by Batya Gur
“That’s what it looks like, but let’s try listening to it. Have you got a tape player here?”
“Be my guest,” said Shaul, taking a tape machine out of his desk drawer.
“Dad, that cassette’ll take an hour to play, I want to be there at eight.”
“Yuvali, I don’t intend to listen to the whole thing; it’ll only take a few minutes, you’ll see,” said Michael, and he noted the pouting lips and disappointed expression that he had seen so often before.
Eli Bahar turned on the player. There was no sound. After a few silent minutes on Play, he pressed Fast Forward and about ten seconds later again tried Play. Again, no sound. In this way he quickly sampled the entire first side. The second side produced no sound either, until the moment when Yuval had opened his mouth to protest and Michael was laying a soothing hand on his arm to indicate “One more second.” Just then the room filled with the sound of a hoarse, elderly voice declaiming in Hebrew, but in a heavy Russian accent: “At dawn violets wilted in your skin.” A cut-off syllable in another voice followed, and then there was silence again. For a few minutes none of them said anything. Yuval’s eyes, too, were fixed on the little tape player.
The tape ended. Michael pressed Rewind and then Play, and the words were repeated, again followed by the cut-off syllable in a different voice.
“What was that all about?” asked Yuval.
“It’s a line from a poem by Shaul Tirosh,” replied Michael, and he went on listening to the blank tape.
“That’s it,” he said at the end. “Not another word. There seems to be nothing else on the cassette, but have someone play it all to make sure.”
Shaul examined it and said: “It’s a TDK. You can get them here, but they make them abroad, in Japan.”
“They do everything abroad,” said Michael dreamily, “murder investigations too.”
“What are you talking about?” said Eli Bahar, looking at him anxiously, as if he had gone out of his mind.
“This is a recording of a conversation between Iddo Dudai and an old Russian, a recording made in America, and you don’t need to be a genius to conclude that the odds are very much in favor of it being the one missing cassette. It’s from Iddo Dudai’s trip to North Carolina, and somebody erased it. Why?”
There was silence in the room again. Eli Bahar bowed his head, and Michael said angrily: “I would think that after the car of a murder victim was found, at least it would be properly examined.”
Eli didn’t react.
“So what do we do now?” asked Shaul in a Talmudic singsong.
“That’s the question,” replied Michael. “Come on, Yuval. It’s already a quarter to eight, and tomorrow’s a big day.”
The phone rang when they were at the door. Michael had no intention of stopping, but Shaul, who had picked up the receiver, said: “Just a minute, he’s here; you’re lucky you caught him. It’s for you,” and he put the receiver down on the desk. On his way to the desk, Michael heard his son’s despairing sigh behind his back, but then the excited words at the other end of the line overwhelmed Yuval’s complaint. “Good, bring him in now,” he said at last, and wiped his hands on the sides of his trousers, first one and then the other. Eli Bahar looked at him anxiously.
“What’s happened?” asked Shaul. “Why are you so pale?”
Michael did not reply. “I’ll drop you off on the way,” he said to Yuval. “I have to go back to work.”
The boy’s face expressed a combination of anger and resolve: to behave with dignity and not show his disappointment, but to make sure that his father realized how he felt about its always being the same—the time to relax together that was always promised and never came. All of this was expressed with a twist of the corner of his mouth, a twist that Michael knew only too well, together with the whole spectrum of emotions it represented. But now he saw nothing except the fog that filled his mind. “How many times have I told you,” he heard Shorer’s voice echoing in his ear, “to be careful of hunches, never to follow them up without covering your ass?” And later, on the way back to the Russian Compound, he heard Ariyeh Levy’s hoarse laughter and saw the gleam in his little eyes. “So you’ve messed up again! I told you it wasn’t a university here. Did I tell you, or didn’t I?”
16
Eli Bahar, too, listened to Balilty’s report. Michael was sitting behind his desk, his face expressionless and his body still. “Alfandari’s gone to get him,” said Balilty, finishing. “They’ll be here in a minute. You don’t look in such great shape to me.”
Michael ignored this comment. “Tell me again. Everything, from the beginning, slowly,” he said.
