by Batya Gur
“The ultra-Orthodox?” Michael asked. “Because of Natasha’s news broadcast?”
“No. That was bullshit. Peanuts,” Schreiber said dismissively. “No, I’m talking about something—” He looked at Natasha with apprehension.
After a moment she spoke. “It’s something very serious, nothing to do with financing yeshiva students. I was intentionally misled, they wanted to get me into trouble to keep me from pursuing the big issue, and to keep me off the air. Now I really don’t know if they’ll ever let me broadcast anything ever again.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll let you,” Schreiber assured her. “Hefetz will let you, he’ll convince Zadik.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” she said, glancing at the front door. “But who’s going to tell Hefetz?”
“I understand you don’t wish to reveal your sources,” Michael said, “but you’re going to have to give us some kind of lead, point us in the right direction, anything. We’ve got to know at least what the issue here is.”
Natasha regarded him with suspicion, then glanced again at the door. Michael hastened to close it. “There,” he said, “no one can hear. It’s only us.”
“It’s,” she began, hesitantly, “it’s that a while ago I heard, it happened that I, well, I came across something really big, I mean big money in the hands of Rabbi Elharizi, and not just him. Others too. Whole suitcases and boxes of dollars and gold, everything. It’s being smuggled abroad.”
“Do you know where to?” Michael asked.
“We think it’s to Canada, but it’s not clear—it seems to be for something really huge, but I’m not sure what exactly yet. Some corrupt scheme the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”
“Hard to believe,” Michael muttered.
“What?” Natasha pounced. “You don’t believe me?”
“No, no,” Michael responded hastily. “It’s hard to believe that there could be corruption that we’ve never seen before.”
“It’s a fact,” Natasha said. “And they don’t even know how much of this affair I’ve already uncovered. Me and Schreiber. But today, after we were parked next to Elharizi’s house and Schreiber even managed to get inside, they’re bound to be suspicious.”
“Her life is in danger,” Schreiber said. “Believe me. They won’t stop at sheep’s heads. It’s like, well, it’s like the horse’s head in The Godfather. That’s probably where they got the idea.”
At that moment the door swung open suddenly, and Balilty burst into the room, short of breath, and looked around. “Like college students,” he said to himself. “This is the way we lived when we were young. Boy, it’s been years…. Say, you could catch pneumonia in this place. It’s sodamp here, aren’t you freezing all the time?” he asked Natasha.
She shrugged.
Balilty stood in front of the bed and pointed at her. “Aren’t you the one on the news?” he asked excitedly. “Aren’t you the one who was talking about the yeshivas?”
Natasha looked out into the darkness—Balilty had left the door open—and Schreiber said, “She was set up. It wasn’t her fault, she was set up.”
“That was clear right away, you don’t have to be some kind of genius to know that,” Balilty said. “With those people you’ve got to check things seven times, they’re—” suddenly he looked behind him. “But let’s not talk about that now,” he whispered, as if in warning. “The guy from forensics—”
Just then a bearded man with a skullcap entered the room. “We took it all,” he said to Michael. “We wrapped up the head, we took fingerprints, I’m sure they used gloves. Not a trace here, nothing. We’re talking professionals. We cleaned up a little too, but it’s hard to see in the dark. I’m ashamed that these kind of people exist,” he added on his way out the door. “And they call themselves religious…”
Balilty moved the Russian book to the floor and sat on the stool. Schreiber was standing in the doorway, and Michael was leaning on the edge of the table, looking from time to time at the green-black sky and the tower in the framed print hanging above the bed. Distractedly he listened to the questions Balilty was asking Natasha.
“I don’t understand,” Balilty persisted. “Who gave you the videotape in the first place?”
“A woman. I don’t know her.”
Balilty pointed at Schreiber. “But he says earlier this evening there was another woman. She was also ultra-Orthodox. And she waited for you too, with another tape, right?”
Natasha did not respond.
