Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  “It’s a very nice theory. Not that I understand the first thing about it, but it’s very nice anyway. And why should I understand all of it? It’s enough that you understand it, because you know about such things. Aryeh Levy would have remarked about your university training by now,” said Balilty, referring to the retired district commander, “but me? I’m not bothered by all your education. It’s very nice. But, with all due respect,” said Balilty, making a mincing gesture with his arm, which sketched an exaggerated flourish in the air, “in the meantime everything’s up in the air, a mirage.”

  “That’s why I asked you to get the search warrants for me, and to make all the papers available. And that’s why I’m asking for additional manpower now, to conduct the search.”

  “And I did,” said Balilty, taking a pile of papers out of his desk drawer. “If you hadn’t stopped at your place on the way and then spent half an hour talking to that Sergeant Malka, you would have been finished with Izzy Mashiah by now.”

  “I didn’t stop at home,” protested Michael. “I haven’t even passed by it since—”

  “I thought you’d changed your clothes,” Balilty apologized. “I thought you were wearing a different shirt this morning.”

  “I wish,” muttered Michael. “I came straight here from Zichron Yaakov and I found Sergeant Malka waiting for me in the corridor. You saw it yourself.” He fell silent and looked out the window, fighting a sudden impulse not to satisfy Balilty’s curiosity. “She’s been found,” he said finally.

  “Who?”

  “The mother. She’s been found. That is, they didn’t actually find her. A friend of hers talked her into telling a social worker who deals with new immigrants.”

  “She’s a new immigrant?”

  “A nineteen-year-old girl. A Russian, all alone in the world.”

  “And they’re going to give her back the baby?” exclaimed Balilty, astonished, and he immediately added: “No, they won’t give her the baby. They’ll put her on trial. She committed a crime, abandoning a baby in some stranger’s basement.”

  “I don’t know what they’ll do,” said Michael hesitantly. “I understood that they’re prepared to take her circumstances into account. In any event, she arrived in Israel all alone, and somebody took her for a ride . . . I don’t know exactly how. Meanwhile, the baby’s with a foster family, Malka tells me, and nothing final has been decided yet.”

  “Does she want the child at all? If she gave her up for adoption, with all the demand for babies we have here, she’d stand a good chance of getting off. But if she makes trouble . . . I don’t know. They’ll probably close the file in any event. But let’s leave that now, okay?”

  Michael nodded.

  “You’ll have to testify if it gets to court,” Balilty suddenly said. “And you too didn’t exactly stick to the letter of the law either, right?”

  “We’ll see,” said Michael vaguely. Now there was suddenly nothing to fight for and no one to fight against. He had never really believed that the mother would be found.

  “Don’t worry,” said Balilty. “We won’t leave you in the lurch, we’ll provide you with character witnesses,” he said with a giggle. “And now, do you want to go to the concert hall first, or do you want to talk to Izzy Mashiah? He’s been hanging around waiting since this morning.”

  “Izzy Mashiah first, I think, but we can have our people start looking through all the papers in the meantime.”

  “That would be a little difficult,” said Balilty sardonically, “since nobody but your majesty knows yet what we’re looking for.”

  “We’re looking for a score. A music score.”

  “Aha,” exclaimed Balilty, and he leaned back in his chair, his bloodshot little eyes making him look like an old boozer. “What are you saying? A score? Just a score? Did you see how many scores there are there? Are you totally crazy now?” He leaned forward and said almost in a whisper: “You’ll have to be a little more specific, if you don’t mind.”

  “After I’ve talked to Izzy Mashiah,” said Michael. “All I can say now is that I don’t know what it looks like. Only that it’s paper almost three hundred years old, with notes on it.”

  “No one . . .” Balilty swallowed and coughed at length. “No one, do you hear? No one but you could ask me to send anyone on such a wild goose chase. Maybe you’ll be good enough to explain. . . . Ah, what’s the use?”

