The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  “That’s not the point,” replied Michael in a conciliatory tone. “She was already demanding a lawyer at the initial interrogation, before we knew anything. Can you imagine how she would react if I brought the subject up in interrogation now?”

  “But even the polygraph people told you that her responses were inconclusive, hers and Tuvia Shai’s, and Ariyeh Klein’s too. There’s no reason not to get a court order and to use it in the meantime,” urged Balilty.

  “Who said that Klein’s test was inconclusive?” Michael leapt from his seat.

  “Okay, relax; the guy from the polygraph told us. But not terrifically inconclusive; we’ll just have to ask him to go over it again, with all that mix-up over when he arrived, where he was, exactly, all that stuff.”

  “What mix-up?” asked Michael suspiciously. “There’s no mix-up! He came back on Thursday afternoon—what’s there to get mixed up about?”

  “Okay, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t prepare him for the questions properly, we’ll ask him to do it again. What’s there to get so upset about? He isn’t the only one who’ll have to do it again.” And Balilty smiled a small, knowing smile. “I know he’s your man and all that.”

  Michael Ohayon nodded his head and looked questioningly at Balilty, who hadn’t stopped sweating since he entered the room.

  “Anyway,” said Balilty slowly, “anyway, to get back to what’s more urgent at the moment, it won’t be you who gets in trouble; it’ll be the secretary who gets in trouble, or the doctor, not us. And by the time you get to court, you’ll have admissible evidence, I promise you. Apart from which, you can arrest her already.”

  Michael sighed. “You know how much I value your work, Danny,” he said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the intelligence officer’s face softening, “but I’m constrained by the law. I’m not saying I won’t use the information, but I’m not sure what will happen. The way things stand now, she’s got at least one motive for murder, if not more, but I don’t like the feeling that we’re not covered by the law.”

  “Okay, should I copy this stuff and give it back to you? Or what?” asked Balilty as he stood up with the cardboard file in his hand.

  Michael nodded and looked at the file.

  “Ten minutes,” said Balilty, leafing rapidly through the pages on his way out of the room.

  The white telephone rang even before Balilty shut the door behind him. On the other end of the line he heard Tzilla, breathing heavily. “She refuses to come,” she said despairingly. “She says that we’ll have to use force to bring her to ‘that place,’ and I don’t know what to do. I tried everything possible. I told her that the police van would come to take her away and God knows what, but she won’t come.”

  “Where are you?” asked Michael.

  “At Mount Scopus. She’s working in her office. I don’t know what to do. Should we bring a van and take her by force? Do you want to arrest her?”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to arrest anyone yet, but find out if Klein’s there.”

  “He’s here,” said Tzilla. “I saw him next to the secretary’s room when I arrived. Should I talk to him?”

  “No. I’ll get in touch with him myself. Wait there.”

  “University,” said the switchboard operator in a bored voice. Michael asked her for the secretary of the Hebrew Literature Department.

  “Hello,” said Adina Lipkin nervously, and Michael asked to speak to Professor Klein.

  “Who wants him?” asked Lipkin.

  “The police.” Michael heard the sound of his voice with satisfaction.

  “He was here until a minute ago, then he went out for a minute. I can go and find him, but only if it’s urgent, because there are people here, and the question is if it wouldn’t be possible to leave him a message.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” said Michael sternly.

  “All right, but you’ll have to wait,” said Lipkin.

  A few moments later he heard the familiar voice saying a brisk “Hello” and then: “Klein here.”

  Michael spoke for a few minutes and heard the breathing of the man on the other end of the line, who said “Yes” several times and, once, “I understand.”

  For a long time Michael looked at his watch. The minute hand moved slowly, and the ashtray filled up with stubs. His legs were stretched out in front of him, and he watched the smoke rings he was making and saw Yael Eisenstein’s face inside them. He couldn’t concentrate on anything but the coming interrogation. Balilty came back after ten minutes, as promised, to return the file, looked at him, and went out again without saying anything.

  Any minute, thought Michael, the door would open, and the fragile, flowerlike figure would stand there, and he would have to ignore the fragility and the beauty.

  He concentrated on the image of the murder. The dark shadow hitting the long face again and again, the fall backward. The pathologist’s calculations of the murderer’s height allowed for too many variations. The lengthy, exhausting work of the forensics team at the scene of the crime, all their measurements and calculations, had come up with nothing. A murder committed in a burst of rage, he said to himself, isn’t planned in advance. A murder like that, he explained to the contending voices, doesn’t take place because of an expected inheritance. He imagined the delicate, Madonna-like figure of Yael Eisenstein holding the statue of the Indian god Shiva, the god of fertility and destruction, and the image rose vividly before his eyes. He could see the white arm, the face twisted in terrible rage, the eyes bulging furiously, and he could feel what she was feeling . . . perhaps, he warned himself.

  He thought about the vulnerability of a person capable of such rage. Such a person would have to desire something passionately, with a terrible force, and also to hate this passionate desire. Perhaps, he said to himself, perhaps it was Yael.

  But not because of the inheritance, he said to himself. Because of something else, something I don’t know.