Balilty looked at Schreiber. “Was it the same woman?”
Schreiber pursed his lips as if to say, How should I know?
Balilty was growing angry. “You’re not going to answer me?” he asked Natasha.
Schreiber began to explain. “She can’t reveal her sources on something that hasn’t yet—”
“Tell me something, Natasha, haven’t you learned anything yet?” Balilty asked. “You’ve already discovered they screwed you here, didn’t you?”
“This isn’t the same thing,” she said after a pause. She rubbed her pale face, and for a moment her thin, transparent skin glowed pink and a spark of defiance lit the innocent blue of her eyes as she regarded him and answered, “I already told you: this is something altogether different.”
“All right,” Balilty said with a sigh. “What can I tell you? You make your own bed and you gotta lie in it, isn’t that so? Afterward, don’t say I didn’t tell you so.” To Michael he said, “I’m just going to let Yossi Cohen go, and I’ll take the cassette from this guy,” he said, pointing at Schreiber, “the tape where he filmed the sheep’s head.” Balilty shuddered. “Never heard of such a thing before. Come with me,” he said to Schreiber, and the two left the apartment.
“Maybe you should stay away from here for a few days,” Michael said, looking around. “Even if we assume your life isn’t in danger, it won’t be good for you to come home every evening to something like this.”
Natasha pushed the blanket off herself, stretched her legs, and sat up on the bed to look at him. Her blue-eyed look was completely innocent, but the defiant, downward turn of her long, narrow lips gave her face an expression of bitterness and maturity. Her legs dangled—in spite of the cold she was barefoot; wool socks and a pair of boots lay on the floor at the foot of the bed—and he noticed her narrow, naked feet. They looked heartbreakingly vulnerable and delicate.
She bowed her head and examined the exposed stone floor. “I don’t know why you people are making such a fuss. Like you’ve never seen anything like this before. I mean, you see dead human bodies all the time, and here we’re only talking about—”
“Right,” Michael said, pondering aloud. “But it’s the element of surprise. When you’re called in to see a body, you know what you’re going to see. But this is something out of place. Are you sure you don’t want to tell us something? Just the smallest lead?”
“I can’t,” Natasha said. “It’s too…not until…anyway, it’s a criminal offense.”
“What is?”
“The scandal I’ve uncovered.”
“And nobody but Schreiber knows anything about it?”
“Arye Rubin knows,” she said after a moment. “But he himself deals a lot with dangerous material, I know I can trust him. Nothing ever stops him, he’s not afraid of anyone.”
“But he’s preoccupied right now, what with Tirzah’s death—”
“Rubin’s never too preoccupied,” she said, cutting him off. “Rubin is…do you think just because Tirzah died, he stopped working? As we speak he’s busy preparing his report on the doctors, and he’s working on Benny Meyuhas’s film, too.”
Balilty and Schreiber appeared in the doorway. “Listen, sweetheart,” Balilty said, “there’s no way you’re staying here. Got that?”
Natasha remained silent.
“Don’t you have anywhere to go? Family? Relatives? Friends?”
“No, she doesn’t,” Schreiber said. “She’s ‘all alone in the world,’ as they say. She can sleep at my place.�
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“No, sir,” Balilty said. “With all due respect, that’s a bad idea because from what I understand you’re also—”
“Did you tell him?” Natasha said, exploding. “What did you tell him, Schreiber?”
“Nothing, I swear,” Schreiber said, his hand over his heart. “He just asked what part of the city we were in earlier today, and I told him. He understood all on his own we were at Rabbi Elharizi’s.”
“What are you so worried about?” Balilty asked Natasha. “No one is going to hear a word about this from me. But you can’t go to Schreiber’s place, who knows what’s waiting for you there. Maybe they put the sheep’s head here and left the body at his place. How about if we drive over and check it out first? That way you won’t be waking us up again tonight.” To Michael he said, “How about we bring her in to the office? In the meantime she can make a statement.”
