Bethlehem Road Murder

by Batya Gur

  Michael regarded him in silence.

  “So that’s it,” Balilty, summed up and turned as if to leave.

  “Danny,” said Michael.

  Balilty turned around and looked at him, the amused glint back in his eyes. “Yes? What?” he asked.

  “Are you playing Columbo now?” asked Michael.

  “Huh? Huh? What have I said?”

  “It’s what you haven’t said. You intended to leave and come back right away. In a minute you would have gone off and forgotten to tell me the main thing.”

  “Ah, yes.” Balilty smiled broadly. “You tell me if it’s the main thing or no.” He nodded his head in the direction of the end of the corridor. “She’s waiting for you in the small room. I didn’t want to let her wander around here so that everyone could see her and—”

  “No, I can see that until you see me fall flat on my face in amazement, we won’t have any peace around here.” Michael smiled. “Perhaps you would be so kind as to tell us who’s waiting?”

  “Come and see,” Balilty said, and headed, slowly, toward his room, demonstratively straightening his back. Michael, bemused, trailed after him.

  The small room, which was usually a repository for files on current cases, office equipment, coffee, sugar, long-life milk and cartons of disposable cups and bottled mineral water, was at the end of the corridor. Their footsteps echoed in the nearly empty space. From the first floor, sounds of laughter could be heard, and the fluorescent lights cast a musty, sallow and depressing hue on the floor tiles and the walls.

  On the only chair in the room, next to the steel desk under which the cardboard boxes were stored, sat Ada Levi-Efrati, with her legs crossed—the old office lamp that lit the room cast shadows on her face and her body—and now she looked up at him with her small, pale face, which was illuminated by an embarrassed smile.

  Balilty hung around near the door. “So now that I’ve done my good deed for the day, and now that she’s forgiven me,” he said with satisfaction. “What do you know? She didn’t want to talk to me, but she had no alternative, because they didn’t let her go up to the second floor, and you don’t have a mobile phone and you don’t answer your pager, so she spoke to me even though I’m a rotten fascist, and we made up. Have we made up?” he said, turning toward her, and she lowered her head in silence.

  “Okay, there’s no need to get so excited,” he said sarcastically. “Justice is relative, and I just want you to know that this contractor, your Arab, is a Jew-hating anti-Semite. Only a blind person couldn’t see that. If someone would strike out at you or if you were in danger, do you think he would save you?”

  Ada Efrati did not answer.

  “Okay, forget it.” Balilty sighed. “The main thing is that we’ve made up and you’ve seen that I’m not just a shit. Have fun.” He smiled, and left.

  “Just a minute.” Michael went out after him.

  “Listen,” said the intelligence officer with a serious expression and leaning against the wall. “I’ll continue with her—with that journalist. We haven’t got anything to do so I’m asking you, let me continue with her. I also know this job; do me a favor. We’ll also work it out with Avital, believe me. There are things we can manage without you. Inside in that room”—he pointed to the door—“sits a woman, a pretty woman, a quality woman, waiting for you. When I asked her about that, she said to me: ‘Personal.’ And I know you, and I’ve already seen the way you were looking at her there, in that house where we found the body. Do you get me?”

  Michael said nothing.

  “Hasn’t the time come for you to get over that other story?” begged Balilty. “Do me a favor, me and everybody, take today—that is, what’s left of it—that is, tonight, and have a holiday meal like a human being and all that. As a favor, a personal favor to me and to Tzilla and to Eli Bachar and to all of us. What do you say?”

  The excited, expectant expression on Danny Balilty’s face touched Michael’s heart, and he smiled.

  “What do you say? As a personal favor, even though she thinks I’m a shit. I have no problem with that,” pleaded Balilty.

  “What can I say? I can say that Matty will kill me, because of me she’ll be sitting all alone in the sukkah,” answered Michael.

  “Matty, if I tell her why, if I tell her that you’re with someone, and someone so classy, and one you’ve already had . . . Never mind. If I tell her that, Matty will be in seventh heaven and she won’t kill anyone, not even me. And anyway, what do you think? All the children and my sister-in-law and also . . .”

  Michael turned up his palms in a gesture of surrender, and Balilty clapped him on the shoulder and turned to leave with a whistle of joy.

  “Wait a second,” Michael called after him.

  “What now?” asked Balilty suspiciously, as if expecting Michael to change his mind.

  “When you go over Tzilla’s notes, you’ll see that she says there, Miss Orly Shushan, something about Zahara keeping faith with someone. Spend some time on that point—I didn’t get it.”

  “Tell me something, buddy. Are you gaining time, or what? Is this the first time I’ve questioned anybody? What’s got into you?” He pointed to the door. “There’s a woman waiting for you.”

  “And what about you? Are you playing Zorba the Greek?” Michael said, and went back into the little room.

