Murder in Jerusalem

by Batya Gur

  The inspector nodded. “I heard on the way over. What a catastrophe.”

  “You’ll have to give us a few minutes,” Zadik said. “I haven’t had a chance to prepare people yet.” He raised his eyes to the monitor and saw, on the screen, a policeman standing next to Zohar, listening to him. “One of your men. You know him?” Zadik asked. Eli Bachar blinked—he had long, dark eyelashes like a woman’s, and narrow green eyes and a high forehead, only his chin was too small for such a face—and answered reticently, “Yes, that’s Superintendent Shlomo Molcho, a decent guy.” Zohar’s voice was filling the newsroom now that someone had turned the volume up full blast.

  “If that’s so,” Zohar intoned nasally from the entrance to the tunnel, “then the police have reason to believe that the unemployed workers are in possession of explosives, and there’s no telling how far they’ll take this. In the meantime,” he said into the microphone, “there are still no negotiations between the unemployed workers and the police. We have been asked to inform the public that the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road is closed to traffic and that drivers are requested to travel by alternate routes and to refrain from approaching this area.”

  “Benizri,” Hefetz shouted at the glass partition, “what are you still doing here? Didn’t I tell you to get down to the recording studio and get on the air? Nehemia is already down there, and Niva went to the archives to fetch that documentary you made about the Hulit workers last year. Why are you still here? Didn’t I tell you to get down there? Did I or didn’t I? Everyone heard: I did!”

  Danny Benizri, who was standing inside the graphic artists’ room, did not respond immediately. Zadik could see him leaning over the computer screen and explaining something to Tamari. He hurried into the room and saw the sketch she had already prepared, the roads and the tunnel with two trucks at one end and two at the other. So there actually were a few departments here where things worked properly, Zadik wished to tell someone when he had returned to his place, but when he looked up from the computer screen, his eyes met those of Arye Rubin, who was standing next to him expectantly.

  “I only need two minutes,” Arye Rubin told him. “Maybe three.” Zadik shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

  At the doorway to the room, Inspector Eli Bachar stepped backward to make way for Benizri, who was on his way out at a run, en route to the recording studio on the ground floor.

  “Just two minutes,” Rubin pleaded with Zadik. Zadik caught sight of Natasha watching them from the corner of the conference room.

  “Hang on, Rubin, just hang on,” Zadik said, pointing at the monitor. Once again the picture faded and Zohar disappeared; in his place the screen showed policemen running in every direction. “I don’t get this at all,” Zadik said, annoyed. “Where are they running now, what are these guys filming? Look where the Channel Two cameraman is positioned and where—”

  “Zadik, calm down.” Hefetz had popped up suddenly at his side and was watching both the monitor and Inspector Eli Bachar, who was leaning against the wall next to the bulletin board. Thanks to his white shirt and his short gray jacket, probably no one else there knew what he was doing in the newsroom.

  “For your information,” Hefetz told Zadik, “Zohar was tuned in to the police broadcasts the whole time. He’s always first on-site, no other reporter was there when he arrived, but what do we get for all his efforts? Do we get anything for all his efforts? No, we don’t. Who’s running things around here? Us? No. Not us. Who? The technicians! So don’t tell me afterward that it’s a disgrace that Channel Two gets there before us, because they don’t have a technicians’ union!”

  Zadik hoped that because of the ensuing tumult—the noise of two monitors running at once, the constant ringing of telephones, the incessant chatter—no one had heard Hefetz, but just then an unfamiliar burly man in blue coveralls poked his head in from the foreign correspondents’ room and said, “How ’bout not blaming the technicians for everything that goes wrong?”

  At the same time, David Shalit approached Eli Bachar, tapped him on the arm, and in an intimate, almost mocking tone said, “Inspector Eli Bachar, sir, to what do we owe this pleasure?” Eli Bachar smiled awkwardly, narrowed his eyes, and in lieu of an answer, shrugged his shoulders and nodded toward Zadik.

