he complained.
“No, I’m not too hot, but maybe it’s the central heating that’s bothering you,” Eli Bachar answered. He touched the radiator, and a layer of peeling yellowed oil paint stuck to his finger. “Actually, it’s stone cold,” he said with surprise. “The heating isn’t even on.”
“Cutbacks,” Matty Cohen said with satisfaction. “We only begin heating from four or five in the afternoon, depending on the temperature outside. Where were we?” he asked, glancing at his watch impatiently.
“It wasn’t very nice for you to put a stop to Benny Meyuhas’s production,” Eli Bachar reminded him. “You were walking along the catwalk, and you looked down below you.”
“Yes, but I didn’t stop or anything, because I was on my way to tell Benny …” He sighed. “In the end, I never told him.”
“Why not?”
“Because I never made it there. My wife phoned on my way to the roof, I had to take my kid to the emergency room. He was having an attack, he’s got spastic bronchitis. I couldn’t … you can’t wait with these things, it was really urgent. When he gets these attacks, he chokes. Once he’d turned blue by the time we got him to the hospital.
I had the car. My wife doesn’t drive, so there was no choice, and she, she’s pregnant, and we’ve already lost … never mind.” He grimaced as if disgusted with his own complaining, with the details, with his own loquacity. “I had to get home urgently.”
“Did you return the same way you came?” Eli Bachar asked.
“Sure, there’s no other way. Well, there is, from the back, a shorter way, out to the parking lot, and another from the main building. But my car was in the small parking lot—”
“Which means you went back along that catwalk?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Matty Cohen said with annoyance.
“So she was still there?”
“Who? Tirzah?”
“Tirzah and the person who was with her.”
“I didn’t notice,” Matty Cohen said, as though astonished by the absurdity of the situation. “I didn’t look down, I was anxious about …”
“You were in a hurry,” Eli Bachar said as a way of helping out.
“Exactly, I was in a hurry because of my kid, because my wife said he was already … that’s it, I was in a hurry, and I can’t tell you if she was still there or not. I don’t know where they found her, because only this morning I saw that …” He spread his arms in a gesture of helplessness.
“She was found next to the scenery, by the pillar, a white marble pillar.”
“I think I remember something like that,” Matty Cohen said. “With a capital at the top? I saw it sometime.”
“That capital crushed her face and her skull,” Eli Bachar stated. He kept his eyes on Matty Cohen, who paled.
“You don’t say,” Matty Cohen mumbled as he licked his lips, which were suddenly parched. “Is there … is there any water around here?”
he asked as he rose from his chair and made his way unsteadily to the urn. He peered inside, poured himself a tepid glass of water in a Styrofoam cup, and drank it down in one gulp.
“I’m very sorry,” he said as he sat back down. “I didn’t look down on my way back out, I don’t know if she was still there, but when I was on my way to the roof she was standing with someone and talking, I mean …” He fell silent. Eli Bachar, who had noted the hesitation in his voice, folded his arms and waited. He hoped that through patience he would hear the end of Matty Cohen’s sentence, since people cannot—
as Ohayon had taught him—stand silences. But Matty Cohen did not continue speaking. His puffy face was contorted with some effort, the nature of which Eli Bachar was hard pressed to identify, and his eyes were half shut as though he were trying to decipher the details in a picture he was carrying around inside himself.
“They weren’t just shooting the breeze,” Eli Bachar guessed.
Matty Cohen shot him a startled look. “What do you mean, ‘They weren’t just shooting the breeze’?” Eli Bachar thought he heard a note of insult or desperation in Matty Cohen’s voice. “I can’t tell you what …
because I really don’t know who she was talking to. I don’t have a clue.”
“Not even whether it was a man or a woman?” Eli Bachar persisted.
“Not even. Nothing. It was pretty dark in there, I don’t even … If Tirzah hadn’t spoken, I wouldn’t have known it was her. Even now I’m not completely sure.”
“It’s actually very important for you to be sure it was Tirzah, very important to remember exactly what she said. You have no idea just how important it is.”
Matty Cohen regarded him with a look of confusion. After a while his face brightened, as though finally comprehending something. “Is it because of the insurance?”
“Yes,” Eli Bachar said, since he had no intention of sharing any of
his thoughts at this stage. “Because of the terms and conditions. It’s a completely different story if this is an accident.”
“But I’m telling you everything I know,” Matty Cohen said pleadingly. “I’m really trying, but what am I supposed to do? On the way to the roof I was thinking about Benny Meyuhas and on the way back not even about that and the whole matter—I mean, we’re only talking about a couple of minutes here, for crying out loud, from when I nearly reached the roof to when I turned around after her phone call.”
“The people filming up on the roof didn’t hear the phone ringing?”
“Which? What? My cell phone? Like, who?”
“The people on the roof,” Eli Bachar said in a new attempt, “or even Tirzah. If she was down below, wouldn’t she have heard the ring?
Wouldn’t she have reacted, noticed that you were there. Called to you, or to someone?”
“No,” Matty Cohen said and shook his head strenuously as if to emphasize his own words. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I was …
that … nobody knew that I would be turning up in the middle of filming. I set my cell phone on vibrate so no one would hear. It was in my pocket. I was standing right next to the door to the roof, I could see it was my wife phoning, and all I said was, ‘What?’ when I answered. She spoke and then I said, quietly, ‘I’m on my way.’ Nobody could have heard that, certainly not on the roof, it’s completely open up there and there’s no way, but not down below, either, nobody could …”
“So then you immediately started running back in the same direction?”
“I told you, I was afraid my kid—”
“No one knew you were there?” Eli Bachar asked again.
“No, it was a secret, you know, I wanted … I needed to catch them in the act, because there had already been a decision to stop filming.”
“How can that be?” Eli Bachar asked, surprised. “Israel Television decides to stop a production, and people keep working on it anyway?
How is that technically possible?”
“First of all,” Matty Cohen said as he lowered his head and scrutinized his fingers, “such a decision is made without fanfare, we didn’t want to … nobody knew about it yet, only Benny Meyuhas himself and his producer, Hagar, and maybe I said something to Max Levin, I don’t remember exactly. We didn’t want a big ruckus on our hands, but I’m pretty sure Hagar told someone else. She’s so committed to Benny Meyuhas that … for many years she—”
“Now I get it,” Eli Bachar mumbled. He removed a crumpled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read in silence the names written there. “That’s why you’re not on this list.”
“What list?” Matty Cohen asked, dismayed.
“The list of who was in the building last night, when the accident occurred. You’re not listed because nobody knew … but Zadik knew, he’s the one who told me.”
“Zadik knew,” Matty Cohen agreed. “Of course he knew, he’s the one … I mean, I didn’t make the decision to stop filming on my own.
