by Batya Gur
“All right, I can go right now, but I’ve got a meeting later at the museum, with a big expert, in connection with the paintings. Okay, maybe I’ll send someone else to the museum. We’ll see. I need a woman when I go with the two of them,” he said. “I’ll take whatshername, with the body, the young one. What’s her name? Dalia?”
“Dalit.”
“I’ll take her. And what about you?”
“I’ll come too, but only for a short time. I still have to talk to the orchestra manager, and afterward I have to see the guy who lived with the victim. Tzilla will get hold of him for me,” Michael thought aloud.
“What guy is that?”
“Not now,” said Michael absently.
“Who’ll get rid of the reporters outside?” complained Balilty. “And what about the ones waiting outside her house? How long can we keep it secret that we’re all there?”
“Don’t let her see the news,” warned Michael. “Or listen to the radio. Not a word.”
“Well, you’ve got me where you wanted me, right in the middle of it,” said Balilty to Michael when they were standing in Nita’s living room, after Balilty had brutally cleaved his way through the many media people, repulsed a woman reporter standing at the door (“You won’t get anything here today, my friend,” Michael heard him say to her, “and that’s a promise”), and pushed Nita, whose face he had covered, inside, where she sank trembling onto the sofa.
Michael picked up the baby and held her cheek to his. She drew her head back, as if she wanted to examine his face from a distance. The color of her eyes, which had wavered between blue and brown, was now a coppery brown. He stretched out his arms so that she would be able to see his face from the right distance and wrinkled his nose. She looked at him very seriously and suddenly smiled a happy, trustful smile.
“She’s cute,” remarked Balilty, standing behind Michael’s shoulder. “She looks happy,” he added, surprised.
“Of course she’s happy,” said Michael indignantly, laying his cheek on hers.
“What do you call her?” asked Balilty.
“Her name’s Noa,” replied Michael, feeling a twinge of embarrassment as he saw himself reflected in the baffled expression on Balilty’s face. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” he asked.
“Of course not,” protested Balilty. “It’s just a little strange, that’s all . . . And what are we going to do with her now? You have to go to the victim’s apartment. Forensics are already on their way there.”
“She’ll be with me,” said Nita in her normal voice from her place on the sofa. “She and Ido will stay with me and Theo. And with you,” she said, looking hesitantly at Dalit, who was sitting on one of the chairs in the dining nook.
Michael didn’t turn a hair, he didn’t even ask, Are you sure? His experience had taught him that different people dealt with tragedy in different, and often surprising, ways. There was no reason not to let Nita look after the children, and in any event she wouldn’t be alone. She looked at him as if she read his thoughts: “Life goes on,” she said to him. “At least for now, I can’t afford to die. Single parents can’t die.”
Ido was sitting on Nita’s lap, gurgling and tugging at her curls. Both babies looked completely calm, for nothing had happened in their world. The phone rang. Nita didn’t move, and Michael picked up the receiver. At the other end of the line there was a prolonged silence until a deep male voice asked hesitantly how Nita was. Michael offered her the phone. “Who is it?” she asked, and Michael shrugged his shoulders. She didn’t move. “She’d like to know who this is,” he said. The voice at the other end mumbled something unintelligible, followed by a silence and then by the sound of the dial tone. “He hung up,” said Michael.
Again the phone rang. It was Tzilla, saying, “I found him. I didn’t tell him anything. He doesn’t know yet what’s happened. You’d better get over there right away, because it’ll be on the seven o’clock news.” He wrote the address down on the back of an envelope. “It’s near Palmach Street,” said Tzilla. “Do you know where it is? You can’t enter it from . . .”
“I’ll find it,” said Michael, and he looked at Balilty, who was placing a tape recorder on the dining table. When he was at the door he saw Theo standing up from the wicker armchair, pushing his hands into his pockets, and starting to pace toward the French windows.
7
The Three Faces of Evil
From the sour expression on the faces of the two men in the mobile forensic lab parked one building down from the one in which Gabriel van Gelden had lived, it was obvious that they had been waiting for a long time. Michael parked next to them and got out. “Are you Chief Superintendent Ohayon?” asked the older of the two, who was sitting next to the driver. Michael nodded.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the driver, a young man with thick eyebrows and pitted skin who was scratching his ear. “Should we come up with you?”
