by Batya Gur
Balilty and two men from Forensics emerged from another room. The house had two bedrooms and a small kitchen, in addition to what Balilty called the salon. One of the bedrooms served Tirosh as a study, and it was from this that the three men had come. To Michael’s regret, Balilty switched on the light, and the magic disappeared. The illumination from the large white fixture suspended from the vaulted ceiling emphasized the whiteness of the walls, the coldness.
“You can smoke inside. Come and see something,” said Balilty impatiently, and Michael followed him obediently to the study. There was a large chest of drawers, all five of its deep drawers open, all of them overflowing with papers and notes. Then Balilty directed Michael’s attention to the desk, its four drawers, too, open and overflowing with papers. Next to the desk stood a stack of cardboard files, each of them labeled in an exquisitely neat handwriting: “Enlightenment, Hebrew,” “Bialik, criticism,” “Structuralism, articles,” and so on. A large notepad lay on the desk, and next to it an ordinary ballpoint pen. Michael bent over the pad and tore off the seemingly blank first page. He looked closely at it against the light and read “Shira—the last chapter.”
“Yes,” said Balilty impatiently, “I’ve already seen that; he pressed the pen hard, but you can’t really make it out. We haven’t found the page he was writing on.”
Michael looked around him. He glanced at the pile of books on a corner of the desk but found no clue there.
“We’ll worry about it later,” said Balilty, and looked at the stack of files again.
“I took them down from that wall, fifty of those files, and there are files full of newspaper articles, and a million books, and there’s no safe in the house, and the bedroom’s full of books and notes too. And if I know you,” said Balilty in a complaining tone, “we’ll need two years to go through it all thoroughly.”
“Letters? A diary?” asked Michael briskly, as if to forestall any further complaint.
“Follow me, sir, please,” said Balilty, leading him into the bedroom.
For a while Michael gazed at the wide, low bed, at the bookshelves on either side, at the single arched window, full of a soft light, overlooking the Hinnom Valley, at the bottle of wine on the little brown bedside chest, the two glasses, the copper candlestick with the stump of candle stuck in it, at the soft white rug. A volume of poems—by Anatoly Ferber, a poet he didn’t know—lay open on the foot of the bed. Balilty opened the closet door wide. Dark suits, gray suits, white shirts, hung there by the dozen, and three pairs of soft, dark leather shoes stood underneath them on the floor.
How empty and pathetic the decor looks without the main actor, thought Michael.
Eli Bahar shuffled around him impatiently and cut through his reflections with a question: “Well, what do you want to begin with?” and Balilty pointed to the little bedside chest, which was locked. Michael sat on the bed and stroked the silk kimono lying on the pillow.
“Is there a key?” he asked, and tapped ash into the little ashtray lying clean and empty on the chest.
“I haven’t found one. The most personal thing we found in the study was his bank statement. And I can tell you right now that he didn’t do too badly for himself: he’s got money invested here and there, and royalties from his books, and an accountant, and reparations money from Germany and money he inherited, and he’s very well organized; he’s got a file for everything. I can’t tell you if there’s anything suspicious in the money department; there’s no copy of a will or anything like that.”
“Okay, let’s get it open,” said Michael wearily. “Let’s not waste any more time. Meanwhile, Eli, call Control, from the phone here, and find out if they’ve made contact with Eilat. Maybe the pathologist’s report on Dudai’s ready. Maybe. And ask them to get in touch with the Institute for Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir and the Marine Medicine Institute in Haifa, where they sent Dudai’s diving gear.”
“Where’s the phone?” Eli asked Shaul from Forensics, who had entered the room, and Shaul led him to the kitchen.
