Murder in Jerusalem (21 page)

“Of course not,” she answered angrily. “What do you think? That I don't care what happens in this country?” Now she was enraged. “Do I look like someone who spends all her time looking out for the hypocritical interests of politicians? Do you think I'm a cynic?”

Benizri licked his lips and looked sideways at her profile, noting the beautiful line of her lips and the light blush that had risen in her cheeks, breaching her pallor. “No,” he answered slyly, weighing his next move. “No, you don't seem like a cynic to me. On the contrary, you come across as a person of principle. Someone whose humanity is accessible,” he added, falling silent for a moment, hoping his words would sink in, go to work on her. Watching her hands lying idly in her lap he said, “That's why I want to speak to you about Shimshi and his friends.”

“What is there to say?” she sputtered, her hands now clasped. “Those hooligans are going to sit in jail.”

“They're not hooligans,” Benizri said, turning the wheel to allow an ambulance to pass on its way to the emergency room. The police van moved off to the side of the road, and the cars in front of them and facing them began to move. “They're just a bunch of desperate men, and you know that.”

“What?!” she exclaimed, alert. “Desperate? Very nice! Then every desperate person should kidnap a government minister and threaten his life, and people will say he's just an unfortunate guy!”

“Listen, Timnah,” he said, daring to use her first name. “Do you mind if I call you Timnah?” Without waiting for a response he hastened to add, “When everything's said and done, you and I…we have…I thought that because of what happened to us, together, I could approach you and tell you…ask you…ask you to withdraw your charges against them, because I know you're not one of those people who…Look, in the end it all worked out, and you're not a vengeful person, so I was thinking…I'm asking—”

The snort that escaped her lips contained surprise and anger and astonishment. Then she fell silent, the windshield wipers squeaking on the glass due to the light rain, and they made their way slowly along the narrow, pitted road, the car lurching forward, then speeding as traffic cleared and the minister, frightened, wrapped her hand around her neck, her thin gold wedding band glittering. After a while, she said dryly, “You are absolutely nuts,” adding in an even voice that there was no way of withdrawing the charges. “It's in the hands of the prosecutor's office now, not mine,” she concluded. “Kidnapping and the intent to kill are criminal offenses, there is no arguing that.” She added that even if the matter were hers to decide (which it was not), she would not retract her claim against the Hulit workers because that would encourage the anarchy already rampant everywhere, where might makes right; it was inconceivable that if people wanted to achieve something, they had to resort to physical strength.

As they passed the enormous monster-sculpture in a playground on the road leading to Kiryat Yovel, Benizri said, “You haven't considered the fact that they've been trying to reach you for a while, but each time you gave them the bureaucratic runaround. These guys are desperate, and…”

She sat up straight in her seat, folded her arms dramatically, and looked at him at length before asking coolly what special interest he had in this affair, aside from his interest as a journalist, which, in her opinion, he had long since exceeded. Perhaps, she suggested, he had a relative among the workers.

He wove carefully between the potholes, making slow progress.

“Well, what's your connection to those workers?” she demanded.

Danny Benizri turned his head so that she would not see how worked up he was. He had no intention of telling her about his relationship with Shimshi. “It's complicated,” he said reticently, his tone indifferent. “You wouldn't understand. You're incapable of understanding such things,” he told her, “because it's not part of your world. You're from a totally different place.”

“Why don't you try me?” she taunted him.

Stopped at a traffic light just before the bridge over Golomb Street, he told her about his father, about the stroke he had suffered when the bakery he had worked at for thirty years was shut down, about the years during which he could neither speak nor walk. About the similarity between his father and Shimshi he said nothing. He looked into her face and saw that she had understood.

“But your father did not kidnap anyone or threaten to blow anyone up,” she reminded him.

“I told you you wouldn't understand,” he answered quickly—now they were stuck in a new traffic jam, on Herzog Street, just before the turnoff to Tchernikovsky—“I shouldn't have said anything. After all, you know quite well,” he said in a burst of emotion, “that the deprived actually never get anything except through violence. What revolution ever succeeded without it?”

