by Batya Gur
It was impossible not to see her as a stereotype, and Michael suddenly realized that he was thinking, angrily: I know the type. After two hours he gave up in despair. He was bone-weary, impatient and irritated. He couldn’t mobilize even a grain of humor to soothe him.
She had not noticed any change in Tirosh’s behavior, not after the faculty meeting on Friday either—he had only looked tired. Iddo looked tired too, “but it was the khamsin; it exhausted me too.” Finally Michael asked her about the objects in Tirosh’s office. She looked at him perplexed. “Do you mean furniture? Books?” she asked.
“You’ve got a phenomenal memory,” said Michael with the right smile, “so I thought you might be able to describe the things in his office to me, as you remember them. What, for example, did he have on his desk?”
A few seconds passed before she replied in embarrassment: “But I never went in there when he wasn’t there.”
“But you must have been there with him,” Michael encouraged her. “We all know how it is—sometimes it’s easier to go into a person’s office than to telephone.”
She nodded. “Ah, just a minute, let me think,” she said, and a frown of concentration appeared on her forehead. Then she turned to him with shining eyes and said: “Okay, I think I’ve got a mental picture.”
Michael knew that now he would let her talk to her heart’s content. No one, he felt sure, would draw a more accurate picture of Tirosh’s office than Adina Lipkin.
She described the full bookshelves, the separate shelf for poetry (although disclaiming knowledge of titles and authors), and the “standard furniture,” as she called it. Michael wrote feverishly. Then there were the “other things”: the Mexican carpet—her daughter had brought something similar back from Mexico, even though she herself didn’t like carpets, if you asked her opinion, all they did was collect dust, and in our climate they were superfluous, especially in summer, in winter it was something else again, especially in Jerusalem; the Indian statuette, something made of bronze, very heavy, she had once held it in her hand to move it away from the edge of the desk—and again, she said, it was a matter of taste, of course, but she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to keep something like that in an office, which was a public place whether you liked it or not, and although everyone said that Professor Tirosh was a man of taste, she, at any rate, didn’t think it was very appropriate, she wasn’t saying it was ugly, or worthless, but it was out of place, if he understood what she meant. He understood. She described the location of the fire extinguisher, and she didn’t forget to mention the telephone. Finally she was silent. She had covered everything. If she remembered anything else, she said, she would be happy to help. And then: “I hope I’ve been of some assistance, of some use, I’ve never had any dealings with the police before.” Michael murmured a few words to the effect that she had been very helpful and stood up before she could say another word. He accompanied her to the door, where he parted from her with a practiced politeness that brought an embarrassed smile to her lips and a blush to her cheeks. As soon as the door was shut he fell on his cigarettes, then switched off the tape recorder and dialed the number of the forensics laboratory. A few minutes passed before Pnina informed him with absolute certainty that no Indian statuette had been found in Shaul Tirosh’s office on Mount Scopus.
As he was putting the phone down, Raffi Alfandari burst in. Michael looked up in surprise; Raffi was supposed to be in the middle of an interrogation. And so he was.
“Come and see for yourself,” he insisted in reply to all Michael’s questions. His fair hair was falling over his forehead, and he was breathing rapidly, as if he had been running. “Everything was okay with Kalitzky and with Aharonovitz, until I got to her. But come and see for yourself.”
In the narrow hallway, Tuvia Shai was sitting and staring in front of him, his eyes lifeless. Michael ignored him and followed Raffi to the room where Yael Eisenstein sat, dressed in a black knit outfit that emphasized her pallor. The room was small and seemed crowded, though it contained only a table and three chairs. She sat with her legs crossed, one knee over the other, and her ankles looked white and delicate in their slender black sandals. Her big blue eyes gazed at him serenely.
Her beauty stunned him. He caught his breath. For a few seconds Michael looked at the white skin—so white it seemed never to have been exposed to the Israeli sun—at the red lips, at the nose, arched just enough to give an aristocratic air to the narrow face, at the neck, which looked as if it had been painted by Modigliani. He was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to speak.
