by Batya Gur
“But there was no intention to murder him. It was an accident. A work accident.”
“I’m not so sure. They would have avoided the accident if they’d broken in when he wasn’t home. Forensics said that whoever removed the picture from the frame was a professional, someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Not even a thread of the canvas was left on the frame. It wasn’t the original frame, otherwise they would have taken that, too. Van Gelden hid it through the whole war. That picture was his fortune. He and his wife and the elder son, who was born during the war, were hiding in some village in Holland. They had the painting with them. It had been in the family for three or four generations. For him it was like . . . like the Torah curtain that an old fleeing Jew would have rescued from the synagogue in his town in Poland. The thieves were very careful when they removed it from the frame. They removed the lock from the door only when they were already inside. Although they took cash and jewelry, and turned the house upside down—pulled out all the papers, emptied out the drawers, threw the books off the shelves—it’s quite clear that all that was a diversion. The only fingerprints we have belong to people with a legitimate reason to be there. The sons, the daughter, the cleaning woman. I’ve already alerted all the art dealers and experts in the country, and there isn’t even the hint of a lead. Nothing. Nada. Every one of them’s got an alibi, the same alibi. Gozlan’s grandson had a bar mitzvah,” he said, snickering gloomily, “and all of them were there, every last one of them. None of them has heard anything. They’re making inquiries for me, but one dealer who owes me something has already assured me that it was an outside, a foreign job. And if that’s so, there’s not much I can do about it except talk to our contact in Europe who works with the Swiss and with Interpol.”
Michael was silent.
“Why are you looking at me like that with those eyes of yours, as if I was some suspect?” said Balilty indignantly. “What’s the matter? Is there something wrong with what I’ve just said?”
Michael was silent.
“Is there something you want to ask me?” Balilty demanded.
Michael wanted to speak, but he cupped his chin in his hand and waited. His mouth was dry. He wanted to speak, but he couldn’t. He wanted to speak simply, to tell Balilty about the baby, but suddenly the place seemed wrong. The air in the room was heavy. On the desk between them stood the two coffee cups. A fly made its way from one to the other buzzing loudly, and outside the window, open to the fresh autumn air, birds chirped. Everything seemed ready for him to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
Balilty folded his arms and looked at him. The two of them sat there as if playing out a scenario Michael himself had written. Years ago, Michael had taught Balilty the power of silence. He himself had honed and perfected Shorer’s theory about the rhythm of silences and the fruits of patience. Victory would come to whomever was able to stand the silence. He could see the wheels turning in Danny Balilty’s head and hear the inner voice whispering to him to keep quiet. “People,” Michael used to tell him when they worked together, “can’t stand long silences. On the whole, they want to be liked. Even psychopaths, or most of them. If you keep quiet long enough they finally say something, to make you talk to them again.” Balilty looked into his eyes and kept quiet. If it hadn’t been for the fear paralyzing him, Michael would have smiled.
Balilty broke first. “I thought we were friends,” he said, offended. “But I see you don’t trust me.”
“It’s not a question of trust,” said Michael, quickly finding his voice, “and you know that I’m here in order to tell you something. But your speed simply takes my breath away . . .” he added admiringly. “You’ve been on the case for only two days, and you already know.”
“Oh, please,” said Balilty dismissively, “I’ve already known about that business of yours for ages.” He looked embarrassed, and not in the least mocking.
“Even before the van Gelden murder?” exclaimed Michael, astonished.
“Naturally.”
“What, have you been following me?”
“Come on! I found out purely by chance.”
“What do you mean, by chance?” Michael was alarmed. “Have people here been talking about it? Does everybody know? If it gets to the Child Welfare, if they find out that we, that Nita and I aren’t really . . .”
“Aren’t really?” repeated Balilty, surprised. “What do you mean, aren’t really?”