  By the time the door opened, he knew that he would have to gamble.

  Tzilla came in, and he made haste to put into a drawer the black cardboard file that Balilty had returned.

  “She’s here,” said Tzilla, wiping her forehead. “The heat outside’s terrible. She’s waiting with Klein; he wants to know if he can come in with her, and I said I’d find out. What should I tell him?”

  “Tell him I want to talk to her alone at first. Afterward, maybe.”

  Michael Ohayon turned on the tape recorder as soon as he saw the slender figure standing in the doorway. She was wearing a black knit outfit again, although not the same one as before; this one was made of a looser weave. Her arms seemed particularly thin, and a narrow string of pearls encircled her white neck, white on white, and again Michael was seized with guilt for what was about to happen, a guilt he silenced with other voices.

  He kept his face expressionless and pushed the ashtray toward her as she lit a cigarette.

  “You wished to speak to me,” she stated coldly.

  “Yes.” Michael sighed, “I want you to describe again your movements on the day Shaul Tirosh was murdered.”

  “I’ve already told you,” she said angrily. “At least three times I’ve told you.”

  “I know and I’m sorry; every time there are different reasons. We’re not interested in harassment for its own sake.”

  “No, not for its own sake,” said Yael Eisenstein, and she shook the ash off her cigarette with a violent movement.

  “I’d like to clarify again what time you arrived at the university on Friday less than a week ago.”

  She tilted her head and looked at him scornfully. He kept his eyes fixed on her face. He felt no anger, only pity and exhaustion.

  “How did you know that you should ask him that question precisely?” Shorer had inquired years before when they were listening together to the tape of an interrogation. “Tell me, how did you already know at that stage?”

  And Michael had explained, with an embarrassed effort: “
I sense the person, I get inside his mind, I think like him, I hear him speak, and then I often know. Not the facts, perhaps, but the principle.”

  “That’s dangerous,” protested Shorer. “It’s impossible to interrogate a person when you identify with him; you need violence, hostility too, when you’re questioning a murder suspect.”

  “It’s the only way I can do it,” Michael had said apologetically. “It’s only when I identify with someone that I know which way to go. There’s a lot of pain in coming close to people like that, especially for me, in the mere fact of the closeness and, mainly, because it’s coming close to them for the sake of tormenting them, but it’s the only way I can know.”

  Now he asked again, with nagging insistence, about her movements on that Friday.

  She replied in detail, repeated that she had arrived in time for the department faculty meeting, then gone to the library, and then taken a taxi home, as she called her parents’ house.

  “And when was the last time you saw him?”

  She shook her head, like Yuval as a baby refusing to eat, turning his head from left to right. “To put it plainly,” she said quietly, “it’s none of your business,” and she lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. Again he noticed her slender fingers, free of rings and yellow with nicotine.

  “Your fingerprints were found in his office,” Michael warned her.

  “So? What does that prove? That I was once in his office? Okay, I heard you.”

  “And you weren’t in his office on Friday?”

  She stared at him. “I’ve already told you.”

  Michael turned the matchbox between his fingers and endeavored to appear paternal.

  “I wish,” he said slowly, “that you would trust me more.”

  “I wonder why. Perhaps because you only want what’s best for me?” she said sarcastically.

  He smiled a wise, tolerant smile. Then he said quietly, giving his voice the requisite note of intimacy: “I’m truly sorry about the misery and humilation you suffered at the hands of Shaul Tirosh.”

  “What are you referring to?” she asked and a delicate pink began to suffuse her cheeks.

  “Would you like me to remind you?”

  She was silent.

  “I’m referring to your marriage and divorce and abortion and also—”

  “Who told you?” Her face was flushed, and her voice choked. “Did Ariyeh Klein tell you?”

  Michael smiled sadly, “Klein didn’t have to tell me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but he caught a glimpse of the tears shining in her eyes before she lowered her head.

  “I know that years have passed since then, but humiliations like that must be hard to forget.”

  Silence.

  “Especially,” Michael continued, stressing every word, “since I realize how unhappy it must make you to know that you’ll never be able to have children as a result of what happened then.”

  She lifted her head. “How can you possibly know something like that?” she asked in a horrified whisper. Her lips twisted.

  “I try to imagine how you must have felt. The misery, and especially the humiliation. You’re not the only person Shaul Tirosh humiliated, if that makes you feel any better.”

  She didn’t react. The pale face looked at him stiffly. He read fear and terrible rage in it. She didn’t move, only stared fixedly at him.

  “I can imagine the conversation between you. He humiliates you, as usual, with his refinement, his reserve; perhaps you even tell him about your gynecological problems; and he, as always, responds with cynicism. What did he say to you? That in any case you’re not cut out for motherhood? That in any case you’re not a woman? What, exactly, did he say to you that made you hit him so hard, that made you want him to die?”

  She stood up and ran to the door, and Michael only managed to stop her when her hand was already on the door handle. He pried her fingers off the handle, one by one, and taking her slender arm in a firm grip, he led her back to her chair and lowered her into it.

  I wasn’t mistaken, thought Michael, and permitted himself a moment of triumph before he went on talking.

