a moment at a blackbird that flew out of the carob tree as the water tank banged against the bottom of the truck.

  “I want to meet your son. Don’t you think the time has come for you to show him to me?”

  “Indeed it has,” said Michael.

  More about the Michael Ohayan Series

  BATYA GUR’S stunning novels probe the depths of human emotion in one of the richest, most fascinating parts of the world. Giving the reader a glimpse into the troubles and triumphs of Israel’s land and people, they tell of the contradictions and conflicts that pull it apart on a daily basis, yet at the same time “reveal the incredible love of life in this little country that dances on a volcano” (Elle magazine [French edition]).

  Turn the page for a glimpse into other wonderfully complex and absorbing books in Batya Gur’s Michael Ohayon mystery series, including:

  The Saturday Morning Murder

  Literary Murder

  Murder on a Kibbutz

  Murder Duet

  AND

  Murder in Jerusalem

  The Saturday Morning Murder

  In The Saturday Morning Murder, the first in Batya Gur’s beautifully written series, the reader meets Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, as he investigates the shocking murder of a Jerusalem psychiatrist. Dr. Eva Neidorf was set to deliver a lecture on the ethical problems in psychoanalysis—making her murder quite opportune for some of her colleagues, and the investigation quite complex for Ohayon. The list of suspects is long, and Ohayon follows a trail through the psychoanalytic community—patients as well as analysts—as well as the bustling Jerusalem commercial district and the Israeli military. In this “flawless” (Publishers Weekly) debut, readers are treated to a complex plot, an intelligent and compassionate detective, and a beautifully realized description of Jerusalem.