  Chapter 8

  Will wonders never cease,” Michael Ohayon whispered at five-twenty in the morning to Ada, whose face was very close to his as he caressed her smooth, tawny arm. Her cheekbones were even more prominent in the yellowish glow of the reading lamp, its shade tilted, and a faint halo surrounded her narrow face. A sly half-smile crossed her full lips and stole into her brown eyes, which narrowed to look at him exactly as they had done years ago, as she stood at the foot of the ladder in the work camp. In amazement he touched the crease etched between her eyebrows and the fine down above her upper lip: Thirty years later it seemed as though they had come with utter naturalness from that grapefruit grove to this bed, to the small bedroom in a ground-floor apartment in an apartment house in the western part of the city. He was amazed by the intimacy he had felt in the small room at the Russian Compound and all the way to the car and from there to her place, an intimacy that did not evaporate even upon entering her apartment and facing the visitors who were waiting there, and even more amazing was the naturalness with which he sat down to the holiday dinner with her daughter and her son and their partners, and with her sister, whom he was meeting for the first time.

  He himself was also amazing. For years, women he loved and men to whom he was close had accused him of being closed, of a tense alertness and a lack of spontaneity in intimate relationships, but throughout the holiday dinner he felt easygoing and serene, as if he had come home, even during the course of this ritual that the years of his marriage, as well as the years that followed it, had taught him to loathe. And also amazing was the natural way members of the family related to him, as if they had known him for a long time, and as if it was nothing extraordinary to have him dining with them at their table.

  “After all, you were my mother’s first kiss,” said her daughter, giggling; with her cropped hair and her gray eyes, she looked like a blonde but exact copy of Ada. With this she had solved the nagging question of what they knew about him, and he did not correct her or mention the existence of that boyfriend who had held him back, and who had certainly kissed her more than once before he had.

  “You were the Don Juan of your grade,” her sister said with a small smile, and shyly looked sideways. “Most probably you don’t remember me—I was two years below you and kind of a little mouse, scared of my own shadow. I never stopped crying at night, out of homesickness, and it took me half a year before I could manage to fall asleep in the dormitory.” Almost apologetically, Michael admitted that indeed he did not remember.

  “Not exactly Don Juan,” corrected Ada with the half-smile that almost always accompanied her observation of him. “There were
no proofs—you never saw him in action and he didn’t go from one girl to the next. None of the girls in our grade reported any personal experience. There were stories. The girls were crazy about him, but he—he was unattainable. They said you had a story with an older woman. Is it true? Did you have a story with an older woman?” she asked, turning to look at him.

  He blushed and cleared his throat, grimacing in negation. Although Becky Pomerantz, the mother of his good friend and classmate, had died several years ago, it never occurred to him, at the table or at all, to tell anyone about the musical education or about the seduction. He lit a cigarette to cover his silence and was again amazed at his serenity, which even the half-mocking conversation did not ruffle. It was the excited serenity of someone who did not need to choke off expectation lest he be defeated; and paradoxically, the more this expectation was prolonged, the sweeter it became. He even knew for certain that this woman—who even beneath the dark hair threaded with gray still preserved the image of his youth—would allow him to touch his image and her image of long ago. He did not understand whence this certainty came, and uncharacteristically he did not force himself to understand its reasons. No “what ifs” and “how shoulds” pecked at him.

  The first time they’d sat together, in the café on Jaffa Street, after Ada had lashed out at Balilty, he’d already felt how pleasant it was to sit with her and talk with her. Even though he knew that Solomon the pathologist was waiting for him, as was Sergeant Yair, whom he had left to wait for him at the office without a word of explanation, he had not hesitated at all—after she had calmed down a bit about the matter of the contractor and Balilty, and it was possible to talk to her about a different subject—to ask about her life.

  Thus he heard how she had made an early marriage to a man who was fifteen years older than her (“My father died, and my mother was dependent on me . . . In any case, I was the oldest, and my sister was still in the army and my little brother—he was really little—and it was natural that I would fall in love, or think I had fallen in love . . . In any case, Jedediah . . . he loved me so much, and I thought . . .”), and how she had gone abroad with him, sent by the geological firm that employed him, to drill for oil in South America, where her two children were born. She also told him about her husband’s long illness and his death, and very little about how she began to do photography (“At first, stills, just pictures of the children, and then with a film camera, and courses and . . . Don’t ask”), and how in the end, after three years of study in Paris, she had become a director of documentary films, and how she had gone from place to place on behalf of the Dutch film company that employed her (“It was awfully hard with the children. They weren’t babies anymore, but . . .”). She spread her palms out to her sides and with her whole mouth she smiled a full, helpless smile, before she looked into his eyes and asked: “And you?”

  They hadn’t really talked about meeting again in the future, because when he glanced at his pager he found three messages from Sergeant Yair and one from Dr. Solomon, and he had to hurry to his office. But the very next day, at his initiative, they met at a café again and talked for hours, about him and about her, and finally, inevitably and very cautiously, about the two of them. And then, and not just once, the subject came up again that had come up at their first meeting: Why hadn’t he tried to find her since then (to which he replied with a question that ticked her off: Why hadn’t she tried to find him?). Once she mentioned the summer work camp, but she hung back when he asked why she had left school, and he let it be.

  At this meeting he held her hand in his and stroked her fingers, and told her that he would like to get to know her again, “But for real, slowly, like it should be.”

  And she laughed and asked in a low voice: “Slowly? Why slowly? We have a head start, don’t we?”

