—and then you’re stuck alone. Why? Don’t you deserve better? Aren’t you a human being?”); and how she wanted to get away from him (“She’s eating her heart out over this guy, and how’s she supposed to get him out of her head when she sees him every day at work?”). “So what do you think of her?”
Balilty had said with an expectant look, which had caused Michael to pause, intending to say something noncommittal. But just then Tzilla had called them into the meeting room.
“Has the final report on Tirzah Rubin come in yet?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, it’s here,” Tzilla said. “But in my opinion we don’t have a case. What do you think?”
“I don’t either,” Michael said absentmindedly, looking at the cigarette Lillian was holding. “Aside from a couple of things Benny Meyuhas said, which I’m not sure—”
“You can’t smoke in here,” Tzilla said sharply to Lillian. “There is no smoking during meetings.”
“Oh, I had no idea,” Lillian said with dismay as she tossed her cigarette into a half-empty bottle of mineral water.
“Since when?” Michael asked, astonished. “We’ve always smoked during meetings, and—”
“First of all,” Tzilla said without looking at him, “the boss has quit smoking—and anyway, it’s a windowless room, the heating’s on, it …
it makes me feel ill.”
“All right,” Lillian said, crossing her legs and shifting uncomfortably in her chair. “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”
Michael looked at Tzilla in wonder. All these years she had never complained: windowless rooms and stuffy cars and everywhere, she had never been with him without his smoking, and she had never once commented on it or asked him to stop. Sometimes she would sigh and give him a sorrowful look when he lit up, and only once she had said to him, “You know, one day some doctor is going to tell you you have to quit, and you will, so why wait until then?” He glanced around and saw that Eli Bachar had lowered his gaze at his wife’s outburst and said, “Enough, Tzilla, let it go.” Suddenly Michael perceived that something was going on between the members of his investigations team.
After all, it was clear that the cigarette had not brought on this outburst; anything, if necessary, could serve as the excuse.
“You’ve spoken with Danny Benizri,” Michael said to Eli Bachar.
“What have we learned from him?”
“Nothing significant,” he responded uncomfortably. “First he showed up two hours late, even more than that, saying he’d been with the Hulit factory workers, that he’d escorted them or something like that. Then later he wasn’t sure, he didn’t know anything about Benny Meyuhas or Tirzah Rubin, didn’t know anything about anyone. Only Rubin, who was his guru. And Hefetz, who he doesn’t get along with.
That sort of thing. That was all.”
“Right,” Balilty said mockingly, “like all the rest of them. Nobody knows anything. On principle they won’t help us. I’ve heard there’s like this tradition, all over the world, that police and journalists don’t get along—”
“Bullshit,” Lillian said, cutting him off. “I’ve sat with that correspondent for police affairs, the redhead, Shalit, and he’s always been very cooperative. He’s never quoted something I asked him not to. All these reporters have given us their full cooperation—”
“Only if it’s vice versa,” Tzilla noted. “Only if they need you. But if you need them? I mean, I just saw in the paper that the Union of Television Workers, about 350 people, is striking against the Tel Aviv police force for assaulting them, for denying them access to crime sites—”
“First of all, those people are not employed by the Israel Broadcasting Authority; they’re government employees,” Balilty explained. “And anyway, there are things we know on our own,” he mumbled, peering at the coffee grinds at the bottom of his mug as he rotated it in his hands. All the others were drinking from Styrofoam cups, but Balilty claimed they ruined the taste of the coffee, so he had brought his own mug from home, which was kept in Michael’s desk drawer. Everyone was expecting him to continue speaking, but he fell silent.
Michael chewed the end of his pencil and waited.
“So,” Eli Bachar asked Balilty, “what are you waiting for? For us to get down on our knees and beg?”
“There are all kinds of issues,” Balilty answered mysteriously.
“Where there are people there are problems, tensions, interests. All kinds of things.”
“How about something in the matter of Tirzah Rubin?” Michael asked finally.
