Murder in Jerusalem (3 page)

“Is this the husband? Is he her husband?” a uniformed policeman asked Zadik as a few men pulled Benny Meyuhas off Tirzah's body.

“Yes, her partner,” Zadik answered. “They've been together for a number of years. Very much in love. You…do I know you?”

“Bachar, Chief Inspector Bachar.” In a whisper he added, “I want everyone out of here, they're keeping us from getting our work done.”

“I told them,” Zadik lamented, “I kept telling them all the time that there would be some sort of disaster here. But I didn't believe…how did it happen?”

The police officer pointed to the white pillar, which at that moment was being moved to the side with great effort.

“That crushed her? How? What, she didn't move aside when it fell? And how is it that she's buried under those scenery flats? They're only made of plywood, how—”

The police officer reiterated, “Just as my men told you, it's too early to know. We'll only be able to determine that when…,” but Zadik was not listening. Instead, he raised his head and said, “We need to tell Rubin. Has anybody tried to contact Rubin yet?”

No one answered.

“Call Rubin,” Zadik ordered, and Max Levin looked around the room until he caught Hagar's gaze and she nodded, stepped aside, and dialed. “No answer,” she said a minute later. “His cell phone isn't in service at the moment.”

“Maybe he's in the building,” Max said. “Try the editing rooms.”

“Where
are
the editing rooms?” asked the uniformed police officer.

“Over at the main building,” Max explained.

“Never mind,” Zadik said. “Let him have a few more hours in peace. There's certainly no rush now.”

 

Indeed, Arye Rubin was in an editing room on the third floor of the main building, and he had company. Natasha was standing next to him, plucking split ends from her fair, disheveled hair, peering at the monitor and occasionally out the window. A short while earlier, when the ambulance and the police van had arrived, she had approached the window and looked out.

“Rubin, come look, something's happened. There are lots of sirens, it's two a.m., what can it be…maybe a suicide bomber?”

“Forget about it,” Rubin told her with an air of distraction, his eyes on the monitor. “Whatever it is, if it's important then we'll hear about it.” He stopped the videotape and turned to look at her, pensive.

Natasha had surprised him, flinging open the door to the room at one in the morning, short of breath. She had tossed her shabby canvas bag and her waterlogged army jacket onto the blue wall-to-wall carpeting without considering the wet spot that was forming there, and slammed the door behind her. Her words had come in a torrent. Although Arye Rubin had tried to stop her—“I've got to finish something here,” he had said, giving her only part of his attention—Natasha had jabbered on breathlessly: “Two whole weeks…days and nights…every free minute…I can't stop now…” Then she had taken hold of his sleeve. “Rubin,” she had said to him without looking at what he was working on—in fact he had been totally immersed in his work but nonetheless stopped the monitor—“Rubin, you've got to see this, Rubin. Believe me, you're going to die when you see this.” Then she emptied the contents of her canvas bag onto the carpet, read the labels on three videotapes, selected one, and inserted it in the monitor.

Rubin regarded her, skeptical. He was in the middle of work on a piece about an interrogatee beaten while in the custody of Israeli intelligence operatives. Several days earlier he had explained to Hefetz, the newsroom chief, that he was less interested in the interrogators than in the behavior of doctors in Israeli hospitals who covered up for them, and that for the first time he had succeeded in breaking through the doctors' silence. He had been lucky, he told Hefetz, had stumbled onto one doctor, a member of B'tzelem, the human rights organization, who could no longer stomach what he was forced to deal with. From the moment that doctor had opened up to him, a whole chain of events was set in motion. Even the director of the hospital had been unable to stop Arye Rubin as he shadowed Dr. Landau, the physician attending to the interrogatee, refusing to leave Dr. Landau alone until he filmed him tossing Rubin out of his office. This had already been a breakthrough of sorts.

“Natasha,” Rubin said wearily, “it's almost two o'clock and this has to be ready first thing in the morning. Why can't this,” he asked, indicating the videotape, “wait until morning? What's so urgent?”

“You'll see in a minute,” Natasha promised him, and without wasting a second, she bent over the monitor, pressed a button, ejected the video Rubin had been working on, and inserted her own. Before he could even protest she had already pressed
PLAY
, then she stopped to say, victoriously, “There you are. Feast your eyes.”

