“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.
“I want to make something perfectly clear,” the director general said. “Violence such as this has no place —”
“There hasn’t been any violence yet,” Danny Benizri corrected him, fingering the top button on the sky-blue shirt he had slipped into just before going on the air.
“Benizri is totally out of line,” Niva said in the newsroom. “What do you call that?” she said pointing at the Channel Two monitor, which was showing smoke billowing from the tunnel. “What’s that, if not violence?”
She pinned her eyes on Arye Rubin, who was standing next to Zadik, watching the monitor. Finally he nodded in agreement.
“Hefetz,” Niva said, “Tell Dalit to get Nehemia to shut Benizri up.
He can’t say that’s not violence.”
Hefetz snapped his fingers at Tzippi, the assistant producer. “Come here,” he said. “Go downstairs and check what’s with that VTR Niva brought from the archives, see if they’ve even gotten it ready. Ask Dalit.” He resumed watching the monitor.
On the screen appeared the three participants in this spontaneous interview: the director general of the Finance Ministry; Danny Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs; and the host, Nehemia, a veteran newsman famous for his evenhandedness, his formal manners, and the special brand of boredom he cast over his viewers. It appeared as though Nehemia had lost control for a moment; Danny Benizri was staring the director general down with sparks in his eyes.
“Ex cuse me,” the latter was saying as he fingered the edges of his tie,
“I am very sorry, but—”
Judging by the actions of the host—Nehemia was touching his ear
lobe, behind which was located a transmitter that was providing him with instructions from the control room—it appeared that he was indeed being told to rein in the correspondent. “Danny,” he said,
“Danny. Please, I must to ask you to … just—”
But Danny Benizri ignored Nehemia completely. He leaned toward the director general and asked, quietly, “Tell me, please, sir, what alter-natives do they have?”
The thick, pale eyebrows of the director general rose halfway up his forehead, giving his round face a look of shock and wonder. “Mr.
Benizri,” he said, straining to maintain his composure, “are you aware of what you are implying, that it is indeed an acceptable way to get what they want? We’re talking here about people who earned large sums of money from shift work, and some of them live in luxurious villas—”
“Gentlemen!” the host cried, though neither man paid him any attention.
“What?!” Benizri said, shocked. “What are you saying? Maybe they’re actually millionaires!”
Nehemia touched his earlobe again, and his brows furrowed until a deep crease formed between them. “Uh … Danny, please,” he said, waving his hand at the control room on the other side of a glass partition that could not be seen on-screen. He cast a pleading look toward the director and the producer and the rest of the staff sitting in the control room, but they could do nothing to rescue him. It was an unplanned live broadcast, and he had been unable to take charge of his guests, who were arguing as if completely oblivious to his existence.
“I can only discuss the facts,” said the director general as he pored over the pages spread out on the table in front of him.
Nehemia leaned over the pages, inspecting them like someone who had been taught it was forbidden for a participant—and certainly the host himself—to appear as though he were not actively engaged in what was taking place. But there was something pathetic about the way he feigned interest in the pages on the table when in the background Benizri could be heard demanding to know, “What luxurious villas?”
The director general laid his hand on the pages. “There are workers who earned more than 30,000 shekels a month during the weeks they worked shifts—”
“You are purposely misleading the public!” Danny Benizri shouted, and cast a look of reproach at Nehemia. “He is misleading the public, not a single one of them is rich,” he said emphatically, “and not a single one of them earns the kind of money he’s talking about. There was only one such worker, his name was Baruch Hasson, and even in his case it was just one month, three and a half years ago, when there was a big order from Greece—”
A sudden commotion broke out in the control room, and the producer waved her arms and called on Nehemia to take charge of the discussion. Nehemia cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, touched his ear as a way of drawing strength and authority from the transmitter and from the producer’s voice, and interrupted the director
