by Batya Gur
MICHAEL OHAYON LOOKED AT HIS WATCH and saw that it was eleven o’clock. A strong wind was blowing, blotting out the sound of the rain. He rose from his seat, and the old man stood up, too, and asked him if he was going to go to Neidorf’s house now. Michael took the hint and asked if he would like to accompany him, adding something about the lateness of the hour and the bad weather. Hildesheimer brushed his reservations aside with a sweep of his hand and said that he had already lived quite long enough, in his opinion, and that in any case he would not be able to sleep tonight. As he spoke, he led Michael to the coatrack in the corner of the long hallway, took down a heavy winter overcoat, and put in on. The house was dark and silent, and the two of them let themselves out. Outside it was very cold. Michael, who had kept his jacket on all the time he was sitting in the study, felt the wind like an icy blow and was glad to get into the police Renault.
He activated the radio, which responded immediately. Control tried to tell him something in a tired female voice; he listened patiently. Everyone was looking for him, everyone said it was urgent. “Okay; tell them I’ll be in touch later. And tell my team that I’m in the middle of something.” Control sighed and said, “Will do.”
Hildesheimer sat next to him, sunk in thought, and Michael was obiged to repeat his question twice before the old man nodded and gave him Dr. Neidorf’s address, the same address that Michael had seen on the identification card in her bag in the course of his repeated rummagings through its contents that morning.
It was a little street in the German Colony. Almost every time Michael passed Emek Refaim Street, he thought of the Knights of the German Templars who founded this neighborhood in 1878. How pathetic were their hopes for redemption, symbolized by the remnants of their flour mill, still visible on the corner. Michael maneuvered the Renault through the narrow alleys and parked carefully. He opened the door for Hildesheimer and helped him out of the small car. The two of them went through the little gate and walked up the path leading to the front door, where the old man stepped back to let Michael open the heavy wooden door.
Michael tried all the keys, at first in the light of the streetlamp and then in the light of all the matches left in the box, which Hildesheimer lit one after the other with an admirably steady hand. Finally they both resigned themselves to the fact that the key to the house was not on the ring. Neither said a word about where it might be.
Michael went to his car and came back a few seconds later, a sharp object in his hand. He mumbled something to Hildesheimer about the skills one acquired during the course of one’s life, then he set to work on the lock. Hildesheimer went on lighting matches—Michael had brought a new box from the car—and ten minutes later they were standing in Eva Neidorf’s house.
Michael shut the door.
In the bright light illuminating the entrance hall, he saw the old man’s pale face. His grimly pursed lips expressed what they had both already realized: someone had preceded them.
Literary Murder
The next book in this engrossing series once again finds Chief Superindendent Michael Ohayon investigating a crime among insular intellectuals. In Literary Murder, two rival literature professors from Hebrew University in Jerusalem are murdered on the same weekend. The upstart Iddo Dudai is poisoned while vacationing in the beautiful beach town of Eilat, and the prominent poet Shaul Tirosh, whom Dudai had recently challenged in public, is found bludgeoned in his office. Since each of the victims would have been the most obvious suspect in the other’s murder, Ohayon must divine whether these two rivals’ murders are a coincidence, or the result of a conspiracy. And when he uncovers a love triangle and a profound betrayal, the chief superintendent learns that the dark secrets of a respected literature department run deep.
WHEN HE WOKE UP THAT MORNING, he had told himself that the first day was safely over, that Uzi was taking care of Yuval personally, that he had the finest apparatus available, that there was only one more dive to go, and that tomorrow it would all be behind them and he would be able to drive home with an easy mind.
But then he saw the title “Do You Have a Regulator?” and he began to read the article below it. “There are no rules governing the examination of the tank valve and the regulator; the sole responsibility belongs to the diver,” it said. He went on reading to the end of the article and decided to show it to Yuval as soon as he came out of the water. (“During the dive, immediately after the diver had executed the underwater somersaults, a fault in the air supply was discovered, necessitating an emergency haul to the surface, while I gave him buddy-breathing,” reported the diving-instructor author of the article, and Michael found himself reading with intense concentration. “Observation of the underwater pressure gauge showed a drop in atmospheric pressure from 100 lbs to close to zero, during inhalation from the regulator.”)