“Nita and I . . . We . . . there’s nothing between us.” Michael squirmed and felt himself blushing. “That’s to say, not what you might think.” With every word he felt more awkward. He rebuked himself silently: Where’s your cunning? Who asked you if there was anything between you and her? Since when have you been in the habit of volunteering information about your love life? What do you care what they think? In any event, you can’t explain to him about the baby. What can you say to him about it? Do you want to tell him about the second chance? About your fantasy of this time doing everything differently?
An amused smile appeared at the corners of Balilty’s lips, and he said: “I don’t remember dropping any hints. I don’t know what there is between you, I just know that you’re living with her—”
“That’s not quite right,” said Michael, with every word feeling himself sinking deeper into the trap he had set for himself.
“And that you’ve got her baby, and nobody knows who its father is,” said Balilty nonchalantly. “As well as the baby you found, which you’re fostering, I understand.”
“Are people talking about it? Does everybody know?” How he hated himself for this question.
“Nobody knows except me,” Balilty assured him. “And I haven’t told anybody.”
“And how do you know?”
“Completely by chance. I told you, this time it was purely by chance.”
Michael raised his eyebrows.
“What does it matter?” said Balilty, evidently enjoying Michael’s bewilderment.
“Balilty,” warned Michael.
“The pediatrician? Who came to see you after the holiday?” Michael nodded.
“His wife?”
“Well?”
“She’s my sister-in-law’s cousin.”
“So?”
“He met you once at our place. Or she did, one of them, I don’t remember which one. Anyway, he knows that we work together. He made me promise not to mention it to you or to anyone else, but he was curious about what was happening with the baby. He thought that I knew all about it because he thought we were friends. And after he found out that it wasn’t so, that I didn’t know, he was sorry he told me!”
“I could kill him,” whispered Michael.
“You’re lucky it’s me. That I’m the only one who knows,” said Balilty with a pious look. “No one will ever find out from me.”
“Her baby,” said Michael, “isn’t mine. I’m not his father.” The words made him feel like a traitor.
Balilty was silent.
“I tell you, somebody else is his father,” he pleaded against his will. “Why should I lie?”
“Okay, okay. Just tell me what it’s all about.”
Michael told him about finding the cardboard box, about the Child Welfare Bureau, about the Social Services Department, about Nita.
Balilty listened attentively. “That’s it? That’s the whole story?” he asked in the end, as Michael took another cigarette from the pack. Michael nodded. “Now you know everything,” he said, and he examined himself to see if he felt relieved. But the sense of oppression was still there, and maybe it was even stronger than before.
“Why does everything always have to be so complicated with you?” complained Balilty. “Here’s a woman. It’s so simple. I’ve seen her. She’s young, successful, pretty, nice, healthy—everything you could wish for. You want a baby, you have a baby. Why does she have to have a child by someone else and you have to bring a baby in from the street? How do you manage to complicate things to such an extent? You could have
. . . any woman you want. Women are crazy about you. Why does it have to be like this?”
Michael lowered his eyes. “Good question,” he said finally.
“I won’t tell anyone,” said Balilty, and he put his hand on his heart. “No one will hear about it from me,” he declared solemnly, “but it’s impossible to keep things like this secret for long. And you know as well as I do that you can’t bring up a baby by yourself. Forgive me for saying so.”
“Why not?” demanded Michael, and he pressed his hand against the knot in his stomach.
Balilty’s light little eyes opened wide in surprise mingled with pity. “Because the moment you’re put on a case,” he said simply, “never mind what case, you won’t have a minute to spare, you’ll be on call twenty-four hours a day. A baby, as you certainly know, is a full-time job. Don’t we both know it? Didn’t you bring up Yuval? Don’t we remember how he used to wait and wait for you?”
“Maybe now it’ll be different,” mumbled Michael.
Balilty sighed. “The opposite. It’s the opposite of what it should be.”
Michael felt like a scolded child. The conversation frightened him because of things he hadn’t been prepared for. He could find no sign that Balilty was mocking him, and he would have preferred his mockery to this.
