Murder in Jerusalem (11 page)

“
Personally
promises,” Shimshi added.

“Personally promises,” Danny Benizri repeated, his pale face filling the screen for a moment before the camera returned to the television studio and the shocked face of the Finance Ministry's director general.

“Will you look at that,” Niva mumbled, still leaning on Aviva's desk, “the DG is actually writing.”

Benizri and Shimshi returned to the screen. Danny Benizri was dictating straight to the camera: “…and will carry out in full within twenty-four hours all agreements regarding salary and severance pay signed by the director general himself seven months ago but never implemented.”

Behind him, Shimshi's voice could be heard. “I want to see the agreement in writing.”

“How are they going to show it to him?” Aviva asked, startled, her eyes on the monitor.

Benizri said to the camera, “Show us the studio.”

As he stroked his neck, Eli Bachar could hear Matty Cohen's noisy breathing. “What a production,” Matty Cohen said as the screen split into two again: the right side showed the studio, the camera focused on the director general as he leaned over the paper in front of him and signed; the left side of the screen showed the group of workers huddled around Danny Benizri, looking into the monitor in front of him.

“Okay, Danny,” Nehemia said from the studio, holding up the paper to the camera. “The director general has signed, now it's time for your side to act.”

On the left side of the screen Shimshi's hand could be seen fluttering over the paper, hesitating, then finally signing. One of the men had leaned over, and Shimshi was using his back as a desk. Then Benizri took the paper from his hands and held it up to the camera.

Everyone in the secretary's office applauded and cheered, except for Aviva, who hurried to dig about in her large purse as though she had been waiting for the moment she would be free to do so. Just then the door to Zadik's office opened, and Zadik stood there, radiant, and called to everyone standing nearby: “Don't say we always screw up. Did you see who saved the day?”

Hefetz, who was standing quite close, said with a big mirthless grin, his eyes blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses, “Good work, everybody, great job. A big day for the News Department.”

“I don't know what you're all so excited for,” Aviva grumbled as she pushed her purse aside in anger. “Nothing good will come of it, you'll see. Remember what I said. Remember, Niva. Are you listening?”

“Why do you always have to be such a killjoy?” Niva said, offended. She returned her foot to her clog. “You always have to put a damper on everyone's happiness, as if—”

“It's not my fault,” Aviva said irritably. “That's life.”

Arye Rubin emerged from Zadik's office and approached the young woman in the doorway. Eli Bachar could only hear him say, “It'll be fine,” saw Rubin place his hand on her shoulder, watched her face brighten. He also noticed Hefetz watching them. For an instant it seemed to him, to Eli Bachar, that Hefetz's dark face paled when the young woman embraced Rubin.

“Who's she?” Eli Bachar asked Aviva quietly.

Aviva looked at Eli and then at the young woman and answered distractedly, “Who? Natasha? That's Natasha.” She clapped her hands like a nursery school teacher and called aloud: “Hefetz, Matty, Yaacobi—all the department heads—you can go into Zadik's office, the meeting is beginning. You're already way behind schedule.”

Hefetz stopped for a moment to watch the monitor as Benizri gazed at the minister's Volvo being escorted by a police car, its siren wailing. Hefetz shook his head, muttered, “
Nu, nu,
if you think this is all behind us you've got another thing coming,” and entered Zadik's office. Inside the office he could be heard saying, “Don't say I didn't tell you so. Did I or did I not tell you: nothing good will come of this. Can something good come of this? No. Nothing good at all will come of this.”

“You, too,” Aviva said, pointing Rubin and Matty Cohen to Zadik's open door. “Max will be in in a moment, after the policeman is finished with him.” Eli Bachar stood in his place, watching them enter Zadik's office. At the entrance to the office Rubin stopped Matty Cohen and asked him quietly—Eli Bachar strained to hear the question—“Is it true you were there last night?” He saw Matty Cohen nod, his face averted to avoid meeting Rubin's gaze, but his eyes met Eli's instead, and he lowered them quickly to the brown wall-to-wall carpet.