Against his will, Arye Rubin looked at the screen. He intended to protest, but the black-hooded figure captured his attention. “What is this?” he asked her without removing his gaze from the screen.

“Not
what
is this,” Natasha corrected him, pointing at the screen with her small, thin finger, the nail gnawed to nothing, “but
who
is this. Why don't you ask who it is? Because you know very well who it is, you recognize him, don't you?”

“Yes, I do,” Rubin said with a sigh. “I recognize him. Chief rabbi, head of the movement. Where is this? Is it the airport? Was this filmed at the airport?”

“Yes,” Natasha said, straightening up. “At the airport, on his way overseas, dressed as a Greek Orthodox priest. It looks like his clothes were taken from Wardrobe or something…. Admit it, Rubin, this is really something.”

“Okay,” Rubin said, “I'll admit, it's really something. But what is it exactly?”

Natasha announced gaily that she had been trailing Rabbi Elharizi for quite some time. “I figured out that once a week he meets with people, in some, like, restaurant in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem—”

“Why ‘like'?” he asked irritably. “‘Like' he meets with people or ‘like' a restaurant?”

“There's this place in French Hill, I'm not going to tell you where, that's like, well, it's not exactly a restaurant, it's sort of a coffee shop, and that's where he meets once a week with these people. I don't know who they are. But he goes in and comes out of there with this sort of black briefcase, like…here, have a look,” Natasha said as she rewound the video, stopping at a frame in which Rabbi Elharizi could be seen holding a small, thick black suitcase. “Like that,” she said, “no, not like that,
that's
exactly the one. And look: the suitcase is attached to his wrist with a metal chain, did you see that?”

Rubin nodded; he had seen it. “So they meet in this restaurant, and—?”

“That's just it,” Natasha said, “I don't know exactly what. But a lot of money passes hands there. I peeked inside once. Money, bills, dollars, everything. And I also know that Rabbi Elharizi has been traveling regularly to Canada, he's been there three times in three months and he always takes the suitcase with him. So what do we learn from that? Somebody's giving him money, which he then moves to Canada!”

“So?” Rubin said, looking at Natasha expectantly.

“What do you mean, so?” Natasha said, annoyed. “Like you really think that's normal. What's so normal about getting money and transferring it to Canada?”

“Maybe he came into an inheritance. Or sold his house.”

“No way!” Natasha shouted. “I know exactly where he lives, he hasn't sold his house and he hasn't come into any inheritance. And anyway, look,” she said as she fast-forwarded the tape and stopped at a frame showing Rabbi Elharizi in priestly garb again. “He's moving money to Canada for something big—big and illegal—look at this getup, that means something, doesn't it? I'm telling you, it's something big and illegal. That much I'm sure of.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Rubin,” Natasha said with a laugh, “you yourself taught me: I do not divulge my sources, I've got my source and I'm sure not giving it out. But I need you to help me. I need you to persuade him to give me a crew, I want to get to the bottom of this thing.”

“Persuade who? Hefetz?” Rubin asked, surprised. “You want
me
to persuade Hefetz? Who could possibly persuade him better than you? You certainly don't need any help when it comes to Hefetz. You know that
nobody
has more influence over him than you do.”

“Listen, Rubin,” Natasha said, her lips trembling as if she were about to burst into tears, “you're wrong. And as one who…never mind, you're totally wrong. That's insulting. I don't have any influence over him, you're talking stereotypically.”

“Ah,” Rubin said with a wan smile. “Stereotypically? I get it…”

“Don't patronize me, Rubin,” Natasha said, pulling on the sleeves of the oversized sweater she was wearing. “You're thinking in terms of stereotypes, like in American movies or something, but it doesn't work that way in real life. On the contrary…”

“Enlighten me,” Rubin said, folding his arms across his chest and pushing his chair back. “Explain how it works in real life.”

“All right. I know you have experience, I know that you yourself have already…never mind,” she said, slapping her thigh as if to close the subject. “I didn't say that…never mind, Hefetz won't ever help me, he won't help me—”

“Natasha,” Rubin said, making an effort to sound fatherly and patient, “how can I possibly bypass the news chief to help you? Explain that to me. Especially when you and he—”

“On the contrary,” Natasha implored him. “It's exactly the opposite of what you think: if a man like Hefetz sleeps with a woman, he doesn't think she's worth much anymore. He knows how to talk nice, I guess, but you'll never catch him taking me seriously, treating me like my work has any value. I think that…in general, if a person of his rank screws around with a nobody, a new reporter, do you really think he's going to promote her because of that?!”

