by Batya Gur
“All right,” Lillian said, crossing her legs and shifting uncomfortably in her chair. “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”
Michael looked at Tzilla in wonder. All these years she had never complained: windowless rooms and stuffy cars and everywhere, she had never been with him without his smoking, and she had never once commented on it or asked him to stop. Sometimes she would sigh and give him a sorrowful look when he lit up, and only once she had said to him, “You know, one day some doctor is going to tell you you have to quit, and you will, so why wait until then?” He glanced around and saw that Eli Bachar had lowered his gaze at his wife’s outburst and said, “Enough, Tzilla, let it go.” Suddenly Michael perceived that something was going on between the members of his investigations team. After all, it was clear that the cigarette had not brought on this outburst; anything, if necessary, could serve as the excuse.
“You’ve spoken with Danny Benizri,” Michael said to Eli Bachar. “What have we learned from him?”
“Nothing significant,” he responded uncomfortably. “First he showed up two hours late, even more than that, saying he’d been with the Hulit factory workers, that he’d escorted them or something like that. Then later he wasn’t sure, he didn’t know anything about Benny Meyuhas or Tirzah Rubin, didn’t know anything about anyone. Only Rubin, who was his guru. And Hefetz, who he doesn’t get along with. That sort of thing. That was all.”
“Right,” Balilty said mockingly, “like all the rest of them. Nobody knows anything. On principle they won’t help us. I’ve heard there’s like this tradition, all over the world, that police and journalists don’t get along—”
“Bullshit,” Lillian said, cutting him off. “I’ve sat with that correspondent for police affairs, the redhead, Shalit, and he’s always been very cooperative. He’s never quoted something I asked him not to. All these reporters have given us their full cooperation—”
“Only if it’s vice versa,” Tzilla noted. “Only if they need you. But if you need them? I mean, I just saw in the paper that the Union of Television Workers, about 350 people, is striking against the Tel Aviv police force for assaulting them, for denying them access to crime sites—”
“First of all, those people are not employed by the Israel Broadcasting Authority; they’re government employees,” Balilty explained. “And anyway, there are things we know on our own,” he mumbled, peering at the coffee grinds at the bottom of his mug as he rotated it in his hands. All the others were drinking from Styrofoam cups, but Balilty claimed they ruined the taste of the coffee, so he had brought his own mug from home, which was kept in Michael’s desk drawer. Everyone was expecting him to continue speaking, but he fell silent.
Michael chewed the end of his pencil and waited.
“So,” Eli Bachar asked Balilty, “what are you waiting for? For us to get down on our knees and beg?”
“There are all kinds of issues,” Balilty answered mysteriously. “Where there are people there are problems, tensions, interests. All kinds of things.”
“How about something in the matter of Tirzah Rubin?” Michael asked finally.
“Yeah, her too,” Balilty confirmed as he examined the bottom button on his shirt, which looked as if it were about to pop off. He straightened the sleeves of his blue sweater, which everyone knew had been knitted by his wife in only two weeks (“And I didn’t even know about it”), and wrapped them around his large belly, and only then he started speaking about Tirzah Rubin, who was Arye Rubin’s wife and then had gone to live with his very best friend, Benny Meyuhas (“Instead of the opposite, the opposite happened. Did you get that? Instead of going from the boring one to the interesting one, she went from the interesting one to the boring one, from the classy one—Rubin is one classy guy—to Benny Meyuhas, who looks like her grandfather”), who she’d been with for seven, eight years. “She left Rubin because of all his skirt-chasing,” he explained, examining his fingertips, “but I don’t know whether she knew about the son he had with Niva Pinhas. Have you people met her?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eli Bachar said with a sigh. “There was no avoiding it, was there? She’s not exactly the shy and fearful type.”