“No. You’ll have to wait a little longer,” Michael replied.
“Call us when you’re ready,” said the young man. The older one wiped his flushed face with the back of his hand. “Will you be long?” he called after him.
Michael turned his head and shrugged his shoulders. “I hope not, but you never know,” he said. He wondered whether he had sent for them too early. On the other hand, he decided, it was better for them to wait for him than the reverse.
“You could have called us for later,” complained the perspiring man with the flushed face. Michael didn’t reply as he advanced toward the three-story building with the rounded façade. At the entrance he stopped and looked up. There was a yellow light burning in a window on the third floor. Some weeks before, they had changed the clocks, and he still wasn’t used to it. At half past six it was already dark.
Whenever he felt a wave of shock at the sight of someone weeping unrestrainedly at the loss of a loved one, whenever he stood before the expressions of stunned shock and disbelief that preceded the absorption of the fact, he wondered at his failure to acquire the armor that is the gift of habit. And not only was he not immune, he realized again, but he seemed to be more and more vulnerable and open to the grief of others. In other words, weak, he denounced himself as he sat tensely facing the quietly sobbing man. A glass-topped table on a single metal leg separated them. Izzy Mashiah sat in the middle of a black leather sofa, Michael in a deep, wide armchair, it too covered in soft black leather. Tensing his arms on the broad armrests in order not to sink even farther into its depths, he scrutinized this Izzy’s reactions, suppressing his own emotions and quickly classifying the man facing him as belonging to the category of the emotionally restrained: those who do not burden their surroundings with screams and shrieks, those whose weeping is held back and civilized. And yet—they weep instead of turning to stone, instead of their expressions congealing into a frozen mask, which tells you that they are no longer with you in the room, that their souls have escaped to another place because they cannot bear the burden of the facts. Therefore they enter a state of what the police psychologist, Elroi, had once described as “total absence as protection against being overwhelmed by emotion.” The impact of this pain on himself, the pang of pity Michael felt because of it, he had to blur or push aside, he warned himself as he slowly activated the tape recorder and placed it on the glass table while Izzy left the room.
He went into the other half of the apartment, from which came the clear sounds of running water, hoarse sobs, sniffles, running water again, and then a long and disturbing silence. When he reappeared, his body bowed, he sat down again in the middle of the black sofa, without a word about the whirring tape recorder breaking their mutual silence.
Even though he was crying now like someone for whom tears were not exceptional, there was nothing effeminate about this man, whom Michael had disturbed at his work when he rang the bell. When he opened the door, before Michael told him the news, it was obvious that he had risen hastily from the desk with a long printout piled up at the side of a compu
ter whose screen was filled with tables and columns of figures. Izzy Mashiah had opened the door as if he had been waiting tensely for the bell to ring. He opened his mouth to say something, froze, and then stared at Michael with surprise that changed into open disappointment. He had been waiting, it turned out, for the plumber, who was coming to fix a leak in the central heating system. A plastic bowl stood under the white pipe to receive a thin trickle of rusty brown water. He’d been waiting for him since lunchtime, he explained even before he asked Michael what he wanted. With a smile of recognition, he then remembered Michael from the condolence call he had paid during the shiva for Felix van Gelden. Izzy made a broad gesture with his arm to invite him in, remarking with a sigh on plumbers’ well-known unreliability. He looked at his watch, saying that Gabi should be back any minute now. He had no idea where he could be, he added with a puzzled expression, and pointing to the black leather chair, he suggested that Michael sit down there to wait for him.
From the first moment Michael realized that Izzy Mashiah was not in the least surprised by his visit, taking it for granted that he had come to see Gabi either about Felix van Gelden’s death or about Nita. In view of this assumption, Michael was afraid that questions about Izzy’s movements during the day would seem absurd. Nevertheless he twice asked Izzy whether he had seen Gabi during the morning, whether he had been to the rehearsal, whether he and Gabi had spoken during the day. And Izzy readily told him that he had spoken to Gabriel on the phone at about one o’clock in the afternoon, during a break in the rehearsal. Gabi had told him about the Teddy Kollek interruption, and that because of it the rehearsal would take longer than expected. Gabi was very tense, he said in a worried tone of voice, as if he enjoyed displaying intimate knowledge of the other man’s moods.