Rubin grimaced. “I don't like…why are you talking like that? Why do you talk about yourself with such disdain? This isn't a matter of getting it on the sly, it's totally clear that you two have had something serious going for quite a while.”

“It's not important what we have going,” Natasha said, cutting him off. “It doesn't matter what Hefetz says, he can talk about love from morning to night. I'm telling you, if a married guy messes around with a girl half his age it's called screwing, that's all it is, and I don't have any intention…in your case maybe it…but in any case, it's over.”

“Aha. Over. Now it's all clear to me,” Rubin said, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

“What's clear to you?” Natasha demanded to know, and with a trembling finger she pressed the button that slowly ejected the videotape. “Because it's clear to me…that you don't want…”

“Oh, come on, Natasha, don't be so touchy, at least spare me that,” Rubin said, grabbing tightly the bony hand that held the tape.

“So do you admit it's explosive?”

“Explosive?” He pursed his lips as though tasting the word. “All right, I'll give you that. Or at least it's the start of something explosive, if we must use such words. But an explosion is also destructive, they may not even let you screen it, especially if that's all you've got—”

“I got two more,” Natasha said, bending down to her canvas bag.

“You
have
two more,” Rubin said, correcting her. He gazed toward the window pensively. “Since when?”

Natasha stood next to him, gazing out the window. “Look,” she said, alarmed, “what is all this? All those flashing lights, police vans, maybe…something must have happened, something awful. Look,” she said, moving aside.

Rubin looked. “I really don't know,” he said. “It's hard to see from here. Shall we go down and check it out?”

“Maybe we can just call and ask. Here you go,” she said, holding out the videotapes. “I
have
two tapes that I am now giving you, I know how much you like it when I speak properly. What do you mean, ‘since when'?”

“Since when is it over between you and Hefetz?” he asked, ignoring the tapes in her outstretched hand.

“Since today, since now, a half-hour ago,” she answered as she inserted the video into the monitor and rewound it. “Anyway, his wife is coming back tomorrow. During the two weeks she was gone I understood…okay, never mind. I'm already twenty-five, I can't waste my whole life on…”

In her worn jeans, her thighs seemed gaunter than ever, the look on her face vacant.

“You've got something there,” Rubin said. “I'm in favor of family, kids.”

Natasha chuckled. “Sure you are,” she said with a smile. “That's why you've got a family and children.” As soon as she said it, she shut up and looked at him with misgivings. She had overstepped the boundary.

Rubin did not respond.

Natasha was dismayed. She knew that since the breakup of his marriage to Tirzah eight years earlier, there had been no other woman in his life. Everyone noticed that he was careful not to get mixed up in any kind of binding relationship with a woman. Rubin, who had been known at Israel Television throughout his marriage to Tirzah as a real Don Juan, as someone who always maintained two or three relationships with women “of every age and every color,” as Niva, the newsroom secretary, put it, had been uncharacteristically discreet in the past few years. No one knew to whom he was giving “limited, no-illusion pleasure,” as Daphna from the film archives quoted him as describing it. With all the women he had had affairs with, according to rumors, Rubin maintained good, cordial—even friendly—relations. With everyone, that is, except perhaps Niva; Natasha had twice glimpsed Niva trying to speak with Rubin, who would brush her off. Everyone—in the canteen and the newsroom and the hallways—everyone talked about the child, how he resembled Rubin. Rubin thought no one knew about the boy, and Natasha had no intention at all of being the one to tell him what people said behind his back. Only a few days earlier Niva had said something about a gift for the kid's seventh birthday. Natasha wondered whether Tirzah knew about the boy. People said Rubin refused to see him. They said Niva had tricked him, set a trap, that she had thought if she had a baby, Rubin would agree to live with her. But the opposite had happened, sometimes that is how things play out. Natasha was dismayed: maybe now that she had reminded Rubin that he himself had no family or children, she had ruined everything.