“She screams all the time, there really are women like that,” Balilty explained, as if he was particularly knowledgeable in this area. “Secretaries in the media are known to be especially tough—all of them, even the junior ones—so imagine one in the newsroom…. I always say, you want to get to the director general, make sure you get on the good side of his secretary…. Never mind, where were we? Oh, yeah, whether Tirzah Rubin knew about the kid. I don’t know, but I do know that Rubin took great pains to keep any information about him from reaching her, even after she’d left him. He’d be about six, maybe a little older, and he doesn’t have a clue who his father is,” he said in wonder, explaining that Tirzah could not carry full-term. “She had four miscarriages, lots of fertility treatments, poor thing, you should see her file at Hadassah Hospital. They couldn’t help her.”
“That means,” Lillian chimed in, stroking her pointed chin and prodding the dark mole at the base of her neck, “that now the kid can be told. Like, now Rubin has nothing to hide?”
“Yes,” Balilty affirmed, “that’s exactly what it means. What do we learn from this?”
“That Niva Pinhas gains something from Tirzah’s death?” Lillian ventured.
Michael nodded. “But Niva Pinhas was in the newsroom when Tirzah was killed. She never left there. In fact, she just happened to be filling in for someone else that evening, we checked.”
“There were a lot of people in the building. They were there, and people saw them there,” Eli Bachar said. “Hefetz was around, and Rubin, and the skinny young woman with the blue eyes—”
“Natasha,” Tzilla said.
Balilty added, “Meyuhas and Rubin had a very strange relationship—sort of like brothers, unconditional love and all that, but there couldn’t be two more different people—”
“They served together in the army,” Michael explained. “First in the youth movement and later as paratroopers. I understand they spent the Yom Kippur War in the Sinai Desert, nearly their entire platoon was wiped out—only six of them survived, of whom three are alive today: Rubin, Benny Meyuhas, and a friend of theirs who lives in Los Angeles.”
“Aha!” Balilty shouted. “Now I get it.” He stood up from his chair and went to look out the window, at the front courtyard and the main gate to the Russian Compound. “Hey, check this out,” he said, as if to himself. “The wives of the guys laid off by the Hulit factory are still out there. What are they hanging out around here for?”
Michael drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “Nu,” he said at last, but Balilty continued to stare out the window and did not speak up.
“What? What is it you ‘get’ already?” Eli Bachar shouted.
“What? What’s the matter?” Balilty said innocently. “It’s nothing important, it’s just that in Rubin’s office there’s this corkboard with all kinds of large photographs. Not pictures from his news reports and not babes—not like Zadik’s office either, with pictures of VIPs—you know, Zadik with Clinton or Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai or lots of other people—no, there’s none of that with Rubin. He’s got this big photo of an Arab kid with these bulging eyes, like he’s starving or something, and a photo of himself with Tirzah, at the Sea of Galilee, I think, and then there are these, like, historical photos, Japanese POW camps in World War Two, and American POWs, I guess in Vietnam, they’re sitting on the ground with their hands in the air—”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Lillian asked, looking suspiciously in Tzilla’s direction, who was acting as though she had not heard the conversation.
“A lot,” Balilty said, strumming his lower lip with a fat finger. “Rubin and Meyuhas and those other guys were probably POWs or something. If you’re with somebody under enemy fire or in a war, well, that’s a bond for life, even stronger than brothers. They were together
in the Yom Kippur War? There was some story about the paratroopers in the Sinai, we should look into it, but—”
“Let’s get back to the medical report for a minute,” Michael said; Balilty’s incessant chattering was getting to be more than he could bear. “First of all, there are these marks, the bruises on Tirzah’s neck, as though someone had a firm grip on her. But the pathologist can’t determine exactly when. It could be from her argument with Benny Meyuhas, which was a few days before that. The pathologist says that couldn’t be, but still—”
“What?” Tzilla said, taken aback, “you want to tell me that Benny Meyuhas is a wife-beater?”
“What are you so surprised about?” Lillian exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you think that just because someone’s a celebrity he must be a decent human being.”
“Not just any celebrity,” Tzilla said, standing her ground. “He’s the most respected director in television, the most—how shall I say it, someone that everyone knows is reputable—and now with that film of his, the story by Agnon. And the man looks, well, he certainly doesn’t look like a wife-beater.”