  She sat limply, as if she no longer had any will, frightened and helpless. He knew that from now on it would be easy.

  “What did he say to you? You know there’s no point in trying to run from here. What did he say to you, when you were in his office, that made you strike him with the statue? And hit him again and again?” He asked himself if this was the right moment to say something about manslaughter, if she cooperated, as opposed to murder with malice aforethought, and decided to refrain.

  “It was terrible to see him fall, to leave him there,” he stated as if he had been there himself.

  She looked at him and averted her eyes, shook her head, and finally she took an embroidered handkerchief out of the little leather bag hanging from the back of the chair and soundlessly blew her nose. It was years since Michael had seen a woman blow her nose on an embroidered handkerchief, like a well-brought-up little girl.

  He was on the point of repeating his question, when she said in a voice even softer than usual that she wasn’t the one who had hit him.

  “But you were in his room,” stated Michael.

  “Yes, but only on Thursday.”

  “And you quarreled with him.”

  She nodded.

  “What was the quarrel about?”

  “Something personal.”

  “More personal than the fact that you can’t have children?”

  Yes. In her eyes. That was how she saw things. And in any case, she had never told Shaul about it.

  What, Michael asked himself, could she consider more personal that her gynecological problems? And he felt that he should know, that he had to guess, urgently, as if his life depended on it. He thought about her life, her work at the university, her reclusiveness, her avoidance of traveling by bus, her diet of yogurt and fruit, her monotonous wardrobe that never changed according to the dictates of fashion, about the intelligence information Balilty had unearthed about the psychoanalytic treatment she had undergone—four times a week, Balilty had said, taxis there and back—about her loneliness, especially about her loneliness. You’re losing the rhythm; sense her. Don’t ask yourself what’s personal by your standards, ask what’s personal for her. And with a rapid movement, he whipped the black cardboard file out of the desk drawer.

  “I understand that what really hurt you was his attitude to this,” he said, and handed her the poems.

  She gripped the file tightly and said nothing.

  I read them. They’re awful. They’re so bad they’re embarrassing, thought Michael. Aloud he asked: “Was it because of his criticism of your poems that you became enraged and hit him? Was this the humiliation that made you lose your head?” She wept soundlessly. It was supposed to melt his heart, thought Michael. “You must answer me,” he said quietly.

  She didn’t hit him, she said. She was in his office on Thursday, in the morning. Ruchama Shai had been waiting outside; he could ask her, Ruchama, how she had looked when she came out of the office. She had left the poems there with him because she couldn’t bear to look at him for another minute. She felt frozen, she said. She had never been capable of reacting violently when someone hurt her, she simply came apart, and he had never, never insulted her as he did then, when he returned her poems. He sat behind his desk and he tried to be tactful, she said, which was insulting in itself. She had never shown the poems to anyone, she sobbed, not even to Klein. Actually, she had only started writing this past year, and she had no way of knowing their worth. At first he had tried to be gentle, but being Shaul, he couldn’t help getting in a few digs, and in the end he said impatiently: “You haven’t got a future. You can’t write; you need a womb to write.” Perhaps she would have hit him if she’d had the strength, but her first impulse was to throw herself out the window of the sixth-floor office.

  Michael didn’t take his eyes off her.
He listened intently to every word and saw the scene before his eyes. A couple of times he asked himself if he believed the story he was hearing. He didn’t know the answer. She looked exhausted.

  He had two questions, he said.

  And again, like lightning, anxiety lit her face.

  Had Tirosh ever tried to start with her again?

  Yes, she admitted. He tried and she rejected him. He had been angry, but not for long.

  The second question: Could this serve to explain the sentence: “If only this might make some slight amends for what it was not in my power to give.”

  “Could what serve? Explain what? What are you talking about?” Her wide eyebrows arched, and she stared at him incomprehendingly.

  It was no longer “What are you referring to?” thought Michael. Now she was genuine, as if everything was already known. Or perhaps she wasn’t genuine, perhaps he was being led astray by his so-called “intuitions”?

  And after a slight hesitation: “Perhaps you know something about the will left by Shaul Tirosh?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Will? What will?” she asked without fear, only surprise.

  “Did he ever talk to you about it?”

  She wasn’t interested in such things, she replied.

  “Nevertheless, taxis, analysis, medical treatments, food . . . What do you live on?” he asked, thinking about the monthly sum regularly deposited in her bank account. This was one of Balilty’s achievements, displayed with a flourish at a team meeting.

  She worked, she replied, and she received support from her parents every month.

  “But,” he said carefully, “as I understand it, your father went bankrupt in ’76, and since his last heart attack he hasn’t been working.”

  She was silent, and he waited. Moments passed before he addressed her: “Come on, you’ve said far worse things today. If you don’t care about money, you shouldn’t have any difficulty in speaking about it.” He was unable to prevent the impatience from showing in his voice.

  She swallowed her saliva and explained with some embarrassment that the apartment was registered in her name and that her father had managed to transfer money to America “before the crisis, a large sum, I don’t know exactly how much, but I live on the interest, and although my father says there’s nothing to worry about, I can’t help feeling uneasy about transgressing the law.”