“Yeah, her too,” Balilty confirmed as he examined the bottom button on his shirt, which looked as if it were about to pop off. He straightened the sleeves of his blue sweater, which everyone knew had been knitted by
his wife in only two weeks (“And I didn’t even know about it”), and wrapped them around his large belly, and only then he started speaking about Tirzah Rubin, who was Arye Rubin’s wife and then had gone to live with his very best friend, Benny Meyuhas (“Instead of the opposite, the opposite happened. Did you get that? Instead of going from the boring one to the interesting one, she went from the interesting one to the boring one, from the classy one—Rubin is one classy guy—to Benny Meyuhas, who looks like her grandfather”), who she’d been with for seven, eight years. “She left Rubin because of all his skirt-chasing,” he explained, examining his fingertips, “but I don’t know whether she knew about the son he had with Niva Pinhas. Have you people met her?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Eli Bachar said with a sigh. “There was no avoiding it, was there? She’s not exactly the shy and fearful type.”
“She screams all the time, there really are women like that,” Balilty explained, as if he was particularly knowledgeable in this area. “Secretaries in the media are known to be especially tough—all of them, even the junior ones—so imagine one in the newsroom… . I always say, you want to get to the director general, make sure you get on the good side of his secretary… . Never mind, where were we? Oh, yeah, whether Tirzah Rubin knew about the kid. I don’t know, but I do know that Rubin took great pains to keep any information about him from reaching her, even after she’d left him. He’d be about six, maybe a little older, and he doesn’t have a clue who his father is,” he said in wonder, explaining that Tirzah could not carry full-term. “She had four miscarriages, lots of fertility treatments, poor thing, you should see her file at Hadassah Hospital.
They couldn’t help her.”
“That means,” Lillian chimed in, stroking her pointed chin and prodding the dark mole at the base of her neck, “that now the kid can be told. Like, now Rubin has nothing to hide?”
“Yes,” Balilty affirmed, “that’s exactly what it means. What do we learn from this?”
“That Niva Pinhas gains something from Tirzah’s death?” Lillian ventured.
Michael nodded. “But Niva Pinhas was in the newsroom when Tirzah was killed. She never left there. In fact, she just happened to be filling in for someone else that evening, we checked.”
“There were a lot of people in the building. They were there, and people saw them there,” Eli Bachar said. “Hefetz was around, and Rubin, and the skinny young woman with the blue eyes—”
“Natasha,” Tzilla said.
Balilty added, “Meyuhas and Rubin had a very strange relationship—sort of like brothers, unconditional love and all that, but there couldn’t be two more different people—”
“They served together in the army,” Michael explained. “First in the youth movement and later as paratroopers. I understand they spent the Yom Kippur War in the Sinai Desert, nearly their entire platoon was wiped out—only six of them survived, of whom three are alive today: Rubin, Benny Meyuhas, and a friend of theirs who lives in Los Angeles.”
“Aha!” Balilty shouted. “Now I get it.” He stood up from his chair and went to look out the window, at the front courtyard and the main gate to the Russian Compound. “Hey, check this out,” he said, as if to himself. “The wives of the guys laid off by the Hulit factory are still out there. What are they hanging out around here for?”
Michael drummed his fingers on the edge of the table. “Nu, ” he said at last, but Balilty continued to stare out the window and did not speak up.
“What? What is it you ‘get’ already?” Eli Bachar shouted.
“What? What’s the matter?” Balilty said innocently. “It’s nothing important, it’s just that in Rubin’s office there’s this corkboard with all kinds of large photographs. Not pictures from his news reports and not babes—not like Zadik’s office either, with pictures of VIPs—you know, Zadik with Clinton or Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai or lots of other people—no, there’s none of that with Rubin. He’s got this big photo of an Arab kid with these bulging eyes, like he’s starving or something, and a photo of himself with Tirzah, at the Sea of Galilee, I think, and
