Murder in Jerusalem (29 page)

“No one has ever said about my office that they feel safe in here. ‘Safe' is not a word I've heard used in this room,” he said, pondering the idea. “You've got to be really, well, you can't have any misgivings. In short, you can't feel guilty.”

“What should I feel guilty about?” Natasha asked with surprise. “What? Did I do something wrong?”

Michael smiled. “Since when do guilt feelings have anything to do with having done something wrong? It's enough to be alive just to feel guilty.”

She held the cup of coffee tightly between her hands and stared at a spot on the desk.

Michael said, “A person has to have been wronged pretty seriously in order for him not to have guilt feelings.”

“Oh, I'm an expert at that,” Natasha said. “But I can't stand when people feel sorry for themselves. You're responsible for most of what happens to you after childhood. I hate it when people bawl about what was done to them without ever considering their own responsibility.”

“Even when their lives are threatened just doing their jobs?” Michael asked. He took a sip from his coffee without taking his eyes off Natasha.

Natasha looked into her coffee cup and then peered at him. She said coolly, “What an elegant way to get back to the topic.”

Michael spread his hands as if to say there was no choice in the matter. “I said we needed your statement. You can't keep your sources a secret when—”

“I sure can, and I will. I have to,” Natasha said. “I have no choice. My career really
will
be over if I say something now. And anyway, what can you possibly do to me? Toss me in jail?”

After a short pause Michael said, “Well, how about at least, without giving away any details, why don't you just tell me who might be interested in leaving you a token of his affection like that sheep's head? Do you have any enemies? Is there anyone who hates you?”

Natasha chuckled. “Who doesn't have enemies?” she said. “It's enough to—how did you say it? It's enough for a person to be alive to have enemies, to be hated. Even if he hasn't done a thing wrong. But if you want to be a journalist and you're, like, young, and you have this thing with the director of the News Department at Israel Television, then, wow—”

“You think you made people jealous?” Michael asked quietly.

“Yeah, but there's no connection to—” she began, then decided against it.

“To the sheep's head?”

“Yes, that's because of, because of the investigation I've been conducting. It's like, they want to scare me off because I'm onto something really important, you know? I'm not afraid. On the contrary: I know I've really got them nervous.”

“With that kind of money at stake,” Michael said, “I'm really not surprised. We should even consider putting you under police protection.”

“Police protection!” she shouted. “Like, a bodyguard? Like someone's going to follow me everywhere and know everything I do every moment of the day?”

“We'll consider it,” Michael repeated. “We'll see.”

After a quiet moment Natasha asked in a childish voice, “Can I take off my boots in here?”

Michael nodded and watched as she struggled to remove her boots.

“Natasha,” he said suddenly. She shifted in her chair and regarded him, her eyes wide open. “Do you think Tirzah Rubin's death was an accident?”

“Me?” she asked, surprised. “I have no clue—I don't know anything about her.”

“All right,” Michael persisted. “But what do you think?”

She said nothing.

“Because you know Rubin so well,” Michael said.

“Rubin, yes, but he—” She stopped, searching for a word. “He is the most, really, there's nobody else like him. Believe me, I know some personal stuff about him,” she said with pride.

“Oh, yeah?” Michael asked, like a child on a dare.

“Yeah. Like how he helps Niva out financially. I mean, he couldn't acknowledge the kid publicly or anything, but he didn't abandon the boy either. And then there's Rubin's mother.”

“What about his mother?” Michael asked.

“She's in a nursing home in Baka'a. You know the one? On Bethlehem Street? It's like for old folks who came from Europe. You know how much that place costs every month? And who do you think pays for it?”

“He's an only child,” Michael noted.

“And there's nobody else, because the whole family perished in the Holocaust. She's not in good shape either, his mother. He has to run over there every day, deal with doctors and all that. Just the other day she ran out of some prescription and he had to dash around—he left everything in the middle, in the middle of preparing his report, and he went over there to bring it to her.”

“What was the prescription?” Michael asked.

