Murder in Jerusalem

by Batya Gur

  Michael stood up and poured more mineral water into her cup, which he placed in her hand. He touched her shoulder and said, as if to a frightened child, “Drink. Drink a little.” She obeyed, drinking a few sips, then wiped her lips with the back of her hand. She raised her eyes and regarded him with gratitude; she wished to please him, and continued talking.

  “Hagar came here too. Not here, I mean, there. To my office. Believe me, I’m so confused I don’t know where I am anymore. Anyway, she came in, stood next to my desk, and didn’t stop talking. She hadn’t seen Benny Meyuhas since yesterday, she was already very worried. She was with the actress from his production; all this was before Zadik—the actress, the Ethiopian girl, I can’t remember her name. She’s Ethiopian, isn’t she? I don’t care one way or another, but they call her the Indian, Benny’s Indian actress, but I think she’s from Ethiopia. I think she didn’t want to say she was from Ethiopia, she prefers—nobody seems to know anything about her, maybe just Benny and Hagar. Don’t think that everyone around here is so open-minded. There are ranks and classes, you better believe it! Especially with the technicians. Her skin is so dark, but maybe not dark enough; I don’t know if there are such light-skinned Ethiopians. Never mind, it doesn’t matter. The actress said that yesterday, when she was in his house with him, someone came and called for him. She didn’t see who it was. She was somewhere else in the house. Maybe the bathroom. She said she was in the bathroom, but I want to tell you what I think. Yeah, I think so, it’s a known phenomenon between directors and actresses. I’m not saying he wasn’t…well, with the business with Tirzah and all that. I’m sure that Benny’s in mourning. Distraught. But that’s got nothing to do with it. You’ve got to understand, that has nothing to do with it. I remember once when I was really young, I had this relative, an older man, he’s passed away since then, poor guy. Well, his wife died—nobody’s ever said so, but I’m sure she died of cancer—and two days after her funeral I was visiting the house. Actually, she was my relative, not him, a cousin of my mother’s. I was still in the army and my mother, may she rest in peace, said, ‘Aviva, go visit him, please, sweetie.’ I was my mother’s youngest, her darling. I was a good girl and did what she asked. She said, ‘Aviva dear, Shmulik is sitting shiva, go visit him and bring him some joy, help him overcome his sadness a bit.’ So I went to pay a shiva call, even though I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to because I had a bad feeling about it. I told you, some people can feel things in advance. I went into the kitchen for a moment to drink some water or something, and what happens but he followed me in, grabbed me in the corner. In the kitchen, next to the sink. He came up close and started telling me they didn’t have a good life together, him and his wife. I mean, his wife’s body hadn’t even had time to cool off yet—they’d been married for something like thirty years, he must have been well over fifty, with grown children, and I wasn’t even twenty—and here he was, grabbing me in the corner during his wife’s shiva. I swear it. He’s talking to me, and touching me too, at first just my face, and then he’s stroking me. And he’s not ashamed one bit. Do you think it was from his sadness? Could it be the sadness he felt? In any event, that’s what I think about Benny Meyuhas and his actress. I saw her, and she’s beautiful, that’s for sure, if you like them thin and black-haired. It’s a matter of taste. I personally don’t…

  “Where was I? Oh, yeah, Benny’s nowhere to be found, and then Rubin says, ‘I’ll find him,’ to which Zadik shouts, ‘How is it that you have time for such things? What’s going on? Is your report ready?’ And Rubin says, ‘It’s completely ready, including footage of the mother of the guy who was interrogated. I’ve got it all on film, be prepared for a real brouhaha.’ Then Zadik is already sighing because he knows he’s going to have trouble on his hands with the hospital spokesman and with the minister of health and all that, but anyway…”

  In the adjacent room, on the other side of the window covered by a heavy curtain, they could hear the chair being pushed back, the sobbing, the noisy sipping of water. Rafi took the opportunity to change the reel on the recording device. “Whoa, that one’s got a real case of diarrhea of the mouth,” he said quietly as he pressed a button on the amplifier. “She just keeps talking and talking and talking and you don’t even need to ask any questions. I’ve never seen anyone go on like that.”