“What exactly, in your opinion, does a wife-beater look like?” Lillian asked with forced calm. “Do you think he has some sort of crazed look about him or something? I—in Narcotics, where I used to work, there were lots of…one thing I learned was that if someone wants to hide it, he hides it; it’s not like a common criminal, where you can see it written all over him. With a white-collar guy there’s no external sign that gives him away, especially if he’s a drug addict.”
It seemed that Tzilla was about to say something, but Michael cut her off. “In any case,” he concluded, “you can see in the report in front of you what the pathologist has to say. He writes ‘inconclusive’ at the bottom of the first page.”
“One thing’s for sure: there’s something very strange about this accident,” Tzilla muttered. “How can a pillar fall on you, and you don’t move aside? And what about how Eli heard him saying, ‘It’s because of me’? They must have had some serious argument.”
“But,” Lillian reminded them all, “in the affidavit it says that Benny Meyuhas was on the roof the whole time. He never left.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Michael said. “There was a break. Two in fact, one for food and one for cigarettes or something. The first was at ten o’clock and the other was”—he paused to thumb through his papers—“at eleven-thirty, when they sent for the sun gun. But who knows? He’s the director. He couldn’t very well disappear without someone seeing him.”
“Sure, and people could have gone to the bathroom, too,” Balilty noted. “Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But if you ask me, we don’t have a case here. Nobody has a motive, and someone from the outside, well, there was a guard on duty and it doesn’t make sense that—even if someone had the key to the back entrance, we don’t know of anyone who—like who? Who?”
“We don’t know yet,” Michael emphasized. “In fact, we don’t know anything yet. The question is whether to start poking around or not. The decision is based more on intuition than on some particular finding.”
“What about the digoxin they found in Matty Cohen’s body?” Lillian piped in. “If we add Tirzah’s accident to the surplus of digoxin in Matty Cohen’s blood—”
Balilty cut her off. “Even though it fits in with the general picture, the guy was taking digoxin for five years, he was a bona fide heart patient. It appears he accidentally took too much of the stuff. We don’t have a case, it’s just that…”
While he was speaking, Tzilla passed around additional copies of the medical documents to her husband, who gave them a quick look and handed them to Lillian.
Michael waited until Lillian had passed them on to Balilty and said, “In any case, two dead bodies in under twenty-four hours, each an accident, and with some connection between the two of them—I think it’s a bit…how shall I say it—”
“Okay,” Balilty protested. “There is such a thing as coincidence, don’t you think?” He smiled. “Well, then again, not where you’re concerned, there’s no such term as ‘coincidence’ in the Ohayon dictionary, is there? But there you have it,” he said, a note of victory in his voice, “you always disagree with me, but this time it turns out you’re wrong.”
“I haven’t said anything yet,” Michael reminded him. “But, yes, this time, too, I have this—never mind, we’ll give it another day or two, we’ll put it on the back burner, but we’ll keep our feelers out. I have to go back there in any event to talk to Hefetz, since he can’t make it over here. They’ve got something big on tonight’s program, and you,” he said, pointing to Eli Bachar, “you’re going back to Benny Meyuhas’s place like we talked about?”
Eli Bachar glanced at Tzilla, and for a moment it seemed to Michael that he saw a flicker of fear in his eyes; Tzilla lowered her gaze and shrugged. “It won’t take very long,” Eli said. He looked at Michael and smiled. “Today’s our anniversary,” he said quietly. “We thought we would…”
Michael looked at them both. “That’s right,” he said, remembering. “The first night of Hanukkah. How many years has it been? Fourteen? You celebrate according to the Hebrew date?”
“Fifteen years. How could you not remember?” Tzilla said, scolding him. “You orchestrated the whole thing.”
