Murder in Jerusalem (27 page)

“Anything specific?” Michael asked.

“Decent people with high moral standards are not always well loved, if you get my meaning,” she said, and her tone of voice surprised him. He had not expected her to sound so quiet and reflective. “You think I hated her because of Rubin, but I didn't, I actually didn't. I didn't have anything against her, but she was annoying, believe me. Decent people with high moral standards,” she continued contemplatively, “sometimes go too far. I mean, they become
too
decent. Annoying, if you get my drift.”

He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“They—if they demand a certain ethical standard, let's say they check everything twice, don't report overtime hours, won't let you cheat the government out of a penny. Well, that can get to be a drag. It's so sanctimonious. People like that expect to impose their standards on everyone. So they make enemies. That's what I wanted to tell you, because I heard—” She fell silent.

“Yes?” he asked, his interest piqued. “What did you hear?”

“People are saying it wasn't just some accident, and I felt it too—how can I say it? I heard that someone else was there, in the corridor of the String Building. I heard that Matty Cohen, poor guy…and that makes me nervous. Is it true?”

“Is there anyone specific you're referring to when you mention ‘enemies'?”

She glanced under the table in search of one of the clogs she had let slip to the floor the moment they had sat down. “I uh, I don't feel comfortable,” she said, her eyes on the glass partition. “Hefetz is snooping around like some—”

Michael did not turn his head to look. “Anyone specific?” he repeated.

“No,” she said after a long pause. “No one specific.”

“But you yourself weren't crazy about her.”

She shrugged but did not respond.

 

“You want to come to my office?” Hefetz grumbled when Michael exited from the inner office. “Or would you prefer the canteen?”

“Let's sit in your office,” Michael suggested. He stood as far away as possible from Hefetz, who was at least a head shorter than he, in order to blur the difference between their respective heights. “If you're ready.”

Hefetz led the way through the newsroom, stopping to watch the monitor. “Turn up the volume for a minute,” he ordered. The room filled with the voice of one of the inner-circle participants of the live-broadcast political affairs program. A bleached-blond young man was shouting, “She's not even her biological daughter,” as he fingered the row of earrings that ran the length of his left ear. “Mia adopted her with her previous husband, André Previn, when she was like eight years old. Woody Allen is absolutely right, in his place I would have left that hysterical Mia Farrow, too.” There was applause from the audience, and raucous laughter. “In any event,” the young man said, “it's really cool how they got married in Venice, it's so romantic, and—”

“He could be her grandfather,” a woman on the other side of the table shouted. “He's thirty-five years older than she is!”

“More power to him!” the young man said. “It's more natural that way. There have been studies that show that an older man with a younger woman—”

“That's a senseless generalization,” someone from the outer circle shouted. “Don't make generalizations.”

Hefetz waved his hand as if to dismiss them all. “Israel's on fire—the president's brother has been taking bribes, concessions are being granted on Channel Two—and these people are preoccupied with who Woody Allen is screwing. I've never been able to stomach the guy, he's a boring old windbag. Come on,” he said, turning to Michael, “we'll leave them to it.” At the entrance to his office he was still on the topic. “You see what they're dealing with? And that's a
political
program, not just any old show. Things sure wouldn't look like that if I were in charge. That's—that's the flagship of Israel Television!”

H
ow insignificant is a parent's ability to ensure his child's happiness. When they are young, you still have a chance, but at the end of the day—which comes sooner than expected—they must shake off your protection, must stand on their own, both for their own good and for yours. Like Yuval, Michael's only son, who for quite a long time had been disastrously involved with a young woman who was “making his life a misery,” but could not or would not break up with her. (Michael often wondered, every time that formulaic expression entered his mind, whether she was really the one who had made Yuval's life a misery; as always, a cloud of distress and sorrow enshrouded his son's name in his consciousness.) No fatherly influence would improve matters in this case; Michael was incapable of helping Yuval, nor could he teach him from his own experience. After all, his own life was no shining example in this sphere, and not just because his marriage to Yuval's mother had failed; since the time of his divorce, eighteen years earlier, he had found no woman he wanted to spend his life with. Not that he had not fallen in love. He had, in fact, and more than once. But somehow it was always with the “wrong” women, love always involved some insurmountable obstacle—an objective one—like the two women who were already married.

The telephone rang, and although it was nearly two in the morning, the ringing did not disturb him. He was happy to be summoned, since he could not sleep. “The torment you're experiencing has nothing to do with having quit smoking; after two or three weeks your body has weaned itself.” This was what Emmanuel Shorer, his close friend and boss, had told him. It was Emmanuel who had taken responsibility for serving as a father figure to Michael fifteen years earlier and had brought him to work for the police when he was desperate for money due to Nira's demands for alimony (and thus had in an instant, at a crucial moment, prevented him from completing his doctoral thesis on the relations between masters and apprentices in the guilds of the Middle Ages, and from entering academic life). “Your suffering is psychological. Believe me, I've been there, I know what you're going through,” Shorer had reminded him. “Do you prefer to wait until it's too late for you? Until you get a heart attack, like I did? Isn't shortness of breath enough for you?” And yesterday, when Michael had returned to work after two weeks of vacation during which he had spent most of his time flat on his back at home, Balilty, the intelligence officer who fancied himself Michael's close friend, had looked him over. “Having a rough time, are you?” he had asked. “Terrible,” Michael had confessed, without—for once—censoring his words, and proceeded to tell him about his difficulties concentrating and his insomnia.

