him. Then he looked at the crew, who had descended from the roof, his gaze resting finally on Sarah’s face, which was pressed into Hagar’s shoulder. Zadik noticed her arms trembling in the sleeves of the white gown, and her thin legs, her bare feet. “What’s going on here?” he asked hoarsely.
“What are all of you doing here at such …”
Max Levin moved closer and whispered something in his ear; Zadik gave him a look of sheer astonishment. “I don’t understand,” he said in a parched voice. “You’re still filming that? Didn’t Matty put a stop to it?
Where’s Benny? Where is he?” His voice rose with the last words he spoke.
Max indicated with a nod of his head that Benny was up on the roof. “They’re trying to keep him away as long as possible, detain him upstairs for a while,” he told Zadik, “until … I thought maybe they would cover her up or something… . He’s going to take this very hard.”
Zadik noticed the doctor standing next to the body; the doctor returned his gaze and approached, his hand extended in greeting. “I’m Dr. Elyashiv. As I’ve already told these people,” he said, indicating the police captain and the members of the forensics team crouching by the body, “this pillar crushed the victim. She was standing here,” he explained, pointing to the wood-frame flats, “and it somehow moved, apparently, and toppled onto her. Her skull is cracked, that much I’m sure of. The pillar could have caused the fracture if she was standing there, and—”
“It’s too early to tell,” said a man from forensics as he rose to his feet.
“What’s too early to tell?” Zadik demanded to know. “Too early to tell how … ?”
Zadik fell silent because just then Benny Meyuhas ran in, pushing through the small crowd and, ignoring the people from forensics, bent his knees and fell on top of Tirzah’s body—fell or collapsed, they would argue about it later in the newsroom when they were describing the scene, and someone said it was a shame that Schreiber had not been filming at that moment, but was instead standing in the back, his arms stretched wide as if apologizing for failing to prevent it. Benny Meyuhas lay on top of Tirzah’s body, ignoring the protests of the investigators and the chalk outline on the floor and all the careful work of gathering proof and evidence, shouting again and again, “It’s my fault… . it’s because of me … because of me … I …” Hagar bent down and tried to pull him up. He forcefully shook himself free of her grasp. A bright light blazed, the flash of a police camera.
“Is this the husband? Is he her husband?” a uniformed policeman asked Zadik as a few men pulled Benny Meyuhas off Tirzah’s body.
“Yes, her partner,” Zadik answered. “They’ve been together for a number of years. Very much in love. You … do I know you?”
“Bachar, Chief Inspector Bachar.” In a whisper he added, “I want everyone out of here, they’re keeping us from getting our work done.”
“I told them,” Zadik lamented, “I kept telling them all the time that there would be some sort of disaster here. But I didn’t believe … how did it happen?”
The police officer pointed to the white pillar, which at that moment was being moved to the side with great effort.
“That crushed her? How? What, she didn’t move aside when it fell?
And how is it that she’s buried under those scenery flats? They’re only made of plywood, how—”
The police officer reiterated, “Just as my men told you, it’s too early to know. We’ll only be able to determine that when … ,” but Zadik was not listening. Instead, he raised his head and said, “We need to tell Rubin. Has anybody tried to contact Rubin yet?”
No one answered.
“Call Rubin,” Zadik ordered, and Max Levin looked around the room until he caught Hagar’s gaze and she nodded, stepped aside, and dialed. “No answer,” she said a minute later. “His cell phone isn’t in service at the moment.”
“Maybe he’s in the building,” Max said. “Try the editing rooms.”
“Where are the editing rooms?” asked the uniformed police officer.
“Over at the main building,” Max explained.
“Never mind,” Zadik said. “Let him have a few more hours in peace.
There’s certainly no rush now.”
• • •
Indeed, Arye Rubin was in an editing room on the third floor of the main building, and he had company. Natasha was standing next to him, plucking split ends from her fair, disheveled hair, peering at the monitor and occasionally out the window. A short while earlier, when the ambulance and the police van had arrived, she had approached the window and looked out.
“Rubin, come look, something’s happened. There are lots of sirens, it’s two a.m., what can it be … maybe a suicide bomber?”
“Forget about it,” Rubin told her with an air of distraction, his eyes on the monitor. “Whatever it is, if it’s important then we’ll hear about it.” He stopped the videotape and turned to look at her, pensive.
Natasha had surprised him, flinging open the door to the room at one in the morning, short of breath. She had tossed her shabby canvas bag and her waterlogged army jacket onto the blue wall-to-wall carpeting without considering the wet spot that was forming there, and slammed the door behind her. Her words had come in a torrent. Although Arye Rubin had tried to stop her—“I’ve got to finish something here,” he had said, giving her only part of his attention—Natasha had jabbered on breathlessly: “Two whole weeks … days and nights … every free minute
… I can’t stop now …” Then she had taken hold of his sleeve. “Rubin,”
she had said to him without looking at what he was working on—in fact he had been totally immersed in his work but nonetheless stopped the monitor—“Rubin, you’ve got to see this, Rubin. Believe me, you’re going to die when you see this.” Then she emptied the contents of her canvas bag onto the carpet, read the labels on three videotapes, selected one, and inserted it in the monitor.
Rubin regarded her, skeptical. He was in the middle of work on a piece about an interrogatee beaten while in the custody of Israeli intelligence operatives. Several days earlier he had explained to Hefetz, the newsroom chief, that he was less interested in the interrogators than in the behavior of doctors in Israeli hospitals who covered up for them, and that for the first time he had succeeded in breaking through the doctors’ silence. He had been lucky, he told Hefetz, had stumbled onto one doctor, a member of B’tzelem, the human rights organization, who could no longer stomach what he was forced to deal with. From the moment that doctor had opened up to him, a whole chain of events was set in motion. Even the director of the hospital had been unable to stop Arye Rubin as he shadowed Dr. Landau, the physician attending to the interrogatee, refusing to leave Dr. Landau alone until he filmed him tossing Rubin out of his office. This had already been a breakthrough of sorts.
“Natasha,” Rubin said wearily, “it’s almost two o’clock and this has to be ready first thing in the morning. Why can’t this,” he asked, indicating the videotape, “wait until morning? What’s so urgent?”
“You’ll see in a minute,” Natasha promised him, and without wasting a second, she bent over the monitor, pressed a button, ejected the video Rubin had been working on, and inserted her own. Before he could even protest she had already pressed play, then she stopped to say, victoriously, “There you are. Feast your eyes.”
Against his will, Arye Rubin looked at the screen. He intended to protest, but the black-hooded figure captured his attention. “What is this?” he asked her without removing his gaze from the screen.
“Not what is this,” Natasha corrected him, pointing at the screen with her small, thin finger, the nail gnawed to nothing, “but who is this.
Why don’t you ask who it is? Because you know very well who it is, you recognize him, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Rubin said with a sigh. “I recognize him. Chief rabbi, head of the movement. Where is this? Is it the airport? Was this filmed at the airport?”
“Yes,” Natasha said, straightening up. “At the airport, on his way overseas, dressed as a Greek Orthodox priest. It looks like his clothes were taken from Wardrobe or something… . Admit it, Rubin, this is really something.”
“Okay,” Rubin said, “I’ll admit, it’s really something. But what is it exactly?”
Natasha announced gaily that she had been trailing Rabbi Elharizi for quite some time. “I figured out that once a week he meets with people, in some, like, restaurant in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem—”
“Why ‘like’?” he asked irritably. “‘Like’ he meets with people or
‘like’ a restaurant?”