“Danny Benizri,” the minister said with fatigue, wiping her brow, “do me a favor and don't give me any history lessons just now. And turn here, please,” she said, gesturing to the parking lot of the two-story buildings at the end of Palmach Street. “Here, the second building.”

Danny Benizri parked the car. “Wait,” he said, looking around after he had shut off the engine. “Watch out for the puddles and let me take your bag,” he said, and ignoring her protests, he followed her to the door, waiting for her to remove her key from her purse and slowly open the door. He entered the living room behind her, watched her draw the curtains. His cell phone rang just as her home phone did. He glanced at the display on his phone as she slowly raised the receiver. “Yes,” he heard her say, looking directly at him, “I'm completely alone.” He shut his own phone off. “My parliamentary assistant,” she mouthed to him. He moved behind her, quite close, while she explained to her assistant that she needed to rest, that no one knew she was back at home, that she did not wish to be disturbed. He watched as she lay the receiver next to the telephone, turning around with the thought that he was at the other side of the room, near the door, surprised to find him right behind her. As he folded his arms around her he noticed a deep crease near her left eyebrow, and it dawned on him that she was at least ten years older than he and that this was the first time in his life he had touched an older woman in this way. But something about her narrow back dulled this realization, as did the taste of her full, dry lips.

Panic and anger flashed through her at the liberties that Benizri, this journalist, was taking with her, and a dull alarm of suspicion and danger rang in her mind, but the wave of heat rising from them both was stronger than the two of them and born of great loneliness and prolonged torment that she suddenly, at that very minute, had had her fill of. This journalist, who had stated so openly what he wanted and needed, had said something to her that she had not heard in years, which made her think that he was her friend, as illogical and unexpected as that was.

By the time they awakened, he had already missed by two hours his appointed “chat” (“I'm only requesting that you come in,” Michael Ohayon had said to him; “this isn't an interrogation, and you will not be read your rights”). There were five messages on his cell phone, three from Tikvah, who had been searching for him with desperation in her voice. In the third message she told him she simply did not know what to do with the baby, who had been crying since the morning; he imagined Tikvah's gaunt, forlorn face, could picture her wandering helplessly with the baby carriage. In this cold weather she had taken the baby out in her stroller to bring Gilad home from nursery school; now Tikvah would be shut up in the house with the two of them because of the rain, and suddenly he remembered the promise he had made to Gilad. He had never lost his head like this before; he had no explanation for it, and he searched for one in Timnah Ben-Zvi's face. She was leaning on pillows propped behind her, her eyes half closed. She opened them and returned his gaze.

“Are you sorry or something?” she asked him quietly.

“Sorry? No, no way. I just…” He fell silent and began dressing.

“I…don't think that I…do you usually…?” she stammered.

“Oh sure,” he said sarcastically, “every day, what do you think?” Then, as her face darkened, he said, “Hey, I was only kidding. I'm not the philandering type.”

“Nor am I. I mean, I've never—”

“You've never had an affair?” he asked. She shook her head.

“So maybe
I
should be the one asking if
you're
sorry,” he asked with a slightly curious lilt to his voice, trying to conceal his own self-doubt.

“No, I'm not at all sorry,” she answered, crossing her arms. “I'm just…how can I say this…I'm just a bit…in shock at my own behavior.”

“In shock. She's in shock,” he repeated as if trying out the words. “I've heard,” he said hesitantly with a smile, “that women make fun of men who ask if it was good for them, but I'd like to know…maybe you'll tell me why you're in shock—”

“If anyone were to catch sight of us right now,” said the minister of labor and social affairs as she plumped up the large pillow behind her head, her eyes on him as he dressed, “we'd become the lead item on this evening's news, ahead of the strikers, ahead of everything.”

“Not on television,” Danny Benizri said as he shoved his arms into the sleeves of his sweater.