“She won’t talk,” said Raffi Alfandari, “without her lawyer.”
“Why not?” Michael’s eyes had not left her face.
“It’s my right,” she replied softly, the softness of her voice in sharp contrast to the firmness with which she uttered the words. She took a final deep drag on the cigarette she was holding. Her delicate fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. Her other hand supported her arm. Michael glanced at Raffi, who hurried out of the room.
“You know,” said Michael Ohayon after he, too, had a cigarette going, having seated himself in Raffi’s chair, “you’re a surprising person.”
“What do you mean?” asked Yael. A spark of interest appeared in her eyes, and she lit another cigarette from her stub.
“On the one hand, you faint and everyone protects you, and on the other, here you are, demanding a lawyer. Have you done anything wrong to make you want a lawyer?”
“Nobody’s going to ask me personal questions and get an answer. My private life is my own business.”
Again he was struck by the contradiction between her delicate, aristocratic beauty and her assertiveness. And then he was overcome by anger and heard himself saying: “My dear young lady,”—in the particular quiet voice he always used, so he was told, when he was angry—“maybe you think this is a movie, but we’re conducting an investigation into a murder here, not acting in a French film, so perhaps you’ll be good enough to get off the screen. You want a lawyer? A psychiatrist? No problem!”
“A psychiatrist?” asked Yael, uncrossing her legs. “What’s a psychiatrist got to do with it?” Her voice was still soft, and before Michael gave way to the temptation to retort with some witty, sarcastic remark, he looked at her face and realized that he had unintentionally touched a sensitive spot.
“We’re not in the Middle Ages,” he said after a moment, “and you’re not a murder suspect yet, even if you are in therapy. I’m quite willing to let you phone your lawyer, if you have one, right now. I simply think it would be superfluous. At this stage, anyway.”
“It’s not a question of therapy,” she said, and burst into tears. Michael let out a sigh of relief. Tears were something more familiar; at least they were human. Between sobs she said: “That man who was here before, he was so rude to me, he asked me right off why I’d fainted, as if it wasn’t obvious, and if I’d had an ‘affair’ with Professor Tirosh.”
“And had you?” asked Michael, quickly deciding to gamble.
“Not really; just something years ago.”
“What do you mean by ‘something’?” Michael looked into her eyes.
“I read his poetry when I was very young, and I wrote him a letter, and then I met him. When I was in the army I even ran away to him once. I stayed in his house for a few days.”
“Until they discharged you?” asked Michael, in what seemed like a fortuitous intuition but was actually the product of a story he had once heard from a friend, a history student, who was in love with a girl who had gone absent without leave to be with Shaul Tirosh. Now the two stories connected, like the other threads that were connecting, and he felt anxiety rising in him again, like the dread he had felt in Tirosh’s house. But the woman in front of him—now he remembered, too, how his fellow student had raved about the beauty of the girl so many years ago—had no idea of the source of his information, and two dark-red stains flushed her cheeks as she asked: “How do you know? Every
thing’s in your files, isn’t it? Why do I even bother to ask?” And again she burst into tears.
“I wouldn’t have thought,” said Michael, “that it would matter to a woman like you if that information was known. I wouldn’t have thought that you cared about military service—or public opinion.”
“I don’t. But I do care, very much, about my private life, and I’m not prepared”—her voice, delicate and bell-like, rose for the first time—“for every policeman in this ugly place to know everything about me.”
And Michael remembered the whole story and asked: “And you were hospitalized again later, right?” and the blue eyes looked at him in dread. The red patches on her cheeks disappeared as she shook her head, and then she said: “No, that was the only time.” (Rely on the computer, on the intelligence people! thought Michael. They’ll always tell you that there’s nothing special—computer never lies!)
“And how long did that hospitalization last?”