She looked at him, surprised. “How would I know? What difference does it make? Something for her heart, I don't remember what. Just that it was urgent. I happened to be in his office when they called. Never mind, it's not important. I just wanted to tell you that he's a great guy.”

“And what about Benny Meyuhas?”

“I don't really know—but he's Rubin's best friend, so I'm sure he's—”

“And Hefetz?” Michael asked.

“Hefetz?” Natasha rolled her eyes. “He's another story altogether.”

“How so?”

“He's a guy who—it's hard to say; he's complex. People will tell you about his drive and ambition, but he can also be really sympathetic and warm. I didn't just—anyway, it's complicated.”

“You've had a close relationship,” Michael reminded her. “Intimate. Perhaps you were in love?”

“No,” Natasha said adamantly. “I never loved him, not for a second. He's just—it's like, if someone so much older and more important than you takes you like seriously—I just couldn't remain, like, indifferent.”

“Like, or for real?” Michael asked.

“What?” Natasha asked, confused.

“Did he take you seriously?”

“What do you think?” she asked mockingly. “He's twice as old as me, director of the newsroom, married for about a million years, has grown children. You think he possibly could have been serious?”

“Don't you believe someone could actually, seriously, fall in love with you?” Michael asked.

She stared at him for a while, then lowered her eyes and said, “I have no idea what that is. What does it mean that someone
loves
someone else?”

“How about Schreiber? He seems to look after you, and he's willing to take risks for you.”

“Schreiber?” she asked, embarrassed. “It's like, well, mercy on his part. He's this guy with a great big heart. But that doesn't have anything to do with love.” She rested her head on her arms again. “I'm exhausted,” she said, her voice muffled. “If you want a written statement from me, let's get it done now, before I fall asleep on your desk.”

 

At six in the morning, when the sky was still completely dark and it had begun to rain again, Balilty and Schreiber were already in Michael's office. They were stirring sugar into their coffee when Balilty's ears perked up at the sound of footsteps running down the hall, followed by noise from transmitters and wailing police sirens.

“What's going on?” Balilty asked. “You call your radio monitors, and I'll call mine,” he said to Schreiber. “Let's see who gets some answers first.

“Hey, there's no reception here,” Balilty said, and walked out into the hallway. Schreiber followed him, and the two returned to the office after a few minutes.

“I don't believe it,” Balilty said. He turned to Michael. “What is it you like to say? ‘How wondrous are the ways of God'?”

“That's not exactly what I say,” Michael corrected him.

“Okay. How does it go again?”

Michael sighed.

“All right, I'm sorry. ‘There's no end to miracles.' That's what he says,” Balilty expounded to Schreiber.

“Poor women,” Schreiber said.

“What? What happened?” Natasha asked as she pulled one boot over a wool sock.

“It's the wives of the fired workers from the Hulit factory,” Schreiber said.

“What happened to them?” Natasha asked.

“They're in big trouble,” Balilty said, scratching his forehead. “I can sympathize with them, but they're in big trouble. You won't believe this: all the company vehicles, like seven trucks—”

“What did they do?”

“I'll tell you what they did,” Balilty said. “They stole them, drove off with seven company trucks all on their own. Then they filled them up with bottles, emptied out all the warehouses. The drivers came to work this morning and found nothing: no trucks, no—”

“Where are they now?” Natasha asked.

“On their way to big intersections, nobody knows which. They're planning to dump the bottles there, block traffic. In short, big trouble.”

“Can't somebody stop them?” Natasha asked.

“Nobody has yet, I guess it's still got to be organized.”

“Is Danny Benizri with them?” Natasha asked.

“Are you crazy?” Schreiber asked. “You think he's going to get himself into trouble and take part in something like this?”

Natasha shrugged but said nothing.

“Would you?” Schreiber asked pointedly. “Would you go with them, Natasha?”

“I don't know,” she answered. “Anyway, it's some story.”

“Don't mind her,” Schreiber said to Michael. “Ambition has warped her brain.”

