Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “Excuse me, what is this?” demanded Theo, taking off his glasses and jumping off the stage. The baby girl stirred in her carrier, and Ido sucked noisily on his pacifier and rubbed his eyes with his fists. “What is this?!” said Theo again. He stood at the end of the row where the mayor was seated. Teddy Kollek greeted him genially and waved toward the stage. “Hello, everybody!” he said with absent-minded patronage. He dropped his arm with a heavy thud on the arm of the chair.

  “But we’re having a rehearsal!” cried Theo, outraged.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” asked the young woman as she straightened the hem of her cream-colored jacket. “German television is here for an interview with Mr. Kollek. It was arranged weeks ago,” she added indignantly.”

  “Nobody told me!” announced Theo in a tone combining indignation with disbelief.

  “It won’t take long,” said the woman, “half an hour at the most,” she promised.

  Theo spread out his hands. Teddy Kollek folded his arms and stared in front of him with open indifference.

  “Where’s the manager? Where’s Zisowitz? Why didn’t he coordinate with me?” said Theo. His face was pale. He went down to the foot of the stage, looked at the orchestra, and then turned to look at Kollek, who planted an elbow on the arm of his chair and supported his heavy face with a big hand. His eyes were half closed. The sentences in German spoken by the young woman echoed in the hall as the camera focused on her face. Theo flung his arms up and let them fall to his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “Break!” he announced, and he put on his glasses.

  The concertmaster stood up quickly, leaned toward Theo, and whispered something.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” said Theo, “I know we’re running late, but I want another hour today, so we’ll finish an hour late. We have to complete the first movement today.”

  There was no mistaking the disgruntled expressions on the faces of some of the musicians. The timpani player tugged at her big T-shirt and rummaged noisily and demonstratively in the plastic bag she had hidden behind her drums. Gradually the musicians rose from their places. Michael took hold of the handles of the carrier in one hand and the handle of the baby seat in the other and hurried out of the hall.

  Nita followed him. She undid the buckle of the strap around Ido’s stomach and picked him up. He laid his face on her shoulder and nestled against her for a second, then threw his head back and began to wriggle. After a brief consultation they decided that Michael would wait until the end of the rehearsal. She returned to the hall to feed Ido backstage, in the hope that he would fall asleep. Michael remained seated in a red velvet armchair in the lobby. Noa was sleeping. A few of the musicians came out into the lobby and sat down in chairs near him.

  “He’s a terrorist,” muttered the timpanist as she took a big sandwich out of a plastic bag.

  “It’s against the rules,” grumbled the clarinet player who had yelled out on stage. He poured himself a cup of coffee from a blue plastic thermos bottle.

  “Don’t complain,” said a big, fat man with a heavy Russian accent. “It’ll be harder work with his brother.”

  “Are you going over to him?” asked the timpanist with her mouth full. “Are you going to switch to his ensemble?”

  “Nu,” said the Russian, “conditions will be better. He’s paying better. But there will be more work. He will pay by the rehearsal.” He burped. “Capitalism!” he explained with a smile. “No tenure,” he added.

  “I wouldn’t take the risk,” said the timpanist, folding her plastic bag neatly. “He can fire you from one day to the next, and you’ll be left with nothing.”

  “Nu, he already fired Sonia two weeks ago. And Itzik, too.”

  “Which Itzik?” asked the clarinetist,, screwing the empty cup, which was still dripping, back onto his thermos.

  “Nu, Itzik!”

  “There are two Itziks,” said the timpanist. “The trumpeter or the violinist?”

  “The violinist, the violinist,” said the Russian.

  “He fired Itzik?” said the woman, aghast. “How could he fire Itzik?”

  “What I can’t understand is why anyone setting up a Baroque orchestra should take Itzik on in the first place,” said the clarinetist with a laugh.

  “Nu, it’s going to be a very good ensemble,” said the Russian, looking at Michael. “There has never been a historical performance Baroque ensemble like it here.”

  “How good can it be if it’s just a second job for the top players?” asked the clarinetist.

  “Nu, it will not be a second job for long,” promised the Russian. “He’s holding auditions all the time.”

  Someone came into the lobby and clapped his hands. “They’ve finished. We’re starting,” he called out from the entrance. The musicians began returning to the hall. The Russian held the big wooden doors open as Teddy Kollek, accompanied by the young German woman holding his elbow, shuffled out, followed by the cameramen and the people with the television lights. As the musicians emerged from backstage, Theo van Gelden was already sitting on his high stool. Nita beckoned to Michael from the entrance to the hall. She put Ido into his arms. “He’ll sleep now,” she promised, stroking Michael’s arm. “But if he doesn’t fall asleep, if there are problems, just take them both home and I’ll make my own way back when the rehearsal’s over.”

