by Batya Gur
“The other one, the one that’s alive,” she answered unthinkingly. She then looked embarrassed and horrified.
“Where’s the office?” Michael asked the concertmaster, who pointed to the bend in the corridor. He began walking in that direction, turning his head to make sure that Michael was following him. The concertmaster stopped at a door and said in a voice that turned quickly from confusion to open fear: “Weren’t you here today at our rehearsal?” Michael nodded vaguely, knocked at the door, and opened it without waiting for a reply.
Nita lay huddled, curled up on her side on a pale couch in a corner of the room. Under the wool blanket it was possible to discern her knees drawn up close to her stomach. Her eyes were closed and her white face looked like a waxen mask. He hurried to her side, bent down, and took her wrist in his hand. The pulse was weak and faint. Everything’s lost, he thought as soon as he saw her face. She’ll never recover from this. She would never again with a shining face lay her curly head on his shoulder or rub her cheek against his arm. For a brief moment he wanted to gather her up in his arms and escape. Then he roused himself, feeling disgusted. She’s alive, he reminded himself.
Theo was sitting on a small chair very close to the couch. When Michael opened the door he removed his hands from his face and turned his head.
“It’s you,” he said, seeming startled. “They sent you?” Theo asked in a tone of alarm. Then he immediately recovered and wiped his face with a few rapid movements of his hands. “Maybe it’s better this way,” he mumbled. “Precisely because you know . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen to her, she . . . She’s really in a state,” he said in a tremulous voice. “I don’t know what we’re going to do when she wakes up. I dread it.”
“She won’t wake up for a few hours.”
“Who could have imagined it?” whispered Theo. “Within a week, it isn’t even a week yet, both of them at once. I just don’t know what to say.”
“Who found him?” asked Michael.
“Nita,” said Theo in a shocked voice, as if he had only just become aware of the scene that his sister had come upon. “Nita went to look for him, people were waiting for him. I was still working with the timpanist on the stage. Nita went to look for him.” He took a deep breath and expelled it. “And she found him.”
Michael was silent. He let go of Nita’s hand and sat down on the edge of the couch.
“It was an hour . . . about an hour ago that she found him. Have you seen him?” Michael nodded, but Theo had covered his face with his hands again and did not see the nod. He repeated his question. This time he raised his head and exposed his face, which was the gray-yellow of old wax, with green-black semicircles under his eyes, like the ones under Nita’s when Michael had first met her.
“I saw him,” said Michael. “But I don’t know much yet.”
“Who could want to do such a thing?” whispered Theo passionately. “And in such a way . . . with all that blood and all.”
Michael said nothing.
“I simply don’t understand it. Were they trying to decapitate him, or what? Who could have wanted to cut off Gabi’s head?”
“In the meantime, stay here and think about that question. It’s quite crucial.”
“It’s unbelievable,” mumbled Theo between his hands, in which he had buried his face again.
Michael got up and again stood next to Nita. She didn’t move. Her breathing was so quiet that he had to bend down close to her to feel it on his face. He straightened up. “I’ll be back soon,” he said, and he closed the door behind him.
The forensics people were moving carefully through the crime scene, the pathologist was pacing up and down the corridor, and the concertmaster was standing with his back pressed against a metal cabinet. He asked if he was needed here, and when nobody answered him he remained standing in his corner. Michael turned to him. “Where is everybody? Where are the musicians?” he asked.
“Some of them have already gone home, they went before we found . . . before we knew . . .”
“And the rest?”
“They’re in the lobby,” said the concertmaster, massaging his neck. “I told them not to leave, but they couldn’t have gone anyway. Those who didn’t see . . . see Gabriel,” he said, swallowing hard, “heard Nita’s screams. It was terrifying, they’re all in shock, nobody dared leave,” he said.
Michael asked him to tell them again to stay where they were. The concertmaster shifted his weight from foot to foot and muttered that he would prefer not to take the responsibility on himself. “I don’t know how they’ll react, it would be better if you told them yourself.”