Balilty broke open Tirosh’s bedside chest with a little screwdriver he had taken out of his pocket, removed three deep drawers from it, and set them on the floor at the foot of the bed. Michael straightened up and announced: “I need coffee. I’m dead on my feet.” Balilty ignored this remark, spread the silk kimono out on the bed—Michael noted the green dragon pictured on its back—and emptied the contents of one of the drawers onto it. Michael reached for the ashtray, and suddenly there was an explosion as the bottle of Riesling that had been standing next to the ashtray on the bedside cupboard fell and shattered, and the room filled with a sour smell of wine. Balilty looked at the bottle on the floor and said: “Lucky we’ve already taken prints—from the glasses too; we’ve fingerprinted everything in the room,” and only then did Michael notice the traces of the powder. Balilty went out of the room “to get a rag, to clean it up so it won’t stink.” Again Michael tried to dispel the sweetish stench of decomposition from his nostrils, taking a deep pull on his Noblesse cigarette, whose aroma overcame the wine smell as well.
The drawer had contained photograph albums of the old-fashioned kind, the covers and pages tied together with cord, and inside them yellowing family snapshots against a background of foreign, European scenery. On the first page of one of the albums the single word “Schasky” was written in a rounded script. Michael saw a picture of a young woman holding the hand of a little boy in a sailor suit, who was looking straight into the camera with serious eyes. Under the picture the words “Prague 1935” were written in blue ink in a masculine hand.
He paged slowly through the album, and the child grew from page to page. In the second album Michael traced the boy’s features in the face of a youth. The sailor suit had given way to a man’s suit and a tie, and the youth in the yellowing snapshot stood in a relaxed pose, his hands at his sides and, in his eyes, the serious, lusterless expression that Michael recognized from the lectures on the history of Hebrew poetry from the period of the Jewish Enlightenment to the present day. Under one of the photos, the young Tirosh standing behind the same woman, who had aged in the interim—she in a heavy armchair, her hair drawn back in a bun, he looking straight at the camera—were the words “Vienna 1956,” they, too, written with a fountain pen in Roman letters, this time in a round, feminine hand.
There’s a whole life history here, thought Michael, even material for research into European Jewry and its vicissitudes.
Balilty came back into the room with a rag, went down on his knees, and cleaned up the wine stain and the broken glass. Michael returned the albums gently to the drawer and emptied the contents of the second drawer onto the silk kimono. Three notebooks bound in black leather hid the red flames bursting from the dragon’s mouth. Now they’ll have historical value, thought Michael, and remembered the portable typewriter on the desk in the study. All Shaul Tirosh’s poems seemed to be there in the notebooks, handwritten in ink, in elongated Hebrew characters with vowel points. Michael leafed through page after page and found poems he knew, lines that he remembered by heart, combinations that had stunned him when he first saw them. “What a field day the scholars will have when it’s all over. There are even different versions of the same poem here—there’ll be many papers written!” he said out loud.
“What is it?” asked Balilty impatiently.
“Poetry,” replied Michael, and recited aloud: “‘To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till it be found stopping a bung-hole?’”
Danny Balilty looked at him in amazement for a moment, then he smiled and tapped him on the knee. “My dear Ohayon,” he said, “we’re not crazy about Hamlet in the police, you know. We like action, not hesitation.”
“You know it?” asked Michael, and felt foolish when Balilty answered with a good-humored smile: “Come off it, Ohayon, don’t be a snob. I studied Hamlet in high school too—in English, what’s more, hours of learning speeches by heart. It’s
just that it took me a while to understand what you were talking about. As soon as I hear ‘Horatio,’ I know that it’s from Hamlet. My brother learned Julius Caesar by heart, and my sister Macbeth, so as far as Shakespeare goes, I’m okay. Which doesn’t mean that I go around thinking about Hamlet during working hours. A very negative type, old Hamlet. Unhealthy. Can we get back to business now? Are those poems important? For our case?”
“Everything’s important for our case,” said Michael.
Balilty emptied the contents of the third drawer onto the bed.
Notes, rhyming lines, snapshots of Tirosh himself, Tirosh with women, Tirosh in a large group of people, reviews of his poetry neatly cut out of newspapers, a photograph of a long article about the award of the Presidential Prize, old menus from restaurants in Paris and in Italy, old programs, official invitations, letters and diaries.
“This is what I was waiting for,” said Balilty, and the two of them began paging through the diaries. “I don’t believe it!” said Balilty after a while. “So many women! And all with names and addresses! What are you blushing about?” Michael handed him a page of the letter he was reading.
