Murder in Jerusalem (2 page)

Benny Meyuhas looked to the corner of the roof. Max Levin was the one who had suggested filming Gemullah's promenade on top of the scenery building. The moon lit up the cactus in the rusty bucket they had moved to the side so that it would not appear in the frame, along with the paint-spotted rooftop they had covered in sand. From a corner of the roof, the scent of smoke wafted upward from a grill. The first time Benny Meyuhas had come up to the roof with him and had stared in wonder at the charred grill and the remains of charcoal and the pile of thin bones that cats were gnawing nearby, Max Levin had been embarrassed, as if he were sorry he had brought him to the inner sanctum of his realm. “One of the crew members,” Max explained apologetically in his strong Hungarian accent, “he has a hobby, he keeps a chicken coop next to the compressor, so at night and sometimes in the early morning the guys, you know, while they're waiting, they fry a few eggs from the coop, and sometimes they roast a chicken, not a whole one from the coop, just wings, or a steak on occasion.”

“You people have a whole life up here, don't you?” Hagar had said with a grin. She was standing at the corner of the roof, checking the paint spots. “Turns out that here at Israel Television,” she had said to the sky, “the head of Props is lord of the manor.” Max Levin had grimaced, his face a study in denial and opposition that worried Benny Meyuhas. Benny always tried to remain nonconfrontational with them all: “Maintaining good relations is half the job,” he would say to Hagar and anyone who would listen to him at the start of every production. “We'll have to cover this with something, maybe sand,” Hagar had said as she wrote herself a note on the second page of her legal pad. “You want this place?” she had asked after Benny stood surveying the roof for several minutes. “Over there by the edge,” she had added, “they have a basketball court, too. They've got it great up here, and we had no idea!” Benny had nodded his head, yes, he wanted the place. And to his great good fortune—he didn't even know why—Max Levin was being cooperative.

 

“Cut!” Benny Meyuhas was now calling, looking again at the film and then at the door to the roof. “Hasn't he come back yet?” he murmured as if to himself.

“Who?” asked Schreiber.

“Avi,” Hagar answered from the corner of the roof. “Benny's waiting for Avi, he went to bring the sun gun.”

“But we have enough moonlight,” Schreiber protested.

“A while back, when he went, we didn't,” Hagar said, glancing at her cell phone. “He'll be back soon,” she said, consoling Benny, “and Max will probably be along soon with the horse.”

But she was wrong. For more than ten minutes Avi, the lighting technician, had been standing in front of the guard booth at the entrance to the elongated building, a sun gun in his hand, trying to convince the guard to let him in. “Identification,” the new guard repeated in his odd accent. “No ID, no enter.” Nothing helped. There was no point in phoning Hagar on the roof to come down and save him, since they were in the middle of shooting and she would never answer.

Avi looked around, one-thirty in the morning, not a soul about. Only a persistent new guard, Russian perhaps, or maybe an Argentinian, who chased after him, fought him in his feeble attempt to get past him, unwilling to believe a word he said. Suddenly, at last, a car screeched to a halt and Max Levin stepped out. Short and chubby, he left the car door open as he approached the guard booth, his glasses hanging from a metal chain around his neck, his head inclined to the side. “Max!” Avi cried with joy. “Tell him, tell him I'm with you people on the production.”

“He won't let you in, why should you come in? Don't let him in,” Max instructed the guard. He walked in and waited until Avi's face had completely fallen, and only then returned, smiling, and said something in Hungarian to the guard, who pushed his long, straggly hair back from his eyes, answered Max, and let Avi pass.

“Iggen miggen?” Avi said as they passed inside the building, mocking the Hungarian he had just heard. He lit the way with the sun gun.

“If I were you I wouldn't spit into the well you are drinking from,” Max said. “Especially if Benny is waiting for that sun gun of yours. If I were you I wouldn't be making jokes at all.”

“Tell me something,” Avi said. “Tell me what all this is about. Fetching this and fetching that at one in the morning. You'd think he was the king of England, with all due respect…and what about you? What are you doing here at this hour?”