  “Certificates of authentication,” Michael reflected aloud. “Maybe you should bring in someone from the documents lab, to have an expert on the spot.”

  “I won’t bring in anyone until we find something!” shouted Balilty. “I’m not going to keep anyone hanging around there for nothing! It could take all night, it could take days! If we ever find anything at all!”

  Balilty looked at his empty coffee cup, banged it on the table, and then said more quietly: “For me what the girl said is enough. Ten minutes was all it took to break her. And then she said that he was supposed to be with her, you hear? Supposed to! She waited for him for an hour, and then she left. He arranged to meet her in a café, and he didn’t show up. He ended up coming to her apartment. A quarter of an hour before they both had to leave. She, too, she plays in the orchestra, she’s an extra violinist. He asked her not to tell anybody that he came to see her so late. He promised her the world if she kept her mouth shut. What is he, an idiot? Why should she lie for him? All I had to do was tell her I was going to arrest her for lying, and she broke. I can’t understand what he thought he was doing, making a date with a woman before a concert, and then turning up for fifteen minutes. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, we have enough. Now that he has no alibi, we can arrest him right away!”

  Michael felt like saying: Then arrest him and be done with it! Instead he only said: “Do me a favor. I know you’re the head of the team, but trust me, and if I’m wrong I’ll never argue with you again. Even if you think I’ve gone off the rails, as you keep on saying, just trust me on this. Believe me, it’s better to talk to him before we arrest him. Everything’s still too vague, and with the kind of lawyers he’ll have, we should get a confession out of him first. And only then—”

  “You’ll get a confession out of him?” said Balilty, snorting. “When hair grows here!” he cried, slapping the palm of his hand. Then he recovered and continued in a normal voice: “Izzy Mashiah’s waiting with Tzilla.” He rose heavily and pushed his chair back. “I’m going now to the concert hall. The scores from his house will be brought here, to your office. The ones in the concert hall I’m not moving from there. I’ve already wasted the whole morning on that other business,” he said, turning his face to the window and rubbing his cheeks.

  “What business?”

  “You know, with that girl who . . . with Dalit,” he said, openly embarrassed. “Elroi’s taking care of it now. He’s already spoken to me. She . . . It’s a sickness. Do you know that? She’s sick,” he said, puzzled. “How could anyone tell?” he said after a moment, sighing. “She seemed completely normal. God knows what’s going to happen to her now,” he concluded as he walked toward the door with his hands deep in his pockets.

  The conversation with Izzy Mashiah took far longer than expected, even though it contained few of the details he had hoped for when he imagined the man unburdening himself of everything he knew in an attempt to gain sympathy and trust.

  Michael ignored his doleful expression, the slackness of his limbs, the undisguised fear in his eyes. Impatiently, he asked him: “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” confessed Izzy Mashiah.

  “What is it?”

  “You already know that for the last month or two Gabi and I were . . . had difficulties . . . That man,” he said, jerking his head toward the corridor, “said that my polygraph was irregular.”

  “It was very regular,” Michael corrected him, “but it gave rise to a number of questions, precisely because it was so regular. The regularity showed that
you were lying.”

  Izzy Mashiah sighed. “Some time before . . . about two months ago, I sensed that Gabi was involved with something.”

  “What do you mean?” Michael said, tensing.

  “I mean I felt that he wasn’t really with me. His mind . . . his heart . . . were preoccupied with something he wasn’t telling me about.”

  “Did you talk to him about it?”

  “He denied it. He said that maybe he was under stress about the new ensemble he was setting up. But I had a bad feeling about it. And around two months ago he went to Europe and he didn’t want me to come with him. I was looking forward to that trip so much.” He covered his face with his hands.

  Michael tapped a pencil impatiently on his desk. In the ensuing silence he forced himself to overcome his impatience. Izzy Mashiah uncovered his face. Michael was relieved to see that there were no tears on it.

  “Ever since Passover we’d been talking about going to Europe together, and then he went alone. Twice! And he wasn’t even prepared to tell me why!”