Schreiber watched Natasha in silence as she put on her socks and boots. Suddenly he asked Michael, “Can you take her with you? I’ll be fine,” he hastened to add, “I can always go to my sister’s, even in the middle of the night. She lives in Sha’arei Hesed, not far from here. But I can’t bring a woman with me, even under these circumstances. My sister is super religious, and she has a lot of kids. She wouldn’t understand.”
“Don’t you go setting me up somewhere,” Natasha scolded him. “I can take care of myself, and—”
“You’ll come with me,” Michael announced. “Anyway, we have to take a statement from you. We can do that now.”
Natasha silently picked up her canvas bag and tapped Schreiber’s arm as he walked toward the door. She waited for Michael to exit, locked the door, and put the key under an empty planter. She followed Michael obediently to his car.
In less than ten minutes they had reached police headquarters at the Russian Compound. Michael led her to his office, first removing the cardboard files piled on the chair facing his desk and then motioning her to have a seat. “Coffee?” he asked, to which she nodded. “Sugar? Milk?”
“Black,” she answered. On his way to the hot water dispenser in the hallway, he glanced at her bony hands and her gaunt body and was tempted to say she could afford a little sugar.
When he returned with two cups of coffee, he found her resting her head on the desk atop her folded arms. In the wake of the silence after he closed the door, he listened to her measured breathing; he was certain she had fallen asleep, so he sat facing her as quietly as possible and stirred his coffee. As he peered into the cup, he could not resist the thought that a cigarette would be just the right thing at that moment: desired, craved, long-awaited. It seemed to him that since he gave up smoking, coffee had lost its flavor. Natasha raised her head, her eyes wide open. “I woke you up,” he apologized.
“Not at all,” she said. “I wasn’t sleeping, I was just resting a minute.” Suddenly she smiled, exposing her small, white teeth, the teeth of a child. “This is actually a place somebody could rest in,” she said with wonder. “You feel safe here.”
Michael laughed.
“What’s so funny? What could happen to me here?”
“No one has ever said about my office that they feel safe in here. ‘Safe’ is not a word I’ve heard used in this room,” he said, pondering the idea. “You’ve got to be really, well, you can’t have any misgivings. In short, you can’t feel guilty.”
“What should I feel guilty about?” Natasha asked with surprise. “What? Did I do something wrong?”
Michael smiled. “Since when do guilt feelings have anything to do with having done something wrong? It’s enough to be alive just to feel guilty.”
She held the cup of coffee tightly between her hands and stared at a spot on the desk.
Michael said, “A person has to have been wronged pretty seriously in order for him not to have guilt feelings.”
“Oh, I’m an expert at that,” Natasha said. “But I can’t stand when people feel sorry for themselves. You’re responsible for most of what happens to you after childhood. I hate it when people bawl about what was done to them without ever considering their own responsibility.”
“Even when their lives are threatened just doing their jobs?” Michael asked. He took a sip from his coffee without taking his eyes off Natasha.
Natasha looked into her coffee cup and then peered at him. She said coolly, “What an elegant way to get back to the topic.”
Michael spread his hands as if to say there was no choice in the matter. “I said we needed your statement. You can’t keep your sources a secret when—”
“I sure can, and I will. I have to,” Natasha said. “I have no choice. My career really will be over if I say something now. And anyway, what can you possibly do to me? Toss me in jail?”
After a short pause Michael said, “Well, how about at least, without giving away any details, why don’t you just tell me who might be interested in leaving you a token of his affection like that sheep’s head? Do you have any enemies? Is there anyone who hates you?”
Natasha chuckled. “Who doesn’t have enemies?” she said. “It’s enough to—how did you say it? It’s enough for a person to be alive to have enemies, to be hated. Even if he hasn’t done a thing wrong. But if you want to be a journalist and you’re, like, young, and you have this thing with the director of the News Department at Israel Television, then, wow—”
“You think you made people jealous?” Michael asked quietly.
