Murder in Jerusalem (4 page)

“You look awful, Natasha,” Rubin said, and in his voice she was surprised to discern not anger, but compassion. “Have you eaten anything today? You look anorexic, no, no, no, don't light a cigarette here, the windows are closed because of all this rain and my throat is already killing me. Come tell me what you think is really going on with Rabbi Elharizi, what you think he's plotting to do with all that money and that getup and Canada. Let's try to guess what could be going on there and why, and then together we'll figure out what to do about it.”

H
ere's the lineup. In spite of everything, we managed to get it done on time,” Niva said as she placed a sheet of paper with the list of news items for the evening program on the table in front of Zadik. “Just look at them,” she added incredulously, handing an identical sheet to Erez, the news editor, who was sitting next to Zadik, and placing another in front of the empty seat next to him. “Unbelievable. I can't get over the fact that everyone's already here. I've never seen this place so full this early in the morning.”

Zadik sat at the head of the long conference table. Pale light penetrated the room through the large window spotted with dried raindrops, throwing light on his short gray hair and the last traces of night in his red eyes and in the dark circles under them, which gave his full, round face the look of an exhausted playboy. He looked at the serious expressions of all those present, then glanced up at the clock hanging on the wall opposite, behind the two monitors broadcasting Channel One and Channel Two, respectively. He intended to reply to Niva—the veteran secretary of the News Department, known for her sharp tongue—with something witty, but his own secretary, Aviva, beat him to it. As usual, she was sitting behind him in a comfortable chair as though not even listening, scrutinizing the dark line she had drawn around her full lips, then placing the lipstick and the small, round mirror inside her makeup kit and the makeup kit inside her purse. She zipped up her purse with a flourish, placed it under her seat, and said, “It's just too bad that somebody had to die around here for people to show up for the morning meeting on time.” She stretched one long leg to the side and added, “And it's already eight-twenty, even today we're running late,” then examined her calf and the narrow ankle below it.

Zadik pulled the perforated edges from the paper, went over the lines of the chart and the air times for each item with the pen he had just banged on the table to call the meeting to order, and added two exclamation points after the words “gaining momentum,” which appeared next to the headline STRIKE TODAY. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Niva's pink scalp peeking through her short and wispy red hair. She had arrived at work a few days earlier with this new red haircut in place of the disheveled gray curls she had had previously. She leaned toward Aviva, touching her shiny red shoe. “New?” she asked.

“Can you believe it, one hundred and twenty shekels, Italian leather, and look how nicely it shows up my leg,” Aviva said, smiling, as she meticulously straightened the sleeves of her thin blue sweater, folded her arms, and stretched her body so as to show off her breasts. For a brief moment Zadik regarded these two women, so different from one another; he had often thought about Niva as a woman who had “let herself go,” an expression he had learned from Rubin that meant she did not make an effort to cultivate her femininity. It was Rubin who had explained to him once, on a trip abroad, that women who stop dyeing their hair or watching their figures, the ones who hide their bodies in flannel shirts and thick wool socks, can claim a thousand times that they are in favor of the “natural look” and that they are tired of looking like Barbie dolls and that they are fighting to free women from all the bullshit that men have conditioned them to, but the truth is that these are women in despair of ever attracting men again. And worse: these are women who have given up on the need to appear as if they believe there is still a chance that someone could love them, given up even on the need to
pretend
that they hope they will find some such man. It stood to reason that Niva would be jealous of Aviva, or mock her, because in appearance Aviva was her total opposite, a gorgeous blonde who, according to Zadik's calculations, had to be at least forty years old but did not look a day over thirty-five. Her fluttering eyelids, her long, long lashes, her laughter that rang out everywhere, the fulllipped smile she had for every male, the way she touched one long red fingernail to the edge of her lips in a way that promised…had he not known her as long as he had, he might have…but it was better not to think of such things, they would only bring trouble. Instead, it would be a good idea to get the lineup started. Every morning he had to remind them how important it was for them to be present and focused at the morning meeting, and how important it was to begin the critical summary of the previous evening's program on time and to move on quickly to that day's first lineup, which was bound to change twenty times. But nothing helped. For three years he had had to clap his hands and yell and shout, and suddenly disaster had struck, and at least this: they had all assembled around the table—or nearly all of them. “It's too bad that it takes a disaster,” he said, removing his glasses, “for everyone to be here at eight-twenty in the morning.” Again he banged his pen on the table. “People, people,” he called. “Quiet, please!”

