Murder in Jerusalem

by Batya Gur

  “Not Zadik, but Tirzah Rubin,” Eli Bachar said calmly.

  “What kind of problems did she have with Tirzah Rubin?”

  “Benny Meyuhas, too. Don’t you get it? The head seamstress, the head of the Scenery Department, the director—she was always—”

  “Okay already,” Balilty said, “what kind of clashes did they have?”

  “None, in fact,” Eli Bachar said. “Truth is, I just wanted to show you that just because someone’s been there a while doesn’t mean they’re a suspect.”

  “Gentlemen!” Shorer cried out. “Is this the way things work around here? As if this were a kindergarten?”

  Silence fell on the room until Eli Bachar cleared his throat and began speaking again. “Let’s say we want to start with people with keys. So we take Max Levin, for example, a guy who’s responsible for having planned and built most of the String Building. He’s got a key to the back entrance, and there’s reason to believe he knew about the door in the hallway.”

  “So?” Michael said. “Let’s say we start with him. What have we got on him?”

  “He was in the String Building at the time Zadik was murdered, never left his office from eight in the morning until they called to tell him about Zadik. He’d been sitting for at least three hours with the security officer, whose name was”—Eli Bachar flipped through his notepad—“Ziko. Yeah, I remember it was a weird name.”

  “It’s not weird, it’s probably Bulgarian,” Shorer muttered. “Ziko is a common name among Bulgarians, a nickname for Yitzhak. But that’s not important. Go on, go on.”

  “They were working on the problem of theft. Seems there’s a huge problem, equipment gets stolen all the time over there. Here, I’ve got a complete list; a television camera was stolen, and now it turns out it was passed over to the Palestinian Authority. They suspect a building contractor who was doing some renovations there, and maybe a cleaning contractor, too. The investigation into the stolen camera took on pretty big proportions, nobody suspected the damage to be so great—it led to the discovery of a whole series of thefts, all kinds of things: spotlights and video cameras and lighting equipment, lots of stuff.”

  “I noticed they’re pretty sensitive about all that right now,” Rafi said. “I talked to the guy in charge of maintenance, and he says that for the past couple of days, ever since the business with Tirzah Rubin, people have been bringing stuff in like crazy. Turns out they were hanging on to cameras and all kinds of things at home. So now they’re bringing it all in before somebody starts hunting them down.”

  “In any event, Max Levin seems clean, along with a list of other people who weren’t alone at the time,” Eli Bachar concluded. “Hefetz says he was wandering around the building, everybody saw him. He was in the canteen and the archives. Everywhere.”

  “We’re talking about half an hour,” Michael reminded them.

  “Okay. He says he wasn’t looking at his watch all the time, but he was in Aviva’s office twice trying to get in to see Zadik. I don’t know if—”

  “What about Rubin?” Shorer asked. “What about him?”

  “Rubin was in his office, working on his report for Friday’s show. He was writing text—that’s what he told us—and never left his office.”

  “Any witnesses?” Shorer asked.

  “No,” Eli Bachar answered. “Nothing specific. He interviewed some doctor in his office, a guy who’s working with him on a report about doctors who cooperate with the Israeli secret services.”

  “Oooooh,” crooned Balilty, “how I love those bleeding-heart liberals who—What? Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked Michael. “I can’t stand those self-righteous leftists, they’re out of touch, living in a dream world, they think—”

  “Not now, Danny,” Shorer said quietly. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Well,” said Lillian, “I’d like to tell you about my talk with Natasha concerning Rubin.”

  “Really?” Tzilla said, resting her chin in her palm and staring at Lillian in an aggressively expectant manner.

  “I had a chat with her in Rubin’s office while he was in the editing room,” Lillian explained.

  “And who asked you to converse with her?” Tzilla asked, raising her voice in anger. “Did someone ask you to? Do you think there’s some connection between the sheep’s head she found at her apartment and these murders? Do you think that—”

  “Tzilla,” Michael implored her, “enough of that. I’ve already spoken to you about it.”

