by Batya Gur
Lillian nodded.
“On his cell phone, too?”
“The whole works,” Lillian assured him. “She’s got it all organized, with the times and everything. The two days preceding as well: yesterday and the day before. If you want, she can get the whole week.”
“I want to have a look at it before our meeting,” Michael said. “Please make sure a copy is waiting for me here when I finish with—” He indicated the other side of the window. “I want to see it, and everyone should have a copy.”
Lillian nodded, and Michael examined the toothpick he was holding between his fingers before placing it once again in his mouth and returning to the room.
“People began trickling into my office and standing there, waiting for him. To one he’d said, ‘I can see you for two minutes before I leave,’ and to another he’d said, ‘Come at ten o’clock.’ Zadik had promised them all, but who did they complain to? Yours truly, of course. Hefetz shouted at me. Like I really have the authority to tell Hefetz not to enter Zadik’s office! I told him what Zadik had told me, so he did me a big favor and walked away. Ten minutes later he was back, that would have been around eleven-fifteen. And Natasha, the silent one, was there, too, just standing in the corner, waiting. They say these young female journalists will do anything to get ahead, but I’m not sure about Natasha. I mean, I don’t know, there’s something about her—like, she’s not a bad sort, really, you know what I mean? Some of them would sell their own mothers, but not Natasha. But boy, is she stubborn! She was there the whole time, from around ten o’clock. After the Orthodox guy left, I don’t know when exactly, she came in, took up her position, and didn’t move. She was waiting for him, you could say she was ambushing Zadik. Then the spokeswoman for the Israel Broadcasting Authority showed up, and yes, the electrician—the guy from Maintenance—he was funny, and a reporter from the Times, I can’t imagine how Zadik could have promised to meet him…. Anyway, time passed, and Zadik wasn’t coming out. It was already after eleven-fifteen, and he had a meeting outside the building. So I rang into his office. But he didn’t answer. I got up from my chair and knocked on his door. No answer. I tried to open the door, but it was locked, so I called him on his cell phone. No answer. Eventually, Hefetz looked at me and said, ‘I don’t like the looks of this, Aviva. Maybe something happened to him.’ Those were exactly his words. Truth is, I thought so too. Maybe something had happened to him. Nothing like this had ever, well, it’s not like never, but for so long? I didn’t know what to think, especially since it crossed my mind that two people had already died, one just yesterday, even if it was only a heart attack. And Zadik, after all, was not exactly immune to heart trouble, was he?
“I have no idea if he tried to phone out. He never asked me to get anyone on the line for him. He had his own private direct line he could use without going through me, and his cell phone, too. Maybe he was just sitting there and…I mean, I didn’t know about that other door. Until you told me about it, I didn’t know a thing. I don’t even have an idea who knew about it. I’ve been here fifteen years, and I certainly didn’t. Should I go on? Where was I? Anyway, Hefetz called the security officer, and Alon showed up. He tried to open the door, he pounded on it, all that stuff. Hefetz said, ‘Let’s call maintenance,’ and then phoned himself. They showed up pretty quickly, and they, well, they opened the door. That part you know, you’ve seen it, you were there. But before that, before you arrived, Alon wouldn’t let me in. But I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t just stand there on the sidelines. I couldn’t believe it, so I pushed my way in to have a look. You know, you work with a person for so many years, and you don’t even think about…and then suddenly…and this is the third one, in one week, in three days! Look, you don’t know me. Maybe I come across to you as a hysterical woman, but believe me, I’m not. I’ve seen a few things in my lifetime, in high school I even volunteered at a hospital. I come from a traditional home, that was part of our education, we were expected to be good citizens and all that. So that’s the way I am, not hysterical. But something like this, even you, you have seen so much; were you able to just go on as though nothing happened? No way. I’m sure you couldn’t. I saw you. Even you couldn’t….”
