Murder in Jerusalem (7 page)

“Naturally,” Tzippi scoffed from the doorway. “Were we really expecting a problem-free broadcast? We'd all go into shock!”

“Just tell me how we expect to make the ratings with shoddy work like this?” David Shalit grumbled.

“What I can't understand,” Hefetz said despairingly in a hoarse voice, without taking his eyes from the monitor, “is why it always happens at moments like these. Sometimes I swear it feels…it feels like it's on purpose…”

“I totally don't get why a military correspondent is there,” said Danny Benizri to Hefetz. “You heard them: if it's really a bunch of unemployed workers, then I'm the one that should be there, don't you think?”

“Listen, buddy,” Hefetz said, cutting him off, “where's your jacket? Get yourself down to the studio right now, we're breaking in to the program. You read me?”

“Me?” Benizri protested. “There's no reason for me to be in the studio. I told you, I should be—”

“You will do what you're told to do!” Hefetz bellowed. “And one more thing: Niva, are you listening? Get me the documentary about the Hulit workers, the one Benizri showed on Rubin's program about a year ago. Get it fast.”

Niva punched in the numbers on the internal phone. “The line at the archives is busy,” she said quietly, and Zadik could have sworn he heard a note of satisfaction in her voice. “It could take hours,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screens. Once again Zohar was on the screen, standing in front of the tunnel, a microphone in his hand, behind him pillars of smoke billowing forth. The picture disappeared again, and again the screen read TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAY TUNED. The picture on the second monitor showed the correspondent in a military parka. “It's Sivan Gibron, the Channel Two military correspondent, their news department's latest acquisition,” Hefetz declared as he tugged on his nose with fervor. “What a lucky break this guy gets on his first day on the job,” he complained. Just then Zohar returned to the screen, along with his voice. The room fell silent as everyone listened to Zohar announce, his voice choked with emotion, that it had been “planned like a military operation: four trucks manned by workers from the Hulit factory trapped the car of the minister for labor and social affairs. It was the minister's driver who alerted the police…”

“We've never had anything like this before,” Hefetz said as he slapped Zadik on the shoulder. Hefetz's gesture could have been interpreted as an expression of nervousness or anxiety, but the yellowish sparkle in his brown eyes indicated a totally different kind of excitement, an eagerness that was not entirely foreign to Zadik himself, but which had no place that morning, after the tragedy, and Zadik was about to remind Hefetz of the fact that just hours earlier they had lost Tirzah, but just then he saw, in the doorway of the newsroom, not far from where Natasha stood leaning on the door frame as though she had no interest whatsoever in what was happening in the tunnel on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road, Inspector Eli Bachar, who was looking at him and gesturing to him. Zadik skirted his way around the reporters and assistant producers, two maintenance workers standing in the doorway of the foreign correspondents' room, the language editor, the graphic artist, and everyone else who had heard that something big was taking place and had rushed in for an update, until he was facing Eli Bachar, and, with an odd sort of schadenfreude owed to the circumstances that were preventing him from giving Bachar his full attention, Zadik said, “So, you see how it is….”

The inspector nodded. “I heard on the way over. What a catastrophe.”

“You'll have to give us a few minutes,” Zadik said. “I haven't had a chance to prepare people yet.” He raised his eyes to the monitor and saw, on the screen, a policeman standing next to Zohar, listening to him. “One of your men. You know him?” Zadik asked. Eli Bachar blinked—he had long, dark eyelashes like a woman's, and narrow green eyes and a high forehead, only his chin was too small for such a face—and answered reticently, “Yes, that's Superintendent Shlomo Molcho, a decent guy.” Zohar's voice was filling the newsroom now that someone had turned the volume up full blast.

“If that's so,” Zohar intoned nasally from the entrance to the tunnel, “then the police have reason to believe that the unemployed workers are in possession of explosives, and there's no telling how far they'll take this. In the meantime,” he said into the microphone, “there are still no negotiations between the unemployed workers and the police. We have been asked to inform the public that the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road is closed to traffic and that drivers are requested to travel by alternate routes and to refrain from approaching this area.”

