Murder in Jerusalem (13 page)

“You know,” Eli Bachar said after a moment, in a wistful tone he was adopting in order to provoke Max Levin, “the folks from forensics measured the angle of the pillar and calculated the way it falls and all that, and they believe it couldn't have fallen by itself, such a marble pillar could not have just fallen on her skull and crushed it. She would have moved aside.”

Max Levin pressed his hands to his face and rubbed again like someone who had just awakened. From behind the hands covering his face he said, “Believe me, I myself don't understand it. Maybe she was tired…when you're tired you move more slowly, you don't pay attention, maybe—”

“You don't think it's possible that someone pushed the pillar on top of her?”

Max Levin lowered his hands, straightened in his chair—even so he looked short, an impression reinforced by his thin body—and looked at Eli Bachar in astonishment. “Impossible. No way someone would…What? Accidentally?”

Eli Bachar remained silent.

“No, no. That's impossible,” Max Levin said, renouncing the very idea. “Not even worth discussing.” He stared at Eli Bachar and made him feel a certain discomfort in spite of his years of experience. He had asked this question in a mechanical manner, almost without intending to, and had not expected so vigorous a response, that Max Levin would be so personally offended. He wondered about his accent—it did not seem exactly Russian, he could not place it—which thickened when he raised his voice and repeated, “Impossible! No way, you should not even be talking that way. Who would ever want—what is this here, Hollywood? No way that Tirzah—do you know how much people loved her here? Thirty years she's been here, and she doesn't have a single enemy. Believe me, she wasn't an easy person to work with, she drove us all crazy, but you know what? She was fair, so very fair, you just don't find people like that anymore. And how much, how much she cared about people, and helped them. Ask the seamstresses, and even the painters, the carpenters—no question. Ask Avi the lighting technician, he'll tell you the same thing.”

Eli Bachar nodded and rose from his seat. “Yes, Avi's waiting outside, I'll talk to him in a minute. But…where is he now, Benny Meyuhas?”

Max Levin shrugged. “I imagine at home, he's probably…I would bet he's not alone, Hagar must be with him. That's his assistant, his producer, they've been together for years. And friends must be with him at home, but ask Aviva, she'll find out for you. He stood up in a rush and moved to the door, opened it, and called, “Aviva, can you help the policeman here find Benny?”

“Of course,” Aviva said. “Come here, Eli. Your name's Eli, right? Let's try and find him at home. Arye Rubin told me before that he's at home. Come, sit here.” She removed several files from the seat next to her desk and patted it for him to sit there. Eli Bachar looked at her and sat down obediently.

Y
ou see this guy?” Intelligence Officer Danny Balilty asked Matty Cohen as he placed his hand on the shoulder of the tall, thin man who had risen from his seat when he entered the room. The man had come around the desk, stopped in front of Matty Cohen, and shaken Balilty's proffered hand with cool politeness while Balilty hoisted the belt on his trousers over his bulging belly with his other hand. Next to one another the pair looked like Laurel and Hardy. “Take a good look at him,” Balilty continued with obvious pride, as though discussing a close relation he had raised himself. “You're looking at a real artist, and don't forget it. Ilan here is a painter, not just some technician. He's doing us a big favor here, isn't that so, Ilan?”

After nearly an hour sitting across from Ilan Katz, Matty Cohen was wringing his hands and rocking from side to side in the chair, which was too small for his huge frame. He had to give an answer—any answer—not only to satisfy this Ilan Katz, who had sympathetically entreated him to tell him anything that came to mind about the moment he had spotted Tirzah with another person as he made his way above them across the catwalk, but also because he was so very tired and his feet hurt and his left shoulder was bothering him and maybe his arm, too; all he really wanted was for them to leave him alone so he could go home and sleep.

“I'm not really even certain it was Tirzah,” Matty had declared with hesitation at the outset of their conversation. “There was very little light, that area is always dark,” he had said in a pleading voice, but this Ilan Katz, who sat beside him, was staring at him through narrowed lids as though he had heard nothing Matty Cohen had been saying and had no intention of letting him off the hook. His eyes, inside their web of tiny wrinkles, radiated patience and trust and expectation; he merely sat there and without averting his gaze said, for the thousandth time, “Anything. It doesn't matter what, any little thing you can recall, a spot on the wall, a crack in the tiles, anything.”

And because of his persistence, just to get him off his back, Matty Cohen added, “I think he was taller.” He took a sip of water. “The person whose back was to me, he was taller than she was.”

“Aha!” Ilan Katz exulted. “You see? I knew you'd remember!” He tossed aside the vague drawing he had made, quickly scribbling instead on a new blank white sheet of paper two figures, the profiles of a woman and a slightly taller man. “You see? Every single word teaches us something,” he summed up with satisfaction, squinting at his work. “You said ‘he,' so it's clear it was a man you saw, and you said ‘back,' which means he was facing the woman and maybe he attacked her, even if you yourself don't know it. Let's give him a few more characteristics according to what you remember. We always remember more than what we think we do,” he added in a paternal tone.

