that, and anyone else will, too. Avi the lighting technician, everyone.”
“You know,” Eli Bachar said after a moment, in a wistful tone he was adopting in order to provoke Max Levin, “the folks from forensics measured the angle of the pillar and calculated the way it falls and all that, and they believe it couldn’t have fallen by itself, such a marble pillar could not have just fallen on her skull and crushed it. She would have moved aside.”
Max Levin pressed his hands to his face and rubbed again like someone who had just awakened. From behind the hands covering his face he said, “Believe me, I myself don’t understand it. Maybe she was tired …
when you’re tired you move more slowly, you don’t pay attention, maybe—”
“You don’t think it’s possible that someone pushed the pillar on top of her?”
Max Levin lowered his hands, straightened in his chair—even so he looked short, an impression reinforced by his thin body—and looked at Eli Bachar in astonishment. “Impossible. No way someone would …
What? Accidentally?”
Eli Bachar remained silent.
“No, no. That’s impossible,” Max Levin said, renouncing the very idea. “Not even worth discussing.” He stared at Eli Bachar and made him feel a certain discomfort in spite of his years of experience. He had asked this question in a mechanical manner, almost without intending to, and had not expected so vigorous a response, that Max Levin would be so personally offended. He wondered about his accent—it did not seem exactly Russian, he could not place it—which
thickened when he raised his voice and repeated, “Impossible! No way, you should not even be talking that way. Who would ever want—what is this here, Hollywood? No way that Tirzah—do you know how much people loved her here? Thirty years she’s been here, and she doesn’t have a single enemy. Believe me, she wasn’t an easy person to work with, she drove us all crazy, but you know what? She was fair, so very fair, you just don’t find people like that anymore. And how much, how much she cared about people, and helped them. Ask the seamstresses, and even the painters, the carpenters—no question. Ask Avi the lighting technician, he’ll tell you the same thing.”
Eli Bachar nodded and rose from his seat. “Yes, Avi’s waiting outside, I’ll talk to him in a minute. But … where is he now, Benny Meyuhas?”
Max Levin shrugged. “I imagine at home, he’s probably … I would bet he’s not alone, Hagar must be with him. That’s his assistant, his producer, they’ve been together for years. And friends must be with him at home, but ask Aviva, she’ll find out for you. He stood up in a rush and moved to the door, opened it, and called, “Aviva, can you help the policeman here find Benny?”
“Of course,” Aviva said. “Come here, Eli. Your name’s Eli, right?
Let’s try and find him at home. Arye Rubin told me before that he’s at home. Come, sit here.” She removed several files from the seat next to her desk and patted it for him to sit there. Eli Bachar looked at her and sat down obediently.
c h a p t e r f o u r
You see this guy?” Intelligence Officer Danny Balilty asked Matty Cohen as he placed his hand on the shoulder of the tall, thin man who had risen from his seat when he entered the room. The man had come around the desk, stopped in front of Matty Cohen, and shaken Balilty’s proffered hand with cool politeness while Balilty hoisted the belt on his trousers over his bulging belly with his other hand. Next to one another the pair looked like Laurel and Hardy.
“Take a good look at him,” Balilty continued with obvious pride, as though discussing a close relation he had raised himself. “You’re looking at a real artist, and don’t forget it. Ilan here is a painter, not just some technician. He’s doing us a big favor here, isn’t that so, Ilan?”
After nearly an hour sitting across from Ilan Katz, Matty Cohen was wringing his hands and rocking from side to side in the chair, which was too small for his huge frame. He had to give an answer—any answer—not only to satisfy this Ilan Katz, who had sympathetically entreated him to tell him anything that came to mind about the moment he had spotted Tirzah with another person as he made his way above them across the catwalk, but also because he was so very tired and his feet hurt and his left shoulder was bothering him and maybe his arm, too; all he really wanted was for them to leave him alone so he could go home and sleep.