“At our age,” said Balilty, musing aloud and crushing the toothpick with his fingers, “we’ve learned that not everything everybody else does is nonsense. That’s to say, sometimes the simple, conventional things are the logical way to go. It’s the opposite: In other words, first you love a woman—you find a suitable woman—and then you have and bring up a baby. That’s the proper order of things. It’s logical. It’s the way of the world, and it makes sense, and you know it.”
Michael bit his lips and nodded. “Okay, we’ll see, we’ll see what happens,” he said to the air, and he looked out the open window, heard the chirping of the birds, the buzzing of the flies, smelled the smell of autumn.
“How did she take it? The woman? The news of her father?” Balilty asked, businesslike.
Michael spread his hands. “Hard, but you can’t really tell.”
“They’re quite close, she and her brothers,” said Balilty, and he pulled a big color photograph out of his desk drawer. “Here’s the painting. Have you ever seen it? Look. This is a photograph van Gelden received from a museum in Holland that sent an expert to photograph it. It took us hours to find this, it was with a lot of other photographs in the mess they made of the house.”
The skull on the pile of books gleamed in the golden light. At the bottom right corner was a small, reddish wooden flute. The books were piled untidily on top of one another, and on the binding of the bottom one there were Gothic letters. The faded gold edges of the two books above it were meticulously painted. The top book was open, and it looked as if it was about to fall and topple the whole stack. Between the flute and the pink-gray skull floated the narrow face of a woman whose copper-colored hair fell to her shoulders. One of her shoulders was exposed and a radiant white light shone from it. This face, Michael thought, intensified the effect of the skull as something dry and inanimate. “Vanitas,” he said aloud. “A still life.”
“Half a million dollars and uninsured,” remarked Balilty.
“Uninsured?”
“Yes. Old van Gelden refused to take the necessary precautions—a steel security door, bars on the windows. So no one would insure the painting. He lived there in that old house in Rehavia with an ordinary wooden door, two simple locks, one above the other, two turns each. No burglar alarm. He didn’t believe in banks, his son said, he kept his money at home, foreign currency, and he didn’t believe in steel doors, either. He was a character, the old man. Didn’t you know him?”
Michael shook his head.
Balilty glanced at his watch. “I’m waiting for a call from Switzerland,” he explained. “But it’s still too early, only two days have passed. If the thieves have left Israel they may not even have arrived anywhere yet. It wouldn’t be hard to get the painting out of the country in a suitcase or a shoulder bag.”
“I may have seen him once, years ago, in his music shop. Yuval needed music for his guitar. Later he stopped playing it, just as he stopped playing the recorder. I barely remember what van Gelden looked like. Only that he was tall.”
“I knew him well,” announced Balilty, blinking with the effort to sound matter-of-fact and conceal his pride. “I met him years ago, at the lodge.”
“What lodge?”
“You know, the lodge,” said Balilty, coughing. “The Masonic lodge. He was a Master Mason. I joined twenty years ago, because of my father. I first went to make my father happy, and after he died I just stayed on. I saw van Gelden there regularly.”
“I didn’t know the Masons exist here at all, and that you were a member.” Michael was astonished.
“No, you didn’t know,” agreed Balilty. “Not that it’s such a big secret. I don’t go around talking about it. But I don’t keep it a secret.”
“Twenty years?”
“Nineteen, nearly twenty.”
“I . . . for me, the Masons, even though I know they’re still active in England and America, they seem to me like something legendary. Something that came to an end after Alexandre Dumas, or after Mozart.”
“What does Mozart have to do with it?” asked Balilty.
“He was a Mason two hundred years ago in Vienna. Do you know The Magic Flute?”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Balilty, embarrassed, “but the organization has changed a lot in two hundred years.”
“Since when has it existed in Israel?”