“A blue horse,” Max answered. “I have to bring him a blue horse. Come here, shine that light into the storeroom, there's not enough light in there,” Max said as he stuffed his rotund body inside the enclosed space under the metal staircase.

“I don't understand anything anymore, nothing at all,” Avi the lighting technician said, as if to himself. “Where you got a plug here? Think you can find it in the dark?” As he spoke he felt along the wall, unraveling the cord. He stuck the plug into a socket he had located and aimed the sun gun toward the inside of the storeroom, turned it on, and pointed it at the black shadows cast on the low walls by blurred objects. “I don't understand how they keep shooting when there's no budget, and how he can send us to bring things when Matty Cohen's on his way here.”

“What are you talking about, on his way here?” Max asked, alarmed, as he extricated a large blue wooden horse from the storeroom. “Now?! You think Matty Cohen would show up here at this hour?”

“You talk as if you don't know what Matty Cohen's capable of,” Avi said, lowering the sun gun to his side. “What's with the horse, anyway?” He did not wait for Max to respond. “I heard in the canteen. Someone leaked to Matty Cohen, whispered the big secret to him about them filming at night, and he wants to catch 'em red-handed. Maybe it's already too late, maybe there's nobody to bring your horse and my sun gun to, because maybe Matty Cohen already shut the whole thing down and everyone took off. That's what I heard in the canteen.”

Max looked at Avi; there was a half-smile on the lighting technician's face. “What are you so happy about?” Max scolded him. “This is Israel Television's most important production, and to you it's a laughing matter.”

“What's the big deal? What's so important about it, huh?” Avi protested. “Everyone's tiptoeing around here, going on and on about Agnon. I mean, it's just Agnon! Tell me, who's gonna watch it, anyway? The ratings'll be zero.”

“You've been working on it for six months, and you don't even know what it's about? Shame on you.”

“What is there to know, huh? It's just about some broad from India.”

“Not from India,” Max explained. “I don't read Hebrew all that well and Agnon is difficult language, and what's more, everyone says this story,
Iddo and Eynam,
is impossible to understand anyway, but she isn't Indian, that much I'm sure of. She's from an oriental Jewish tribe.”

“Like Ethiopian?” Avi reasoned.

“Something like that, I guess, some ancient Jewish tribe,” Max said. “She's a somnambulist, which means she walks around at night singing her songs. Her father marries her off to some intellectual, a researcher, who brings her to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem she wanders the rooftops and sings, that's all I know.”

“My sister's daughter…,” Avi began, pulling the electrical cord from the wall and stepping to the side to make room for Max to pass.

“Shine the light over here,” Max urged him. “What's wrong, you afraid of using up the battery?”

Avi shone the light down the hallway ahead of them as he continued talking. “My sister's daughter had moonsickness, the sleepwalking disease,” he announced to Max's back as he walked quickly behind him, trying to keep up. “She'd wander around at night, and once I woke up and found her standing next to my bed. God, was that scary! I was still a kid myself, I didn't know what moonsickness was, but I sure knew what it was to be scared!”

Now he was shining the light on the scenery flats and the pillars. “Hey, come here, there's someone…,” Avi whispered. “Look, over in the corner next to the pillar, someone's there.”

Max, too, saw the white boot, and then the whole leg in dark pants. Only when they drew near and stood next to the pillar did he bend down for a closer look. Avi shone the light on the face, and a muffled scream escaped his mouth. In a swift movement he turned his head and the sun gun wobbled in his hand, shining in the far corners, on the ceiling, and then it fell to the floor, landing next to the wall and shining on a dark puddle.

“It's Tirzah. Tirzah,” Max Levin whispered. “What's wrong, Tirzah?” he asked hoarsely, crouching to touch her arm. “It's Tirzah,” he said, stunned. He raised his head and looked to his hand. “There's blood, a lot of blood. Her face…look at her face…”

Avi did not respond.

“Listen,” Max called out, choking on his words, “I think something fell on her…the pillar…call an ambulance, she doesn't have a pulse, call an ambulance, quick.”

Avi did not respond. He coughed and coughed, then Max heard him retching. There was blood all around them. Again Max heard Avi vomiting, and with a very cold hand he felt for the cell phone clipped to his belt, and dialed.