Michael nodded to Yaffa, one of the forensics team. She looked at the scene and then at Michael, and at last said to the concertmaster: “Come with me, I’ll tell them.” The two of them left via the stage.
Again heavy footsteps were heard from the direction of the exit, overwhelming the light steps of Tzilla, who came in jingling her car keys and short of breath. “I asked Eli to come, too,” she whispered to Michael when she reached his side. “We’ll be together at least.” He nodded and then she confessed: “I got a terrible fright. I thought at first that it was her,” she said, lowering her voice even more. “I calmed down when I heard it was a man.” As if she grasped the absurdity of her words, she added with embarrassment: “I mean that if it had been a woman . . . Never mind, it doesn’t matter. What’s going on here?” She shook herself and looked for the first time at Gabriel’s body lying at the foot of the concrete pillar. The keys stopped rattling. She clenched her fist around them. After a few seconds she opened her hand and they dropped to the ground. Michael bent down to pick them up. She turned her face away. “Who is it?” she asked, her hand at her throat, and she looked at Michael.
“Gabriel van Gelden,” he replied. The forensics investigator kneeled down not far from the body, picked something up from the floor with tweezers, and dropped it in to one of the plastic bags he had in his case. “The younger of Nita’s brothers,” added Michael.
“And I’m Doctor Solomon,” said the pathologist. He hummed, straightened his shoulders, puffed out his concave chest with a noisy breath. He went on humming as he rummaged in his bag and took out, one after the other, a thermometer, a camera, a magnifying glass, and a pair of gloves, laying them in a straight row at his feet. “Don’t you go and faint on us now,” he said to Tzilla as he went down on his knees next to some drops of blood outside the pool, not far from Gabriel’s nearly severed neck. He pulled the gloves on, took up the magnifying glass, drew very close to one of the drops of blood, shone a flashlight onto it, hummed and crooned to himself, and said in a hollow voice: “Can I have a bit more light here?” The forensics investigator lit a mobile spotlight, stood it close to the wall, and directed it onto the corpse.
Yaffa returned to the corridor from the side entrance, followed by the concertmaster, who walked with his head bowed. “Avigdor,” said Yaffa to the concertmaster, “please stay over there for a minute.” She pointed to the corner by the metal cabinet. “We told them,” she said to Michael. “They’ll be waiting for you in the lobby.” The other forensics investigator stood next to the pathologist with the camera in his hands. He photographed the body and the drops of blood from close up. Then he photographed small areas around the body, sometimes focusing on a single tile, until he put the camera down, took a thick marker out of his shirt pocket, stood close to the corpse, and waited.
“What have we here?” said the pathologist in his singsong. He examined the droplets outside the blood pool with the magnifying glass. “We have an irregularly shaped drop, come and look,” he said waving at Michael, who went down on his knees and peered through the magnifying glass. “Do you see these drops?” asked Solomon. “Do you see that they’re not round, that their contours are blurred, jagged?” Michael nodded and Yaffa silently photographed the drops of blood. “So we can already say,” Dr. Solomon summarized, “that they fell to the floor from above. In other words, that th
e initial position of the victim was upright. This blood was spilled while he standing.”
Tzilla’s face, as she kneeled beside Michael and looked at Gabriel’s neck, was very pale, and her lower lip had disappeared completely between her teeth.
“Do you see that the wound goes almost completely around the neck?” asked the pathologist, and he examined it though his magnifying glass. “Okay, we’ll talk about that in a minute,” he said, and he hummed. “Now the temperature, but before I move him, let’s do some photographing,” he announced, focusing his own camera on the corpse. For a while all that could be heard was the clicking of cameras. After that the pathologist made room for the forensics investigator to squat and draw a white line all the way around the body. Yaffa resumed taking pictures. It looked as if she was doing it with her eyes shut in order to avoid the sight of the gaping throat.