  “What? Our big boss called you?” David Shalit asked doubtfully. “And why would that be? What have the police got to do here? And if we’re talking police, where’s your boss, Ohayon? I’ve heard he’s on vacation. So does that mean you’re his replacement?”

  “Maybe they’re here to look for the person who’s been leaking information to us about the police,” Aviva teased. She had come up behind Rubin and looked as if she were waiting in line to talk to Zadik. “You know how it is with the police, they only show up when you don’t need them anymore.”

  “If I were you,” Eli Bachar told her, “I wouldn’t be quite so jovial the morning after a colleague of mine was killed. I wouldn’t be up to such joking.”

  Hefetz turned to Zadik. “Did you invite him here?” he asked accusingly. “What are the police doing here now?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please,” Zadik called out from the doorway of the newsroom, and—miraculously—the room fell silent. “This gentleman standing next to me is Inspector Eli Bachar of the Jerusalem District Police, who is here regarding Tirzah. The police are investigating possible negligence, and…to make a long story short, he’ll be talking with people here—he’ll decide who—and I would ask each and every one of you to cooperate with Inspector Bachar and any other representative of the police, because we would like this investigation to end quickly.”

  Natasha stood behind Rubin, pulling his sleeve; Rubin touched her arm with a calming hand. “Zadik…,” he said.

  “Just a minute, Rubin, just wait a minute. Can’t you see that I’m…” Natasha took a step backward.

  “I don’t understand this,” Hefetz said irritably. “What exactly have they got to investigate here? Have they got something to investigate here? Did someone do something wrong here? She was crushed under the scenery flats and a marble pillar, wasn’t she?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Hefetz?” Niva whispered. “Suddenly you’ve forgotten the rules about death under unnatural circumstances?”

  “Hey, what’s going on?” said the maintenance man, walking out of the foreign correspondents’ room with a large plastic bucket and a putty knife splattered with white stains. He ran straight into Elmaliah the cameraman, who had entered the newsroom carrying an oversized sandwich.

  “Watch where you’re going!” Elmaliah scolded the maintenance man. “You almost knocked the sandwich right out of my hand.” To Hefetz he said, “Don’t you know that when someone dies like that, not in his bed, not from some disease, not in the hospital with a doctor’s certificate, the police have to investigate if it was an accident, and if so, to determine who was responsible?”

  “Sometimes the engineer has to be charged with criminal negligence—if it’s a case of faulty construction,” David Shalit added, placing his empty Styrofoam cup on the edge of the table.

  Eli Bachar whispered something to Zadik, and Zadik raised his head and asked, “Has anyone seen Max?”

  “Max Levin?” Aviva asked, surprised. “What’s he got to do with…ah…” Realization dawned on her. “Because he was the one who found her…but he must be in the String Building, in his office.”

  “That’s just it,” Zadik explained, “he’s not there. Find him for me, Aviva, we need him urgently. Avi Lachman, too, the lighting technician who was with Max when…” To the inspector he added, “Go with Aviva, she’ll get you anyone you need, and you’ll have more peace and quiet in my office, which you can use in the meantime…”

  Aviva flashed Eli a pleasant smile and wound a platinum curl around her finger. The inspector followed obediently.

  “Niva,” Hefetz called. “Did you bring the VTR from the film library to the studio?�
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  “Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, out of breath. “I run down there like a madwoman, get to the archives, and find that Hezi…I’ll kill him if he does that one more time…next time I’m not going down to the archives for you people under any circumstances, he is so disgusting….”

  “Why, what did he do?” David Shalit asked with a look of innocence.

  “Here, they’ve cut into the program,” Zadik said with an air of satisfaction at the sight of Nehemia the interviewer, Danny Benizri, and the director general of the Finance Ministry on the Channel One monitor. “Good job, Hefetz, you got the director of the Finance Ministry,” he said, adding, “and damn fast, too.”