“Why don’t you tape me?” asked Balilty, beginning to smile, but Michael waved his arm impatiently and Balilty’s smile was abruptly nipped in the bud.
“Where to start?” he asked, and stared at the ceiling. Then he began again, this time speaking deliberately, glancing sideways as if for confirmation at Eli Bahar, who sat next to the desk, looking at him intently.
“You know that we checked his story,” said Balilty. “Alfandari spoke to his mother; he drove up to Rosh Pinna specially on Monday. You said not over the phone, so he went in person. You heard what he said at the meeting: that she’s one of those pioneering types, eighty if she’s a day. He’s got a brother in Safad, and a sister in Sede Yehoshua; they’re quite a close family. He’s the middle one. Anyway, his mother told Raffi that he arrived at her place on Thursday night and drove from there to the airport on Saturday night, so Raffi went over her story with her and he believed her. You can trust him, and he says that I would have believed her too. It’s a big house, with a lot of land, and a big fence around it. So I don’t know, maybe Raffi’s right and nobody saw anything. Anyway, he wasn’t satisfied—Raffi, that is—because the next-door neighbor wasn’t there when he arrived to question the mother and the first thing Ariyeh Levy asked was if we had spoken to the neighbors. So this morning we drove up again, me and Raffi. I had something to do in Tiberias, anyway, not connected with the case. This time the neighbor was at home. Another one who wasn’t born yesterday, half deaf and doesn’t know what’s going on, but his son was there too, character himself, about fifty, and what did he say? He said that on Thursday night, when Klein’s supposed to be there already if he came straight from the airport, at about eleven, she comes knocking at their door, Klein’s mother, her name’s Sarah, and asks if he, the neighbor’s son, who doesn’t live there—he was only visiting and was just about to leave for Haifa, where he lives—listen to this: she asks him if he can come and see what’s wrong with the telephone. Her phone doesn’t ring loud enough and with her being hard of hearing at her age, she was afraid she wouldn’t hear when it rang. So naturally I ask myself why she has to go and ask the neighbor’s son to come and fix the phone for her if her own son is there. And so I ask the neighbor’s son, his name’s Yoska, if Ariyeh Klein was there at the time. Nu, of course he wasn’t, he says, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed him, because Ariyeh can fix anything. There was nobody home except her. That’s what he said. Before that I spun him a yarn about why I was asking him; it was all very friendly; he didn’t have a clue about what he was telling me. So then I asked him when did Klein arrive, and he said he didn’t know but that when he finished fixing the phone his mother persuaded him not to go back to Haifa and to spend the night with them, so he stayed and slept over, at his parents’ house. It was pure chance he was there today too, I caught him there by chance; he brought his kids to visit their grandparents, that’s what he said. Anyway, so I asked him when Klein arrived, and he said he didn’t know, he left early on Friday morning and drove home to Haifa. Okay?” Balilty sighed and stole a glance at Michael, who sat tensely and said nothing.
“Well?” Eli Bahar spoke for the first time since entering the room.
“Well, so like I said, Raffi and me went back to Klein’s mother’s house and told her to come with us. And she said why on earth should she, and I warned her about p
erjury and asked her why she didn’t ask her own son to fix the phone if he was at home, and then she saw she was trapped, but she didn’t say a thing. She didn’t tell a different story either. She just stood there as if she was posing for a monument and said she didn’t have anything else to tell us and she wasn’t going anywhere with anyone and if we wanted to we could take her by force. Do I look as if I was going to take her by force? I said to her: Okay, lady, if that’s the way you want it, you can have the local police force right here on your doorstep. We disconnected that phone of hers and got a local cop to keep her incommunicado, so she couldn’t warn the professor, and drove straight back here.”
“So he wasn’t really at Rosh Pinna?” asked Eli Bahar.
“He wasn’t there on Thursday night. And his flight got in at two o’clock in the afternoon. So it seems to me that we should ask him where he was. If you have no objections.”
The door opened, and Raffi Alfandari’s head peeped into the room. “He’s here. When do you want him?”