  Tzilla regarded him with mistrust but said only, “All right. So what’s the deal with Natasha?”

  “I recorded it,” Lillian said, clearly pleased with herself. “Here’s the cassette. Do you want to watch it?”

  “Before we get to that—” Balilty said as Tzilla inserted the tape into the machine and removed a remote control from the right-hand drawer of Michael’s desk. “Wait a minute, don’t start it yet,” he instructed her. “I just want to say about that sheep’s head, you should know that it doesn’t appear to be connected to the case.”

  “Which means?” Shorer asked.

  “Which means,” answered Balilty, “that I have my sources, especially among the ultra-Orthodox, and I spoke with Schreiber the cameraman, and I have a pretty good idea—never mind, what’s important is that she’s onto something pretty serious. I have a few plants, a mole, okay? They tell me the sheep was meant solely to convince Natasha not to continue investigating the matter. All right?”

  “What’s the matter in question that she has information about?” Lillian asked.

  “Listen, honey,” Balilty said with a cool look. “When the time comes to know, you’ll be told.”

  “That means,” said Eli Bachar by way of explanation, “that Balilty simply doesn’t know. Have you people noticed that he doesn’t know everything?”

  Tzilla cast a protective look at her husband, nodded her head, and turned the volume on the monitor up before Balilty had a chance to respond.

  “This is in Rubin’s office, okay?” Lillian said. “It was Yigael who set up the camera for me.” They watched Natasha remove her red scarf and look around. She took stock of the walls and the papers scattered across the desk, then turned over one upside-down photograph, looked at it, and frowned at the portrait of a man in a doctor’s white coat with a stethoscope dangling from his pocket. She tossed the photo into a corner. Lillian’s voice could be heard on the tape. “Please sit down,” she said. “It’s not exactly the first time you’ve ever been in this room, is it?” A hand removed the stack of cardboard files sitting on a chair and patted the chair, signaling to Natasha to take a seat.

  “I don’t come here all that often,” Natasha said, her gaze straight and steady at the camera. “Usually I sit with him in the editing room or the canteen.”

  “What’s wrong? Don’t you like all these photos?” Lillian goaded her. The camera panned to the corkboard overhanging the desk, to which were pinned rows and rows of black-and-white photographs: hundreds of uniformed Japanese soldiers, their hands held high over their heads in surrender; seated Wehrmacht soldiers, hands on their heads; in the corner of the corkboard, a large photo of dark-skinned soldiers sitting in the sand, their feet bound; American soldiers, their heads bowed, facing Japanese officers.

  “Check it out,” Balilty hooted. “What an album he’s got! He should collect them into a book.”

  Michael, too, watched the film and thought about The Family of Man, a collection of photographs he had encountered in his youth and which Becky Pomerantz, the mother of his good friend Uzi from high school, had particularly liked. She was, as well, the first woman to seduce him, teaching him to love music and good books like The Family of Man, with its impressive photographs. Becky Pomerantz had taught him to smoke, too, when he was seventeen. How he wished he had a cigarette now. If only he had a cigarette, his powers of concentration were certain to improve greatly. Maybe he should take up smoking again, just for the duration of this investigati
on, then he would give it up for good. He wished someone could approve such a plan, where he could smoke just for a few weeks. But then he’d have to endure this torment of quitting all over again. He passed his fingers over his face and touched his bottom lip lightly, just at the most comfortable spot for a cigarette, and resumed watching the cassette.

  “That’s Rubin’s collection,” Natasha was explaining defensively. “He calls it his ‘pacifist’s collection.’ What’s wrong with it? Would you prefer naked girls?”

  Lillian’s face appeared on-screen, watching Natasha with heightened interest, giving her her full attention. “First of all,” she said, “of course naked girls would be better. They’re lots prettier, don’t you think?” She smiled mysteriously. “Second of all, I thought you had something going with Hefetz. Are you involved with Rubin, too?”

  Balilty glanced at Lillian and whistled. “Good job, Miss Lillian,” he said. “I see they taught you something over in Narcotics.”

