“Who’s she?” Eli Bachar asked Aviva quietly.
Aviva looked at Eli and then at the young woman and answered distractedly, “Who? Natasha? That’s Natasha.” She clapped her hands like a nursery school teacher and called aloud: “Hefetz, Matty, Yaacobi—all the department heads—you can go into Zadik’s office, the meeting is beginning. You’re already way behind schedule.”
Hefetz stopped for a moment to watch the monitor as Benizri gazed at the minister’s Volvo being escorted by a police car, its siren wailing.
Hefetz shook his head, muttered, “Nu, nu, if you think this is all behind us you’ve got another thing coming,” and entered Zadik’s office. Inside the office he could be heard saying, “Don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Did I or did I not tell you: nothing good will come of this. Can something good come of this? No. Nothing good at all will come of this.”
“You, too,” Aviva said, pointing Rubin and Matty Cohen to Zadik’s open door. “Max will be in in a moment, after the policeman is finished with him.” Eli Bachar stood in his place, watching them enter Zadik’s office. At the entrance to the office Rubin stopped Matty Cohen and asked him quietly—Eli Bachar strained to hear the question —“Is it true you were there last night?” He saw Matty Cohen nod, his face averted to avoid meeting Rubin’s gaze, but his eyes met Eli’s instead, and he lowered them quickly to the brown wall-to-wall carpet.
“You wanted to put a stop to the production?” Rubin asked him, his tone threatening. “You wanted to stop work on Iddo and Eynam?”
Matty Cohen breathed deeply and spread his hands wide, as if to say he had no choice.
“Now?! At this stage, after the whole thing has almost been completed?”
Matty Cohen merely shrugged his shoulders and made a face as if to say there was nothing he could do about it.
“We’ll talk about this after the meeting,” Rubin told him.
“After the meeting I have to speak with the police,” Matty Cohen answered, glancing to the side at Eli Bachar.
“Why do you have to speak to the police?”
Matty Cohen shrugged and looked around. “That’s what they want.
Because … ,” he said, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “because of Tirzah.”
“So after that,” Rubin said.
“Where is everybody, what’s with you people?” Zadik shouted in the direction of the door to his office. “Why aren’t you coming in?
We’re waiting for you two.”
Matty Cohen cast Zadik a questioning look. “Should I talk to him now or not?” he asked, indicating Eli Bachar.
“Now,” Eli Bachar said from the doorway of the little office. “Come speak with me first.” He made way for Matty Cohen to pass by.
“Hang on a minute,” Matty Cohen said. “I’ve got to have a cup of coffee from Zadik’s room. I didn’t sleep all night. I’ll just bring myself a cup of coffee.”
At first the two men sat without speaking. Each time the monitor in Aviva’s room fell silent, or between rings of the telephone, Matty Cohen could be heard gulping down his coffee noisily or breathing heavily. His flushed and swollen face and his belabored, grating breaths roused Eli Cohen’s suspicions: the man looked as though he might choke to death at any minute. Michael Ohayon had taught him to be quiet and wait, but time was pressing and Matty Cohen was not suspected of any wrongdoing and quite shortly he would have to speak with Max Levin and with the lighting technician; after all, this was only a work-related accident, so there was no point in creating a ruckus.
(That’s what Ohayon had said at night when he had phoned him:
“There’s no point in my coming. This is an accident, it’s standard; what’s the matter with you? Are you crumbling under the pressure?”
And Eli, in a flash of inspiration, had said, “It’s just that I miss you so much, I have no life without you,” to which Ohayon had responded with a laugh: “You’ve got just a few more hours to endure. It’s after one a.m. now, just hold yourself together for another seven or eight hours.”) “I understand you were in the vicinity last night,” Eli Bachar
said at last, noting wistfully that Matty Cohen had at that very same moment opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, like some fish in distress.
“Vicinity?” he asked. “What … oh, you mean the place where Tirzah … ?”
Eli Bachar nodded. “Were you there at night before she was killed?
Did you see her there?”
Matty Cohen explained that just before midnight he had taken the catwalk over the scenery storerooms and that Tirzah had been standing below him, next to the scenery flats.
“Did she see you?” Eli Bachar asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” Matty Cohen said thoughtfully. “I was on my way to the roof, where they were filming Benny Meyuhas’s film. I didn’t want to dawdle. And she … she wasn’t alone down there.”
“She wasn’t alone?” Eli Bachar swallowed his astonishment and repeated his question to gain time. That, too, he had learned from Ohayon years earlier: exaggerated expressions of surprise will cause the person under investigation to guard his tongue; he will no longer be spontaneous, and you will no longer hear what you could have heard from him. “That is to say, she was with someone?”
“Yes. But I don’t know who that was, because it was pretty dark down there and she was hidden by the scenery flats. I could barely make her out, just her boots and her voice.”
“Did she say anything in particular?” Eli asked.
“Not exactly, she just said, like, what I think she said was, ‘No, no,’
or something like that.”
“Who was she talking to?” Eli Bachar asked without disguising his agitation. His pulse was racing with this sudden change of circumstance. “Who was with her?”
“That’s just it,” Matty Cohen said as he pulled down the sleeves of his blue suit jacket and inspected a gold button. “I don’t know.”
“Male or female?” Eli Bachar asked pleasantly, as if there were no urgency in the response.
Matty Cohen frowned in bewilderment. “I can’t for the life of me say, it was dark and the other person wasn’t talking.”
“What exactly did you see?” Eli Bachar asked. “Describe it for me as if … as if I were a news reporter asking you exactly what you had seen.”
“It was like this,” he answered. “Someone phoned to say that Benny Meyuhas was filming at night—”
“Who?” Eli Bachar asked. “Who called to tell you that?” He scribbled something on the pad of legal paper perched on his knees.
“What does it matter who? Someone phoned,” Matty Cohen answered irritably. “It had been decided that he would have to stop filming because the entire budget had been used up. I came there to catch them red-handed and put a stop to the production. I knew they were on the roof of the String Building.”
Eli Bachar’s hand stopped moving across the page. “What? What’s that?”
“The String Building,” Matty Cohen answered impatiently. “The other building, where they build the scenery, where … nu, String, haven’t you been over to the other building? Weren’t you there, where they found Tirzah?”
“Yeah, I was. Is that the String Building?”
“That’s what it’s called, because once it was a string factory,” Matty Cohen explained. “I don’t know if you noticed or not, but there is this small flight of stairs that goes up to the second floor, a sort of half-story up, and there’s this narrow open hallway, a catwalk with a railing that’s above the carpentry workshop and the rooms where they build the scenery. Anyway, you can walk down that catwalk and see what’s going on below, no problem. So I was holding on to the railing and walking fast. I was really tired and in a pretty bad mood because I knew that … well, it’s not very nice to have to put a stop to filming in the middle, especially not with someone like Benny Meyuhas, who …”
Matty Cohen fell silent, lifted himself from the chair with difficulty, removed a crumpled checkered handkerchief from his trousers, and wiped his face. “Are you hot too, or is it only me? The heat is killing me here,”
