The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  8

  What did you do to her? A child like that,” said Tzilla as she sat down opposite him.

  “She’s not such a child. She’s okay,” replied Michael absentmindedly as he compulsively redialed a number on the outside line, which had continued to be busy.

  “And pretty too, no?” said Tzilla in the coquettish tone she sometimes used when they were alone. Sometimes Michael would respond, but this time he ignored her amused, inquisitive expression and, as he redialed yet again, asked: “What’s up? What’s new?”

  Sighing loudly, Tzilla began briefing him: everyone’ had already been told to come in for questioning, the intelligence information had been gathered, there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of the people in the Literature Department.

  “What does that mean?” Michael was increasingly irritable as the telephone continued to emit the busy signal.

  “I mean that they’ve committed traffic offenses, that Iddo Dudai took part in an unlicensed demonstration, and that Aharonovitz once complained about the noise in the house next door. Are you listening to me?”

  Nodding as he dialed yet again, he said: “On Wednesday last week they had a departmental seminar, and there was a TV crew there. There’s a film, and I want to see it—today.”

  Tzilla stood up and walked to the other side of the table, and while Michael kept talking and dialing, she took a sheet of paper and a chewed pen out of the top drawer and scribbled something down. Her arm brushed against his, and he breathed in her smell, a delicate astringent perfume. Tzilla drew her arm quickly away.

  “And please get hold of Tuvia Shai’s wife for me, ask her to come in for questioning, and Iddo Dudai’s wife too.”

  “I told you yesterday,” said Tzilla as she resumed her seat opposite him, “that if you started looking for all the women he ever slept with, you’d waste your whole life on it.”

  But then someone answered the phone, and Michael spoke to Dr. Hirsh at the pathology lab, while he drummed his fingers on the table. Tzilla went out and came back with two cups of coffee, and by then the paper in front of Michael was crowded with words.

  He sipped the coffee, pulled a face, and went on talking into the mouthpiece. A few minutes passed before she realized that he was talking to somebody else now.

  “What’s the problem? It shouldn’t be difficult to find such a rare make.” And afterward: “Really! How do you think you’re going to find it on the computer? What dead person reports a stolen car? A white 1979 Alfa Romeo GTV. Comb the whole university area, Mount Scopus—I don’t have to tell you how to work!” He slammed down the phone.

  “She’s waiting outside, the department secretary—I forget her name. She looks as if she’s about to have a heart attack. What did Hirsh say?” asked Tzilla, who knew that from now on there would be no flirting.

  “The report won’t be ready until the day after tomorrow; he couldn’t begin the autopsy until the court order arrived, and the absence of family complicated things. Eli was there while Hirsh was doing the postmortem.” Michael looked at the sheet of paper in front of him, knowing very well what the expression on Tzilla’s face would be when he raised his eyes. And indeed, her mouth tightened and her eyes flashed, but she didn’t say anything. Michael preferred to avoid autopsies, and Tzilla was always angry at him for shirking this unpleasant duty and relying on Eli’s report instead. But Michael was not willing to experience the ordeal with each new case. He almost told her: When Eli’s the head of an SIT, he’ll be able to send someone else too. Instead he looked at the paper again and said: “The cause of death was a double fracture at the base of the skull, apparently from the fall onto the radiator. The pathologist on the scene already pointed that out: there were marks on the radiator. Hirsh says that he was unconscious from blows received before the fall, which is why he fell. There were fractures of the ribs, too, and internal bleeding.”

  “I didn’t know he was beaten,” said Tzilla, and Michael remembered that she had not seen Shaul Tirosh in his office. “His face was squashed flat,” he explained. “I presume someone hit him with something commonly found in a university lecturer’s office—a paper-weight or a heavy ashtray or a knickknack. Forensics said that the only bloodstains were the ones on the radiator. There was nothing on any of the objects in the room. And nothing without fingerprints. So maybe the assailant used something that was there, or maybe he brought the instrument with him, but now it doesn’t look as if we’re talking about a premeditated murder, so the weapon probably was something in the office.”

  “What prints did they find?” asked Tzilla. “Did anyone refuse to be fingerprinted?”

  “No; everyone agreed; there was no problem. We took them yesterday, and we’ve already eliminated anyone with a legitimate reason to be there. Tirosh’s prints were all over the place, and everyone who went into his office on Sunday, and some unidentified prints. Students went into his office too, don’t forget, so who knows who was there.”

  “Do you think,” asked Tzilla thoughtfully, folding her hands on her stomach in the way of pregnant women, even at the beginning, when their stomachs are still flat, “that a woman could have done it?”