The pathologist touched both sides of the body, holding the thermometer in his left hand. “First the surface temperature,” he singsonged. “And now here,” he said after a while, turning the dead man over onto his side. With sharp, rapid movements he undid some of the body’s clothes. “Aha! That’s it!” he said after examining the thermometer and raising his eyes to the concrete pillar at the foot of which Gabriel was lying. He wiped his hand on the pillar and studied his glove with interest. “You see,” he said to Michael. “Look, the plaster comes off the pillar. That’s what he has on his shirt, you see these marks?” Michael followed the pathologist’s finger. “We would only have seen them in the laboratory if he had a light-colored shirt on, but since it’s a dark one, we can see them now. This white on his shirt must come from the pillar. Excuse me for going into matters within the province of my forensics colleagues, but this white on the shirt interests me because of the position.”
“What does it mean?” asked Tzilla.
“It means,” sang the pathologist, “that we know not only that he was standing but that he was leaning with his head against this pillar, like this.” He tilted his head back as if resting it against a pillar. “Maybe, I don’t say definitely, but maybe, someone came from behind and pssst.” Dr. Solomon drew his hand over his throat in a cutting gesture and resumed his kneeling position next to the corpse, the thermometer in his hand. After a few moments of absolute silence, during which the forensics investigators prowled the long corridor, fingering, photographing, marking, and kneeling, Dr. Solomon announced: “Between one to two hours.”
“Where’s Nita?” asked Tzilla, and the concertmaster emerged from his corner to tell her.
Tzilla was horrified. “She’s the one who found him? Like this?”
“Yes,” replied the concertmaster, and he approached them, bowing his head apologetically, so that the bald pate shone between the two rows of curls on either side of his head.
“When?”
“At about . . . three, say a quarter past three. I’m not sure, but it was after we’d already finished, and the only people left were the ones who had to talk to Gabriel, about his Baroque ensemble. He was making a revolution . . . changes,” he tried to explain and fell silent. “We couldn’t find him.” Then he added, almost with surprise: “Suddenly he wasn’t there, all of a sudden he was gone, he’d disappeared, and now . . .” He choked and buried his face in his hands for a moment, then took them away again and shook his head. “It’s unbelievable,” he muttered in a broken voice. “It’s so . . . so . . . absurd.” Then he straightened his shoulders, took off his glasses, and in a spurt of demonstrative matter-of-factness began to discuss the timetable: “We finished the rehearsal at half past, a quarter past two. He was still there then, that’s to say, a minute before he was there, and now . . .” He hesitated and looked at his watch.
“Now it’s four forty-seven,” singsonged the pathologist, “so we also have the time coordinate and a drop of one degree in the temperature, and calculating a one-degree loss per hour . . . approximately, I can’t be definite here,” he warned the investigator kneeling next to him, “I’m only reminding you that the temperature drops one degree an hour. So we could be talking about two hours or an hour and a half. Which means that death occurred between half-past two and three,” he explained to Michael. “But let me check the rigor so that we have as much data as possible.”
He examined Gabriel’s face, palpated the jaws, and poked his yellow rubber-gloved fingers into the mouth “The tongue isn’t swollen, as I thought,” he remarked with satisfaction. “Remind me to make a note of that later, and photograph it, too. It could be important. The jaw still opens, not easily, but it opens. You know the drill,” he said, looking expectantly at Tzilla with his pale eyes.
Tzilla nodded like a diligent pupil and declaimed: “If the jaw muscles are stiff, three hours have passed since death. If you can’t move the hands, six hours. Stiffness in the legs, dead eight hours:”
“In weather like today’s,” amended the pathologist. “Only in autumnal weather like today’s.”
“So there’s actually no rigor mortis at all yet,” said Michael.
“It’s about to begin,” promised the pathologist. “It’s on the way. Now let’s check the livor mortis. “He turned the corpse onto its side again and lifted the shirt. “You see: the spots were on the back, and when I turn him, they slide over there. If you press a place where there’s a discoloration,” he said as he pressed a bluish-purple spot, “the pressure moves the blood to the sides.”
“Already? After only an hour?” exclaimed Michael.
“You have to take age into account. How old was he?”
