Murder Duet: A Musical Case

by Batya Gur

  Her face suddenly turned pale, as if all the blood had drained out of it. For a moment Michael was afraid that she would faint, fall off her chair and hit her head on the dusty stone floor. But she sat up straight, and in a very choked voice she said: “Listen, Theo, listen to me and listen hard. First of all, as you know, I’m not exactly a virgin. Your womanizing is no secret. Second, I’m no longer a child. And if I was still a child not long ago, I’m not one anymore. I had to grow up fast. And third, the Canadian woman you were with at the Hilton, or wherever, says that she wasn’t with you.”

  Theo smiled. For a moment he even looked cheerful. “Naturally she denies it,” he said almost relieved. “What do you expect? She’s a respectable married woman, a pillar of her community. She has four children.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” Nita suddenly said with vehemence. “I’m your sister, not some policeman. I’m talking to you because I’m your sister! When will you understand that? You’re all I’ve got left. Even if you . . . Even if you’re a murderer,” she added in a whisper. “There, I’ve said it,” she muttered in disbelief. “I love you even if you are, unconditionally. But you have to tell me the truth. Don’t lie to me anymore. That woman said she was with another man at the time. She gave his name, he confirmed it, they have her on tape and in a signed statement. And Drora Yaffe, too, the violinist you were supposed to be with after that, broke down under interrogation. She said that she waited for you and you didn’t show up. So don’t tell me any more tales.”

  “What other man?” asked Theo, his eyes darting. “What other man did she have? She’s not even pretty, that Canadian.”

  “Is that what’s important now?”

  “So why haven’t they arrested me?”

  “I don’t know,” Nita admitted. “Maybe you’re already under arrest. But I asked to talk to you, and they let me. I have to know, for my own sake and yours, too. From you and not from them and their interrogations and trials. I have to hear it from you.”

  “You asked to talk to me? They didn’t tell you to?” There was surprise and relief in his voice. “Are you sure?”

  “I asked. Nobody told me to,” she said in a broken voice. “Don’t you understand that you owe me an honest answer? Don’t you understand that you have to tell me?”

  Theo was silent.

  “Only if you tell me might I be able to stand by you. Even though . . . even though Father and Gabi . . . I might be able to . . . I don’t know how, but you know I don’t tell lies. If you want to be close to me now, if you tell me, if you trust me.”

  “What does it matter now?” mumbled Theo. “Nothing matters anymore. Believe me. Not if they found the requiem. Did Herzl tell them about it?”

  “I don’t know. They found it in your office. Inside the score of Les Troyens. The one bound in black velvet. The one Mother gave you. The one with the pictures you used to show me when I was little.”

  Theo was silent.

  “I’m not asking you why, Theo. Right now I’m not asking you why, I’m asking you if you did it or not. That’s what I’m asking. The why I understand by myself. If anyone can understand it. The why can wait till later.”

  “You understand it by yourself? How can you?” Theo shouted and stood up. This was the third time Michael was afraid Theo was about to fling himself on her and beat her to death. He stood over her and shouted uncontrollably. In his neck, long like hers, the veins stood out. “How can you understand when all your life you were everybody’s darling. They gave you whatever you wanted. You were adored by Father and by Gabi, too. How can you understand what it was like for me to hear from Herzl and then from Father about the requiem and to know that I wasn’t going to be allowed to touch it? That it would be the key to Gabi’s well-deserved fame? You hear? Gabi’s well-deserved fame! That’s what Father said. Nothing I ever did, in my whole life, all my efforts, all my fame, all the innovations, all the praise for my brilliance—nothing changed the contempt Father felt for me. And his preference for Gabi! Whatever I did, whatever I did was a lost cause. And he talks to me about well-deserved fame. About what Gabi deserves! About his being a really serious musician. To me he never said anything like that! Not a word! The first time I conducted the New York Philharmonic, do you remember? Mother came by herself. He couldn’t leave the shop! And not even a phone call after the performance. And you can understand that? You with your naivete? You with the family myth you insisted on cultivating? You . . . you . . . with your fairy-tale life?”

  Nita sat frozen. Her arms, like Michael’s own, rested stiffly on the arms of her chair, taut as if all her weight were concentrated on the palms of her hands.

  “Never a word of praise. Never anything about my talent. Only Gabi, Gabi, Gabi.” His voice suddenly fell and became dry and apathetic. “And I wanted so much for him to appreciate me a little, too.”

  Nita didn’t move.

  “After Mother died there was no one who had a kind word for me in that house. Herzl told me about the requiem, not Father.”