W
hat, should I just start talking? This is hard for me, and with that tape recorder I'm…never mind, it's hard for me to talk. Starting this morning when I woke up, I had this bad feeling. It feels like days or even weeks have passed since this morning; look, it's not even dark outside yet, it's only been a matter of hours. All of this has happened in the space of one day, and right from the beginning I had this feeling that I just didn't want to start this day. Sometimes you open your eyes in the morning and before you can even think your first thought, you have a bad feeling, like you do after a dream, a bad dream. I dreamed something, too, I don't remember exactly what. These last few nights I've had trouble—I used to fall asleep in a second. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that if Aviva has a bed and a pillow, she'll be sleeping like a baby in an instant. That's the way I've been since I was a small child. But I guess this whole matter with Tirzah and Matty Cohen has gotten to me. I, I wasn't particularly close to either of them, but you know how it is when people work together for years. Tirzah was at Israel Television from the beginning, from when it was established, and I've been around for a while too, nearly twenty years, from the age of twenty-two. When somebody dies like that, so suddenly, I just…and then all these rumors about Tirzah, if it was an accident or not, well, they set me on edge. But even before, before I saw him, the ultra-Orthodox guy with the terrible burns, standing there next to my desk—I hate when people creep in like that—I was sitting with my back to the door for just an instant, talking on the phone, I had swiveled my chair around for a split second and suddenly there he was, standing next to me. No one can get into Zadik's office without me seeing, nobody. There's no other way into his room, that is, no other way that anyone used, until—okay, you know about all that. But anyway, everything passes by me first: telephones, meetings, people. And I didn't leave my desk for a minute, never even had a chance to drink a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. I was even supposed to leave early today.

“Nothing's clear to me anymore, nothing. I don't understand anything at all: I mean, how is it possible that someone so…so…disfigured, so completely burned—burn marks all over his face, his hands, his neck—how could someone like that just pass through unnoticed? Nobody remembers seeing him. How can that be? Didn't he catch anyone's eye? People are telling me that it's winter, everyone's all covered up in layers of clothing. But his hands? I saw them, his hands, and I'm
still
upset by it. And his face! Can you imagine how frightening that is? Here's this bearded guy in a long, black trench coat and a hat, he could fit in in any of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, but his voice sounded like one of ours, I mean, his way of talking was normal, pleasant, no Yiddish inflections, no accent; a real native-born Israeli Hebrew. He came through the security officer, I know this for sure because they called me from downstairs, and they said, ‘Aviva, there's somebody here who says he has an appointment with Zadik.' I checked his appointment book, and there it was: Zadik had told me to write the letter S. I didn't ask any questions, I just wrote it in. Afterward the guy left Zadik's office and disappeared as though nobody had ever laid eyes on him. Did you people see him after that? Did you find him? I'm telling you, he disappeared.

“It's been a day of disappearances. Everyone disappeared. You could be sure that if you really needed somebody, they would disappear. It started first thing in the morning, these disappearances. First there was the news about the wives of the laid-off workers, how the trucks with the bottles disappeared and the women disappeared. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Like in Naples. Once I was in Naples, just for a day, but I'll never ever forget it because I was with this guy—I can't tell you who because everyone knows him, and I can't really call him a miser because on the other hand—well, all in all, he
was
a miser. Never mind. Married, a miser, there we are in southern Italy, in Naples for the week-
end,
which is appropriate because it was more of an
end
ing than a week-end. Anyway, why was I talking about this? Oh, yeah, because of the wives of the workers. In the end it turned out they took the trucks, drove them, dumped the bottles, the whole works. That's how it was in Naples, too. There was a train strike. Total anarchy. Take a red traffic light, for example. That didn't obligate you to stop, it was more like a suggestion—so anyway, in the morning they reported, one by one, that the stolen trucks were hitting all the most important intersections: the checkpost in Haifa, and Glilot and Shalom junctions in Tel Aviv, and the entrance to Jerusalem, and Danny Benizri is nowhere to be found. Disappeared. It took four hours to find him and, after all, he's their man, the workers' rep. I still don't know where he was all that time, but it was a sign for what was going to happen all day. The first sign.