The events of that morning after a sleepless night, his son's ceaseless cough and red face burning with fever, Malka's hysteria—what kind of mother was she, always at wit's end?—the news about Tirzah, all these people that would not stop questioning him and pleading with him and demanding things from him and putting pressure on him, the talking, the threats—all these had unnerved him. Even Hagar, who had caught him on his cell phone on the way back from the hospital and warned him not to try and put a stop to Benny's production, had left a bad taste in his mouth. True, he had told her he was not a person to be threatened, had added that there was no reversing the decision; but still the conversation with her had been highly distressing and weighed heavily on him. “You are completely heartless,” she had told him. Why heartless? Are responsibility and heartlessness one and the same? Let someone try and tell him that being responsible meant being mean. All in all he merely had a sense of responsibility. What was she talking about, what had he wanted? After all, this wasn't exactly his father's money; he was just doing his job properly. But he hated to be the guy who cut off the money supply, the guy everyone loves to hate. People at work thought he was the bad guy simply because he was the one who doled out the money. No one knew he was really a good person, someone who hated strife and contention. He should have left this job ages ago; he belonged elsewhere, in a different job. He should have been an accountant or at least a tax consultant. He had started studying accounting, and if it had not been for Tamar, he would have finished his studies by now and would have had his own firm, the works. But she had run off with their daughter after two years of marriage and for the past eight years had been bleeding him dry. He had been willing to let her go—“Just leave the kid here and get out”—but she would have none of it, had gone instead to a lawyer who had milked him for everything he was worth. He had given her half the apartment, half their savings, alimony, and in addition to everything she had turned the child against him. And now this morning, first Tirzah Rubin, then that officer from Investigations, Eli Bachar, then the trip to police headquarters; he had never set foot in there before, except for one time when he had come to give testimony on behalf of a neighbor who had been attacked. What reason would he have for being at police headquarters? He had never broken the law. And here he was like some criminal, entering from the back gate, from the parking lot. From there Eli Bachar had led him through the building where everyone could see him—in fact he thought he had caught a glimpse of Epstein from Maintenance—through a long hallway, motioning him to follow him up to the third floor. Eli Bachar had run ahead; Matty Cohen was breathless trying to keep up, he was nearly choking by the time he reached the end of the hallway, and just at the end, when it seemed that there was no more hallway left to pass through, Eli Bachar had opened a white door and suddenly another hallway appeared, a completely new wing, the smell of fresh paint and wood pungent, the rooms empty. In the last room sat this intelligence officer, Balilty, with bags under his beady eyes. Both men had sat facing him, and once again he had had to drink coffee even though he was forbidden to do so; he felt the blood humming behind his ears, the throbbing in his head. How the men had pestered him! Was Tirzah well liked, did she have enemies, what was her relationship with Benny Meyuhas like, did one of the Scenery Department workers hold a grudge against her, was Arye Rubin a real Don Juan, could there be women who…they even mentioned Niva and the boy. As for him, he had always hated gossip and slander. How many times had he told them that Tirzah was a fine person, pedantic but fair, and that she had had no enemies, and that anyway, it had been an accident. After that they were all over him, asking him over and over again why he had gone there at night. And he had tried to explain about their work procedures, why it had been necessary for him to go there in the middle of the night to put a stop to the filming. “You don't understand,” he had said. “We have a certain budget for original drama, and he used it all up. Now he's filming additional scenes, patching up scenes, and these additions alone are costing fifty thousand dollars.”

“I don't understand what these additions are,” Eli Bachar said. “Does it mean he's shooting the same scenes over again, or new ones?”

“Both, really, along with changes in the screenplay that require reshooting the scene.”

“I've heard he's a perfectionist, Benny Meyuhas. Is that right?” Eli Bachar asked him.

“And how,” Matty Cohen said, then immediately felt he had said too much. The way Benny Meyuhas worked was nobody's business outside of Israel Television.

“How much have you people invested in this production?” Balilty asked. “What's the budget for a film like this?”

Matty Cohen hated answering that kind of question and especially disliked discussing the budget with people who had no need to know. “I don't recall exactly,” he said at last. “A drama like this costs a lot to produce, believe me. But this isn't connected to Tirzah's accident…” He could feel his shirt growing damp with sweat. It was cold, and rain was falling outside, but inside this room it was too hot, he felt he was suffocating even though he had removed his necktie, folded it neatly, and stuck it inside his jacket pocket. He felt as though he were being choked, as if something had tightly encircled his neck. He did not say a word about how Benny Meyuhas had been shunted aside over the years, how he was only given the unimportant directing jobs: children's programming and shows about religion, that sort of thing. He said nothing about the charitable foundation that had suddenly popped up from overseas, some anonymous benefactor with a fund for adapting the masterpieces of Hebrew literature to the screen. Were it not for that fund, Benny Meyuhas would never have been given the go-ahead to start with Agnon. But nothing was good enough for Meyuhas. He had used up all the foundation money as well as the entire budget for original drama.