“I’m not really even certain it was Tirzah,” Matty had declared with hesitation at the outset of their conversation. “There was very little light, that area is always dark,” he had said in a pleading voice, but this Ilan Katz, who sat beside him, was staring at him through narrowed lids as though he had heard nothing Matty Cohen had been saying and had no intention of letting him off the hook. His eyes, inside their web of tiny wrinkles, radiated patience and trust and expectation; he merely sat there and without averting his gaze said, for the thousandth time, “Anything. It doesn’t matter what, any little thing you can recall, a spot on the wall, a crack in the tiles, anything.”
And because of his persistence, just to get him off his back, Matty Cohen added, “I think he was taller.” He took a sip of water. “The person whose back was to me, he was taller than she was.”
“Aha!” Ilan Katz exulted. “You see? I knew you’d remember!” He tossed aside the vague drawing he had made, quickly scribbling instead on a new blank white sheet of paper two figures, the profiles of a woman and a slightly taller man. “You see? Every single word teaches us something,” he summed up with satisfaction, squinting at his work.
“You said ‘he,’ so it’s clear it was a man you saw, and you said ‘back,’
which means he was facing the woman and maybe he attacked her, even if you yourself don’t know it. Let’s give him a few more characteristics according to what you remember. We always remember more than what we think we do,” he added in a paternal tone.
The events of that morning after a sleepless night, his son’s cease-less cough and red face burning with fever, Malka’s hysteria—what kind of mother was she, always at wit’s end?—the news about Tirzah, all these people that would not stop questioning him and pleading with him and demanding things from him and putting pressure on him, the talking, the threats—all these had unnerved him. Even Hagar, who had caught him on his cell phone on the way back from the hospital and warned him not to try and put a stop to Benny’s production, had left a bad taste in his mouth. True, he had told her he was not a person to be threatened, had added that there was no reversing the decision; but still the conversation with her had been highly distressing and weighed heavily on him. “You are completely heartless,” she had told him. Why heartless? Are responsibility and heartlessness one and the same? Let someone try and tell him that being responsible meant being mean. All in all he merely had a sense of responsibility. What was she talking about, what had he wanted? After all, this wasn’t exactly his father’s money; he was just doing his job properly. But he hated to be the guy who cut off the money supply, the guy everyone loves to hate. People at work thought he was the bad guy simply
because he was the one who doled out the money. No one knew he was really a good person, someone who hated strife and contention.
He should have left this job ages ago; he belonged elsewhere, in a different job. He should have been an accountant or at least a tax consul-tant. He had started studying accounting, and if it had not been for Tamar, he would have finished his studies by now and would have had his own firm, the works. But she had run off with their daughter after two years of marriage and for the past eight years had been bleeding him dry. He had been willing to let her go—“Just leave the kid here and get out”—but she would have none of it, had gone instead to a lawyer who had milked him for everything he was worth. He had given her half the apartment, half their savings, alimony, and in addition to everything she had turned the child against him. And now this morning, first Tirzah Rubin, then that officer from Investigations, Eli Bachar, then the trip to police headquarters; he had never set foot in there before, except for one time when he had come to give testimony on behalf of a neighbor who had been attacked. What reason would he have for being at police headquarters? He had never broken the law.
And here he was like some criminal, entering from the back gate, from the parking lot. From there Eli Bachar had led him through the building where everyone could see him—in fact he thought he had caught a glimpse of Epstein from Maintenance—through a long hallway, motioning him to follow him up to the third floor. Eli Bachar had run ahead; Matty Cohen was breathless trying to keep up, he was nearly choking by the time he reached the end of the hallway, and just at the end, when it seemed that there was no more hallway left to pass through, Eli Bachar had opened a white door and suddenly another hallway appeared, a completely new wing, the smell of fresh paint and wood pungent, the rooms empty. In the last room sat this intelligence officer, Balilty, with bags under his beady