 

At that very moment it started raining harder, a heavy downpour that pounded at the windows of the building. But neither the rain nor the pellets of hail that were beating the thin walls made a difference to anyone, not even to Shimshon Zadik—head of Israel Television—who arrived after the police, nodding at Max Levin, who was waiting for him at the entrance as if he had not noticed the rain at all. Dripping water, Zadik stood for a moment in front of the entrance to the String Building and looked suspiciously into the brightly lit hallway. “There was a terrible accident on the way here, just outside of Mevasseret Zion,” he said. “You can't imagine…. There's still a two-hour backup, I made a detour…. It was terrible…two kids…destroyed the car, totaled it, they had to cut the car open with a saw to pull them out, I saw the whole thing with my own eyes…” His face, wet with rain, glowed in the blue light from atop the police van, while the headlights of the ambulance lit up the puddles on the asphalt parking lot. Water flowed from his leather jacket and from his close-cropped hair and from the collar of his shirt, and every step he took down the long hallway lit by spotlights belonging to the team from forensics left a wet footprint in its wake. (“Hold on, hold on a minute,” the guard shouted as he ran after Zadik. “I need your ID!” he had yelled when Zadik first stepped out of the car until Max Levin, who was smoking a cigarette at the entrance to the building, grabbed hold of his arm and said kindly, “Quiet now, it's all right. That man is the head of Israel Television.”)

Water pooled under Zadik as he stood near the body, turning his face away as he murmured, “Tirzah, God, Tirzah!” A police officer whispered something in his ear, and Zadik glanced at the huge pillar lying near the body, and at its bloodstained capital. He bent down and tapped on the pillar. “I don't believe it!” he shouted. “This is real marble, where would she have gotten real marble? What is this, Hollywood?” he asked, choking. Zadik rose to his feet and looked around him. “This is terrible, terrible,” he muttered. “What was she doing here in the middle of the night?”

He shifted his gaze from Avi the lighting technician, who was crouched in the corner, to Max, standing next to him. Then he looked at the crew, who had descended from the roof, his gaze resting finally on Sarah's face, which was pressed into Hagar's shoulder. Zadik noticed her arms trembling in the sleeves of the white gown, and her thin legs, her bare feet. “What's going on here?” he asked hoarsely. “What are all of you doing here at such…”

Max Levin moved closer and whispered something in his ear; Zadik gave him a look of sheer astonishment. “I don't understand,” he said in a parched voice. “You're still filming that? Didn't Matty put a stop to it? Where's Benny? Where is he?” His voice rose with the last words he spoke.

Max indicated with a nod of his head that Benny was up on the roof. “They're trying to keep him away as long as possible, detain him upstairs for a while,” he told Zadik, “until…I thought maybe they would cover her up or something…. He's going to take this very hard.”

Zadik noticed the doctor standing next to the body; the doctor returned his gaze and approached, his hand extended in greeting. “I'm Dr. Elyashiv. As I've already told these people,” he said, indicating the police captain and the members of the forensics team crouching by the body, “this pillar crushed the victim. She was standing here,” he explained, pointing to the wood-frame flats, “and it somehow moved, apparently, and toppled onto her. Her skull is cracked, that much I'm sure of. The pillar could have caused the fracture if she was standing there, and—”

“It's too early to tell,” said a man from forensics as he rose to his feet.

“What's too early to tell?” Zadik demanded to know. “Too early to tell how…?”

Zadik fell silent because just then Benny Meyuhas ran in, pushing through the small crowd and, ignoring the people from forensics, bent his knees and fell on top of Tirzah's body—fell or collapsed, they would argue about it later in the newsroom when they were describing the scene, and someone said it was a shame that Schreiber had not been filming at that moment, but was instead standing in the back, his arms stretched wide as if apologizing for failing to prevent it. Benny Meyuhas lay on top of Tirzah's body, ignoring the protests of the investigators and the chalk outline on the floor and all the careful work of gathering proof and evidence, shouting again and again, “It's my fault…. it's because of me…because of me…I…” Hagar bent down and tried to pull him up. He forcefully shook himself free of her grasp. A bright light blazed, the flash of a police camera.