“Then Zadik tells me, ‘Aviva, get me Benny Meyuhas on the line.' So I started looking for him. I looked everywhere. No luck, the guy had disappeared. Even Rubin didn't know where Benny Meyuhas had gone, and he's his best friend. Even before, before—can I have some water, please? Sorry, with all these pills I'm not sure…but every time I picture…never mind, Benny disappeared before all that, before Zadik…excuse me…I'm sorry for crying. It's just when you've been working with someone for ages, and then suddenly he's gone…like…I still can't believe it. To find Zadik like that, and he's not just some nobody—we're talking about the director of Israel Television! In the office, all that blood. Slaughtered, how can you slaughter a person just like that? He lives a full life, and then suddenly in a single minute…Did you see how he was slaughtered? I'm sorry for being like this. All in all he was a good man, not someone who…never mind. I swear, from the very first minute I opened my eyes this morning, I was already sure it was going to be a bad day. Do you believe that some people can feel things before they happen? Not everybody, but there are people, sensitive ones, who sense vibrations, and I'm one of them. Call it whatever you like, I felt something. First thing in the morning. I got to work this morning at seven-thirty, because Zadik—excuse me, could I have some more water please? Zadik asked me to come in early because he had his weekly editorial meeting and he was expecting trouble because…never mind, it doesn't matter now. Anyway, Zadik asked, and I…for years we've been…I've known him…Don't think this is something dirty, there was nothing between us. It's just, how can I say it? At first his wife was uptight. When I became his secretary, she came around to check me out. You know how it is, I'm, well, not ugly, and his wife…anyway, I'm pretty successful where men are concerned, but with Zadik there was nothing. You understand? Still, we've known each other for like fifteen years, I was the secretary of three of his predecessors. I've never gotten it on with the bosses. I'm against that sort of thing on principle, it only brings trouble. I've known Zadik since the time he was just a regular old reporter, I was—oh, never mind, anyway, he asked me to come in at seven-thirty. It's winter, all dark outside, and rainy. On the radio they were already reporting traffic jams, they weren't even talking about the factory women yet. And my car, first it won't start, then it starts, finally, when someone pushes me, but I still made it in by seven-thirty, exactly seven-thirty, you can check to see when I punched in: seven-thirty-seven. I came in the back way, no traffic. I figured there was no getting into the city, what with all the bottles those women dumped. Tell me, how did they manage it? In the middle of the night, and no spring chickens, those women! How did they get those trucks all over the place? You've got to hand it to them, dumping all those bottles and grinding them up in the intersection. Really, you've got to give them credit, it's just like in Naples…never mind, they'll have endless trouble from all this…I was in the office at seven-thirty, everything dark outside, rain and winter and all that. But at Israel Television there are always people around. You know, not just the security people and the radio monitors. The canteen was already…I went down and got a cup of coffee and a hot, fresh doughnut. Not for me, I don't…I'm on a diet, I brought it for Zadik. It wouldn't hurt him to take off a little weight either, but never mind…it doesn't matter anymore…I'm sorry for crying, I can't control myself, it's those pills or the shot, or whatever they gave me. I'm telling you everything, just like you asked, every detail. But it's hard for me to concentrate. And I'd really like to be a help…”

Aviva stopped talking for a minute and regarded Michael expectantly. “I can see that it's important to you,” he hastened to assure her. “And I understand how hard this must be for you. We really appreciate this very, very much.”

She breathed in deeply and exhaled noisily. “You asked for all the details,” she said with a pout. “And that takes time.”

“We have as long as it takes,” Michael said reassuringly, willing himself to sound as fatherly as possible. “You have a terrific memory, and you are clearly a sensitive person.”