“What's all your shouting about?” Niva quipped as she placed a mug of coffee next to the page in front of him. “It's as quiet as a cemetery in here.” She was immediately sorry and threw him a look that begged forgiveness. “Excuse me,” she said, lowering her gaze.

Aviva waved her hands in the air, and she too shouted, “Quiet!” then moved her chair to the side so that Hefetz, director of the News Department, could squeeze by to get to his seat between Erez, the news editor, and Zadik. Zadik cleared his throat, and just then, with all eyes upon him, the room filled with the noise of a drill and the pounding of a jackhammer, the kind used to break walls down. Through the glass partition he could see the profile of a maintenance man in the foreign correspondents' office next door, a large drill in one hand, his mouth covered against the dust.

“I don't believe it,” Zadik muttered. “Now? Right now? This is absurd, like…like some Marx Brothers movie.”

“Stop right now!” Niva shouted. “Keep quiet a minute!” she exclaimed as she ran to the window and pounded it with her fists. The maintenance man stopped working and the drill fell silent. The jackhammer pounded twice more, and there was the sound of a wall crumbling before it, too, ceased.

“People,” Zadik said in a low, hoarse voice as he scribbled lines on the page in front of him, “first and foremost I want to say a few words about this tragedy that has befallen us. A tragedy,” he said with a sigh. As he raised his head he caught the eye of Danny Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs, who was sitting at the far end of the table, near the corner, his chin in his hand. “A tragedy, there is simply no other word to describe it. We have lost our Tirzah. Anyone who worked with her knows what a tragedy this is. That woman…what can I say? If you say ‘Tirzah Rubin,' you've said it all. Isn't that true?”

The telephone rang stubbornly and incessantly; Niva pounced on the receiver, speaking in a loud whisper: “What do you mean, ‘it needed a double cutting'?” Zadik took in Danny Benizri's long, dark, narrow face as he straightened up, rubbed the thin pink scar that ran from his right eyebrow toward his ear, and nodded in confirmation.

“One could even say there was a certain symbolic meaning in the way Tirzah…,” Zadik said, now refusing to allow the telephone or Niva or anything else to prevent him from saying what he had prepared and practiced since six o'clock that morning, “…by a scenery flat, near the scenery room. A terrible accident, but…” Just then he noticed the murmuring around him, sentence fragments ringing in his ears: “Did it happen quickly?” Miri, the language editor, asked Aviva. Karen the anchorwoman butted in. “Yes. She didn't suffer.”

Zadik raised a finger to each temple and pressed hard. He had not slept all night. Only at four a.m., after he had sat with a police officer and answered all his questions, had he informed Rubin. After that he sat with Rubin for an hour or longer while Rubin, pale and trembling, shook his head, buried his face in his hands for a long moment, straightened up, wiped his forehead, and said angrily, “How could you have let Benny see her like that? Why didn't you call me? I was in the editing room, you didn't even try to find me. Who was with him? I've got to get over to Benny's, I've got to see him.”

Zadik could not for the life of him understand how someone like Arye Rubin could mourn a woman who had left him years earlier, or how he had remained best friends with Benny Meyuhas, the man she had left him for. No one even understood why Tirzah had left Rubin. It was clear how much he loved her, even if she'd been no raving beauty, even if he'd had dalliances with other women. Rumor had it that women were crazy about Rubin. He, Zadik, himself had seen Rubin in action more than once, most notably on a business trip they had made together to England ten years earlier; he would never forget the way the young assistant to the director of the BBC archives had looked at him. She was a platinum bombshell, like Jayne Mansfield—who remembers Jayne Mansfield today?—with the body of a starlet. Rubin and the girl had disappeared that same evening for twenty-four hours. To this very day, if he needed something from the BBC, he asked Rubin to use his connections there. He'd heard that the young lady had been appointed to an important position there and that she had had two husbands since then, but for Rubin she was willing to toss everything aside and meet him at any opportunity, even once during a stopover Rubin made on the way to the United States. Rubin had never told him all this, but someone had seen him; maybe it was Matty Cohen himself, he couldn't be sure. But with Tirzah it was something altogether different; everyone knew it was she who had left Rubin, and not vice versa, though no one knew why. If it was because of other women, well, Rubin had always had someone on the side, so that was nothing new. Maybe, in fact, Tirzah hadn't actually known about the other women and had suddenly heard about them from someone for the first time. Maybe someone had informed her.