  “How should I know?” Michael muttered, and leaned over her hand. “People change—and then, we didn’t really know each other in depth,” and she, not laughing anymore, said that the taste of his kisses and his touch had been with her all these years, and that the body is never wrong, and that people who know each other through their bodies know each other best.

  “I’m not sure,” said Michael. “I used to think that, but now I’m not at all sure. Maybe it’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition.” When he walked her to her car, she laid a hand on his cheek and looked at him. The tenderness in her gaze sent a shiver through him and he knew then that they would meet again, once he was done with this case, “which will get into high gear in another day or two, I hope, after we identify the body,” and that maybe they would talk on the phone during the days he was up to his neck in the investigation. And therefore he had been very surprised to see her that evening waiting for him in the little room at the Russian Compound, but he was also very glad about it and without wavering much had accepted her offer and got into her car and driven home with her for the holiday dinner.

  As if they had spoken about it in the car on the way to her house, he also stayed after all the other guests had left, and from a rectangular living room almost empty of furniture, where she had set the table, he followed her into a small kitchen and leaned on the windowsill there, looking at the line of dark hair cropped along the nape of her long, slender neck, at her narrow back, and at the swiftness with which her hands moved with the plates, from which she threw the leftovers into the bin before she put them in the sink. He watched himself in astonishment as he stood close behind her until his lips rubbed against the nape of her neck, and after she turned around—against her lips, as if he had really known her for a long time. And when she, a head shorter than him, lifted her face to him, he paused at the sight of the smile that lit up her soft, brown eyes, which revealed joy in their depths, and alarm and passion.

  “Even your smell is the same,” she now whispered hoarsely as he slowly moved his fingers from her face and her hair to her deep, soft waistline—she was lying on her side. “Then too you had the smell of tobacco and—how shall I say it?—a clear smell of starch and unscented soap, and even then you were smoking. I remember how we, the girls, would go to see you in the smokers’ hiding place, even before the summer work camp.”

  “But you had a boyfriend then,” Michael reminded her, and he himself was amused by the tone of complaint that had come out of his mouth.

  “I did,” she confirmed, “but I wanted you. The fact is that he took off right afterward.”

  “I had no idea,” murmured Michael. “You didn’t show me any signs, nothing. I thought you weren’t interested in me at all.” Nevertheless, the memory of the “boyfriend” who was talked about then had pecked at him; he had been older than them, a soldier, maybe even an officer.

  “Okay,” she said, and stretched out on her back. “It’s because you didn’t want to. And I’m shy.”

  “I? I didn’t want to? I’m telling you that you didn’t show any signs. How could I know whether you wanted to or not?” He couldn’t really remember afterwards whether he had wanted her or not, but now, as he lay beside her and stroked her skin, it was obvious to him that he had, and it was only that talk about the boyfriend that had put him off.

  “What self-indulgence,” she murmured, and looked at him with a smile. “Just self-indulgent pride.”

  A few seconds went by before he understood what she meant by “self-indulgence.”

  “You mean I’m not allowed to be shy?”

  “No, you don’t understand.” She straightened up and plumped the large pillow and supported her back on it in a half-sitting position. “Me—no way, no.”

  The sweet torpor that spread through his limbs slowed down his thought. With an effort he said: “You mean?”

  “I did all kinds of foolish things, but thwarted love—no. Not that.”

  “How did we get to ‘thwarted love’?” he wondered truthfully.

  Her hand sliced through the air above him as she said decisively: “I wasn’t crazy enough to fall in love with someone everyone knew had an older, ex
perienced woman, and who didn’t show he was interested.”

  He was required to protest, at least formally, but he felt so good with her face so close to his, and only because she was looking at him now expectantly did he give in and say: “But you left school right after the camp, and you had a boyfriend, and there was no sign that you—”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” she said decidedly.

  And again, as in a half-dream, even though more than anything he wanted to curl up in the silence, he found himself answering her heatedly, as if they were two children arguing: “No? Nothing to do with it? Was I supposed to fall in love with you and go after you even if you had a boyf—”

  “Enough with that Boaz,” said Ada angrily. “He’s no excuse. If you had fallen in love with me or really wanted me, you wouldn’t have cared whether or not I had a boyfriend.”

  Like her, he tucked a pillow behind his back and sat up, because suddenly the discussion had become serious, and in fact, he now realized, it had become a discussion of the difference between women’s expectations and men’s. “Do you mean to say,” he said cautiously and probingly, “that I was supposed to look for you and chase after you then, to conquer you and convince you?”

  “Of course.”

  There is no such thing as a liberated woman, Michael Ohayon said to himself, and there is no equality between the sexes. Even women don’t really want it, that equality they’re all talking about, and in fact they want defined roles, and there is nothing that would make them happier than to find out that they had dazzled the man. Or in other words—that they had magic control over him. But he didn’t want to use the word “control” now and preferred to talk about her passivity: “So I should have found you and woken you up from your coma with respect to me, or what?” he asked.

  “There wasn’t any coma,” answered Ada, half-insulted. “I was just reacting to the fact that I picked up that I wasn’t on your mind. There weren’t any other vibes.”