Michael Ohayon looked at his watch: the practice session was due to end in fifteen minutes. He stood up and approached the sea. The Diving Club was crowded. No father had ever abandoned his son to his fate like this, he thought in a panic, and then he saw the figure in the black rubber suit being carried from the boat by two people and laid on the beach.
The first thought, of Yuval, was immediately dismissed, because the youngster removing the diving mask from the supine figure was not Guy, the diving instructor who had gone out with Yuval, but Motti, to whom he had been introduced the previous evening. With him was a woman in a diving suit, one of the students in the course, Michael thought. From where he was standing he was unable to see the expressions on their faces, but something in their movements, as they bent over the figure in the diving suit lying on the sand, proclaimed catastrophe.
The premonition of disaster immediately turned into a certainty when he saw Motti rapidly pulling out his knife and ripping open the recumbent figure’s diving suit. The woman ran in the direction of the office, a small stone building on the beach not far from where Michael had been lying.
Motti began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and Michael couldn’t take his eyes off the spectacle. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself standing next to them, waiting for the chest to rise and fall. But nothing happened. Together with Motti, Michael counted the breaths to himself.
It was a young man. His face was pink and swollen.
Superintendent Ohayon, who had seen a lot of corpses during the course of his career, still hoped that one day he would achieve the callousness of the police investigators and private detectives on television. Every time, he was astonished anew, always after the event, by his feeling faint, by the nausea, the anxiety, and sometimes the pity too, that he felt in the presence of a corpse, precisely when scientific detachment and attention to detail were called for. Nothing at all would be demanded of him here, he consoled himself when he realized that all the attempts at resuscitation would be unavailing.
The woman came running back with a young man who held a doctor’s bag. Michael drew closer, silencing the inner voices reminding him that he was on holiday and that it was none of his business.
Murder on a Kibbutz
The third book in the Michael Ohayon mystery series, Murder on a Kibbutz, is another “meaty story, dense with character and plot” (Chicago Tribune). Chief Superintendent Ohayon is seasoned at penetrating complex and insular societies, but when a secretary is murdered on a kibbutz, he encounters barriers that even he has never seen before. The young victim, Osnat Harel, was carrying on an affair with an outsider, and the jealousies, prejudices, and inflexible attitudes of the agrarian kibbutzniks, along with their general distrust of outsiders and their fear of losing their toehold on tradition, make this the determined superintendent’s most difficult case yet.
THE KIBBUTZ ITSELF WAS NOW FIFTY YEARS OLD. A half century had passed since the oldest members had settled on this land. It was not the oldest kibbutz in Israel, but it was certainly well established. The atmosphere today was festive, but at the same time it was clear that nobody was taking the celebration too seriously. Only the children lo
oked excited, but they were drawn to the lineup of agricultural machinery, and none of them paid any attention to the platform and the little choir standing on it. And apart from the members of the choir, hardly anyone was wearing blue and white. Not even the kindergarten children, Aaron noticed with a trace of disappointment that then amused him, and there was no sign anywhere of the national flag. He would have to ask Moish about that too. And at the same moment he thought of the nostalgia that would overcome him on national holidays, and of the excitement with which he would look forward to She-vuoth, the Festival of Weeks, in particular, the feeling of participation in great and important events that had really and truly pervaded him then.