A cloud of satisfaction passed over her face; as if to conceal it, she sighed and continued talking. “The guy from maintenance showed up at eight, I've been pestering them for a week now, you know how it is: you ask them to come, they say they'll be there in an hour, and then no one shows up, you phone again and again, and in the end they tell you, Stop being a pain in the butt, Aviva. You get that?
They
don't deliver, but
you're
the pest! Anyway, the maintenance man showed up, an electrician, he needed to do something to the outer wall of Zadik's office because it's damp, it's been shorting out the electricity. I called him a week ago, but with maintenance if you don't…never mind, it was a new electrician, nice guy, I've never met him before. He seemed pretty young, no older than thirty-something. He wore a wedding ring. The nice guys are always married. So he arrived at eight, well, more like five minutes after eight, I can't be sure about the exact minute, I mean, I had no idea I would need to know later…. Anyway, he came in and got started working. And the very minute he started, Zadik opened his door and started shouting. ‘What's going on here? Are you people crazy? Stop, stop immediately!' That's the way it was: Zadik shouting at me and at the electrician. So I told him he couldn't talk to the guy that way, like he was some…never mind, it doesn't matter. I told Zadik to give the guy a quarter of an hour, until his meeting started. But Zadik said, ‘No. Have him go away and come back later.' So this electrician, who had finally gotten started on the job, was already on his way out. He'd managed to open up the wall, and now he was leaving. ‘Where are you going?' I asked him. I was pretty worried that the whole thing would stay like that, a big hole in the wall and lots of dust, and then he wouldn't come back. But he laughed. ‘Don't worry,' he said, ‘I'll come back after eleven. I'm leaving all my tools here, my drill, everything.' What can I tell you, sometimes life is so…maybe if he hadn't left his drill and all those tools…in the end, it was that drill…if he hadn't left it…maybe Zadik would still be alive. All that blood. Look how I'm shaking. It's the shock of it. I'll be traumatized for the rest of my life by it. Someone who sees something like that is changed forever. Don't you think so? You can never be quite the same. From now on I'll never be able…oh, never mind, it's not important.

“All morning the telephone didn't stop ringing. There were all sorts of calls. Everyone was looking for Danny Benizri. They finally found him. He wasn't at home, he wasn't answering his cell phone or his beeper. His wife told me, ‘He came home late and left early, I didn't even see him.' Later it dawned on me he must be with the wives of those workers, maybe they even, like, called him from the beginning, brought him in from the start. I don't know, I heard Zadik shouting at him. The door was open, he was shouting at him over the telephone just before the meeting got started. From Zadik's shouting I understood that Benizri had no clue about what was happening. Still, they managed to get him on toward the end of the morning program. They interrupted the regular program just before nine for a live broadcast. Channel Two scooped us, though, so Zadik chewed him out over the phone. ‘A full fifteen minutes ahead of us,' he shouted, ‘and you're supposed to be the workers' man!' Of course he was shouting at Benizri; who do you think he was shouting at?

“So anyway, there was this block of time when Benizri had disappeared and nobody knew where he was, but that was before…later, they came to interview Zadik about the role of television during a period of financial crisis, with Benizri serving as an example of a journalist who's become more than just a journalist. How did she put it, that interviewer, one of the famous ones, the one preparing the story? She called it journalism that ‘takes an active role in influencing reality.' Those words of hers, they stuck with me. I mean, what's she talking about, ‘influence'? Like Benizri is really influencing somebody? Some hero he's become! I don't have anything against him—Benizri's a nice guy, a good guy—but I wouldn't want all this to go to his head. She's preparing a character profile of him! So then Zadik says to the electrician, ‘That's enough, quit working and come back after eleven. Eleven-fifteen is even better, just to be sure. That's when I have an appointment with the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority.' The maintenance man shoots me a look; he's only just put his overalls on, and here he is taking them off again. I mean, it wasn't such a big deal, he was wearing them over his jeans and everything. And a mask, too, to protect his eyes. But still. He shoved the overalls into a corner and left everything there: his tools, the drill, everything. How could I know? Nobody could have known. I even asked him, ‘Will you be coming back?' And he said, ‘Sure I'm coming back, what're you so worried about?' Truth is, I don't know what was bothering me so much. I was feeling bad, that's it. Justifiably, it turns out. He never had a chance to go anywhere. Funny thing is, he never had to come back from anywhere, either.