She was right. Even he was not immune to what he saw in Zadik’s office. It wasn’t just the man’s mashed face, an expression of surprise etched around the mouth (“No need to expend much effort on finding the murder weapon, is there?” asked the pathologist with quiet satisfaction, pointing with his elbow at the drill standing in a pool of blood next to the pair of stained blue overalls tossed there). Nor was it just the way the body was sprawled over the large desk. It was all these, along with the blood that had been sprayed about, giving the room the look of a slaughterhouse, that made it hard for him to take it all in. Secretly, pretending to look at the papers strewn on the floor, Michael had turned his head away from the body while the forensics people worked energetically, collecting fingerprints and scraping samples onto glass slides. Only a moment before they wrapped Zadik’s body and placed him on the stretcher did he come close and take a careful look. Blood had stained everything: the light blue carpeting, the wall, it had filled the room—the windows were closed—with the sour smell of rust.
“No one knew about that door,” Aviva repeated, full of respect and humility, “until you discovered it.” Her voice trembled.
It is precisely those things you discover by chance, not by strenuous effort or resourcefulness but by diverting your attention, that often wind up leading to rare achievement and bring you a rather embarrassing notoriety. Embarrassing because you did not really earn it; rather, at a certain moment, in the middle of carrying out the job, just as the forensics people were busy examining the initial data, bending down next to the body, preparing samples for testing blood and tissues, taking photographs, marking things—just then you had to excuse yourself for a moment, get some fresh air, and that’s when you discovered what no one else had bothered to notice. How had no one noticed? How was it that no one had attempted to open that door from the outside? They had thought it was a locked closet, ancient; they explained again and again that the metal cabinet that had stood in the hallway for years had concealed the wooden door. No one had noticed that the cabinet had been moved from its place, and for the time being no one could remember how much time had passed since it had been moved, or how long the light-colored door had been exposed, for all to see. Was it truly possible that people working there for years had no knowledge of a second door leading into Zadik’s office?
“Once I tried opening it, years ago, but it was locked,” Hefetz had told him, while Arye Rubin had regarded Michael with surprise when asked about it. “A door? A hidden door?” He nearly smiled when he said, “Believe me, in this building there are so many alterations and tack-ons and hallways and stairways and basements and doors and windows that have been blocked up that nobody can really know.”
And then there was Niva. “Show me,” she demanded. “I have to see this. I don’t want to see the inside of the room. Have they cleaned it all up? No? Then I’m not looking, I just want to see if there’s really a door, and where it leads.” He brought her to the hallway and showed her; she stood in front of the door in absolute amazement and disbelief. When she placed her hand on the round doorknob and turned it, and the door opened without a sound, she looked at him again, dumb-founded. “It even works,” she said in a feeble voice. “I’ve been here for twenty years, and I thought there wasn’t an inch of this place I didn’t know. Not just here, but the String Building as well. And suddenly, a door! Right in the middle of the hallway! Where has it been hiding all this time?”
Hefetz was the one who told him the tall, narrow metal cabinet had been leaning against the door all those years, causing everyone to forget about its existence, and that the cabinet had only recently been moved. “They forgot about it?” Michael asked. “Forgot? I mean, they knew about it once and forgot?” Hefetz squirmed under Michael’s scrutiny and spread his arms
as if confounded. “I don’t recall that I knew about it, maybe I did once, I can’t swear by it. But even if I did, I didn’t know that I did.”
Rubin intervened. “You don’t pay close attention in a place you know really well, someplace you walk around every day. Whatever you take for granted ceases to exist. A cabinet has been standing here for years, but if you ask us what’s inside it, we won’t have a clue because it’s not in use. Once upon a time office supplies were stored there, I only just remembered that now; paper, staples, that sort of thing. It was kept locked then. Now too, no? It was your people who opened it up, right?”
“Yeah, it was us,” Eli Bachar confirmed. “But nobody had a key. Not for the cabinet, and not for the door.”