“Well,” Balilty said mockingly, “in fact he was only the go-between, that’s all, I remember how Eli—”
Michael gave him a look: all they needed now was for Balilty to start telling about how Eli Bachar had had this “fear of commitment,” and how he had given Tzilla such grief until Michael had finally intervened, speaking with him and arranging matters. Balilty lowered his gaze, grinning, but stopped talking. Michael summed up: they would meet again the following morning.
On his way out of the room Eli Bachar said suddenly, “I can’t believe what an idiot I am! I don’t understand how I didn’t think of this earlier: Benizri told me he was with the Hulit workers, but I saw with my own eyes, when I got here I saw the wives, they were standing outside waiting for the men to be transferred from here to—and Shimshi’s wife said to me, ‘Benizri is our only hope, we’re waiting for him to come.’ So how…where was he?”
Balilty stopped. He was fingering a cigar he had pulled from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “It’s nothing urgent. And anyway those things always come out sooner or later.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
For a long moment Michael stood in the doorway of the large room, quite close to the two death notices—one announcing the death of Tirzah Rubin, the other that of Matty Cohen—and took note of the goings-on. It was impossible to recognize the place from that same morning: now, people were rushing helter-skelter, completely absorbed in preparing for the broadcast, so that anything other than the news—even the deaths of Tirzah Rubin and Matty Cohen—was shoved aside. People stood around the conference table, reading the sheets of paper that had been placed on it, talking among themselves, and shouting to others in the inner rooms. Telephones rang from every corner, muffling the sound of the computer printers busy spewing out pages: one mobile phone burst forth with Carmen, while another one, quite near by, rang to the theme for Mission: Impossible again and again until Dror Levin, the correspondent for political parties, picked up the phone and shouted, “Hello! Hello!” a look of exasperation on his face. Through the glass partition Michael could see Danny Benizri standing behind the graphic artist in her room, pointing out something to her on the screen, and in the next room he caught sight of a translator named Rivi as she spoke with a young woman in jeans and a red sweater who was gesticulating and pointing to another cubicle, where a correspondent for foreign affairs was hunched over the keyboard in front of him, typing and speaking into a telephone at the same time. If you could not hear the voices, the people in the newsroom appeared as absorbed in their activities as children at play. “Tell me, does that look like enough makeup for you to go on-screen?” he heard someone ask Kar
en, the anchorwoman, who was sitting on a corner sofa near the door reading from the same lined printout that had been placed in front of every seat around the conference table, until they were removed by Niva, the newsroom secretary, as she shuffled around the table handing out updated copies, her clogs registering a noisy complaint at having been commandeered into action once again. Suddenly, the voice of a child saying the blessing over the first candle of Hanukkah drowned out all the other noise in the room. Michael raised his eyes to the monitor and saw a dark-skinned, curly-headed child, his hand trembling with excitement as he stood before the glowing menorah. “What’s going on here? Who made it so loud? Turn down the volume on Channel Two!” Niva shouted, adding under her breath to David Shalit, the police affairs correspondent: “See that? Channel Two uses an Ethiopian kid, and in another five minutes we’ll be putting a new immigrant from Russia up there. How do you like that? We know how to play the game, too!” David Shalit did not even look up at the monitor, he merely shrugged and pointed to the page he was holding, as if to say there was no need for another one.
“Can’t you see that it says six-forty-nine p.m. on this one?” she asked, indignant. “If you haven’t noticed, this is the latest lineup; the last one was over an hour ago. Look here, see for yourself how much it’s changed.” She scanned the room and called out to Karen. “Have you been to makeup? Where’s Natasha? I don’t understand why she isn’t here!”
“Here I am, I am too here, what do you want?” Natasha responded from a corner of the room and approached the table.
“What’s that you’re wearing?” Niva scolded her. “It’s not at all my job to be worrying about such things.” She tugged the sleeve of a wrinkled woman whose pale hair was gathered into a sloppy bun. “Ganit,” she said, “you’re a producer, so why don’t you produce already? What’s with Natasha’s blouse?” Niva sighed loudly, spreading her arms and raising her eyes to the ceiling. “Why should I have to worry about this? Natasha, get down to Wardrobe, do you hear me?”