  Michael looked at her before replying wearily: “I don’t know. People sometimes have demonic strength, especially when they’ve gone berserk.” He leaned backward, stretched his legs out in front of him, and lit a cigarette. There were investigation teams working on other cases, there was his ongoing work as head of the Investigations Division, and Azariya, his deputy, was in the hospital, recovering from back surgery. Michael wanted to lay his head on the table and abandon himself to Tzilla’s caressing hands. They were both careful to avoid any physical contact, but there was something so soft and appealing about her now. She was wearing the dress she had worn the night before, and her arms looked smooth and soft.

  Michael sat up in his chair and said: “Tell Raffi that the estimated time of death has now been increased to between two and six on Friday afternoon. I think the murder took place closer to two than six, because the security officer didn’t register an entrance or exit after the gates were locked.”

  Tzilla stopped taking notes and looked at him questioningly.

  “Anyone who wants to be on the campus at night on weekdays, or after four on Fridays, has to register in advance with the security officer. It’s a simple procedure, but it’s documented. You have to phone 883000 and inform them. And please tell the C.O. that I want a meeting with him today. And tell everybody there’s a team meeting at seven o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “And when do you want the television film?”

  Michael silently reviewed the day’s schedule and replied: “Late this evening.” And after thinking, he added: “And we can decide about tomorrow’s schedule then, when the whole team’s there.”

  Tzilla rose, her movements slower than usual, and when she reached the door he said: “Please send the Literature Department secretary in,” and switched on the tape recorder. He had to push aside the oppression he had felt since the end of his conversation with Racheli.

  Adina Lipkin was wearing her “good dress,” he noticed with a smile, the dress that he assumed a respectable woman felt she should wear on important occasions involving contact with the authorities. But such occasions were apparently rare in Adina’s life, he thought, since the dress, which was made of a dark, thick material, was at least one size too small for her, making her stomach stick out and emphasizing her heavy arms. Her face was flushed, her head thrust forward. She sat down, breathing heavily, on the chair he indicated. Her hands gripped the handles of the black patent-leather bag in her lap, and when she stared reproachfully at the cigarette he was about to light, he put it down, unlit, on the desk.

  When he asked her about her movements on Friday, she looked at him with round, bulging eyes, her expression that of a schoolgirl facing an oral examination for which she had been preparing for an entire year. “Do you mean after the faculty meeting?” she asked. Michael replied th
at he meant everything she did on that day. “Aha,” said Adina Lipkin, as if everything was now clear to her, and she even nodded her head firmly, without disturbing a single stiff curl. “If I remember rightly—and I can’t be sure; there are always things that we think we remember, but we don’t get the details right—in any case, if I remember rightly, I was already in the office at seven o’clock in the morning, because I had a lot of work to do, we’re at the end of the year and the students are very nervous about their exams and in a hurry to hand their papers in, really, I ask myself, why do they always leave things to the last minute, but that’s already a different question.” Here she activated her lip muscles, but the smile she produced had nothing mirthful about it, only the anxiety of someone eager to please and wishing to know if she was going about it the right way. Michael maintained his reserve but could not help nodding in response to the smile. “In any case, I was already in the office at seven, and there were a few telephone calls, because I take advantage of the hours when the university’s empty in order to get everything out of the way before the consulting hours, because of course Friday is a very short day, and even if officially there’s no consulting hour, there are always a few students who come to find something out, and even if I don’t usually see students outside consulting hours, sometimes there are special cases, but in any event it interrupts the sequence of work. In any case, there were a few calls to make. I think I phoned Dr. Shai to find out something about a student who handed in a seminar paper very late, and then I called Dr. Zellermaier, she’s always easy to reach in the mornings, because I had a question about typing her exam questions, and afterward I called Professor Tirosh because there was a question about the budget that he was the only one authorized to deal with,” and here she paused at last to take a breath and also because she had remembered the new state of affairs, and she went back to listing the things she had done after she had made the phone calls, and Michael felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice who had set the brooms in motion and couldn’t stop them. The spate of words flowed on, while an expression of satisfaction spread over Adina Lipkin’s face, as if she felt she was passing this test with flying colors, and the exhausted Michael was seized by a feeling of utter helplessness and the certainty that if he stopped her she would lose her power of speech. From time to time he would scribble a note, an act that caused her to look at him with a gratified expression but did not interrupt her monologue. Michael had lost his ability to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, and it was a full twenty minutes before he pulled himself together and acknowledged that she didn’t actually control him. She was in the middle of describing the events of the afternoon. “The children were supposed to be coming for the weekend, even though my grandson had a bit of a fever and my daughter wasn’t sure because her husband wasn’t feeling too well, and he spent the whole of yesterday and today having tests,” and on and on, in her shrill, jarring voice. When she began describing her daughter’s visit, he succeeded in bringing himself to utter the magic words that arrested the verbal torrent: “Excuse me just a minute,” and she silenced herself immediately, her face anxious but full of good will. Then he asked about her relations with the department faculty.