“I’m sure nobody saw it, the cabinet was hiding the door for years,” Niva said. The conversation took place just after Zadik’s body had been removed by stretcher; before the investigation at police headquarters they sat in Hefetz’s office, near the newsroom. “But I’m telling you,” she said excitedly, “we didn’t even notice that someone had moved the cabinet, even though there are plenty of observant people around here. I couldn’t tell you whether that cabinet was moved yesterday or today or even a week ago. I simply didn’t notice. My eyes are always on the ground when I walk, and how much do I actually get around here?”
“That’s just it,” Arye Rubin said. “Paradoxically, it takes someone from the outside to discern details that we are blind to. You see,” he said to Michael in wonderment, “it was a good thing you were wandering around the hall.”
Inside Zadik’s office there stood a bookstand on which were arranged trophies and a number of collections (flags, matches, wine corks) and a shelf that held bottles of alcohol—not a proper bar, just a shelf; behind this was a curtain, the bottoms of which had been shoved aside as if someone had pushed the bookstand from its place and neglected to straighten the edges of the curtain. When Michael had bent down and looked from down below, he noticed suddenly a light-colored wood surface and the hint of a door frame. He exited the office and walked down the hallway, opening door after door and looking in. The narrow metal cabinet stood quite close to one of the doors, very nearly hiding it. When he pressed on the doorknob, he did not expect anything to happen, when suddenly a small space opened in front of him, a square niche that led to another door. He tried opening that one, too, but something was blocking it. He pushed hard against the door and felt something on the other side moving. All at once he could hear the voice of Yaffa from forensics on the other side of the door. “What’s going on?” she called, taken aback. “Someone—who is it, who’s there?”
“Hang on a minute,” Michael had said, dashing back to Zadik’s room. Together they moved the bookstand and pushed the curtain to the side, revealing the other door.
“Wait,” Yaffa said quietly. “Excuse me for a moment.” She nearly toppled him while she dusted the doorknob and the bookstand for prints.
“They used this door,” Michael said. “They opened this door, didn’t they?”
“Sure,” Yaffa said, eyeing him with frustration. “They probably opened it today, otherwise we would have found something, at least some dust, cobwebs, something. Look, nothing,” she said scornfully. “Not even—well, what did you expect? Maybe you hoped that someone would enter, kill a person, and then leave signs on the door and the knob? At least a palm print, a thumb. Something.”
“Nothing at all?” Michael asked.
“Nada,” Yaffa mumbled. “There are prints on the bookstand and the bottles and all that, but not on the door. In any event, not fingerprints. But we’ll find something else, don’t worry, something will turn up. Just like they taught us, ‘Every time you touch something…”
“…you leave a trace,’” Michael completed the sentence in a near whisper, and sighed.
“Why can’t you believe that?” Yaffa insisted as she bent down to the foot of the bookstand and carefully lifted a single hair from the floor with a pair of pincers. “Do me a favor,” she said before he had a chance to answer, “bring me a small plastic bag from the sack next to the door, or tell Rafi and he’ll give you one.” He hadn’t even moved a muscle when she called out, “Rafi, anybody, I need to bag a hair,” and Michael, who was standing between Yaffa and a young man he did not know, was handed a bag, which he passed on to Yaffa. “You haven’t answered me: do you or don’t you believe it?” Yaffa sat down on the rug, placed the hair in the bag, and sealed it, then looked at him expectantly.
“What? That every time you touch something, you leave a trace? Experience shows that’s true, generally,” he said pensively. “But we know that often it’s just a matter of luck, and—”
“When’s the last time we didn’t come up with something for you?” Yaffa said, offended. “If you consider all the times we’ve worked together, I would have thought you’d—”
“No, no, no,” Michael hastened to appease her. “That’s not at all what I meant. You’re a terrific team, there’s no question about it. It’s just that there’s always—”
“It’s true that things are tough at first,” she agreed; even though she had not let him finish his sentence, she knew what caused his doubts. “Until you make some sense of it all, until you get a handle on all those details, it seems like you’ll never get any real answers. But something turns up, it always does,” she concluded, though it was unclear whether she was trying to convince him or herself. Her long ponytail bobbed up and down when she added, “At least in this case we were very lucky to get here so quickly, before anyone could…it’s lucky they called you so fast. Who called you? Ronen?”