  “I’m not involved with Rubin,” Natasha said quietly on the screen as her pale face—especially her cheeks and chin—turned deep red, bringing out her bottomless blue eyes. “And it’s all over with Hefetz.”

  Michael noted that she had not bothered to ask Lillian how she knew about Hefetz and that she accepted as a given the fact that Lillian knew everything about her. Nor did it seem that she cared. “Rubin is just nice to me, he was nice right from the beginning, and it doesn’t have anything to do with…nothing to do with…” Her voice faded, and Lillian waited a moment before asking her next question.

  “Nothing to do with what?”

  “Sex,” Natasha said, then covered her face with her hands.

  “How about we get right to business,” Lillian suggested. “We don’t have all the time in the world for this. The question is, where were you between, say, ten and eleven o’clock?”

  “I was…I was with Schreiber. First I went to the bathroom, then I was in Aviva’s office—I took over for her for a few minutes so she could go to the ladies’ room or something—and after that with Schreiber. I was waiting for Zadik…I was hoping to talk to him,” Natasha said.

  “You were in Aviva’s office?” Lillian asked. “Right at the scene of the crime, no?”

  “I didn’t budge from there,” Natasha said. “Everyone saw me there. You can ask anyone.”

  A loud knock on the door could be heard from the monitor, then the door opened and the film ended.

  “That’s all?” Tzilla asked, disappointed. “That’s all there is?”

  “That’s all,” Lillian affirmed. “After that Benny Meyuhas turned up, and things got crazy. But I checked out her alibi, and it’s all true. Aviva confirmed it, Hefetz saw her—”

  “Hefetz! Oh, that’s a good one!” Eli Bachar said mockingly.

  “Okay, there were others. Schreiber told me they were in a side office, not far from the hallway door that—”

  “Schreiber’s crazy about Natasha,” Eli Bachar told them. “We have to take that into consideration.”

  “What’s going on over there? Is everybody nuts for that scrawny little chick? She looks like a famished orphan,” Balilty said, astounded.

  “Some guys like that type,” Tzilla assured him. She stole a glance at her husband. “There are some guys you can’t even know what’s going to turn them on.”

  “Was there any time you had the feeling she was covering something up?” Michael asked Lillian. “With your experience dealing with drug addicts, you must be an expert on liars.”

  Lillian smiled. “I can tell you that Natasha did not seem like an addict or a liar. Schreiber seemed pretty high the whole time, but I don’t think it’s anything more than ordinary dope.”

  “And neither of them—Schreiber or Natasha—has a motive,” Balilty pondered. “Rubin either, for that matter, don’t you think?”

  Lillian nodded.

  “Anybody want more pita bread or something?” Tzilla asked. No one responded. “Then I’m going to get rid of all this, it’s making me gag.”

  “Let’s get back to the murder itself,” Michael said, reminding them that someone could only have entered the room through the secret door during the half hour Zadik was alone, unless the murderer was the ultra-Orthodox Jew who had entered and exited through Aviva’s office. “We’ve already determined the guy was wearing a maintenance man’s coveralls,” Michael said. “The coveralls remained in the office, and the forensics people are certain they’ll find some evidence on them, but even if they don’t find anything but Zadik’s blood, we still have—”

  “The T-shirt,” Tzilla said.

  “But doesn’t that mean that the person who put on the coveralls knew that the maintenance man would be working in Zadik’s office?” Lillian asked. “Did he come in wearing coveralls, or did those belong to the maintenance man? I don’t understand.”

  “Apparently he entered in street clothes,” Eli Bachar said. “In any event, no one recalls having seen a maintenance man or technician in the hallway.”

  “At Israel Television that doesn’t mean a thing,” Balilty noted quietly. “Those people don’t seem to notice anything: who shoved Tirzah Rubin, the Orthodox guy with the burns—”

  “So he used the coveralls that some maintenance man had left there earlier?” Lillian persisted. “Then he must have known they’d be there. Or how about this, which is even more confusing: he told Zadik, ‘Hang on a minute, let me step into these coveralls before I bash your brains with a drill.’ Like, ‘Let me just put these clothes on so I won’t get myself all messed up.’” She glanced around with the air of a little girl showing the grown-ups how smart she is.