“Two weeks. Just for observation. It was the only way to get out of the army, and it goes without saying that there was no way I could stay in the army. I couldn’t stand the ugliness.”
She shuddered and lit another cigarette, this time with a gold lighter from the little gray leather bag that hung from her shoulder.
Again Michael examined her exquisite beauty, which seemed so extraordinary and out of place in the mean room; a beauty not of this place, thought Michael, and remembered Tirosh’s house, which was somehow connected to this beauty, to the slender ankles and the eyes, to the voice. He looked at the large, round breasts and the slim body and thought of the Black Madonna. He couldn’t take his eyes off her but at the same time felt no desire to touch her, and even began then to wonder why her beauty aroused no physical attraction in him, only the wish to go on looking. Aloud he asked: “And who’s treating you now?” and immediately regretted it.
A curtain seemed to descend over her face, her expression freezing and then becoming calm, as it had been when he entered the room. She didn’t bother to reply. I was in too much of a hurry, he thought; I should have waited. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and her words blunt: “It’s none of your business. That’s confidential information. In any case, he wouldn’t speak to any of you. Haven’t you ever heard of medical confidentiality?”
“Tell me, were you at the department faculty meeting, the one that took place last Friday morning?” he asked, and the wind went out of her sails.
She was.
“And did you see Professor Tirosh?”
“Yes, of course. He was at the meeting.”
“Did he seem as usual?”
“What do you mean? What’s as usual?” she demanded, and launched into a serious lecture, in the same soft voice, to the effect that nobody had a usual appearance, everybody had a different appearance every day.
Michael looked at her as she spoke, at the red lips without a trace of lipstick, and asked himself again why he felt no desire to touch her.
She lacks human warmth, he concluded, and then he asked: “And when was the last time you saw him?”
“At the meeting, at the Friday meeting,” she said nervously, prompting him to ask: “And not after that?”
The soft voice repeated the words “After that?” and Michael was silent. “What do you mean?” she asked with growing nervousness.
“Perhaps you saw him after the meeting? Perhaps you heard from him? Perhaps you were in his office?”
“On Friday, after the meeting, there was a taxi waiting for me, and I went to my parents’.”
“Where do your parents live?” She didn’t reply. He repeated the question. Again she didn’t reply.
Michael looked at his watch: one o’clock already. Without a word, he went out the door. Raffi Alfandari was in the next room. Michael filled him in briefly. “Don’t spend the whole day on her,” he said. “Just try to get her parents’ address out of her, and what time the taxi came to pick her up from the university on Friday, and what she did later that day. And tell her we’ll be asking her to take a polygraph test, and the subjects she’ll be questioned on. As far as I’m concerned, she can come with her lawyer.”
At the door of his office, he bumped into Danny Balilty, who was sweating and out of breath. “I’ve been looking for you; let’s go in for a minute,” said Balilty, as Michael stole a glance at Tuvia Shai, still staring apathetically in front of him.
Inside the office, Balilty said: “I’ve got a few things for you. First, they found Tirosh’s car. In the parking lot of the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus. My guess is that someone, the same person who murdered him, moved it there to delay their looking for the body. The keys were in the car, and that solves one problem—Forensics couldn’t stop talking about the missing car keys. Second . . . ,” and Balilty tucked his shirt into his belt and wiped away the sweat that trickled down his face. “Professor Ariyeh Klein arrived in the country on Thursday afternoon and not on Saturday; he came without his family, who did arrive on Saturday night. Third, one of them, Yael Eisenstein, was discharged from the army, on psychiatric grounds, while she was still in basic training, and she was involved with Tirosh then.” And Balilty gave Michael a triumphant look and waited to be congratulated. “Well, well,” said Michael, and smiled. “Have you got any details?”