“Benizri,” Hefetz shouted at the glass partition, “what are you still doing here? Didn't I tell you to get down to the recording studio and get on the air? Nehemia is already down there, and Niva went to the archives to fetch that documentary you made about the Hulit workers last year. Why are you still here? Didn't I tell you to get down there? Did I or didn't I? Everyone heard: I did!”

Danny Benizri, who was standing inside the graphic artists' room, did not respond immediately. Zadik could see him leaning over the computer screen and explaining something to Tamari. He hurried into the room and saw the sketch she had already prepared, the roads and the tunnel with two trucks at one end and two at the other. So there actually were a few departments here where things worked properly, Zadik wished to tell someone when he had returned to his place, but when he looked up from the computer screen, his eyes met those of Arye Rubin, who was standing next to him expectantly.

“I only need two minutes,” Arye Rubin told him. “Maybe three.” Zadik shrugged his shoulders and spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

At the doorway to the room, Inspector Eli Bachar stepped backward to make way for Benizri, who was on his way out at a run, en route to the recording studio on the ground floor.

 

“Just two minutes,” Rubin pleaded with Zadik. Zadik caught sight of Natasha watching them from the corner of the conference room.

“Hang on, Rubin, just hang on,” Zadik said, pointing at the monitor. Once again the picture faded and Zohar disappeared; in his place the screen showed policemen running in every direction. “I don't get this at all,” Zadik said, annoyed. “Where are they running now, what are these guys filming? Look where the Channel Two cameraman is positioned and where—”

“Zadik, calm down.” Hefetz had popped up suddenly at his side and was watching both the monitor and Inspector Eli Bachar, who was leaning against the wall next to the bulletin board. Thanks to his white shirt and his short gray jacket, probably no one else there knew what he was doing in the newsroom.

“For your information,” Hefetz told Zadik, “Zohar was tuned in to the police broadcasts the whole time. He's always first on-site, no other reporter was there when he arrived, but what do we get for all his efforts? Do we get anything for all his efforts? No, we don't. Who's running things around here? Us? No. Not us. Who? The technicians! So don't tell me afterward that it's a disgrace that Channel Two gets there before us, because they don't have a technicians' union!”

Zadik hoped that because of the ensuing tumult—the noise of two monitors running at once, the constant ringing of telephones, the incessant chatter—no one had heard Hefetz, but just then an unfamiliar burly man in blue coveralls poked his head in from the foreign correspondents' room and said, “How 'bout not blaming the technicians for everything that goes wrong?”

At the same time, David Shalit approached Eli Bachar, tapped him on the arm, and in an intimate, almost mocking tone said, “Inspector Eli Bachar, sir, to what do we owe this pleasure?” Eli Bachar smiled awkwardly, narrowed his eyes, and in lieu of an answer, shrugged his shoulders and nodded toward Zadik.

“What? Our big boss called you?” David Shalit asked doubtfully. “And why would that be? What have the police got to do here? And if we're talking police, where's
your
boss, Ohayon? I've heard he's on vacation. So does that mean you're his replacement?”

“Maybe they're here to look for the person who's been leaking information to us about the police,” Aviva teased. She had come up behind Rubin and looked as if she were waiting in line to talk to Zadik. “You know how it is with the police, they only show up when you don't need them anymore.”

“If I were you,” Eli Bachar told her, “I wouldn't be quite so jovial the morning after a colleague of mine was killed. I wouldn't be up to such joking.”

Hefetz turned to Zadik. “Did you invite him here?” he asked accusingly. “What are the police doing here now?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please,” Zadik called out from the doorway of the newsroom, and—miraculously—the room fell silent. “This gentleman standing next to me is Inspector Eli Bachar of the Jerusalem District Police, who is here regarding Tirzah. The police are investigating possible negligence, and…to make a long story short, he'll be talking with people here—he'll decide who—and I would ask each and every one of you to cooperate with Inspector Bachar and any other representative of the police, because we would like this investigation to end quickly.”