  A good while was wasted on a detailed description of Izzy Mashiah’s mental agonies. (“I was having all kinds of difficulties at work, too, and questions about my life, and every spring I get depressed.” And: “It was a time when I needed him most, and when I told him that I needed him he only got annoyed.”) Then he came out with a simple statement of jealousy: “I thought he had someone else.”

  Michael lit a cigarette. “And what did you do about it?”

  “I began searching through his papers, following him, checking up on him,” said Izzy Mashiah, blushing. “I know it sounds awful, but I was desperate.”

  “How did you check up on him, exactly?” asked Michael, holding his breath and trying to look indifferent. “What did you find out?”

  “I looked in his date book, I opened his mail,” whispered Izzy Mashiah. “And in the end, I went to Holland to see who he was with . . . I thought he had someone in Delft.”

  “Why Delft?”

  “There were two letters from there, and . . .” He fell silent.

  “And was there someone?”

  “It wasn’t what I thought at all,” said Izzy Mashiah, groaning. “I was sure, almost sure, I was so afraid. There were phone calls from Delft. Two. And a fax. And there was a name in his date book with a phone number.”

  “What did you do with his date book?”

  “I took it away” Izzy Mashiah admitted. “I hid it among my papers at work, and he thought it was lost. I had no other way to check. I had to . . . actually steal it, and afterward I couldn’t put it back.”

  “And after he died? Did you keep it there?”

  Izzy Mashiah shook his head. “I burned it,” he said guiltily. “I was afraid that . . . after the polygraph, and the way the other policeman looked at me, I panicked.”

  “You burned it? How?”

  “What does it matter? I burned it.”

  “Where exactly? When?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly burn it.” Izzy Mashiah looked embarrassed and his eyes shifted uneasily. “It sounded better to say burned, but where could I have burned it? I tore it to pieces.”

  “When?”

  “After I was here at the police station the first time. I tore it into little pieces and . . .”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I flushed them down the toilet,” he admitted. His face flamed. “I know it sounds awful,” he stammered. “I know it looks as if I don’t care about Gabi’s memory. As if I despise his belongings. But it isn’t true.” Now he looked into Michael’s eyes. “It really isn’t true. Believe me, it only looks that way. It’s just that I was so frightened, and also ashamed. It goes against all my principles about privacy. I’ve never done anything like that before, believe me.”

  “And what was written in the date book?”

  “There were those names in Holland. All names of men. And they sounded so . . . Hans and Johann, they sounded so foreign, so German or Dutch . . . I thought he was tired of me. That he’d fallen in love. Finally I went there myself,” he said with a groan.

  “You were in Holland. We knew that. You told us so. You were there just before Felix van Gelden was murdered.”

  “And I was in Delft, too,” admitted Izzy Mashiah, “and I went to Hans van Gulik’s address.”

  “Van Gulik—isn’t that the name of the man who wrote the Chinese detective stories Gabriel read?” Michael asked in a deliberately pleasant tone.

  “Right,” said Izzy Mashiah, surprised. “But it’s not the same van Gulik.”

  “So you went to his address,” Michael said, bringing him back to the subject.

  “It’s an antique shop. I went in. There were two saleswomen inside. It’s a fairly big shop, bigger than Felix’s. Filled with all kinds of old furniture, and there was an old man there, too. About Felix’s age.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “I told one of the women that I was looking for Hans van Gulik,” said Izzy hoarsely. “And she pointed at the old man and said: This is Mr. van Gulik.’”

  “And then?”

  “And then I suddenly realized that it was something else entirely, but I went up to him anyway. And I asked him . . . I told him that Gabi had sent me. He suddenly sat up straight and gave me a look as if I’d committed some terrible faux pas. As if . . . I quickly told him that Gabi had recommended him to me as a reliable dealer. That he had sent me to him to help me find an old harpsichord in need of renovation. I talked a lot, and I saw that his attitude toward me was completely different from what it had been before. At first he had been really tense, but as soon as I mentioned the harpsichord he became courteous, and I understood that there was something going on here. Not that he wasn’t nice. He asked me if I knew Felix. And he even asked about Herzl.”