“Let him wait,” said Michael.
“Let him stew for a bit,” added Balilty nastily, and Raffi’s head disappeared.
“When did you get back from there?” asked Eli Bahar.
“Just now, five minutes before I got hold of you at Forensics. We didn’t even have time to eat. It’s a long drive from Rosh Pinna. Raffi did it in three hours flat. And while I was phoning you he went to wait outside Klein’s house, so the bird wouldn’t fly the coop. So what do you say to that little story, eh? Here’s a guy that everyone’s crazy about, the great man himself, and like your boss says, you should always talk to the neighbors.”
Balilty fell silent and looked at Michael, whose face was still blank and whose body was frozen. Beginning to squirm in his chair, Balilty said: “I’m dying of hunger; let’s grab a bite on the corner and bring the boss something too. Eh, Ohayon? What do you say?”
Michael said nothing. At last he made an undefined movement with his head, which Balilty chose to interpret as consent. “What should we bring you?” he asked hesitantly.
“Nothing, thanks. I’m not hungry, I’ve already eaten today,” replied Michael, when he noticed them standing and waiting at the door. The taste of the onion at lunch rose in his throat. When they left he dialed Shorer’s number. There was no reply. He tried his number at home, and there was no reply there either. Finally he put the phone down and told himself that nobody else could do the job for him. He tried to banish the anxiety and confusion fogging his mind. Nobody was to blame, nobody had misled him, only he himself was responsible, and now he felt betrayed. Ariyeh Levy was right, he had been taken in by the good home, the old family, the modern Renaissance man. And maybe he had a story, maybe there was some simple explanation. So why did his mother lie? What did Klein have to hide? he asked himself as he dialed the number of the room next door and told Alfandari to bring the man in.
Klein stood in the doorway. He was wearing the shirt he had been wearing a few hours earlier, the short-sleeved striped shirt that emphasized his big arms. Next to him, Raffi looked shorter than he really was. Raffi left the office excitedly, and Michael knew that he would be in the next room, listening to every word.
Michael felt his face stiffening, sensed his eyes emptying of expression.
Klein too, for the first time since Michael had met him at the university, when he came into the room with his voice booming, looked tense. His face was pale, and he responded to Michael’s mute invitation and sat down, facing him, on the other side of the desk. Again the taste of the onion, accompanied by the taste of Greek olives, rose in Michael’s throat, and he felt nauseous. He sought to suppress his panic, to ignore his anxiety, to erase the thought that in one minute everything was going to collapse around him and there would be no escape from the knowledge that he had been deceived by his own wishes, that he had lost his better judgment. This thought would not let him be; he tried to will anger to replace it, but the anxiety flooded everything. He attempted to relax his leg muscles, but he couldn’t even stretch the legs out in front of him. The air in the room was stifling. Looking behind him, he saw that the window was open, and then he turned back to Klein, who was sitting silently opposite him. Finally Klein cleared his throat a few times and asked in his bass voice: “What’s the problem?”
Michael looked at the thick lips, which were dry now, and asked him quietly when he had returned from America.
“I told you. On Thursday afternoon. Surely it’s easy enough to check,” replied Klein in a tone of puzzled surprise, but Michael noticed that his hands had clenched into big fists. His arms were folded on his chest, and beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. Michael registered every detail. “Look at the body,” he would explain to his students in the Police Academy, “it’s the body that talks.” Klein’s body was shouting. Every movement bespoke apprehension. Yet the cultured voice lacked any trace of indignation. Michael knew that Klein had lied, or more precisely—he consoled himself—withheld information, but he still could not help feeling awed by the man. Someone else should interrogate him, he thought; I’m too involved. But I also want that someone to be gentle with him, to show respect; there’s nobody suitable for a man of his caliber, I can’t hand him over to Balilty or Bahar.
“And tell me again, please: why did you fly separately? You and your family?”
“What’s wrong?” asked Klein, and passed a parched tongue over his lips. “What’s wrong all of a sudden?”
“Just answer the question: why did you fly separately?”