  “What do you think?” Hefetz said, making light of Zadik’s praise. “They’ve kidnapped the labor minister, this is no game, they’re gonna blow themselves up and the minister, too. So what could the director of the Finance Ministry tell me, he doesn’t have time to come down to the studio? Oh, look at this guy, Sivan…what’s his name?”

  They were watching the Channel Two monitor again, the volume turned all the way down. The military correspondent stood wrapped in his parka, shivering from the cold, wiping raindrops from his brow, the microphone pressed close to his mouth, and his lips moving without a sound.

  Hefetz turned up the volume on the Channel One monitor. “Sir,” Danny Benizri said, addressing the Finance Ministry’s director general, who sat tight-lipped as he pressed a pale blue ironed handkerchief to his shiny bald pate, “there’s nothing to get angry about. I simply wish to understand what was done with the money that the government promised to give as aid to the Hulit factory last July, during the previous crisis…”

  “First of all,” the director general said, cutting Danny Benizri off as he tugged the sleeves of his blue tweed jacket over his shirt cuffs and moved his chair to the side, “I wish categorically to denounce an act that is, in my opinion, not only extremely grave, but a very, very, very dangerous precedent.”

  Danny Benizri’s dark eyes were shining. He turned to the interviewer, who held up his hand to request that he wait to speak, but Danny Benizri refused to wait. He, too, cut off his interlocutor. “That’s not what I asked you,” he cried out.

  “I want to make something perfectly clear,” the director general said. “Violence such as this has no place—”

  “There hasn’t been any violence yet,” Danny Benizri corrected him, fingering the top button on the sky-blue shirt he had slipped into just before going on the air.

  “Benizri is totally out of line,” Niva said in the newsroom. “What do you call that?” she said pointing at the Channel Two monitor, which was showing smoke billowing from the tunnel. “What’s that, if not violence?”

  She pinned her eyes on Arye Rubin, who was standing next to Zadik, watching the monitor. Finally he nodded in agreement.

  “Hefetz,” Niva said, “Tell Dalit to get Nehemia to shut Benizri up. He can’t say that’s not violence.”

  Hefetz snapped his fingers at Tzippi, the assistant producer. “Come here,” he said. “Go downstairs and check what’s with that VTR Niva brought from the archives, see if they’ve even gotten it ready. Ask Dalit.” He resumed watching the monitor.

  On the screen appeared the three participants in this spontaneous interview: the director general of the Finance Ministry; Danny Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs; and the host, Nehemia, a veteran newsman famous for his evenhandedness, his formal manners, and the special brand of boredom he cast over his viewers. It appeared as though Nehemia had lost control for a moment; Danny Benizri was staring the director general down with sparks in his eyes.

  “Ex cuse me,” the latter was saying as he fingered the edges of his tie, “I am very sorry, but—”

  Judging by the actions of the host—Nehemia was touching his earlobe, behind which was located a transmitter that was providing him with instructions from the control room—it appeared that he was indeed being told to rein in the correspondent. “Danny,” he said, “Danny. Please, I must to ask you to…just—”

  But Danny Benizri ignored Nehemia completely. He leaned toward the director general and asked, quietly, “Tell me, please, sir, what alternatives do they have?”

  The thick, pale eyebrows of the director general rose halfway up his forehead, giving his round face a look of shock and wonder. “Mr. Benizri,” he said, straining to maintain his composure, “are you aware of what you are implying, that it is indeed an acceptable way to get what they want? We’re talking here about people who earned large sums of money from shift work, and some of them live in luxurious villas—”

  “Gentlemen!” the host cried, though neither man paid him any attention.

  “What?!” Benizri said, shocked. “What are you saying? Maybe they’re actually millionaires!”