Natasha stood behind Rubin, pulling his sleeve; Rubin touched her arm with a calming hand. “Zadik…,” he said.

“Just a minute, Rubin, just wait a minute. Can't you see that I'm…” Natasha took a step backward.

“I don't understand this,” Hefetz said irritably. “What exactly have they got to investigate here? Have they got something to investigate here? Did someone do something wrong here? She was crushed under the scenery flats and a marble pillar, wasn't she?”

“What's wrong with you, Hefetz?” Niva whispered. “Suddenly you've forgotten the rules about death under unnatural circumstances?”

“Hey, what's going on?” said the maintenance man, walking out of the foreign correspondents' room with a large plastic bucket and a putty knife splattered with white stains. He ran straight into Elmaliah the cameraman, who had entered the newsroom carrying an oversized sandwich.

“Watch where you're going!” Elmaliah scolded the maintenance man. “You almost knocked the sandwich right out of my hand.” To Hefetz he said, “Don't you know that when someone dies like that, not in his bed, not from some disease, not in the hospital with a doctor's certificate, the police have to investigate if it was an accident, and if so, to determine who was responsible?”

“Sometimes the engineer has to be charged with criminal negligence—if it's a case of faulty construction,” David Shalit added, placing his empty Styrofoam cup on the edge of the table.

Eli Bachar whispered something to Zadik, and Zadik raised his head and asked, “Has anyone seen Max?”

“Max Levin?” Aviva asked, surprised. “What's he got to do with…ah…” Realization dawned on her. “Because he was the one who found her…but he must be in the String Building, in his office.”

“That's just it,” Zadik explained, “he's not there. Find him for me, Aviva, we need him urgently. Avi Lachman, too, the lighting technician who was with Max when…” To the inspector he added, “Go with Aviva, she'll get you anyone you need, and you'll have more peace and quiet in my office, which you can use in the meantime…”

Aviva flashed Eli a pleasant smile and wound a platinum curl around her finger. The inspector followed obediently.

“Niva,” Hefetz called. “Did you bring the VTR from the film library to the studio?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, out of breath. “I run down there like a madwoman, get to the archives, and find that Hezi…I'll kill him if he does that one more time…next time I'm not going down to the archives for you people under any circumstances, he is so disgusting….”

“Why, what did he do?” David Shalit asked with a look of innocence.

“Here, they've cut into the program,” Zadik said with an air of satisfaction at the sight of Nehemia the interviewer, Danny Benizri, and the director general of the Finance Ministry on the Channel One monitor. “Good job, Hefetz, you got the director of the Finance Ministry,” he said, adding, “and damn fast, too.”

“What do you think?” Hefetz said, making light of Zadik's praise. “They've kidnapped the labor minister, this is no game, they're gonna blow themselves up and the minister, too. So what could the director of the Finance Ministry tell me, he doesn't have time to come down to the studio? Oh, look at this guy, Sivan…what's his name?”

They were watching the Channel Two monitor again, the volume turned all the way down. The military correspondent stood wrapped in his parka, shivering from the cold, wiping raindrops from his brow, the microphone pressed close to his mouth, and his lips moving without a sound.

Hefetz turned up the volume on the Channel One monitor. “Sir,” Danny Benizri said, addressing the Finance Ministry's director general, who sat tight-lipped as he pressed a pale blue ironed handkerchief to his shiny bald pate, “there's nothing to get angry about. I simply wish to understand what was done with the money that the government promised to give as aid to the Hulit factory last July, during the previous crisis…”

“First of all,” the director general said, cutting Danny Benizri off as he tugged the sleeves of his blue tweed jacket over his shirt cuffs and moved his chair to the side, “I wish categorically to denounce an act that is, in my opinion, not only extremely grave, but a very, very,
very
dangerous precedent.”

Danny Benizri's dark eyes were shining. He turned to the interviewer, who held up his hand to request that he wait to speak, but Danny Benizri refused to wait. He, too, cut off his interlocutor. “That's not what I asked you,” he cried out.