“You wanted to put a stop to the production?” Rubin asked him, his tone threatening. “You wanted to stop work on
Iddo and Eynam
?” Matty Cohen breathed deeply and spread his hands wide, as if to say he had no choice.

“Now?! At this stage, after the whole thing has almost been completed?”

Matty Cohen merely shrugged his shoulders and made a face as if to say there was nothing he could do about it.

“We'll talk about this after the meeting,” Rubin told him.

“After the meeting I have to speak with the police,” Matty Cohen answered, glancing to the side at Eli Bachar.

“Why do you have to speak to the police?”

Matty Cohen shrugged and looked around. “That's what they want. Because…,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “because of Tirzah.”

“So after that,” Rubin said.

“Where is everybody, what's with you people?” Zadik shouted in the direction of the door to his office. “Why aren't you coming in? We're waiting for you two.”

Matty Cohen cast Zadik a questioning look. “Should I talk to him now or not?” he asked, indicating Eli Bachar.

“Now,” Eli Bachar said from the doorway of the little office. “Come speak with me first.” He made way for Matty Cohen to pass by.

“Hang on a minute,” Matty Cohen said. “I've got to have a cup of coffee from Zadik's room. I didn't sleep all night. I'll just bring myself a cup of coffee.”

 

At first the two men sat without speaking. Each time the monitor in Aviva's room fell silent, or between rings of the telephone, Matty Cohen could be heard gulping down his coffee noisily or breathing heavily. His flushed and swollen face and his belabored, grating breaths roused Eli Cohen's suspicions: the man looked as though he might choke to death at any minute. Michael Ohayon had taught him to be quiet and wait, but time was pressing and Matty Cohen was not suspected of any wrongdoing and quite shortly he would have to speak with Max Levin and with the lighting technician; after all, this was only a work-related accident, so there was no point in creating a ruckus. (That's what Ohayon had said at night when he had phoned him: “There's no point in my coming. This is an accident, it's standard; what's the matter with you? Are you crumbling under the pressure?” And Eli, in a flash of inspiration, had said, “It's just that I miss you so much, I have no life without you,” to which Ohayon had responded with a laugh: “You've got just a few more hours to endure. It's after one a.m. now, just hold yourself together for another seven or eight hours.”) “I understand you were in the vicinity last night,” Eli Bachar said at last, noting wistfully that Matty Cohen had at that very same moment opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, like some fish in distress.

“Vicinity?” he asked. “What…oh, you mean the place where Tirzah…?”

Eli Bachar nodded. “Were you there at night before she was killed? Did you see her there?”

Matty Cohen explained that just before midnight he had taken the catwalk over the scenery storerooms and that Tirzah had been standing below him, next to the scenery flats.

“Did she see you?” Eli Bachar asked.

“I don't know, I don't think so,” Matty Cohen said thoughtfully. “I was on my way to the roof, where they were filming Benny Meyuhas's film. I didn't want to dawdle. And she…she wasn't alone down there.”

“She wasn't alone?” Eli Bachar swallowed his astonishment and repeated his question to gain time. That, too, he had learned from Ohayon years earlier: exaggerated expressions of surprise will cause the person under investigation to guard his tongue; he will no longer be spontaneous, and you will no longer hear what you could have heard from him. “That is to say, she was with someone?”

“Yes. But I don't know who that was, because it was pretty dark down there and she was hidden by the scenery flats. I could barely make her out, just her boots and her voice.”

“Did she say anything in particular?” Eli asked.

“Not exactly, she just said, like, what I think she said was, ‘No, no,' or something like that.”

“Who was she talking to?” Eli Bachar asked without disguising his agitation. His pulse was racing with this sudden change of circumstance. “Who was with her?”

“That's just it,” Matty Cohen said as he pulled down the sleeves of his blue suit jacket and inspected a gold button. “I don't know.”

“Male or female?” Eli Bachar asked pleasantly, as if there were no urgency in the response.

Matty Cohen frowned in bewilderment. “I can't for the life of me say, it was dark and the other person wasn't talking.”