Balilty glanced at it and then read it in silent concentration, holding out his hand for the rest of the letter, which graphically detailed the reasons why the author, who signed her letter only with initials, was interested in meeting Tirosh again.
Balilty finished reading and whistled. “Okay, we’ll have to take this with us. According to this, our poet’s technique wasn’t bad, eh?” And again the sight of the corpse and the battered face appeared before Michael’s eyes. He went on working through the letters in silence. He always felt embarrassed and curious, even excited, when he was delving into the intimate lives of subjects of an investigation.
“Shaul, Zvika!” roared Balilty from the door. “Come and pack!”
“There are already some bags in the hall, and there’ll be another one here. We’ll need an entire team to go through all this stuff!” said Shaul with uncharacteristic resentment.
“What’s up, Shaul? Is anything wrong?” asked Michael.
“Nothing, except that my wife’s going to kill me. Today’s our anniversary, and I promised to be home by six. We’re supposed to go out to a restaurant. I didn’t have the guts to call her, and it’s almost nine already. You know how many times a year we can afford to go to a real restaurant on my salary?”
They went into the kitchen. “Good,” said Michael, putting out his cigarette in the sink and dropping the wet stub carefully into the empty garbage pail underneath it, whose contents had already been emptied into one of the official bags.
“What’s so good about it?” said Shaul sourly. “Look how much material we’ve got here.”
“It can wait till tomorrow. How many years have you been married?”
“Ten,” said Shaul, looking somewhat appeased.
“Ten?” said Balilty. “You deserve a weekend in Eilat, something serious, not just a restaurant.”
“Yeah?” retorted Shaul angrily. “And who’ll cover my overdraft? You? And who’ll look after the kids?”
Balilty sighed and nodded. “Okay, we all live like that, don’t we? What do you think, that we all drive down to Eilat for the weekend? You think we’ve all got friends who run diving clubs?” And he slapped Michael’s shoulder with a sweaty hand.
“Where’s Eli?” asked Michael.
“Back at the office. Control said the pathologist’s report from Eilat is in, so he went to check it out for connections,” said Zvika. The door of the little refrigerator on which he was leaning suddenly opened, and Shaul, who was facing it, gazed inside and said: “Take a look at this,” extracting a glass jar of red carnations with truncated stems.
Balilty looked and burst out laughing: “The guy was one big act, no? Ohayon, come here and quote a bit of Hamlet—now’s the right time for it.”
“And I haven’t said anything yet about the French cheeses and salamis and the bottles of wine,” said Shaul. “Nothing but foreign goods in this house.”
“Shaul,” said Michael wearily, “call home, so you don’t ruin the evening entirely. And then get going—you wanted to go, no?”
It was situations like these that Michael particularly loathed. His indignation had been roused by the signs of preening and pampering that greeted his eyes wherever he looked, starting with the suits and ending with the bottles of perfume and Italian shaving lotion he found in the bathroom cupboard, on the way to the kitchen, and the French cheeses. But Danny Balilty’s frank envy—which he translated into jokes—and the crudeness he had revealed upset him too. Phrases such as “respect for the dead” and “violation of privacy” went through Michael’s mind, stirred into life by the hostility and contempt expressed by Balilty. But more than anything else, he longed for a simple, satisfying meal and a cup of steaming black coffee, something to efface the refinement he saw all around him.
“Refined, you know, is another side of negative.” He suddenly remembered this line from a poem by Natan Zach and felt that now, for some reason, he understood it better than ever, and also that he had finally entered the “essence of things,” although he still had a long way to go, he thought as he listened to Shaul trying to pacify his wife over the telephone.
This business of the “essence of things,” which was often mentioned with a smile in all the investigating teams he had worked with, was his personal contribution to an unusual style of detective work. He needed, he felt, to become part of the environment that he was investigating, to sense the subtle nuances of the murdered person’s world.