He could not entirely suppress the feeling that once you took away the blue and white and the flags on the Caterpillar, the whole ceremony seemed archaic and foreign, as if it were taking place on a collective farm in Soviet Russia. And yet, he thought, chewing a straw reflectively, he felt that time had stood still, as if he were watching documentary footage from a movie about early Zionist history. But now it was the farce of an agricultural ceremony in a place where agriculture was almost bankrupt—a kibbutz, a Zionist agricultural commune, that derived its income from an industrial plant that, of all things, manufactured cosmetics, having given its name to an international patent for a face cream that abolished wrinkles and rejuvenated skin cells and was advertised in all the newspapers with two photographs of the same woman captioned “Before” and ‘After.” No one else seemed to be showing any recognition of the absurdity of celebrating an agricultural rite where only the manufacture and sale of face cream made it possible to go on working the land. It could, he thought, be why Srulke hadn’t appeared. When Aaron had looked for him in vain in the dining hall in order to greet him, Moish had assured him that he would show up for the ceremony, “if only,” he said, grinning, “to inspect what they’ve done with his flowers.”
As he looked around, ostensibly keeping an eye out for Srulke but actually trying to catch a glimpse of Osnat, Aaron concluded that at least one sector of the kibbutz economy was blooming: There were so many children that a stranger might be excused for wondering how anybody had time for anything else. The products of this intensive reproductive activity scampered about, and the apparent contentedness and good humor of the large families gave him a pang of vague longings. But his other voice nipped them in the bud. The little devil inside him immediately scoffed at his wish to belong, and the skeptical inner voices that had grown louder over the years now asserted themselves and conjured up the image of a herd of placid Dutch cows, spoiling his sense of festivity beyond recovery. He tried to suppress the feeling that there was something stupefying about the tranquility here, recalling the rage that would seize hold of him in the past and that had attacked him today too, on his way to the dining hall with Moish for lunch.
It was only a short distance from Moish’s room to the dining hall, but it had taken a long time to get there, what with having to greet everyone they met and with Moish’s delaying them by remembering one little chore after another, stopping at the children’s houses to see if a dripping faucet had been repaired and the sandbox in the kindergarten refilled with fresh sand, and then at the secretariat to find out whether someone who was supposed to phone had phoned, and only after he had studied the notices on the bulletin board, extracted the newspaper from his pigeonhole and read all the notes he also found there, and answered the phone ringing in the big lobby on the ground floor—only then did the two of them climb the stairs to the building’s second floor, to the dining hall itself.
At the door, Moish lingered to take in the scene, and an eternity seemed to pass before he picked up a tray. As they stood before the trolley holding the trays, Aaron suddenly felt fatigued and impatient with the waste of time, the idleness. He summed it up for himself: The minute you walk into the door of the dining hall, your oxygen supply drops, your productivity declines; that phlegmatic calm, that slowness, they’re enough to drive a person crazy. He retreated behind the protection of the guessing game: who was who, who belonged to whom. He succeeded in identifying members of three and even four generations standing together in groups, the youngest children on their fathers’ shoulders. Which of the adults had been born on the kibbutz and which had married into it he couldn’t guess, but he could tell at a glance which of them were guests like himself.
Murder Duet
Jerusalem is rich with cultural history, and Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, an avid classical music lover, revels in the world-class performances of the ancient city. In Murder Duet, the solitary Ohayon crosses paths with his neighbor Nita, an accomplished cellist, when he stumbles upon an abandoned baby and takes her into his care. Nita is from a family of musicians, and her own experience as a single mother is invaluable as Ohayon scrambles to find the baby’s parents, and keep her safe from harm. But when Nita’s father is murdered, and her musician brother is also murdered soon thereafter, Ohayon must share his attention with the bereaved Nita. Delving deep into the competitive and complex world of the classical music community, while struggling to keep his own life together, and the baby out of harms way, Ohayon must penetrate a reticent and layered community of musicians in this “virtuoso performance” (Booklist).