  “No, darling.” Balilty sighed. “Don’t you remember what we said about Zadik’s autopsy? I mean, we discussed this this afternoon, and you were certainly there: we said that the pathologist found a large bruise on the base of Zadik’s skull, near the neck, which indicates that he lost consciousness first, and only then there was the business with the drill. Capisce?”

  “The guy rammed him with the tool, he didn’t drill a hole in his head. That’s why there was no noise,” Eli Bachar explained.

  Lillian hung her head. “The official results from the pathologist haven’t come back yet,” she claimed. “I don’t remember all that because I haven’t seen it in writing.”

  “So you’re going to have to take my word for it, sweetheart,” Balilty said softly. “First the guy cracked him over the head, then, when Zadik lost consciousness, he pulled on the coveralls and creamed him with the drill. Got it now?”

  “Do me a favor, Danny,” Tzilla said as she wrapped her arms around herself, “spare us the gory details, will you?”

  “So did he know or didn’t he?” Lillian persisted.

  “Did who know what?!” Balilty shouted.

  “The murderer,” Lillian said. “Did he know about the maintenance man or not?”

  “Even if he didn’t know,” Tzilla said impatiently, “even if it all developed spontaneously—let’s say it wasn’t premeditated—then the scenario could have been something like this: you enter the office, something happens that makes you need to eliminate the other guy, you whomp him without giving it much thought, then you notice the work clothes and the tools and you get a great idea. What difference does it make if he knew or he didn’t know?”

  “Nobody knew that a technician was supposed to come,” Michael announced. “Only Aviva. Zadik himself had completely forgotten about it. Aviva had set it up in advance, and it was penciled in to her appointment book, but in a way nobody from the outside could have understood. We checked it out.”

  Lillian, however, was not appeased. “How? Did she write in code? In a secret language?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Tzilla said, a note of victory in her voice. “You’d be very surprised. She writes first names only or even just initials and a phone number and nothing else. She says she got used to setting up meetings that way when she managed the office of a division commander during her arm
y service, since everybody was always walking in and taking a peek.”

  “That’s also not a bad method for making sure your boss is completely reliant on you,” Balilty added. “It’s typical of single women who have no lives and no family and their work is their whole life. They make sure the boss can’t manage without them.”

  “Not everyone is like that,” Lillian said. She threw him an offended glance. “Some women—”

  “Let’s get on with it,” Michael said. “Do you have the list, Eli, the one with who entered and exited the building, and when? Rubin’s doctor friend, for example. Is that marked in? Hand the list over to Tzilla and just tell us who the problematic people are.”

  “No one,” Eli Bachar answered. “No one’s problematic. On the face of it nobody’s…everyone…the time span is just too narrow,” he explained.

  “I would get back to the question of motive,” Michael said.

  A ruckus broke out in the room. “Whoa, pipe down,” Michael said. “Let’s discuss motives with regards to the murder of Zadik.”

  The room fell silent.

  “What’s so difficult here?” Shorer asked. “There’s no man alive without enemies. A man without enemies is a dead man.”

  “Even dead men have enemies,” Balilty muttered. “Believe me, my sister-in-law’s mother—” He glanced at Michael and shut his mouth.

  “All right,” Eli Bachar said. “The director general did not like Zadik.”

  “Let’s get serious,” Rafi said irritably. “The director general didn’t like Zadik? Oh, come on!”

  “I’m just doing what I was asked,” Eli Bachar said with mock innocence. “But if you’re asking for my impression, I’d say that folks at Israel Television really liked Zadik. All of them, even in the canteen. They’re bawling down there like—”

  “Fine,” Michael said. “Then we’re asking for your impression.”

  “You see, that’s something else altogether,” Eli Bachar said. “My personal impression, no basis in fact for this whatsoever, is that, well—did you see the five o’clock news? When they announced Zadik’s death?”