“It's all in your head,” Balilty had said, as expected. “Your body is clean, but that's what happens with psychological addiction.”

“Well, what about the mind? Doesn't that count for something?” Michael had teased. “Isn't what we
feel
reality?”

If one more person said something to him about psychology, the soul, and the ethereal nature of emotional addiction…He had been smoking nonstop since the age of seventeen, more than thirty years, at least twenty or thirty cigarettes a day; he was incapable of imagining himself without smoking. Were it not for his pact with Yuval, that together they would quit (Yuval himself had begun smoking at sixteen; how was it possible to stop your teenage son from making the same mistakes you had?), he never would have managed it. A few times he had been tempted; there were cigarettes in the house, he had not thrown them out. All he had to do was enter the kitchen and, without looking, stick his hand into the back of the bottom drawer. “What's the big deal?” a faint, deep voice full of intelligence and secret echoes whispered seductively. “Just one, your last.” But that seductive voice was ignoring the
next
cigarette. “Not even a single puff,” Balilty had warned him. “I'm talking from experience. How many times did I quit before I really quit? That one cigarette isn't the problem. It's the
next
one after it. Because what's the point of smoking one cigarette if there isn't another one to follow? There's no point in smoking just one. A cigarette is simply one drag that leads to the next. A cigarette
is
the next cigarette. And that way you find yourself right back where you started in no time.” He had inclined his head and gazed peculiarly at Michael, then he had smiled and added, “Just don't get fat. It's easy to substitute food for cigs, and that special look of yours could be ruined. If you get fat, the girls won't chase after you so much. Then again,” he said, thinking aloud, “you…you don't use artificial sweetener for sugar and you don't drink instant coffee in place of Turkish coffee. What I mean is, you're not the type for substitutes. Maybe you could smoke an after-dinner cigar in another year or two, cigars aren't dangerous because you don't inhale into your lungs.”

Well, he was not eating more and had not gained weight, perhaps because he could not fall asleep and had started walking at night. At first it was around the neighborhood, and later it was longer distances; once he had walked all the way to the village of Aminadav, where a night watchman had had to rescue him from a band of wild dogs.

It was the investigations officer who had been summoned to Natasha's apartment by Schreiber who phoned Michael at two o'clock in the morning. “I figured you'd be interested in this because I understand from Zamira that you're dealing with two cases from Israel Television.” (Zamira, the division coordinator, knew everything that was going on, since all written material—work schedules, transfers of materials and files—passed through her hands and was under her authority. She was a large woman of forty with especially thick legs who nonetheless insisted on wearing short, narrow skirts topped with billowy blouses, her short blond ponytail swishing from side to side. She always gave preferential treatment to Michael and told him of her woes with men, and especially about the problems she was having with her teenage son.) “We're not talking about tire-slashing like they did to the television crew van when it was parked next to the home of Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, it's like—well, truth is,” the investigations officer concluded, “it's totally fucking insane. I've never seen anything like it. We didn't touch a thing, you'll see it for yourself; even when we didn't think it was connected to anything else, well, if you understand what I mean…I don't think it's connected, but after two deaths, well, just in case…”

The rain had let up, but a strong wind was blowing. Puddles sparkled on the empty roads, and in the darkness the huge bulldozers that stood in front of the new luxury development being built across from Sha'arei Zedek Hospital looked like enormous, silent beasts. He rolled down the windows of his car and breathed the clean air and the scent of rain and wet earth deeply into his lungs. For a moment, Jerusalem smelled like the garden of his childhood home, the smell of steam rising from wet earth and the smell of darkness that did not threaten but in fact had a calming effect. It seemed possible to believe this was a normal city whose inhabitants were comfortably tucked into their beds and sleeping as if protected from all evil. Because the streets were empty apart from two police vans at the Valley of the Cross and the occasional sauntering taxi in search of customers, he made it in seven minutes, and parked his car where the officer had told him, on Nissim Bachar Street near the Mahane Yehuda farmers' market, facing the stairway that leads to the steep and winding Beersheva Street, which is off limits to traffic. (“There
is
a way of getting your car in,” the investigations officer had told him. “Jerusalemites know it, but it'll take me longer to explain it to you than for you to park and walk the distance on foot.” Even after living in Jerusalem for thirty years and having completed his high school education at a boarding school there, Michael was still not considered a true Jerusalemite.) He took the narrow stairs two at a time until he reached the floodlight that had been placed in front of the white metal door and found himself facing the head of a sheep hanging from the door frame, swaying in the wind and dripping blood in a heavy stream. The sheep's round, brown eyes stared straight ahead with a look of trust and innocence.