  Again they could hear muffled sobs. Aviva was mumbling, “I’m sorry, forgive me, I can’t,” followed by deep, hoarse coughing.

  “That’s because of the shot,” a sergeant named Ronen explained. “With some people it doesn’t put them to sleep, it has the opposite effect: they become even more wide awake, but without inhibitions.”

  “I don’t know if this one had any inhibitions to begin with,” Rafi muttered. “She seems like someone who—”

  “Tell me,” Lillian whispered when they heard Michael asking if she had the strength to continue, “what about him? Ohayon? He hasn’t said a word.” She peeked around the edge of the curtain. “How is it that she’s going on and on like that when he doesn’t say a thing?”

  Rafi frowned and, stroking his light beard, said, “You can count on him, that’s the way it always is. He just focuses his eyes on her and doesn’t lower them. Believe me, that’s all it takes.”

  “Not always,” Ronen said. “First he asks a few questions, but sometimes, like in this case, all he has to do is ask what happened. You see how many times he said, ‘Don’t worry, just tell me whatever pops into your head’? With him, every word is planned: ‘Tell me.’ He puts the emphasis on ‘me.’ Like he has a special way of listening to her, like he’s there just for her. Sometimes that’s all it takes. A little personal attention. What more are people looking for? They just want—”

  “Quiet,” Rafi said, cutting him off. “She’s starting to talk again.”

  “You may as well give me the whole bottle of water. If it’s next to me, I won’t have to keep asking for it. Where was I? Oh, yeah, people kept coming in and going out. Niva came in looking for Hefetz in the middle of the meeting, and Danny Benizri, and somebody else, I don’t remember who. I didn’t write them all down, I mean, why would I? The security people downstairs do, they keep track of everyone who comes in from outside the building, but why would I? I just write down the appointments. But I’ve already given your people my appointment book. The policeman with the green eyes took it. Eli, right? Eli Bachar. Nice guy, but married. I told you, the nice ones are always married. Isn’t that true? Never mind, where was I? That’s right. So then everyone left, and there was a moment when Zadik was all by himself, nobody else was in his office, and then he made a few phone calls and by then it was already ten-thirty and they hadn’t finished with the news yet, and everybody who wandered in stopped to look at the monitor to see what was happening with the wives of the unemployed workers at the intersections, especially that pregnant one. Esty, that’s her name, right? The one who chained herself to the steering wheel? And we were looking for the labor minister, who also took a long time to locate. Even her parliamentary assistant didn’t know where she was. All that was my responsibility. If someone can’t be found, it’s like it’s my fault. All in all I just want to do my job the best I can and make it home every day in one piece, you understand? I’m clearly overqualified, I’ve had job offers, I could be—but nothing’s worth trading in my job security. When you’re a woman on her own, you simply can’t manage without financial security. What am I talking about: financial security? That’s a laugh, my salary is a bad joke, believe me, the bare minimum, but with overtime and a good pension program and lots of years on the job…I can’t very well allow myself, as a single woman, to throw it all away. You know what I mean? I’m not exactly looking for adventures, I’ve learned to hang on to what I’ve got rather than tossing away something good. Now where were we? Ah, it was ten-thirty and I think that was when I looked up from my work and saw there was nobody around, I thought maybe Zadik had cleared everyone out, I don’t know. There was just this momen
t when nobody was there and I was talking on the phone, not really paying attention, and suddenly I raised my head and there was this guy, this burned man, standing in front of me. I almost screamed! Imagine this: first of all I see his hand, which he had placed on my desk. I didn’t even hear his footsteps, I was on the phone. Alon, the security officer downstairs, told me he was on his way up, they told me the guy was on his way, but I didn’t know what he looked like. The phone rang. You know how your people were snooping around the other day, how one of the policemen took a bunch of production files? You don’t know about it? Whoa, Zadik hit the ceiling about it, threw him out. You didn’t hear? Zadik went all the way up to the police commissioner about it. That was yesterday, what a ruckus! Zadik thought that you people were taking advantage of an opportunity to figure out who ratted on that police commander from the Northern District. Anyway, I was on the phone and suddenly that hand, which was sort of brownish red, was on the desk in front of me, like the hand of some Frankenstein from a horror movie. I can’t stand that kind of movie because life itself is a kind of horror movie and I don’t need to see it in the movie theater, too. Does that make sense to you? So I saw that hand and I almost screamed. But I didn’t, I just looked at it. I hope he didn’t notice, I don’t feel very nice about it even though now it doesn’t really matter if he noticed or not. What does it matter now? Just then Zadik opened the door to his office and looked the guy over—the black hat, the beard, the black overcoat, everything. Search me, I don’t know anything about the man, but I can tell you this: he had a nice voice, like the voice of a radio announcer. He talked like we do, like a modern Israeli. Zadik ushered him into his office and told me he wouldn’t be taking any calls, ‘until I come out and tell you so. Don’t let anyone interrupt us.’”