“He had a hard day ahead of him,” he explained with a wry pursing of his thin lips and a cluck of his tongue that did nothing to hide his pride. In an expression of indignant complaint at the burdens imposed on his friend by the world, he went on to explain, without having been asked, that Gabi was tense because of the meetings he had scheduled for after the rehearsal with potential members of the ensemble he was creating, and especially because of the confrontation he was expecting with a certain woman violinist, a second violinist in the big orchestra. By this he meant the orchestra that Theo led. The violinist insisted on obtaining a place in Gabi’s ensemble orchestra on the grounds of her seniority and the fact that she needed the extra money (“It’s incredible what some people think they’ve got coming to them,” Izzy muttered). “It must be because of her that he hasn’t come home yet,” Izzy said with a giggle. “This fury is probably detaining him.” He shuddered. Theo had trouble with her, too—she wanted him to promote her to the first violin section. He himself had once heard her standing in the lobby and holding forth to a big group of musicians about the frustration and mental anguish of the players who sat in the back rows of the stage, where no one in the audience could see them. She was demanding rotation, at least, in the seating arrangements. “Theo really does sometimes rotate them. Once every few months, he told me so himself, he changes the places, mostly of the strings. He’ll move a violinist with seniority forward to increase motivation. I’m telling you this because Nita says that you’re almost part of the family . . .” he explained. “That’s why I’m going into these details with you . . .” Izzy’s voice died out in embarrassment. “He’ll be here in a minute,” he resumed, and he offered Michael something hot or cold to drink.
Michael looked around uncomfortably, and feeling acutely aware of the invidious irony of his position, he examined the room, which was exquisitely neat and tidy and gave off a warm family atmosphere, with a mass of blooming little red flowers on the windowsill.
He had heard the sound of the choral music while he was still in the entrance lobby. To his frustration he was unable to identify it, though it sounded familiar. The music ended as he stood in the living room, which also served as a study. Out of the corner of his eye he took in the stereo system. Izzy breathed carefully on the LP record, put it in its sleeve, and covered the player with its transparent plastic lid while Michael looked with admiration and awe at the harpsichord standing in the corner near the desk. It was a small walnut piece of furniture that looked like a brother of the cabinet in Nita’s living room, except that here there were no floating cherubs but a row of gilt lions decorating the façade. The lid was open, and there was music on the rack above the keyboard. “What was that chorus singing?” Michael ventured. In this field he was always afraid of exposing his ignorance.
Izzy smiled. “It’s only four voices,” he said, waving the record sleeve. “Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. Don’t you know it?” he asked, surprised. Michael shook his head and looked at the sleeve to gain time. “Only four voices?” he marveled. “It sounded like . . .”
Izzy looked at him forgivingly. “It’s a fine performance,” he commented dryly, in his low, pleasant voice, which featured a rolling Slavic “r.” Izzy Mashiah was on the short side, broad-shouldered, with a sturdy body. His face had the red-brown tan of a fair-skinned person who has spent much time in the sun. His graying, wavy hair was combed back, exposing a high, smooth forehead. His chin, round and slack, gave his face an expression of rather querulous weakness, and also a kind of eagerness to appease.
His first reaction to the news of Gabi’s death was a convulsive smilelike grimace, then his narrow little mouth pursed before emitting a strange sound, almost a laugh, which burst out in a groan at the sound of the word “murdered.” He removed his horn-rimmed glasses as he listened to the dry account Michael gave him only after he had answered all his questions. Before that, Izzy had explained that he had not left the house because the next day he was to present a research proposal, on which he was going to have to work all night long, adding that he had to stay home anyway because of the plumber. Only after all this did Izzy express surprise at the question.