Zadik stole a glance at Niva and caught her profile, noticed how she had aged in the last year: the sagging double chin, the wobbly flesh of her neck, everything betrayed her age, no matter that she had cut her hair as short as a boy's and dyed the stubble bright red, as if she had suddenly been frightened by her own longtime self-neglect and had decided to make one last feeble effort. But nothing would help—not even a diet. He would love to ask her how she felt now that Tirzah was gone, how she
really
felt, but he would not dare. What was there to ask? The path to Rubin was obviously clear now, maybe Niva would get him to commit to her and the kid and all that. It was strange to think that Tirzah had gone to live with Benny Meyuhas; he had never been able to understand that. On the other hand, all those years everyone had known that Benny Meyuhas was in love with Tirzah, that because of her he had never married. But in comparison with Rubin, Benny was, well…he looked like he could be Tirzah's father, with his small, pinched face; really, you couldn't compare the two men at all, even though they were the same age. He, Zadik, had had a lot of time to think it over—after all, he had not slept all night, and there were all those questions the police officer, Eli Bachar, had asked him. He had supposedly come to question him about what had happened, to discuss the accident and shoddy work procedures, but after he had spoken with someone over the phone—Zadik did not hear the conversation, he merely saw Eli Bachar move aside and lower his voice to a whisper—after that, Bachar was asking for a list of the engineers, contractors, technicians, and God knows who else to determine whether this was a case of criminal negligence; that was what he had called it. At first it had seemed as if the whole affair would end with a coroner's examination, and then all of a sudden the guy was asking questions about Tirzah and her personal life, as if there was some connection. How ironic that in this case, Tirzah had been the most negligent party. Zadik should have explained to Police Inspector Eli Bachar how she had always insisted—this time more than ever—whenever it was one of her husband's films and the scenery was particularly expensive, that the scenery should stay where it was, and how in this case she hadn't even agreed to store the scenery in the carpentry workshop until the shooting was wrapped up. Ultimately, even though he was not directly responsible, even Benny Meyuhas could be charged with negligence, as well as Hagar, his assistant and the film's producer. That police inspector had asked to summon them too, even after Zadik repeated himself several times about Tirzah's work procedures and how she herself had instructed the carpentry shop workers where to place the scenery, including the marble pillar. Marble! He goes nuts every time he thinks about that marble pillar. What do these people think, that he has piles of money to dish out? All those claims from Benny Meyuhas that an actor performs differently if he's leaning on a marble column and not a piece of plywood—what bullshit! If it weren't for those crazy ideas of his, no pillar would have crushed Tirzah's skull in. He himself was telling them all the time that this insane wastefulness was the mother of all sins. And if he's already thinking about money, where the hell is Matty Cohen, the guy who had promised to shut down that production? In another forty-five minutes a meeting of department heads was scheduled to take place in his office, and Matty Cohen was expected to attend. But nobody had seen him since yesterday. That stupid production had to be shut down, it had already cost them more than two million—the whole budget for drama—but now they would say it wasn't the appropriate time, that it wasn't fitting to stop Benny Meyuhas just when he'd lost his life partner. Zadik himself couldn't care less whether Tirzah was his legally wedded wife, he was open-minded in these matters, didn't have any prejudices, and anyway, Benny Meyuhas presented her as his wife, so to him, she was his wife. If only someone could explain to him how those two, Rubin and Benny Meyuhas, had remained friends.

With women it could never happen, Zadik had told Hefetz that morning before the news meeting when they were discussing the police investigation. Women would hate each other for the rest of their lives. Forever. Only with men could a friendship like that endure. “But even me, as a man, I'm not sure I could handle it,” he had admitted to Hefetz. “I don't know how I'd manage to remain close friends with a man living with the woman who was once my wife. Even worse, I don't know what I'd do if I still loved her.”