Balilty was persistent. “How much is ‘a lot'? How much are we talking, a million? Two?” His eyes were twinkling, and it was clear he would never give up.

“I don't exactly recall,” Matty Cohen answered. No one would force him to give out such information to no end. He was not the type to air dirty laundry in public.

Balilty would not let it go. “I'm asking ballpark, I'm not looking to quote you.”

It was clear this would never end. He had to tell him something. “Around two million.”

“Dollars or shekels?”

“Dollars, dollars, with productions we talk in dollars, but we write the budget in shekels.”

Balilty whistled.

“That's not a large budget for a film,” Matty Cohen said defensively. “Overseas that's small change, but here in Israel…”

But Balilty looked at Eli Bachar and said quietly, as though Matty Cohen could not hear, “Look what kind of money we're talking about here. Did you hear that? This is no laughing matter: with sums like that, anything's possible.”

“That's not money that someone receives,” Matty Cohen explained. “That's money for the film's budget; no one gets his hands on it. Everyone's on salary.”

Balilty did not respond, merely scribbled something on the paper he was holding, folded it, and said, “I'm asking you again: you don't remember anything about what you saw down below? Who was with Tirzah? Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you agree that at that hour not just anybody could be standing there?”

Matty Cohen explained once again that when he had seen her, he was in a hurry, that he had been on his way out to the roof, and then afterwards, making his way back across the catwalk, he had peered down but could not stop to look because he was rushing home to take his son to the emergency room. All to no avail; nothing helped his cause.

“Don't worry about it,” Balilty had said as he rose from his chair, “we'll help you remember. Come with me, I'm taking you to someone who knows how to make you remember. We've got this guy, it's like he fishes out your memories, he's an expert in pulling them out from way down deep.”

Now this tall, thin man sitting across from him, whose angular knees were almost touching his own, was fingering his blond, wispy beard and tugging on his pointy nose. “Now just tell me, without giving it any thought: you must have seen his head. Was he wearing a hat? A skullcap?”

“I don't think so,” Matty Cohen said as he wiped his face. A wave of cold passed through him, then the shivers, like symptoms of a high fever. His shirt was now completely wet with sweat, but he was cold, and slightly nauseous. His left shoulder was in pain and he had chest pains and he could feel the food rising in his stomach. But what had he eaten? A few cold bourekas and all that coffee. Still, he felt as if he had eaten something rotten.

“So he wasn't wearing a hat. Was he bald, or did he have a head of hair?” Ilan Katz touched his own high forehead, readjusted his skullcap, tugged at his nose again. He reminded Matty Cohen of a picture of Pinocchio in a book he had had as a child.

“No, he wasn't bald,” Matty Cohen said, feeling as though any minute he would vomit on the white paper attached to the clipboard perched on the jutting knees of the man sitting across from him.

“How about a skullcap?” Ilan Katz asked while penciling in hair on the taller of the two figures he had drawn. “Straight hair? Curly? Don't think, just say whatever comes to mind. Quickly.”

“No skullcap,” Matty Cohen told him, mopping his sweaty face again. “Can we take a break? I'm not feeling so well.”

“We're almost finished, we're making great progress,” Ilan Katz assured him. The contours of Katz's arm, which was moving rapidly across the page, dimmed, and suddenly Matty Cohen could see several arms in a blur moving up and down, and heard the voice, filled with excitement, as if from a great distance and behind a glass partition asking, “Curly hair or straight?”

“Straight, I think,” Matty Cohen said, forcing himself to sit up straight, grasping the sides of the wooden chair for support and breathing deeply, as if a deep breath might drive away the pain he was feeling in his chest. This was a pain he had come to recognize, not just from several years ago but from these past nights, a paralyzing pain, as if someone had clamped an enormous vise on the left side of his chest and was crushing and bending him; a pain that took his breath away, but which he hoped would pass quickly by itself, without anyone knowing what was happening to him.

“Good job, Matty. You're doing great. Here we go, straight hair. What do you think? Dark or light?”

Matty Cohen did not respond. Because of the pain he was unable to speak, but the artist was oblivious. “Did you notice his legs? His shoes? Let's try the legs. Were they long? Thin? What kind of shoes was he wearing?” Ilan Katz was ecstatic, completely unaware of the man's labored breathing. Matty Cohen had placed his right hand on his chest.

Ilan Katz drummed his fingers, the pencil tightly pressed to the page in front of him. Suddenly he jumped up from his chair with a start, knocking it backward, and stood in front of Matty Cohen. “You've got to tell me quickly, we've got to strike while the iron's hot, it only gets tougher over time. Memory doesn't get better, only worse. Believe me, every hour we remember less.” He waved one long, slender, yellowed finger in front of Matty Cohen's nose. “Something about his clothes. Was he wearing a coat? A suit jacket? A sweater? What?”