  “They were talking about you,” Rafi whispered to Balilty, who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. “She was telling Michael about how someone walked off with the production files, the ones you pinched. She said you took advantage of an opportunity—”

  “So what? Who cares if she said that,” Balilty said with a yawn. “That was before Zadik…” He fell silent, passing a finger over the folds of his neck as if slicing it.

  A light blush rose to Rafi’s smooth, freckled cheeks. “Why?” he asked with emotion. “If we’d known about Zadik, wouldn’t you still have taken the files?”

  “Do me a favor, both of you,” Lillian protested. “Don’t start up again. I don’t want a repeat of yesterday’s meeting.”

  “No, buddy boy, I wouldn’t have,” Balilty answered Rafi. “But not for the reason you think. If I’d known there was going to be a slaughter, I would have waited, because now, my friend, we’ll be able to poke our noses wherever we want in that building and nobody’s going to bother us.”

  “Can you guys keep it down,” Sergeant Ronen complained. “It’s impossible to hear them.”

  Balilty kept his mouth shut and looked toward the window. He pushed the edges of the curtain to the side and peered through the one-way glass.

  “He asked us to keep the curtain closed,” Lillian whispered. Balilty inclined his head and gave her a look, his lips moving as though he intended to say something, but in the end all that came out was “fffffff,” like a tire leaking air. Most of those present in the room knew this was Balilty’s own personal shorthand for “fuck you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t the first time that Zadik had asked not to be disturbed. About half an hour later—with people coming and going all the time, everyone passed through: Hefetz, Niva, Natasha, the guy from the union, the insurance agent who’s been after him for ages and made an appointment with him, Shoshana the seamstress, who asked to speak to him—and there I was like a watchdog, making sure that nobody bothered him. In the meantime there was this big ruckus, all the monitors were blaring and you couldn’t even hear yourself think. The ultra-Orthodox guy in black, you know, the burned guy, came out after about twenty minutes; you’d think someone like that would wear gloves to hide his hands, but no. It was like he did it on purpose. He said good-bye politely, in a leisurely way, like he had all the time in the world. And boy, what a look he gave me! What can I tell you, I was afraid of him. Not disgusted, afraid. He said good-bye and left. After that Zadik buzzed me on the intercom. No, he didn’t leave his office, he spoke to me by phone. Could I have some more water, please?

  “I listened to him on the speaker. ‘Aviva,’ he said, ‘don’t pass any calls through. Until I leave my office I’m not talking to anyone. Is that clear?’ Sure it was clear. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had someone to tell not to pass calls through to me, too? Yes, of course it happens sometimes that he sits with someone or has an important phone conversation and doesn’t want to be disturbed, so he tells me not to pass calls through. But in this case, everyone was looking for him all the time, phoning: the director general’s secretary, the director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, the head of the labor union at Israel Television, the spokeswoman for the minister of labor and social affairs, the insurance agent, who went to wait in the canteen. It seemed like nobody wasn’t looking for Zadik. Even Danny Benizri’s wife and the lawyer for the Hulit factory workers. Everybody! It’s all written down, you can see for yourself, every incoming telephone conversation—even cell phones—they’ve all been registered. The outgoing ones, too.”

  On the other side of the window they could hear Michael talking. “Wait a second,” he said. His chair squeaked, the door slammed open, and in an instant he was standing at the doorway to the adjacent room. “Lillian,” he said in a hush, “do you know if Tzilla has gotten hold of the list of incoming calls yet?”