“I'm Yossi Cohen, don't you remember me?” the investigations officer said to Michael, sounding offended. “We met at Balilty's son's bar mitzvah.” With one hand he pinched the wet fur collar of his army jacket together. “He's here,” the man said into the transmitter he held in his other hand. Returning to Michael, he said, “It's a good thing you came down here. I'm going crazy with so much to do. I woke Balilty up, too. You won't believe it, I've still got to file an eye-rep with the IIO.”

“What? What was that?” Schreiber had sidled up to them and had overheard the policeman. “Was that Hebrew?”

“Yes, it was,” the officer responded impatiently. “I said I have to file an eyewitness report with the Intelligence and Investigations Office.” To Michael he said, “Our friend Balilty is on his way here now. As soon as he heard you'd be here, he wanted to come too. Should be arriving in a few minutes,” he added, pleased.

“Aren't you people going to take this down?” Michael asked, indicating the bloody sheep's head hanging from a rope and casting black shadows that danced all around them, even on the dark puddle of slowly dripping blood gathering under the dangling sheep's head.

“In a little while. I didn't want to take it down until…the forensics people will be here soon. There was a note attached,” the officer said as he handed a piece of cardboard to Michael. Michael examined the drawing of a skull with the words YOUR END IS NEAR printed in red ink in large, distorted capital letters. “Better that Balilty should see this too,” the officer said. “If he's on his way anyway, then he may as well see this. But you can wait inside; I'll wait for them here. Outside.”

 

The kerosene heater was of no use; the room was terribly cold. It was a Jerusalem cold—dense, powerful—of old stone rooms. Schreiber stood rubbing his hands over the soot-covered grid of the heater. “She didn't want to call you people,” he said casting a look of reproach at Natasha. “It took me a while to convince her, but in the end I told her she could do whatever she wanted, but there was no way I was getting mixed up with them.”

“Who's ‘them'?” Michael asked.

“These religious fanatics,” Schreiber said. He moved to the half-open door and lit a cigarette there. “It's pretty clear they did this, don't you think? Believe me, I know those people.”

The room was very small, most of the space taken up by a single bed in disarray. A few sweaters lay in a pile upon it, and at the other side of the room, in a niche in the thick wall, was a clothes hook with several shirts and one skirt hanging from it. There was a pile of books on the floor next to the bed, and perched on a woven-straw stool stood a book in Russian, open facedown. A makeshift kitchen stood facing the doorway; there were water spots and mold on the wall near the electric burner, a single pot and pan hanging there, and a dish rack with three plates, two mugs, a few spoons, two forks, and a knife. Behind a half-open door there was a bathroom: a toilet, a sink, and a faucet with a shower hose.

Michael looked around the room; everything was utilitarian and meager except for a blue vase with a clutch of wilting wild daffodils that stood on the only table in the room, and a long, narrow print in a thin wooden frame hanging over the bed. The print showed a solitary and peculiar tower standing erect in an empty brown field; one side of the tower was brightly lit and the other shaded, the shadow extending from two people, small and displaced, posed in the middle of the foreground. He wondered how it was that in spite of the bright white light on the illuminated side of the tower, the picture exuded the feeling that the light did not have the power to illuminate this world, as though the shadows had overwhelmed it and the blackness in the background was about to flood the entire picture. Four flags blew loftily in the wind from the top of the tower, but even these brought no happiness. The mood of the entire picture was one of regret, of interminable loneliness. Who had painted this picture, he wondered, and why did it disturb him so? Underneath it, in a corner of the bed, folded in between the wall and the simple wooden table on which stood the vase of daffodils and a few plates with the remains of dried-up hummus and pita bread, was Natasha, huddled under a gray army blanket and shaking nonetheless. Michael looked into her clear blue eyes and saw no fear there.

“It's like she doesn't care,” Schreiber said, “but at first, from the shock of it, she screamed. After that, nothing. She wanted to clean it up. It took me a long time to convince her to call the police. I didn't let her touch all the blood and filth, I wanted you to see it as it was…. Anyway, I took pictures of it all,” he said, adding in a faint voice, “It was
her
idea.”

“What was Natasha's idea?” Michael asked. From outside the apartment they could hear the forensics people arriving, and Balilty's voice a moment later. “Taking pictures?”

“No, taking pictures was my idea,” Schreiber said. “Calling you was her idea,” he explained, lowering his eyes. “She said that you—”

“Schreiber, shut up already,” Natasha said. Her voice burst forth from between her narrow hands, which were wrapped around her small face.

“What? What did I say wrong? Didn't you tell me to call him? You said he was the only one worth his salt.”

“There's no reason to hurt people's feelings,” Natasha mumbled, looking out the half-open door. “There are other people here. Everybody needs a good word.”

 

The wives of the striking workers had watched Natasha's flop on television, too. In the living room of the Shimshi household in a town near Israel's northern border they kept their eyes on the enormous television—which took up the entire surface of the glossy brown console—and listened as Natasha at first made her highly emotional announcement (they were waiting for the item about their husbands) and then her retraction and apologies. “Corrupt, the whole lot of them,” muttered Esty, Rachel Shimshi's sister-in-law. “Everywhere you look, it's all just filth.” She laid her hands on her protruding belly. Rachel Shimshi looked at her suspiciously, as though she were predicting the future.