“Because of my daughter’s end-of-term party in America. The middle one, Dana. As I told you. She wasn’t willing to give it up, and I couldn’t wait. My mother was expecting me; I promised her. And besides, there was no room for me on the flight that arrived on Saturday night. Ofra and I never fly together—it makes her anxious.”
“But she flew back with all your daughters?”
Klein said impatiently: “Yes, I already said so.”
“Okay, we’ll leave that for the moment. You said there was a rental car waiting for you? At the airport?”
Klein nodded. His arms were still folded on his chest, as if in an attempt to hide his clenched hands. “I ordered it in New York.”
“Why didn’t your family come to meet you? They hadn’t seen you for nearly a year, your brother, your sister, even your mother; why didn’t they come to the airport?”
Klein took his hands from his chest and rested them on his knees, so that his shoulders rose and the upper half of his body stretched and lengthened. Michael waited.
“Complicated family matters. That’s what we arranged, that they would come to my mother’s on Saturday. I don’t like to be a nuisance.”
“Are you sure that that’s the reason?”
“Meaning what? What other reason occurs to you?”
“To give you freedom of movement, for example?” said Michael quietly, with contradictory wishes in his heart. Let him lie, let him go on lying, he thought; then I’ll be able to get angry. At the same time, he also wanted him not to lie, for things to be the way they had been a few hours before, for him to remain a good guy.
But Klein said nothing.
At last Michael asked the question he was afraid to ask. “When, exactly, did you get to Rosh Pinna, to your mother’s place?”
Klein crossed his arms on his chest again. “I’ve already told you,” he replied and compressed his lips into a straight line.
Michael waited, but Klein remained silent.
“We know that you weren’t there on Thursday night,” said Michael finally. He couldn’t bear the thought of Klein lying. “When did you arrive there?”
After an eternity, Klein sighed and said: “It makes no difference when I arrived there.”
There was a long silence. Michael looked directly into Klein’s eyes, and Klein put his elbows on the desk and cupped his face in his hands.
“Can you explain why, exactly, it makes no difference?”
“Because it’s not relevant,” said Klein, looking up and down into Michael’s eyes. “You’ll have to believe me that it’s got nothing to do with the murder.”
“Professor Klein,” said Michael, feeling the anger begin to well up, “you’ll have to be a little more forthcoming for me to give you any credence. When, exactly, did you arrive, and why isn’t it relevant?”
“I arrived in Rosh Pinna early on Friday evening, and I’m telling you that it’s got nothing to do with the case. Why can’t you just believe me and leave it at that?”
Later, when he listened to the playback, Michael heard the furious sound that had burst out of him, jackal-like, shameful in its self-exposure. Only then did he realize just how hurt he had been.
“Professor Klein,” he exclaimed, stressing every syllable, “I’m investigating a murder, two murders. Of a young man you were fond of and attached to and of a man who was close to you for many years. I’m asking you!”
Klein wiped his forehead with his hand and looked into Michael’s eyes again, his own eyes wide open, seeming more than anything else sad and serious.
“I’m sorry you don’t trust me, really sorry,” he said in the end.
“It’s not a question of whether I trust you, not to mention the fact that you already lied once. It’s a question of facts. Your mother lied—why did you make her lie? Things people say are meaningless unless there are facts behind them. What’s it got to do with my trusting you? Respect, affection, none of that means a thing if I don’t have the facts. If we’re talking about trust, it’s you who didn’t trust me!”
Klein looked as if he were hesitating, pondering what Michael had said. At last he said: “You’re right. But after I tell you, you’ll see that it has nothing to do with the case, nothing at all.”
Michael waited, without putting any more pressure on him. At last Klein said: “It has to stay between us. Do you understand? It has to. Promise me.”
Michael nodded.
“Do you promise?” repeated Klein, and this childish insistence astonished Michael. He thought of Raffi listening in the next room, of Balilty and Eli Bahar, who would no doubt soon join him there, of the team meeting, of the typed transcripts of the entire conversation, which Tzilla would place before him the next morning, and he said: “I promise.” For some reason, he didn’t add the usual formula: on condition that it turned out to be unconnected with the investigation, etc.