“Yeah, but there’s no connection to—” she began, then decided against it.
“To the sheep’s head?”
“Yes, that’s because of, because of the investigation I’ve been conducting. It’s like, they want to scare me off because I’m onto something really important, you know? I’m not afraid. On the contrary: I know I’ve really got them nervous.”
“With that kind of money at stake,” Michael said, “I’m really not surprised. We should even consider putting you under police protection.”
“Police protection!” she shouted. “Like, a bodyguard? Like someone’s going to follow me everywhere and know everything I do every moment of the day?”
“We’ll consider it,” Michael repeated. “We’ll see.”
After a quiet moment Natasha asked in a childish voice, “Can I take off my boots in here?”
Michael nodded and watched as she struggled to remove her boots.
“Natasha,” he said suddenly. She shifted in her chair and regarded him, her eyes wide open. “Do you think Tirzah Rubin’s death was an accident?”
“Me?” she asked, surprised. “I have no clue—I don’t know anything about her.”
“All right,” Michael persisted. “But what do you think?”
She said nothing.
“Because you know Rubin so well,” Michael said.
“Rubin, yes, but he—” She stopped, searching for a word. “He is the most, really, there’s nobody else like him. Believe me, I know some personal stuff about him,” she said with pride.
“Oh, yeah?” Michael asked, like a child on a dare.
“Yeah. Like how he helps Niva out financially. I mean, he couldn’t acknowledge the kid publicly or anything, but he didn’t abandon the boy either. And then there’s Rubin’s mother.”
“What about his mother?” Michael asked.
“She’s in a nursing home in Baka’a. You know the one? On Bethlehem Street? It’s like for old folks who came from Europe. You know how much that place costs every month? And who do you think pays for it?”
“He’s an only child,” Michael noted.
“And there’s nobody else, because the whole family perished in the Holocaust. She’s not in good shape either, his mother. He has to run over there every day, deal with doctors and all that. Just the other day she ran out of some prescription and he had to dash around—he left everything in the middle, in the middle of preparing his report, and he went over there to bring it to her.”
“What was the prescription?” Michael asked.
S
he looked at him, surprised. “How would I know? What difference does it make? Something for her heart, I don’t remember what. Just that it was urgent. I happened to be in his office when they called. Never mind, it’s not important. I just wanted to tell you that he’s a great guy.”
“And what about Benny Meyuhas?”
“I don’t really know—but he’s Rubin’s best friend, so I’m sure he’s—”
“And Hefetz?” Michael asked.
“Hefetz?” Natasha rolled her eyes. “He’s another story altogether.”
“How so?”
“He’s a guy who—it’s hard to say; he’s complex. People will tell you about his drive and ambition, but he can also be really sympathetic and warm. I didn’t just—anyway, it’s complicated.”
“You’ve had a close relationship,” Michael reminded her. “Intimate. Perhaps you were in love?”
“No,” Natasha said adamantly. “I never loved him, not for a second. He’s just—it’s like, if someone so much older and more important than you takes you like seriously—I just couldn’t remain, like, indifferent.”
“Like, or for real?” Michael asked.
“What?” Natasha asked, confused.
“Did he take you seriously?”
“What do you think?” she asked mockingly. “He’s twice as old as me, director of the newsroom, married for about a million years, has grown children. You think he possibly could have been serious?”
“Don’t you believe someone could actually, seriously, fall in love with you?” Michael asked.
She stared at him for a while, then lowered her eyes and said, “I have no idea what that is. What does it mean that someone loves someone else?”
“How about Schreiber? He seems to look after you, and he’s willing to take risks for you.”
“Schreiber?” she asked, embarrassed. “It’s like, well, mercy on his part. He’s this guy with a great big heart. But that doesn’t have anything to do with love.” She rested her head on her arms again. “I’m exhausted,” she said, her voice muffled. “If you want a written statement from me, let’s get it done now, before I fall asleep on your desk.”