Rubin’s office, she frowned as if to say she had no idea, but after a moment she remembered and said, “It was after one a.m. because—before that—I passed through the
newsroom on the way up to Rubin’s office and I saw—no, someone told me—” At this point he stopped her to ask about Hefetz. She neither blushed nor paled, but she held on to her chair, stretching her arms and raising her shoulders until they reached her ears. She bowed her head so that her face was covered by a fan of her long, straight, fair hair. “Look,”
she said in a quiet, muffled voice, “I don’t know what you’ve been told, but whatever it was, it’s no longer relevant.”
“But you saw Hefetz in the newsroom, before you went up to Rubin’s office, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “He caught me as I was running upstairs to Rubin, but I didn’t tell him anything about—” She touched her canvas bag, and he understood that she had not spoken to Hefetz about what she was working on. She explained that as she had only been at Israel Television for less than a year and a half, she had hardly known Tirzah Rubin at all. “I started as a teleprompter, you know, the person who gives the cues. I’ve only been in the News Department for a few months, I barely knew her. I knew who she was, but she didn’t know who I was.” Almost in passing he asked about Hefetz’s relationship with Tirzah Rubin, and she gave him a look of surprise. “Hefetz? What about him? There was nothing special between them,” she rebuffed him. “He was in news, she was in something else altogether. They only ever met occasionally in the canteen. Nothing special.” And as with all the others he had spoken to, she denied categorically that Tirzah Rubin’s death could be anything but accidental. To the question about who, in her opinion, Tirzah could have been meeting with there at midnight, and confronting, she shrugged her shoulders and asked if he was sure it had been a prearranged meeting. She reminded him that Tirzah had been very popular, that she had never heard about her having any enemies. “But I’m not sure, I really didn’t know her— only Rubin, and he has always helped me, no strings attached.” She looked into his eyes with a gaze that made him ponder—it contained a plea, excitement, who knew what else—and then she lowered her gaze as if she were embarrassed. For a few moments he found it difficult to concentrate; he wished he had a cigarette. He chewed his toothpick, but did not derive even a flicker of satisfaction from it.
• • •
During their staff meeting the team commented on Michael’s restlessness. Tzilla noted graciously that it must be a difficult period for a person who had smoked for so many years and given it up all at once; this roused Balilty, who inclined his head, gazed seriously at her and said,
“Now his true personality will come out. You all thought he was a calm person? Nice, gentle? Tranquil? It was all thanks to the cigarettes, you can see for yourselves.”
Tzilla scolded him. “Why are you—it’s really hard to quit smoking—
we have to help him.”
“That’s the way of the world,” Balilty said serenely. “There are gentle people and caring people who help and support others, and there are the people who don’t—I, for example, did not need to take a vacation in order to give up smoking. I just woke up one morning and said, That’s enough. I went to that guy I told you about, the one out in Beit Shemesh, I paid whatever I paid him, I was there maybe seven minutes, he did this laying on of his hands, and that was that, I quit. How many times have I told him to go there?” he asked, indicating Michael with his head. “But him? He can do it on his own: so be my guest! Did he listen to me? You know what he said about it, don’t you, Tzilla? ‘You went to one of those guys who says, Special for you today, only six hundred shekels? I don’t believe in witch doctors.’ So, please, be my guest: witness the results.”
Michael squelched a smile. From the beginning of their relationship it had been Intelligence Officer Balilty’s custom to give him useful advice in every aspect of life: how to court women (“Look at her once like you’re crazy about her and then the next time like you couldn’t care less”); how to invest in the stock market (“Some people go to investment brokers, but I’ve studied up on it, and I can tell you just where to invest right now”); how to look for a new apartment (“Why do you live like a bag lady, all these years in such a dive? There’re a few new developments going up near our place, one right across the street”); how to gain extra days off (“How often do you get sick? Call in with a bad back, a slipped disk, just say the word and I’ll set you up with a doctor that’ll provide you with a note”); how to talk to his ex-wife (“Why do you always keep quiet? She’s the one who took you for everything you had, no?”); and how to manage his son’s life (“Give him
direction, give him advice so that he thinks he’s come up with it himself, that’s what young people like”). And afterward, if Michael did not take his advice, he would be deeply offended.
