explain?”
“Perhaps you meant that because of you she was at work at that hour?”
“No, not that.”
“What then? Did you do something that caused her death?”
Benny Meyuhas flashed him a furious look. “The marble,” he said at last, smothering his face in his hands. “They say it was the marble pillar that crushed her.”
“Don’t think about that, Benny, you don’t need to be thinking about that,” Arye Rubin interjected, a look of worry on his face. He leaned on the bed, hooking his arm around Benny Meyuhas’s shoulder. “It’s not because of you. Nobody could tell Tirzah what to do. You could have told her a thousand times to move the pillar and she wouldn’t have, she wouldn’t have given a damn about your opinion or anyone else’s.”
“Did she generally tell you where she was going?” Michael said, feeling his way.
“Sometimes, not always. It depended,” Benny answered reluctantly.
“On what? On where she was going? On the time of day? What?”
Benny Meyuhas did not look at him. He was staring at his fingers, which were pleating the edges of a page of the Haaretz newspaper lying on the bed next to him. Between the small advertisement at the corner of the page in which LIAR was printed in bold black letters, just as it had been every day for the past two months, and an item about the Jerusalem hairstylist and his girlfriend the model who had been found shot to death, there was a small notice about the head of the Scenery Department at Israel Television, who had been killed in an accident.
Benny Meyuhas remained silent.
“How is it that she didn’t say anything to you? You were both in the same place, you worked together. You yourself were there, up on the roof.”
Benny Meyuhas frowned. “Yes, I was.”
“From what time? Approximately.”
“A little after six, after it got dark. We were waiting for the moon; we were hoping it would poke through the clouds.”
“Who knew that you were up there?” Michael asked.
Benny Meyuhas shrugged. “I don’t know, I don’t have a clue,” he said without looking up. “Whoever needed to know.”
“Were you aware that Matty Cohen was on his way?” Michael asked, aware that Rubin was tensing up.
“The tea will be here in a minute,” Rubin said to Benny Meyuhas.
“It’s hard for you to speak because your mouth is so dry.” Rubin cast a glance at Michael that contained a measure of warning, but Michael ignored it.
“Matty Cohen was on his way to the roof,” Michael said to Benny Meyuhas, “to put a stop to your production. Did you know that?”
Benny looked up from his fingers. “No,” he said in his parched voice, “no, I didn’t. There were rumors… . I had heard they weren’t going to let me complete the missing bits, Zadik had already hinted …
but I didn’t know that he was—” A note of astonishment had crept into his voice. “But he didn’t come, I didn’t see him.”
“He was on his way, and he saw Tirzah at around midnight, before—” Michael waved his hand instead of completing his thought.
“She was still alive at the time.”
Benny Meyuhas regarded him; unlike his voice and the rest of his body, his round blue eyes were now filled with expression, his pain alive and writhing. They were bloodshot, the eyes of a man haunted.
“She was not standing there alone; she was with someone else,”
Michael said carefully. “Someone was arguing with her.”
Benny Meyuhas did not speak.
“We thought that perhaps you might have some idea who she could have been speaking with in the middle of the night,” Michael said.
“I don’t,” Benny Meyuhas said. “I didn’t even know she was there. If I had known, I would have—” He fell silent and covered his face with his hands.
“What would you have done?” Michael hastened to ask. “What?”
“I would have spoken to her, I would have told her—never mind.”
“Are you certain she did not tell you she would be at work?” Michael persisted.
Benny Meyuhas shook his head. “I did not know.”
“I understand that there was some … disagreement … crisis … rift between you two?” Michael said, venturing a guess.
Benny Meyuhas’s amazement was visible. “We—how did you know that?” A note of suspicion entered his voice. “Nobody knew,” he said, wiping his face with his hands. In the ensuing silence, the only sound was his heavy breathing. Arye Rubin laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Generally speaking, did you two get along well?” Michael asked, studying Benny Meyuhas’s face and ignoring Arye Rubin’s look of reproach.
“We got along beautifully, beautifully,” Benny Meyuhas said. “God …
how …” and he pressed his hands to his face.
“You yourself were there,” Michael said to Arye Rubin.
“When?” Rubin asked, surprised.
“Last night, when Tirzah … you were at the television station, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was, but in the editing rooms. They’re in the main building, nowhere near… . I had no idea, I didn’t see Tirzah, I was busy working,” Rubin said.
“There’s no connection between the two buildings, no passageway?” Michael asked.
“None,” Rubin said emphatically. “There’s practically no connection between floors of the same building. Anyway, there are always people around. Apart from the security guards, there are rooms manned twenty-four hours a day. The broadcast monitoring room, for example: you can check who was on duty monitoring local and foreign transmissions, the place is never unmanned.”
Michael asked suddenly, “What was the disagreement about? Did something specific happen?”
Benny Meyuhas glanced at him, dismayed. “It’s something personal, it’s not relevant— something personal.”
Michael looked at the newspaper. A headline at the side of the page caught his eye, the story of an explosive device planted at the door of a West Jerusalem apartment occupied by three female Arab university students. Apparently the bomb had been placed by some ultra-Orthodox fanatics, and the police sapper sent to defuse it had been slightly injured when he touched the bag. “You can never know,”
Michael said after a few long moments of silence, “if it’s relevant or not. Sometimes something that seems relevant—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Benny Meyuhas sputtered.
“Was it a serious argument?” Michael said, groping. “Was it something important, something that might affect the future of your relationship? Was there some talk of a separation?”
Benny Meyuhas slumped until he was lying on top of the bed, pulled his knees to his chest, and burst into tears. Arye Rubin’s face wore a look of astonishment; after a moment he leaned over and touched Benny’s shoulder.
“Did you know about all this?” Michael asked Rubin, as though Benny Meyuhas were not in the room.
Rubin shook his head. “I had no idea.”
Hagar pushed the door open with her shoulder, carrying a cup of tea on a saucer with a teaspoon clinking inside. Michael hastened to make way for her to pass and went to stand by the window, where he could observe her placing the cup and saucer on the nightstand next to the bed, and where he could watch her as she threw an inquisitive and accusatory look at Rubin. Rubin shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I don’t know.” When she touched Benny Meyuhas’s arm, he removed his hands from his face and glanced at her as though he were seeing her for the first time in his life.
Michael stood watching the window and the side of the bed near it and noticed a pair of black velvet embroidered boots shoved underneath, partially hidden by the bed. He wondered if they belonged to