Michael had not discerned any uneasiness behind the surprise. It sounded innocent of any knowledge. Izzy’s high forehead arched in a question that he restrained out of politeness, and he explained without protest that there was nobody who could testify to the fact that he had not left the house, except, perhaps, for the departmental secretary at the Institute, to whom he had spoken twice during the day: “Once she phoned me, and the second time I phoned her,” he said, and he looked at Michael in growing perplexity at his pedantry. Uneasiness began to appear in his voice, and he twisted his gold ring—three coils ending in a snake’s head with a tiny green stone for an eye; a similar ring, Michael recalled, had adorned the third finger of Gabriel van Gelden’s left hand—when he was asked to state exactly when the secretary had called him.
He took the ring off and put it on the glass table top, arched his brow again, and asked in surprise: “Do you have to know exactly?” He looked at Michael, who nodded, and finally admitted that he couldn’t remember. “Although,” he suddenly added, “I could reconstruct it because of the radio,” he said, putting the ring back on his finger. “It was when the, Voice of Music was playing the Mozart Quintet for Piano and Winds,” he said happily, and he quickly picked up the newspaper lying neatly folded next to the sofa and began paging through it. “Here you are,” he announced with relief, as if he had regained control over chaos. “Since they played the Bruckner symphony first, that’s about forty-five minutes, and because the Mozart ended at noon, it was the last piece in the morning concert, then she phoned during the second movement—I’d never have phoned anyone during that piece—then we can put her phone call at about twenty to twelve, something like that. But why do you have to know?” he finally dared to ask, and there was already a faint tremor of anxiety in his voice and a frown between his eyebrows, above the brown frame of the thick-lensed glasses he again put on. No, he hardly ever went to dress rehearsals, especially not if Theo was conducting. With an ingratiating smile he remarked: “I have a hard time with Theo, particularly when he’s conducting. And Gabi doesn’t lik
e me coming to them either, and anyway, I’d never have gone today, what with everything I had to do.”
“Are you a mathematician?” Michael inquired.
“Not at all,” Izzy said, surprised. “I’m an epidemiologist. What made you think I was a mathematician?” And then he hastened to add that he was connected with the Weizmann Institute and also with the university hospital.
“I thought that because of something Theo said,” Michael explained.
“Ah, Theo,” Izzy said. “He barely knows me. He isn’t interested in other people. Even if someone had told him what I do, he wouldn’t have remembered. Gabi doesn’t like us to meet, Theo and I, because in my presence Theo suffers what Gabi calls ‘affability attacks.’ That drives Gabi crazy, Theo’s forced attempts to be nice to me. You know him. I don’t know if Theo’s friendly to you. I do know that Gabi is very appreciative of what you’re doing for Nita. But I don’t know what Theo thinks about it.” He waited for a reply.
Michael observed that he had spent very little time in Theo’s company, and that he didn’t know him well enough to say.
“Yes, but with me he made a special effort, that’s what Gabi said, because he wanted to seem open-minded, about me and Gabi, that is. People who aren’t really open-minded often go out of their way to demonstrate open-mindedness,” he added with a smile, “if you know what I mean. But the main reason he tried to be friendly to me was because I attacked him, and here too it was important to him to appear open-minded, open to criticism. I said things to him about his performance. . . . Are you interested in music?”
Michael shook his head. “I’m interested,” he said uneasily, “but I don’t understand anything about it.”
“Well, I don’t know why I said what I said. I didn’t mean to, it just came up during a discussion of Wagner,” he said with a smile that revealed two rows of very big white teeth and a little gap on the left side where a tooth was missing, marring the radiance of his smile. He said all this in his deep, pleasant voice, and the more he spoke the more pronounced the vertical line between his thick eyebrows became, and now, as Izzy stroked his right ear with a delicate finger, Michael noticed the big scar next to it. His face was smoothly shaved, and his eyes, light and small, glittered and blinked, reminding Michael of the way he had seen Gabi blink, and the thought of Gabi’s face and of his open staring eyes as he lay at the foot of the pillar brought the image of his nearly severed neck to the forefront of his consciousness. He suddenly felt weak in the knees, and precisely because of this weakness he forced himself to ask Izzy once more if he was sure that he hadn’t been out of the house all day.