“Well, not yet, but soon that kind of thing will be on television, too, some sensationalist program on Channel Two or—”

“Not at Israel Television,” he assured her, pulling on his shoes. “Not at Israel's official station,” he announced cheerfully before bending down to where she lay propped up against the headboard of the large double bed. She began to smile, but stopped when he placed his lips on her face, on her mouth. “That's why I'm still at Israel Television,” he said as he straightened up and glanced at himself in the large mirror facing the bed. “
Our
priorities are still intact,” he said, and flashed her a genuinely serious smile.

 

In his office at police headquarters, Michael sat listening to Natasha's explanations. She asked if they could cut the interview short, if she could go. “I know I was late and everything, but I've got to be at work in another half an hour, and it's rush hour,” she said, explaining that she still needed to put the finishing touches on her report for the evening news. She did not answer his question about the topic of her report, and after he queried her again, she said, “Journalistic immunity. I'm permitted not to answer—you said this wasn't an interrogation.” He let her get away with it. She also refused to explain why she had arrived late, but her eyes were sparkling and she would not let go of the canvas bag in her lap. “You'll know soon enough,” she said, trying to suppress the note of victory in her voice. “Really soon, I promise you,” she added, gazing at him with such childish exuberance that he longed to pat her gaunt cheeks. There was something about her that reminded him of an alley cat, the kind you could not tame or tether, the kind that would do anything for a fish head, or less. “I heard about that,” she said, lowering her eyes when Michael mentioned Matty Cohen's death. “But I don't have…I didn't have anything to do with Matty Cohen, I'm not…I'm not important enough.”

“You will be, one day.” He was surprised to hear himself answer like that; it was, he thought, due to the keen and open desire he could see in her slender fingers, which never stopped moving, and her long, narrow lips, which were incessantly contorting, and the way she kept stealing glances at her watch. She answered the questions that had nothing to do with her news report willingly and even enthusiastically, describing her meeting with Rubin in the editing room: “He was working on a report of his own, and I blew in like the wind, but he's so…so professional, so understanding, that he dropped everything and gave me…” When he asked her what time it was when she came to Rubin's office, she frowned as if to say she had no idea, but after a moment she remembered and said, “It was after one a.m. because—before that—I passed through the newsroom on the way up to Rubin's office and I saw—no, someone told me—” At this point he stopped her to ask about Hefetz. She neither blushed nor paled, but she held on to her chair, stretching her arms and raising her shoulders until they reached her ears. She bowed her head so that her face was covered by a fan of her long, straight, fair hair. “Look,” she said in a quiet, muffled voice, “I don't know what you've been told, but whatever it was, it's no longer relevant.”

“But you saw Hefetz in the newsroom, before you went up to Rubin's office, didn't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “He caught me as I was running upstairs to Rubin, but I didn't tell him anything about—” She touched her canvas bag, and he understood that she had not spoken to Hefetz about what she was working on. She explained that as she had only been at Israel Television for less than a year and a half, she had hardly known Tirzah Rubin at all. “I started as a teleprompter, you know, the person who gives the cues. I've only been in the News Department for a few months, I barely knew her. I knew who she was, but she didn't know who I was.” Almost in passing he asked about Hefetz's relationship with Tirzah Rubin, and she gave him a look of surprise. “Hefetz? What about him? There was nothing special between them,” she rebuffed him. “He was in news, she was in something else altogether. They only ever met occasionally in the canteen. Nothing special.” And as with all the others he had spoken to, she denied categorically that Tirzah Rubin's death could be anything but accidental. To the question about who, in her opinion, Tirzah could have been meeting with there at midnight, and confronting, she shrugged her shoulders and asked if he was sure it had been a prearranged meeting. She reminded him that Tirzah had been very popular, that she had never heard about her having any enemies. “But I'm not sure, I really didn't know her—only Rubin, and he has always helped me, no strings attached.” She looked into his eyes with a gaze that made him ponder—it contained a plea, excitement, who knew what else—and then she lowered her gaze as if she were embarrassed. For a few moments he found it difficult to concentrate; he wished he had a cigarette. He chewed his toothpick, but did not derive even a flicker of satisfaction from it.