  Again Michael saw to his great surprise that a man of over fifty, an acclaimed conductor wearing a suit and tie, was turning before his eyes into a child of three. His lower lip was extended as if he had just been grievously insulted. As if he had been deprived and treated with outrageous injustice.

  “Did you ever think about that?” Theo yelled. “That Father’s miserable assistant was the only one on my side? What do you have to say about the fact that your father didn’t even intend to tell me?”

  “You intended to kill Father,” said Nita in a hollow voice. “Did you really hate him so much? So much that you could plan to kill him?”

  “I hated him? How can you say I hated him? I wanted so much . . . so much . . .” His voice broke. After a few seconds he recovered. “Don’t be so melodramatic,” he said severely. “I didn’t plan anything. I went to the house to talk to him. He was so . . . so cold, and so full of contempt. He was preoccupied by Herzl’s having told me about the requiem and that I’d be unable to keep it secret. The whole time he was thinking only of Gabi, and of what Gabi deserved. We were in the bedroom. He was lying on the bed. I saw that he had no idea of what I was going through, of what it meant to me. All of a sudden the blood went to my head. And I picked up the pillow to throw it at the wall. I didn’t mean—I really wasn’t thinking. And then his face suddenly looked to me like a monster’s face, like . . . like the way Kafka talks about his father. That’s what he looked like. With that clicking of his dentures and that certainty that I was nothing. I didn’t plan it. How can you plan a thing like that? I wanted it, I often felt like killing him, like shaking him with all my strength, but I didn’t plan it in cold blood.”

  Now Nita’s face was bathed in tears. Michael heard Balilty rub his hands and breathe a sigh of relief.

  “I didn’t mean to . . .” Theo bent toward her and held her hands. “I don’t even know how the pillow, instead of hitting the wall. . . . I can’t remember how it ended up on his face. I only wanted not to see his face, with that contempt, that callousness toward me, never thinking of me for a minute. I wanted not to see his face. To cover it. Not to see it anymore. I put the pillow on it. I don’t know how much time passed before I realized what I was doing. And I can’t even tell you how I knew he was dead. He must have been a lot weaker than I thought. I didn’t mean to do it, Nita. I, I loved him, too. I wanted . . . I couldn’t get through to him. Whatever I did was no use. Please understand. You said you wanted to understand.”

  “And the painting? And Gabi?”

  “Afterward I got into a panic. I don’t know where the idea of the painting came from. I didn’t plan that either. Believe me. Everything was in a fog. I didn’t think of what was going to happen next. I myself can’t tell you how or why I moved him to the chair and gagged him, and how I got the picture out. I took the frame apart. I took the canvas to Herzl’s place. I didn’t think of the consequences. I didn’t think of anything. It was . . . like a dream.”

&nb
sp; “And then at the concert you looked the same as usual. And we all waited for Father!”

  “I . . . it was as if it was someone else, not me,” said Theo in a dreamy voice. “It’s impossible to explain, and I’m not asking you to forgive me. All my life I’ve been driven, haunted. This is the first time I’ve ever talked about it to anyone. About the hurt that never stops. About the despair you feel when you realize that whatever you do is no use.”

  “And Gabi.”

  “And Gabi.” Theo bowed his head.

  “Everything was planned.”

  “You can’t really say that either,” said Theo.

  “What are you talking about, Theo?” She buried her face in her hands. “You took the package of strings from my wardrobe. In advance. And the gloves, they tell me, from the locker. You took the strings I’d forgotten all about. And you know that they’re concert strings. And that nobody else had ones like them. As if you wanted them to think that I . . . I did it with you. You let me find him!” she sobbed. “I don’t know if you even saw him after that. How much hatred you must have felt to do what you did! How much hatred to give you such strength!”

  “I had no choice,” said Theo. “He would have found out that I . . . He would have found out what I did. . . . He would have found out about Father. He wouldn’t have given an inch. It would have become a sacred principle for him to carry out Father’s wishes. I couldn’t go back anymore. I couldn’t.”

  Behind the glass wall there was only the sound of Nita’s sobbing.

  “What are we going to do now?” asked Theo in a small voice.

  Nita wiped her face and blew her nose. “First of all, we’ll get you a lawyer,” she said hoarsely.

  “No lawyer is going to get me out of this,” said Theo. “For the rest of my life, whatever’s left of it, I’ll be locked up somewhere. You must realize that’s not for me.”

  Nita looked at him in silence.