  “He knew Felix and Herzl?”

  “He told me that he was a childhood friend of Felix’s. I wanted to tell him that I was part of the family, that Gabi and I . . . But I didn’t say anything.”

  “And the other man?”

  “All it said in the date book was ‘Johann—Amsterdam,’ and the name of a café I don’t remember.”

  “And did you tell Gabi about it when you returned?”

  “How could I?” demanded Izzy Mashiah. “After his father died like that, how could I bother him with my fears? And I wasn’t even with him when it happened. I only arrived a few days later.”

  “So you never went to a conference?”

  “Yes, I did, of course I did. You checked it out yourselves. I had to bring that girl all the documentation . . .”

  “What girl?”

  “The blonde one with the short hair. I gave the policewoman all the documents the day after I gave you my passport. I was at a conference in France and then I went to Holland only about Gabi. I phoned him from Paris and told him I was going somewhere to rest for a few days. I was vague about the details. I was afraid to tell him the truth, and I also wanted him to stew a bit,” he admitted, embarrassed. “I didn’t know that while I was away his father was going to be murdered.” Again he buried his face in his hands.

  “And how did he react to your vagueness? Was he as jealous as you were?”

  “No.” Izzy Mashiah sighed. “He wasn’t. It was always a waste of energy to try to make him jealous. I told him long ago that he didn’t let himself be jealous, that he was defending himself because he was afraid of being hurt. But he only laughed and said: ‘I’m completely confident that nobody can mean to you what I do. And if you do find someone who means more to you than I do, then it’s a sign that that’s the way it has to be.’ I envied him his strength. I felt so weak and vulnerable next to him! Confidence like his is completely beyond my powers. But now I think that it was a defense. That he didn’t allow himself to love me as I loved him. That’s what I think.”

  “In your opinion jealousy is a sign of love,” concluded Michael. “Is that what you really think?”

  Izzy Mashiah nodded after a certain h
esitation, and he said: “Look, I’m not so simple-minded. I understand that my fears aren’t necessarily a function of love. My vulnerability is my own problem. Possessiveness needn’t necessarily have anything to do with love. But these are human feelings, after all. Almost part of human nature, and they emerge in relation to our deep encounters with other people. Otherwise why should we be afraid at all?”

  Michael was silent.

  “This rationality of Gabi’s never convinced me. The power he had over me, as if he knew that for me he was . . .”

  “Did you hate him when you went to Holland?”

  Izzy Mashiah looked at him with alarm. “Hate him? How could I hate Gabi? I was afraid. I tell you I was afraid that he wanted to leave me. That he had someone else. You know,” he said with an insightful air, “maybe I also hated him. I suppose I also did hate him. Anyhow, I suffered terribly.”

  “And after you met Hans van Gulik?”

  “In a certain respect it calmed me. But not completely,” Izzy Mashiah admitted, “because I thought that maybe through this Hans he had made a connection with someone else. Like Johann, for instance. But late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought that maybe he had some other business with him. Something very important. So important that he made two separate trips he wouldn’t tell me anything about. And suddenly I was furious at him for keeping me out of it. But then his father was killed, and after that . . .”

  “You had no idea what was preoccupying him?”

  “I wish I had. It would probably have saved me a lot of heartache.”

  “Tell me,” Michael said, passing the pencil from hand to hand, “how much would an old manuscript of a musical work be worth?”

  “An important one?”

  “Let’s say it is.”

  “It depends on how old it is. Really old?”

  “Let’s say a Baroque manuscript.”

  “It could be worth millions. Somewhat less if it’s not the composer’s autograph manuscript but a contemporary copy. And most important, of course, is who the composer is.”

  “Do you know,” said Michael quietly, “that the plumber you said you were waiting for actually turned up? At about noon?”