“Forty-seven, about, if I remember correctly”
“Well, at that age, there’s already venous insufficiency,” the pathologist murmured. “There’s already discoloration after an hour, you can see the spots.”
“What a color!” Tzilla murmured. Under the dazzling white light the spots blossomed blue and purple.
“That’s what happens when the blood is deoxygenated,” the pathologist said with a brief hum. “You must have seen these things before.”
“You never get used to it,” she said, sighing, and she raked her fingers through her short hair.
“Ah,” said the pathologist dismissively, “when you have to, you can get used to anything. Human beings are incredibly adaptable creatures.” He hummed and pressed a big spot, causing it to flow to the side. “Look, I press, and the color turns white, you see, and that shows us again,” he sang, “that death took place less than eight hours ago, because . . .” He waved a gloved finger at Tzilla, and she obediently said: “After eight hours the blood vessels close and the spots don’t move.”
“Very good,” he pronounced and returned to viewing the neck through the magnifying glass. “I don’t want to touch this with the tape measure,” he said with a hum. “A clean circular cut like this you don’t want to spoil.” He put down the magnifying glass and picked up the camera, brought it very close to the cut, and clicked several times, humming. “We’ll take a few decent close-ups.” Then he returned to the magnifying glass. Michael kneeled next to him while Tzilla stood back and averted her face. “You have to look at it from the scientific point of view,” admonished the pathologist, “it’s not a person anymore, it’s a case. Say that to yourself until you’re convinced.” Tzilla remained where she was, with her face averted.
“Look at this mark!” said Solomon, placing his finger on the corpse’s neck. “Do you see it? Like a bite? It’s got nothing to do with the case, but you might as well learn something.”
“What is it?” asked Michael, and he turned away from the sight of the finger on the brown mark.
“Call that man over. What’s his name, Avigdor?”
Avigdor stood before Solomon with a frightened expression. “He has one of them, too,” said the pathologist, gratified. “Do you play the violin?” Avigdor nodded. “He’s the concertmaster,” said Michael. “There you are!” said Solomon with satisfaction. “It’s an inflammation a lot of violinists and violists have. A piece of plastic—I
think it’s plastic, I’ll have to check—on the violin does it under their chins, just like the mark on our gentleman here. Was he a violinist?” he asked, pointing at the corpse. Michael nodded. “I’m sure we’ll find another one under here,” said the pathologist, lifting the dead man’s beard. Then he bent over the mark, magnifying glass in hand, to examine it. Slowly his hand moved down from the chin to the neck.
“You see,” said Solomon, handing Michael the magnifying glass, “the cut goes around most of the circumference of the neck. Do you see that there’s no major difference between the right side and the left?” In the seconds that his eyes strayed away from the magnifying glass, unprotected, Michael got a glimpse of Gabriel van Gelden’s eyes, which had remained open. The expression of horror frozen on them and the memory of the dead man’s shy smile paralyzed him. Although he was looking through the magnifying glass, he could neither see nor think, and he grunted vaguely and returned it to the pathologist, who said with satisfaction: “From this we can conclude a number of things. Number one, the cut was not made by a knife.”
“Not by a knife?” repeated Michael. When he looked at the corpse without seeing the face, from the neck down, it was easier.
“Definitely not. A knife isn’t even in its action. With a knife we wouldn’t have obtained a circumferential cut like this one, either. But I can also tell you something else, which is number two: There are no hesitation wounds here. Not that I can see anyway.”
“What are hesitation wounds?” asked Tzilla faintly.
“It means that it wasn’t a suicide,” said Michael.
“Look over here,” said the pathologist to Tzilla, not noticing that she took care to look away as he continued: “You see, there are no little wounds on the skin here, as if there was an attempt to estimate how deep to go. When someone is about to commit suicide he first tries out the weapon, the knife or rope or whatever it might be. And so we have little wounds in addition to the big wound. There’s no such thing here. There are no hesitation wounds, only one clean cut,” he pronounced, shining a flashlight onto the neck. He hummed.