  Her view of the staff of the Hebrew Literature Department was restricted to their administrative functions. All her opinions and feelings about the various lecturers related exclusively to the manner in which they performed their duties in handing in grades, examining papers, and completing forms. Michael quickly learned that Dr. Shai always treated his students’ seminar papers seriously, grading them fairly and not procrastinating. “Of course, I’m not setting myself up as an expert, but everything goes through me, the student hands the paper in to me, and I pass it on to the lecturer, and so we avoid problems, because it’s already happened that a student has complained that he handed in a paper and the lecturer lost it, and what do we need problems for?” she said, straightening her hem.

  All questions about the personalities of the teaching staff, about changes in their relations, gave rise to anxiety and confusion and disrupted her smooth delivery.

  “I’m not interested in gossip,” she said firmly when he asked her about Tirosh’s relations with Tuvia Shai’s wife. “Dr. Shai does his work properly, he’s always in order.” And she quickly added: “As far as I know, in any case.”

  When Michael had understood—only at the end of half an hour—what it was possible to ask her, he learned that Shaul Tirosh did not always meet his departmental obligations. But Michael grasped that even though Tirosh didn’t consistently hand in his students’ grades in time, she was somewhat intimidated by him, a little in awe of him. Sometimes the students complained that he didn’t make any comments on their papers, and some said that they didn’t think he even read them, “but that’s not my department, I can’t make any comment on that,” she stated firmly, as if to say: It wouldn’t be fair to demand information from me that’s not included in the material set for the examination.

  Iddo Dudai, said Adina in a voice full of pathos, a solemn expression on her face, “was such a nice boy, he took such an interest. There are a few people, not many, who appreciate your work when you make an effort, and Iddo was one of them. He always thanked me and always praised my responsibility and always . . . ,” and Michael let her sob, and blow her nose loudly on the tissue she extracted with an effort from her patent-leather bag.

  Michael reflected silently to himself, while maintaining his inscrutable facade, that sometimes people are even more stereotypical than the stereotypes you store in your head. Adina Lipkin personified all his prejudices about the classic secretary who identified totally with her role. And you can’t tell, he went on reflecting, if she was always like this, or if during the course of the years the border between herself and the role she performed had grown more and more blurred. He raised his eyes from the paper at which he had been gazing and looked into her face with renewed interest.

  Soon after she had entered the room, Michael learned that the only object of her unqualified admiration was Professor Ariyeh Klein. “He’s a real mensch!” she said three times, each time with the stress on a different word. “You won’t hear a bad word about him from anyone. And what a wife he’s got! And what daughters!” And inclining her head to one side, she said in a confidential tone: “I’ll give you an example. You know how sometimes it’s the little things that show you who the person is?” Michael nodded. “He’s never come back from a trip abroad,” she continued, “without bringing me something—something small, but just the fact that he thought about me . . . This last year when he was away has been so difficult for me.”

  Her answers were more to the point when he asked her about the department faculty meetings. She had never taken part in them, but the minutes were all in her possession. And he could certainly have a look at them, on condition, of course, that she received the proper permission.

  No, she had never read the minutes; she only took care of them. The minutes were usually taken by a junior lecturer or a teaching assistant.

  No, she didn’t attend the departmental seminars either; she worked so hard during the day, she said, that in the evenings she was worn out. “And also,” she added, “I don’t like leaving my husband alone at night. There are some women who don’t care”—she paused here as if to give him time to consider which women these might be—“but I like spending my evenings at home.” And then, in a special effort to share her life experience with him: “There are some days when the pressure is terrible. Everyone hands in their examination questions at the last minute, for example, and they want them copied immediately, and then there’s pressure from the students, and a person who doesn’t understand, a person from outside,” she said, and giving him a subtle look of rebuke, added: “If you’ll forgive me, I don’t mean you, but people in general, the students too, in any case, someone from outside can’t understand why I’m so strict about having everything in writing, about the consulting hours, because he doesn’t see the diff
iculties, I can’t talk on the telephone when there are students in my office during consulting hours, and it makes some people angry,” she said in a tone of incomprehension, confident that he would see things from her point of view.