“What exactly did you see?” Eli Bachar asked. “Describe it for me as if…as if I were a news reporter asking you exactly what you had seen.”

“It was like this,” he answered. “Someone phoned to say that Benny Meyuhas was filming at night—”

“Who?” Eli Bachar asked. “Who called to tell you that?” He scribbled something on the pad of legal paper perched on his knees.

“What does it matter who? Someone phoned,” Matty Cohen answered irritably. “It had been decided that he would have to stop filming because the entire budget had been used up. I came there to catch them red-handed and put a stop to the production. I knew they were on the roof of the String Building.”

Eli Bachar's hand stopped moving across the page. “What? What's that?”

“The String Building,” Matty Cohen answered impatiently. “The other building, where they build the scenery, where…
nu,
String, haven't you been over to the other building? Weren't you there, where they found Tirzah?”

“Yeah, I was. Is that the String Building?”

“That's what it's called, because once it was a string factory,” Matty Cohen explained. “I don't know if you noticed or not, but there is this small flight of stairs that goes up to the second floor, a sort of half-story up, and there's this narrow open hallway, a catwalk with a railing that's above the carpentry workshop and the rooms where they build the scenery. Anyway, you can walk down that catwalk and see what's going on below, no problem. So I was holding on to the railing and walking fast. I was really tired and in a pretty bad mood because I knew that…well, it's not very nice to have to put a stop to filming in the middle, especially not with someone like Benny Meyuhas, who…” Matty Cohen fell silent, lifted himself from the chair with difficulty, removed a crumpled checkered handkerchief from his trousers, and wiped his face. “Are you hot too, or is it only me? The heat is killing me here,” he complained.

“No, I'm not too hot, but maybe it's the central heating that's bothering you,” Eli Bachar answered. He touched the radiator, and a layer of peeling yellowed oil paint stuck to his finger. “Actually, it's stone cold,” he said with surprise. “The heating isn't even on.”

“Cutbacks,” Matty Cohen said with satisfaction. “We only begin heating from four or five in the afternoon, depending on the temperature outside. Where were we?” he asked, glancing at his watch impatiently.

“It wasn't very nice for you to put a stop to Benny Meyuhas's production,” Eli Bachar reminded him. “You were walking along the catwalk, and you looked down below you.”

“Yes, but I didn't stop or anything, because I was on my way to tell Benny…” He sighed. “In the end, I never told him.”

“Why not?”

“Because I never made it there. My wife phoned on my way to the roof, I had to take my kid to the emergency room. He was having an attack, he's got spastic bronchitis. I couldn't…you can't wait with these things, it was really urgent. When he gets these attacks, he chokes. Once he'd turned blue by the time we got him to the hospital. I had the car. My wife doesn't drive, so there was no choice, and she, she's pregnant, and we've already lost…never mind.” He grimaced as if disgusted with his own complaining, with the details, with his own loquacity. “I had to get home urgently.”

“Did you return the same way you came?” Eli Bachar asked.

“Sure, there's no other way. Well, there is, from the back, a shorter way, out to the parking lot, and another from the main building. But my car was in the small parking lot—”

“Which means you went back along that catwalk?”

“Yeah, that's what I said,” Matty Cohen said with annoyance.

“So she was still there?”

“Who? Tirzah?”

“Tirzah and the person who was with her.”

“I didn't notice,” Matty Cohen said, as though astonished by the absurdity of the situation. “I didn't look down, I was anxious about…”

“You were in a hurry,” Eli Bachar said as a way of helping out.

“Exactly, I was in a hurry because of my kid, because my wife said he was already…that's it, I was in a hurry, and I can't tell you if she was still there or not. I don't know where they found her, because only this morning I saw that…” He spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

“She was found next to the scenery, by the pillar, a white marble pillar.”

“I think I remember something like that,” Matty Cohen said. “With a capital at the top? I saw it sometime.”

“That capital crushed her face and her skull,” Eli Bachar stated. He kept his eyes on Matty Cohen, who paled.