“How could I have gone to him? For what? Anyway, it only helps people who believe in it,” Michael said in self-defense.
“So you prefer wasting two weeks of vacation on it?” Balilty grumbled. “You don’t travel abroad, you don’t go out, you sit at home reading books and thinking thoughts and you quit smoking. You probably took Valium, too, didn’t you?”
“All right, cut it out already,” Eli Bachar said, intervening. “We’ve seen how well you do on your diets. Where are all the diet witch doctors? And didn’t you take a vacation to go to a fat farm? Just cut it out already. Can’t you see you’re getting on his nerves?”
Michael forced a smile, a smile that was meant to conceal the restlessness and malaise he was feeling in general, and especially his impatience with Balilty’s comments. He knew he would end up exposing his true feelings if Balilty did not shut up.
The report on Matty Cohen’s autopsy had been placed in front of each of the team members.
“Digoxin is the stuff they give to regulate the heart rate, isn’t it?”
Tzilla asked.
“Of course. It’s already written here,” Lillian said, “right at the beginning.” She pointed to the first page of the autopsy report. “It says he had four times the proper amount of digoxin in his blood.”
Tzilla raised her eyes from the page and glared silently at her.
Michael thought he noticed a quiver of annoyance in her pursed lips, but he could not be certain, not yet.
“For a new team member she’s pretty involved,” Balilty had said earlier, when they were standing in the hallway and he was watching Lillian from behind as she entered the meeting room. “You’d think she’d learn a little, get organized, get to know the territory. Ha! I wish I had her confidence. An hour ago she came up to me and told me that she has ‘a few suggestions’ to add to the file on this case. At first I was like—speechless—a person’s brand-new on the job, and she’s already got suggestions! What do you make of that?”
Michael had hemmed and hawed but as usual Balilty had not waited for a response. Instead he had said under his breath, “I told her that it’s not even clear if we’ve got a case here, this is only an initial briefing. So she says, ‘Whatever,’ but you could see she was offended. Oh well, I guess that’s the way it is with Russian women. She’s Russian, isn’t she?
How exactly did we get stuck with her here anyway?”
“She’s been in Israel for more than twenty years, since the age of five, and went through the school system here, so I don’t think you can exactly call her a Russian,” Michael had said quietly. “She came to us from Narcotics with excellent references.”
Balilty whistled under his breath. “Forget references, check out her ass,” he said quietly. “Tell me, have you ever seen an ass like that in your life? It’s like—there’s nothing like it. I’d love to give an ass like that a try once, wouldn’t you?”
Under Balilty’s watchful gaze, Michael glanced with embarrass-ment at her rear end. Indeed, it was full and round beyond proportion to her narrow back and her slim hips.
“That’s not a woman with an ass,” Balilty concluded, “that’s an ass with a woman. And her legs are too skinny. But she’s got a nice face, don’t you think?” Michael smiled against his will and sighed. It was clear that from here on in he would be hearing about her face, her rear, her chutzpah. He had accepted her onto the team because of a request made by Yaffa from forensics, who was doing a favor for a neighbor.
Yaffa had told Michael how great a neighbor she was, how she was always ready to lend a hand (“If I’m stuck, like without sugar or something, she’s always got some, and she never turns down any request. So now that her daughter’s in trouble, how could I not return the favor?”); and how the daughter, who was very talented, had gotten into a romantic entanglement with someone at work (“This guy comes along and says that he’s separated, that he’s in the process of getting a divorce; they’re always in the process, that divorce is always just about to come through, but then they tuck their tails between their legs and run for home, “for the kids’ sake”—yeah, right