  “You said you would stand by me,” Theo reminded her like a child reminding its mother. “You said you would help me.” There was something cunning in his voice. It was apparently this that made her stand up, trembling, and put her hand on his arm, as if he really were a small child. “I have to think about it,” she said. “I still have no idea of what to do now.”

  ‘Ask your friend,” whispered Theo, and he raised his eyes to the ceiling.

  “Now,” said Balilty, tugging at Michael’s sleeve. “Go in there now.”

  She stood facing the door. Her arms hung limply at her sides. “He’ll tell you whatever you want,” said Nita on her way out. “Get him a lawyer, and whatever else he needs,” she added and collapsed. If Michael hadn’t supported himself against the doorpost, he wouldn’t have been able to bear her weight. Danny Balilty carried her into Shorer’s office and called an ambulance.

  The interrogation of Theo van Gelden continued for five days. During those days Michael never left the building. The world ceased to exist. Sometimes Balilty and Eli Bahar joined in the interrogation. “So he’ll appreciate you more,” Balilty joked to Michael. During those days—in a bare, windowless little room on the fourth floor—Michael sometimes felt the boundary between his skin and that of the man opposite dissolve. During those days, he sometimes thought as he retired to Shorer’s office for a few hours’ rest, he was living as if he had lost himself and his own life, as if he were truly inside the mind of Theo van Gelden, who was becoming increasingly dependent on him.

  Even when he closed his eyes in Shorer’s darkened office, the voices went on echoing in his head. Things were mixed up. Every day Balilty cursed the press and tried to calculate precisely when the right moment would be for the reenactment of the crimes. Continuing to complain about Michael’s attachment to the suspect, Balilty would also give him a brief report about the state of Nita’s health, assuring him that she was never left alone. Izzy Mashiah sat by her bedside, and there was a hired nurse and the babysitter Ruth Mashiah had engaged. Once he also said something about Nita’s baby: “Ido stood up today, he doesn’t know yet how to sit back down, and he cries a lot.”

  Theo, too, was never left alone. Michael was always on the alert during those days, and Balilty took care never to leave the building without making sure that there was someone standing outside the door when they let Theo sleep for a while, and that there were no sharp or blunt instruments within his reach. “No tie or shoelaces,” Balilty would repeat to the policemen on guard, “no knife or fork, just a spoon.”

  Sergeant Ya’ir walked in front of Theo when they climbed the stairs from the improvised detention room on the second floor to the interrogation room on the fourth. Michael followed a few steps behind Theo, who walked to the end of the corridor with his head bowed like an apathetic old cart horse. And this slow, submissive walk of his in the narrow corridor was the reason both Michael and Sergeant Ya’ir allowed themselves to be distracted from the possibility that hovered day and night in the air of the building and were taken by surprise when Theo suddenly leaped aside with astonishing agility and lightness and threw his body over the balustrade into the black void of the stairwell.

  Michael’s scream was heard throughout the building, and dozens of policemen were already in the basement by the time he got there. They stepped aside so that he could see for himself the smashed, broken-necked body.

  Weeks passed before he was allowed to see Nita. During those weeks Ruth Mashiah would knock at his door every day on her way out of the apartment building. Her wrinkled little face became the sight most precious to him. Every day she would tell him something about Nita and Ido. He would sometimes see the baby from the kitchen window, when the babysitter took him out in the stroller. He didn’t dare go out to see him. Ruth Mashiah made it clear that he could not see Nita until Nita agreed to it.

  “At the moment,” she said to him gently, “your name can’t even be mentioned in her presence. But I believe,” she added compassionately, “that one day, with a lot of patience . . .”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, but Michael clung to it nonetheless, week after week, by day and by night.

  About the Author

  BATYA GUR, novelist and literary critic, was almost single-handedly responsible for making the detective novel a flourishing genre in modern Hebrew. She passed away in 2005 in Jerusalem.

  Gur’s novels won the Krimi Preis in Germany as well as the WIZO prize in France. Each of her mystery niovels was voted one of Ten Best Mysteries by the New York Times Book Review.

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  Copyright

  MURDER DUET. Copyright © 1999 by Batya Gur. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover design by Andrea Guinn

  Cover illustration by Christopher Zacharow

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2000.

  FIRST HARPER PAPERBACKS EDITION PUBLISHED 2020.

  * * *

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Gur, Batya.

  [Merhak ha-nakhon. English]

  Murder duet: a musical case / Batya Gur.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-017268-1

  1. Ohayon, Michael (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PJ5054.G637M4713 1999

  892.4’36—dc21

  98-50456

  * * *

  Digital Edition DECEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297041-1

/>   Version 10292020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-093298-5 (pbk.)

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