  Again he returned to the end of the row and placed Ido at his right and Noa at his left. Everyone sat down and Theo called out: “From twenty-six on.” That was from before the entrance of the violin until the full presentation of the main theme of the first movement. After a few bars Theo interrupted: “Are you the police band or what?” he called to the wind instruments ‘and the timpani. “Can’t you see what’s written? Can’t you see that everyone has fortissimo—except for who? Except for the horns, trumpets, and timpani. They have only forte! Forte, not fortissimo!” In a softer voice he added: “Brahms wanted the orchestration to be balanced, for the violins and the clarinets to be heard. If the trumpets and timpani are too loud, it sounds like a police band.”

  At that moment, without any warning, Noa started screaming at the top of her voice. There was laughter from the orchestra, and Theo turned around with a grim face, but he said nothing. Michael hurried out with both babies. He looked at his watch and decided to wait in the lobby until the rehearsal was over. From behind the closed doors he could hear the first movement from the beginning, interrupted by occasional roars from Theo. Again and again they repeated passages while he fed Noa. He listened to the music and to the baby’s loud sucking noises and her sighs in the brief intervals between sucks. Ido fell asleep, enabling Michael to stand with Noa in his arms next to the wooden doors and pace up and down beside them until he heard her burp, and at the same time listen to the music. He had never imagined that he would ever be present at the actual work of preparing a piece of music for performance, with its prosaic moments of rustling plastic bags, grumbling, and complaints. It was work that later, in the evening, under the bright lights, would bring tears to the eyes of such as Becky Pomeranz.

  He heard Theo call out: “Okay! That’s enough for today!” and moved away from the door. He sat down in a corner armchair and waited, with the two babies, until Nita came out of the hall, holding her cello in her hands. “Don’t wait for me any longer!” she said. “It was probably a mistake to drag you here with them. We have to stay on to clear up a few more things, and when Theo says ‘a few more things’ you never know how long it’s going to take. If Gabriel or Theo doesn’t take me home, I’ll get a cab,” she added at the sight of his hesitation. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. I’m fine as long as I’m working.”

  A few hours later, as Michael kneeled down next to Gabriel’s body, he thought for the first time of what was to haunt him for many days to come. Less than three hours separated his persistent whistling of the main theme of the Double Concerto’s first movement from a tormenting question: How different could things have been if he hadn’t done as she asked?
How much, if anything, could he have prevented if he had continued to wait for her in the place where Gabriel van Gelden was murdered?

  5

  Morendo Cantabile—Dying Away, Singing

  The body was sprawled in the corridor behind the stage, at the foot of a narrow concrete pillar. The upper half of the body was lying in a pool of blood flowing from the severed throat. Michael, who had witnessed many horrible sights, looked only for a moment at the almost decapitated head. Only a narrow piece of skin at the nape of the neck connected it to the shoulders. It seemed to Michael literally to be hanging by a thread, about to fall away at any moment and roll along the corridor onto the stage and down the steps one by one into the hall.

  As he stood there averting his face from the body and suppressing the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him, it occurred to him that this was the first time he had seen a murder victim a short time before his death, totally alive, not to speak of playing the violin. For the first time in his life he was standing over the corpse of a man in whose company he had spent hours. The thought in itself gave rise in him to a great unease, and to the muffled recognition that this time everything would be different, that he was involved in this case in an improper way, and that perhaps he should summon someone else right now—someone other than Tzilla, someone who would be able to take over the case if he were to collapse. But why should he collapse? he thought angrily. When did he ever collapse, and what did words like “collapse” and “break down” mean anyway? Did they mean that he would lose his ability to think logically? That he would faint? Anyone would think that he was the injured party here, not Theo or Nita.

  With the thought of Nita—it wasn’t even a thought, just a sharp, momentary sting in his darting mind—and her relation to this man whose throat had been cut and who was lying in a pool of blood, he began to recover. He forced himself to look at the corpse. For the second time. After the first look, which had been vague and unfocused because of the horror, and then became too personal, the second was something else. This time he looked at the dead Gabriel as if he were only an ordinary corpse, only a case, because he knew in advance what he was going to see. The moment he looked for the second time he said to himself that he could do it, that Gabriel was only a case. But he didn’t dare think of Nita yet. For a moment her face flickered before his eyes, and he closed them, as if to drive her away, as if he were saying to her, Not now. As if he were forcibly pushing aside—and he really did need force to do it—the memory of her existence.

  The doctor from the Magen David Adom ambulance, which had been summoned even before the police, behaved as if she had been waiting for Michael’s arrival only in order to repeat a familiar gesture—raising her arms helplessly and letting them fall with a thud onto her heavy thighs. “That’s how he was when we arrived. There was nothing I could do, and I didn’t move him, I barely touched him,” she said, and she turned immediately to Nita’s reaction, which she described as an attack of “clinical hysteria. She screamed and screamed and screamed. We couldn’t stop her.” There was no mistaking the note of alarm and also the hint of condemnation in the description, in which the phrase “I’ve never seen anything like it” was repeated several times before she said: “I finally gave her a shot. These two had to help me hold her down.” The young doctor pointed to the two adolescent boys standing in the narrow corridor next to the metal cabinets blocking the way to the more spacious part of the building that housed the orchestra’s and the conductor’s offices. “They’re volunteers. They’ve never seen anything like this before,” she said reproachfully. “Sixteen is really a little early for this.” One of the youths had a fixed smile on his pale face and the other was leaning against a cabinet with his back to them.