Balilty promised to bring a copy of the psychiatric reports “within a couple of hours.” Michael didn’t ask how the intelligence officer would get his hands on the confidential information. Years of working with Balilty had accustomed Michael to his elegant ways of getting around the law, and he preferred to turn a blind eye, which did not now prevent him from saying: “I’d like to know if she’s still in treatment, and with whom.”
Balilty threw him an offended look: “Who do you think you’re talking to? Have I ever let you down? By the end of the day you’ll have the whole picture.”
“Nevertheless,” said Michael, knowing that his words would be like a red rag before a bull, “quite a few years have passed since she was discharged from the army.”
“Fourteen and a half,” said Balilty, and as he spoke he picked up the coffee cup on the desk and tilted it. “Someone didn’t stir your sugar for you,” he said with a smile, and went out of the room.
The black interoffice telephone rang. “Ohayon,” said the Jerusalem Subdistrict commander, on the other end of the line. “Sir?” responded Michael. Even in his C.O.’s moments of grace, Michael never let himself be tempted to disrupt the delicate balance achieved by means of this formal mode of address. “I want to see you for a minute,” said the C.O. Michael listened to the buzz on the line and made a face, but he left the room immediately, pausing only to light a cigarette.
Tuvia Shai still waited in the hall. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Michael said to the colorless face that looked at him blankly; then he ran up the stairs to the second floor. “Levy’s Gila,” as they called her, was sitting at her typewriter in the little anteroom to the police chief’s office. “He’s waiting for you,” she warned, and followed this with: “When are you going to come and have a cup of coffee with me?” as she slipped a piece of carbon paper between the two white sheets in her hand.
“What’s up?” asked Michael, putting out his cigarette in the ashtray on her desk.
“Don’t ask me. All I know is that I’ve been on the phone to Eilat all morning. When are we going to have that coffee?” she asked, and contemplated her long nails—which he never failed to admire in view of the many hours she spent at the typewriter. They were painted a gleaming silver. “As soon as I’ve got a spare second,” he replied. “Is everything okay with you? The kids?” She nodded. All you have to do is relate to her, thought Michael, and for a long moment he felt self-revulsion, especially when she smiled trustfully at him and replied with a deep sigh: “Everything’s okay. Thank God.”
Behind his big desk, Ariyeh Levy sat drumming his fingers on the large sheet of paper in front of him. The desktop was otherwise empty, except for a roun
d stone on one of the corners. “Ohayon, come and sit down,” said his chief, and Michael tried to identify his mood. No effort was needed: something was clearly making him angry. Michael waited patiently for the string of curses to die down, while he digested the information they contained: the Marine Medicine Institute and the Institute for Forensic Medicine had informed the Eilat people that Iddo Dudai had been murdered. An SIT had been set up in Eilat, and it would be beefed up with extra investigators from the Negev Subdistrict. The main reason for Ariyeh Levy’s anger was the decision to set up a new SIT, manned by people from the national Major Crimes Unit. “In short,” said Levy with one last profanity, “they want you to interrogate the witnesses and send them the conclusions, and they’ll take care of the Dudai murder.”
Michael Ohayon was too familiar with the procedures to lose his temper. In his imagination he could see the whole picture: the request for assistance from Eilat to the Negev Subdistrict, the application to the Southern District, the application to National Police HQ. The only thing that surprised him was the speed with which it had all taken place.
“What’s the rank of the station head in Eilat?” he asked.
“Chief superintendent,” said Levy with a snort of contempt. “And they’ve got one forensics technician but no lab; that’s why they asked for help from the subdistrict on Saturday. When the first doctor from the hospital in Eilat told them that it was an unnatural death and there was a suspicion of carbon monoxide poisoning, they applied to the Marine Medicine Institute, and they sent the air tanks and all the diving apparatus there.”
Several moments passed before Michael said reflectively: “But they’ll soon discover that it all begins here, in Jerusalem, and when they do, we can safely predict that they’ll apply to the departmental investigations officer of the Southern District, and at last they’ll pass it all on to us.”