“Yes.”
“Was he a plant here? Gosh, now I understand why he hasn’t been at work. Did Zadik know about him?”
“He did,” Michael said with a sigh. “He agreed to it because of Matty Cohen.”
Although little time had passed since he had spoken with Zadik, it seemed to Michael as though their conversation about the results of the postmortem performed on Matty Cohen had taken place eons ago, and that ages had passed since he had told Zadik about the excessive quantity of digoxin found in his body. “What’s digoxin?” Zadik had asked. “Isn’t that something given to heart patients? I think I’ve heard of it, I think I even saw Matty taking it. Or maybe he just told me about it.”
Michael had explained to him that the popular medication, produced from the digitalis plant and sold commercially from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century as an efficient way of increasing and stabilizing heart rate, was also a dangerous drug. “Medical professionals and heart patients alike know,” Michael said, explaining to Zadik what he had learned from the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Matty Cohen, “that the main problem with digoxin is the narrow range of proper dosage and the fatal side effects the drug produces when just a little too much is consumed.” He thought to himself about the name of the plant—digitalis, responsible for the digital beat—and a digital ticking began resounding in his ears. Zadik had sat up straight in his chair and, clearly rattled, placed his hand over his chest, then stretched his fingers to feel his left arm. Michael added that for that reason, the level of digoxin in Matty Cohen’s blood had been constantly monitored, and shortly before his death it was found to be fine. The autopsy, however, had revealed that the quantity of the drug in his bloodstream was four times normal.
“Four times?” Zadik said, horrified. “How could that be? Does that mean he took too much by accident? Or not by accident?”
“It’s hard to know,” Michael said. “It’s hard to know whether he ingested it himself, accidentally or not, or whether it was given to him.” He imagined the sound of different heartbeats, the normal and the abnormal—terrifying, galloping, exaggerated.
“What does that mean, it was given to him? Are you saying someone poisoned him?” Zadik was astounded. “Don’t joke about this—what do you think we do here, poison people? Anyway, you’re just talking off the cuff, there’s no proof, is there?”
Nonetheless, Zadik did not put up much of a fight about approving Sergeant Ronen for “employment,” and Ronen started work immediately as a temporary electrician for the Maintenance Department (“Only because you gave me your word of honor that he won’t go near the files, trying to figure out who our informer was,” Zadik had warned Michael, “and because I trust you, and because of this business with the digoxin, even if you can’t pin anything on anyone”). So that was how Ronen was able to contact Michael the moment Aviva alerted the security officer; thanks to Ronen, Michael had managed to arrive on the scene before the doctor and before the forensics team.
Now he was looking at the mass of blond curls on Aviva’s head as she leaned forward, her hands over her face. He noted the bright red of her long fingernails against the background of her starkly white hands. In his head her voice resounded—not the feeble, lifeless tone she had been using for the past hour, but the nasally, whiny voice she had used to repeat, over and over again, what he had heard her saying after they broke into Zadik’s office as she stood near the desk: “How can this have happened? I never left my desk, and nobody…” She kept repeating this until the moment she collapsed, as fate would have it into the arms of the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, who had been summoned, and before they could get a tranquilizer into her. “Just so you know,” the doctor had told him, “she could sleep for hours now.” But only one hour had passed before she opened her eyes and sprang to her feet, so they were able to bring her in for the prolonged questioning that was just now coming to an end. Afterward she was completely exhausted, her limbs sprawled limply. She said, leaning over the desk, “Now I’m simply tired, I don’t even have the strength to get up from this chair.” She lowered her head to her folded arms and fell fast asleep.