  The concertmaster emerged at the bend in the corridor, squeezed past the metal cabinets, and approached them, swaying on his feet. He too averted his face when he passed the corpse. He was the one who had called the ambulance and then the police. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know if he was really dead, and I thought that the first thing was to see if it was possible to save him,” he said apologetically.

  Heavy footsteps sounded on the other side of the thin wall separating the stage from backstage. Puffing and panting, the forensic pathologist appeared. Even his breathing sounds like humming, thought Michael as he reluctantly recognized Eliyahu Solomon as the pathologist on duty. Hurrying behind him came two forensic investigators. Michael wondered if two would be enough. He marveled silently at the speed with which they had arrived.

  The traffic jam had barred his way through King David Street and obliged him to turn on his siren at the Mamilla traffic lights. As he had pushed on toward the concert hall, he had stared, as he always did now, with astonishment at the frameworks of the luxury buildings that were replacing the razed old neighborhood, and then pushed on toward the concert hall. His astonishment—sometimes accompanied by revulsion—at the changes in the view emerging beyond the traffic lights returned whenever he stopped at this intersection. After glancing, with a sense of relief at their survival, at the Muslim cemetery on his left and the “Palace”—the imposing round edifice that housed the Ministry of Commerce and Industry—on his right, he looked straight ahead. For months he had been contemplating the systematic destruction of old buildings. They had left a building once visited by Theodor Herzl untouched, like a single tooth in an old person’s mouth, while, like a set of gleaming white false teeth, the new buildings now stood behind a big sign announcing “David’s Village.”

  They had called him on the police radio when he was already on his way to the Russian Compound, after depositing the babies with the afternoon babysitter. At that moment he was at the Mamilla intersection, staring at stickers proclaiming THE PEOPLE ARE WITH THE GOLAN and JUDEA AND SAMARIA ARE HERE on the back window of the car in front of him. The driver was hastily shutting his window in the face of the barrage of curses let loose by a woman in rags, the beggar woman known as the Madwoman of Mamilla, who plied her trade among the cars stuck at the traffic lights, thrusting a filthy hand at the drivers, grinning or growling with her toothless mouth. The address given him by the dispatcher on Shorer’s orders filled him with terrible panic. “He tried you first at home,” she said, and her voice—a familiar froggy croak—sent a shiver down his spine, as if she had scratched with a stone on a pane of glass.

  “I was on the way,” he said into the two-way radio, mainly for the sake of saying something, and he turned into the right lane. The chill that had flooded in him, that had filled the pit of his stomach at the sound of the address, had not been dispelled even by the words “the body of a man” the dispatcher had added, as if urgency justified her lack of caution about reporters listening in to the police frequency. The chill increased the closer he got—speeding past the long row of cars drawn up at the seemingly unchanging traffic lights—to the concert hall.

  He was chilled, his knees felt weak, and his teeth chattered. How could Shorer find him if he spent his days waiting for babysitters? he castigated himself. He speeded up. The afternoon babysitter, the one they had taken on specially for Nita’s rehearsals, had been half an hour late. “Because of the traffic,” she had said angrily. The bus route had been changed for the visit of the American secretary of state. “And the day before yesterday it was because of some rabbi’s funeral,” she panted. “Three hundred thousand Hasidim for a rabbi nobody’s ever heard of! It’s impossible to live in this city anymore—it’s either terrorist attacks or Hasidic funerals or state visits with limousines and motorcycles. Even if they’re only going from the King David Hotel to the prime minister’s house on Balfour Street, they shut the whole damned city down because of them. What do they care? They’re not in a hurry to get anywhere.”

  Between waves of the shivers he heard himself asking the dispatcher about whether Forensics had already been informed and sent to the scene. He heard his calm, matter-of-fact voice, the familiar voice routinely and automatically on tap for such occasions. Nev
ertheless it sounded strange to him now as he asked whether the pathologist had already been sent to the scene. When he had parked, at the rear entrance of the concert hall, he turned to the radio again and asked that Tzilla be sent to the scene.

  The young Magen David Adom doctor stood next to the skinny pathologist, whose checked shirt emphasized his concave chest and his thin, hairy, white arms. Polishing the lenses of his round spectacles punctiliously, he questioned the doctor briefly in his singsong voice, the silences punctuated by constant humming. He sounded as though he were practicing an endless recitative. She responded to his questions curtly and with evident irritation. When she received the call, it was already “too late,” the doctor said, and now Michael heard the echo of a faint Russian accent in the phrase. “The body was in the same position as it is now, sprawled out like a rag, with all the blood, and the legs folded,” at the foot of the concrete pillar. She hadn’t let anyone touch it, she asserted, no one but she had approached it. She described once more, this time without the note of complaint and condemnation, Nita’s hysterical fit, and that she had sent Nita to lie down in “Mr. van Gelden’s office.”

  “Which van Gelden?” asked Michael.