“Oh, since the British Mandate. The British brought it here. There are a number of lodges in Jerusalem.”
“And it still exists? Actively? And do young people still join?”
“Of course it’s alive,” said Balilty. “And there are quite a few of my age. We meet once a month, like clockwork.”
“And is there still a guard and all that stuff? Masks? And robes and aprons and medals?”
“There’s a guard,” said Balilty seriously, with a certain reserve, “and he doesn’t let just anyone in from the street. He looks through the peephole, and if he can’t identify you have to say the password. There aren’t any masks, of course not, or robes either, but there’s a special garment, a kind of apron worn by the officers, by the president of the lodge. Van Gelden was president two years ago. And we have a skull, too,” he said, suddenly chuckling. “On a pedestal. To remind us always of who we are and where we’re going. Look, if you’re interested, if you’re thinking of coming to see, of joining, I can bring you to a meeting as a guest. The last Police Commissioner himself belonged. A lot of members are professors, highly educated people, people with important public positions, we have a judge in our lodge, scientists. Anyway, that’s how I met van Gelden. I sometimes went into his shop, too, to consult him about Sigi. You know what a beautiful voice she had. I wanted her to do something with it. She had a voice like my mother’s. I used to ask his advice. We got her singing lessons, to learn to read music, all that, but nothing came of it. His shop was something special.”
“All I remember is piles of stuff and strange musical instruments.”
“He knew exactly where everything was,” said Balilty. “He never forgot a thing. He looked like an oddball, but he had his feet firmly on the ground. And if there was anything he didn’t know, his assistant, that scarecrow Herzl Cohen, knew.”
“What assistant?”
“He had an assistant, in the shop. His right hand. He knew everything. Ask your girlfriend.”
Michael thought of Nita’s insistence about finding Herzl, but something prevented him from mentioning it now. “And why isn’t he in the picture, this assistant?”
“Now? Do you mean where is he? Actually, we’re looking for him.”
“And did you meet socially, too? Outside the lodge? With van Gelden? Did you ever go to his house?”
Balilty chuckled. “That’s not the way things work in the Masons. In this case there are a couple of things that don’t make sense,” he said thoughtfully. “For example, the fact that he never had an appointment with the dentist at all.” Balilty stared at the dregs sticking to the sides of his cup. “Van Gelden didn’t have an appointment, but he told his children that he had one. So where was he? Who did he meet instead of going to the dentist? I asked the children where he could have gone. They didn’t know so much about him. Not even Gabriel, the younger son, who was the closest to him.”
“Where do you think he was?” asked Michael. His fingertips tingled as if his hand had gone to sleep.
Balilty shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said with a smile. “And I have no idea what it’s all about. I would have thought that a man his age, a man like him, whose children are public figures, they would have more known about him. But he was the one who knew everything about everyone else. Like in the shop. He was the only one who knew exactly where everything was. You always had to wait for him, to ask him, because that was the way he wanted it, to keep control. He may have been a Dutchman, but he had the soul of a German Jew. You know the kind, they were always so rational and unprejudiced. But they wouldn’t do business with the Germans, he and his Herzl, who looks like a scarecrow, with his hair standing up like this.” Balilty rolled up a sheet of paper and put it on his head for a moment. “He disappeared some time ago. I don’t know what they quarreled about after forty years. None of the children knows, either. I told you, we’re looking for him now. Maybe he knows something.”
“What could he know? The shop’s been closed for the past six months.”
“Ask the daughter. He was very thick with the family. He even had a key to house.”
“So he’s a possible suspect. He could easily have been in on it, the painting and everything,” said Michael, surprised.
“I told you, nobody knows where he is!” protested Balilty. “And the van Geldens say that it’s out of the question. You could rely on him completely. And besides, he’s half crazy. Money and paintings mean nothing to him. They dismiss it out of hand. And don’t tell me that wonders will never cease. As I’ve told you, I’m looking for him anyway.”