THE TRAFFIC JAM HAD BARRED HIS WAY through King David Street and obliged him to turn on his siren at the Mamilla traffic lights. As he had pushed on toward the concert hall, he had stared, as he always did now, with astonishment at the frameworks of the luxury buildings that were replacing the razed old neighborhood, and then pushed on toward the concert hall. His astonishment—sometimes accompanied by revulsion—at the changes in the view emerging beyond the traffic lights returned whenever he stopped at this intersection. After glancing, with a sense of relief at their survival, at the Muslim cemetery on his left and the “Palace”—the imposing round edifice that housed the Ministry of Commerce and Industry—on his right, he looked straight ahead. For months he had been contemplating the systematic destruction of old buildings. They had left a building once visited by Theodor Herzl untouched, like a single tooth in an old person’s mouth, while, like a set of gleaming white false teeth, the new buildings now stood behind a big sign announcing “David’s Village.”
They had called him on the police radio when he was already on his way to the Russian Compound, after depositing the babies with the afternoon babysitter. At that moment he was at the Mamilla intersection, staring at stickers proclaiming THE PEOPLE ARE WITH THE GOLAN and JUDEA AND SAMARIA ARE HERE on the back window of the car in front of him. The driver was hastily shutting his window in the face of the barrage of curses let loose by a woman in rags, the beggar woman known as the Madwoman of Mamilla, who plied her trade among the cars stuck at the traffic lights, thrusting a filthy hand at the drivers, grinning or growling with her toothless mouth. The address given him by the dispatcher on Shorer’s orders filled him with terrible panic. “He tried you first at home,” she said, and her voice—a familiar froggy croak—sent a shiver down his spine, as if she had scratched with a stone on a pane of glass.
“I was on the way,” he said into the two-way radio, mainly for the sake of saying something, and he turned into the right lane. The chill that had flooded in him, that had filled the pit of his stomach at the sound of the address, had not been dispelled even by the words “the body of a man” the dispatcher had added, as if urgency justified her lack of caution about reporters listening in to the police frequency. The chill increased the closer he got—speeding past the long row of cars drawn up at the seemingly unchanging traffic lights—to the concert hall.
He was chilled, his knees felt weak, and his teeth chattered. How could Shorer find him if he spent his days waiting for babysitters? he castigated himself. He speeded up. The afternoon babysitter, the one they had taken on specially for Nita’s rehearsals, had been half an hour late. “Because of the traffic,” she had said angrily. The bus route had been changed for the visit of the American secretary of state. ‘And t
he day before yesterday it was because of some rabbi’s funeral,” she panted. “Three hundred thousand Hasidim for a rabbi nobody’s ever heard of! It’s impossible to live in this city anymore—it’s either terrorist attacks or Hasidic funerals or state visits with limousines and motorcycles. Even if they’re only going from the King David Hotel to the prime minister’s house on Balfour Street, they shut the whole damned city down because of them. What do they care? They’re not in a hurry to get anywhere.”
Between waves of the shivers he heard himself asking the dispatcher about whether Forensics had already been informed and sent to the scene. He heard his calm, matter-of-fact voice, the familiar voice routinely and automatically on tap for such occasions. Nevertheless it sounded strange to him now as he asked whether the pathologist had already been sent to the scene. When he had parked at the rear entrance of the concert hall, he turned to the radio again and asked that Tzilla be sent to the scene.
The young Magen David Adom doctor stood next to the skinny pathologist, whose checked shirt emphasized his concave chest and his thin, hairy, white arms. Polishing the lenses of his round spectacles punctiliously, he questioned the doctor briefly in his singsong voice, the silences punctuated by constant humming. He sounded as though he were practicing an endless recitative. She responded to his questions curtly and with evident irritation. When she received the call, it was already “too late,” the doctor said, and now Michael heard the echo of a faint Russian accent in the phrase. “The body was in the same position as it is now, sprawled out like a rag, with all the blood, and the legs folded,” at the foot of the concrete pillar. She hadn’t let anyone touch it, she asserted, no one but she had approached it. She described once more, this time without the note of complaint and condemnation, Nita’s hysterical fit, and that she had sent Nita to lie down in “Mr. van Gelden’s office.”