  Nehemia touched his earlobe again, and his brows furrowed until a deep crease formed between them. “Uh…Danny, please,” he said, waving his hand at the control room on the other side of a glass partition that could not be seen on-screen. He cast a pleading look toward the director and the producer and the rest of the staff sitting in the control room, but they could do nothing to rescue him. It was an unplanned live broadcast, and he had been unable to take charge of his guests, who were arguing as if completely oblivious to his existence.

  “I can only discuss the facts,” said the director general as he pored over the pages spread out on the table in front of him.

  Nehemia leaned over the pages, inspecting them like someone who had been taught it was forbidden for a participant—and certainly the host himself—to appear as though he were not actively engaged in what was taking place. But there was something pathetic about the way he feigned interest in the pages on the table when in the background Benizri could be heard demanding to know, “What luxurious villas?”

  The director general laid his hand on the pages. “There are workers who earned more than 30,000 shekels a month during the weeks they worked shifts—”

  “You are purposely misleading the public!” Danny Benizri shouted, and cast a look of reproach at Nehemia. “He is misleading the public, not a single one of them is rich,” he said emphatically, “and not a single one of them earns the kind of money he’s talking about. There was only one such worker, his name was Baruch Hasson, and even in his case it was just one month, three and a half years ago, when there was a big order from Greece—”

  A sudden commotion broke out in the control room, and the producer waved her arms and called on Nehemia to take charge of the discussion. Nehemia cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, touched his ear as a way of drawing strength and authority from the transmitter and from the producer’s voice, and interrupted the director general. “These difficult events remind us of the tragic case of Hannah Cohen,” he said, turning to Danny Benizri. “In your opinion, can matters deteriorate as dramatically in this case as they did then?”

  Benizri, too, glanced sideways toward the glass partition. “If you ask me,” he answered slowly, emphasizing every word, “mismanagement by the police could once again bring about tragic—”

  The Finance Ministry’s director general shifted in his seat and waved his hands. “Ex cuse me, I am terribly sorry,” he insisted, “but when a small group of individuals decides to take the law into its own hands, the police have no choice but to—”

  “They don’t have any choice either!” Danny Benizri shouted.

  In the newsroom, all eyes were on the monitor. “Whoa, has Benizri totally flipped out?” Elmaliah the cameraman asked, his mouth full. He laid the rest of his sandwich on the edge of the table and said, “What’s he arguing like that for?”

  A look of absolute loathing on the face of the director general shone through the television monitor. “Excuse me,” he sputtered angrily at Benizri, “with all due respect, you are the correspondent for labor and social affairs, are you not? Not a spokesman for the workers. It seems to me you are meant to remain neutral, don’t you think?”

 
Danny Benizri started to say something but Nehemia, after touching the transmitter once again, laid his hand on the reporter’s arm. “Just a moment, sir,” he said to the director general, and to Danny he said, “Danny, please, I’m asking you…let’s watch for one moment a documentary film you made about Hulit one year ago, for Arye Rubin’s program The Justice of the Sting…”

  But the director general refused to remain silent. He pointed an accusing finger at Danny Benizri and exclaimed, “This is outrageous, sir, simply outrageous the way you are speaking to me here!”

  Salvation came from the control room, where the director cut into the discussion to run the film showing events that had taken place at the Hulit bottle factory one year earlier. Before Nehemia had a chance to say a word or announce the transition, on the screen there appeared a woman on a roof, shouting. Only someone who had been completely attuned to the program would have known that this was not taking place live.

  Utter silence fell on the newsroom, until Hefetz went to the telephone, dialed, and said into the mouthpiece, “Pass me to Dalit.” A moment later his shouts could be heard everywhere: “Why are there no captions? People will think this is happening now! I want him to announce again that this is footage from the archives! Take care of it, you hear me?” He turned to Niva, his face red with anger, and shouted at her. “See? You wanted a woman to be news editor?! Screwup after screwup! Am I the one screwing up here? No! Did you see who’s screwing up? Did you or did you not?!”