The literary associations that had been coming into his mind ever since he saw the corpse were part of this involuntary, uncontrolled process, the attempt to penetrate the milieu of the Hebrew Literature Department. He felt that he was penetrating deeper and deeper into the soul of Shaul Tirosh. He clearly sensed loneliness, emptiness, something false and overcultivated, and he knew that he was not the only one to feel it, except that Balilty and Eli Bahar resisted, expressed open revulsion for Tirosh’s world, while he followed his feelings, allowed them to take control of his consciousness, wanting the subterranean currents of Tirosh’s life to overtake him.
“Can we go?” asked Balilty, interrupting his thoughts.
“Not yet,” said Michael. “Has the place got a storeroom?”
“Behind the house; nothing unusual: a few tools, boxes, some papers, bottles of wine, and a bit of old furniture,” said Zvika. “I took photographs.”
“Okay, then, we can lock up and leave,” said Michael with a sigh, but at the door he stopped and said to Balilty: “On second thought, I’d better take another look in the bedroom too.”
“You said it was just a bunch of poems,” protested Balilty.
“Never mind, give me an empty bag anyway,” said Michael to Zvika, and returned to the bedroom, where after putting the notebooks and the albums into the bag he looked at the bed again. The silk kimono was no longer there; the lab people had packed it up. For a few seconds he gazed around the room, and then he picked up the book of poems by Anatoly Ferber, which lay on the bed. I’d better have a look at it, he thought wearily to himself; it was presumably the last book Tirosh read before he died.
Michael joined the others and placed the extra bag carefully in the Forensics van. There was no sign of the Ford Escort in the parking lot. For a moment he was alarmed, and then he remembered Eli Bahar. He got into Balilty’s Renault and sat down next to him. The radio began sending out signals.
“Where are you?” said the officer on duty in the control room when he heard Michael’s voice. “Danny Three’s looking for you.”
“On my way,” replied Ohayon, and lowered the volume of the radio. After lighting a cigarette—“one for the road”—he raised the volume again and announced that he would be there in a few minutes.
“Be back in a minute,” said Balilty when they arrived at the Russian Compound headquarters, and, as usual, he disappeared.
<
br /> Eli Bahar was standing in the control room and saying: “So get me Ariyeh Levy—what is this bullshit? What do you mean, you can’t let me have a copy?” When he saw Michael, he turned to him: “The bureaucracy’s unbelievable—I’m telling you it’s unbelievable. The idiots don’t want to give me a copy of the autopsy report. That’s what you get for going by the book with them—they can drive a person crazy.”
“Who doesn’t want to give it to you?”
“In Eilat they don’t want to, and the pathologist I talked to at Abu Kabir gave me a whole song and dance about it too,” said Eli furiously, and concluded with a juicy curse in Arabic.
Five policemen were sitting at the switchboard and answering incoming calls without missing a word of their superiors’ conversation.
“Just a minute,” said Michael. “Before you get onto the C.O., get me Abu Kabir again. Who’s the pathologist there?” Eli Bahar mentioned an unfamiliar name, and Michael said: “No, don’t put him on; wait a minute. I’m going up to the office—come with me.” And finally, as always, Eli calmed down after Michael put the phone down in his office and said quietly: “That was Hirsh I just spoke to. They’ll send us a copy of the pathologist’s report in the morning. But he’s going to phone back soon and give us the gist of it.”
Michael smoked silently, and Eli Bahar went out and came back with two cups of coffee. When the phone rang, Michael picked it up immediately and listened attentively to what was being said at the other end, making rapid jottings on the paper in front of him and saying, “Aha,” innumerable times. Then he thanked Hirsh, a pathologist who had been working with him for eight years now, asked him how his son, the soldier, and his daughter, the student, were getting on, sent affectionate regards to his wife, and replaced the receiver.
“Well?” said Eli Bahar. “Is there any connection? Is there anything?”
“Is there a connection!” Michael gulped down the rest of his coffee. The painting of the sea in Tirosh’s house reappeared before his eyes, together with Dudai’s body lying spread out on the sand. “Iddo Dudai died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide, CO, not CO2, the carbon dioxide we exhale, but the poisonous gas that comes out of car exhausts. All those suicides in America in a closed garage with the car engine running? That kind of thing.”
