then there are these, like, historical photos, Japanese POW
camps in World War Two, and American POWs, I guess in Vietnam, they’re sitting on the ground with their hands in the air—”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Lillian asked, looking suspiciously in Tzilla’s direction, who was acting as though she had not heard the conversation.
“A lot,” Balilty said, strumming his lower lip with a fat finger.
“Rubin and Meyuhas and those other guys were probably POWs or
something. If you’re with somebody under enemy fire or in a war, well, that’s a bond for life, even stronger than brothers. They were together in the Yom Kippur War? There was some story about the paratroopers in the Sinai, we should look into it, but—”
“Let’s get back to the medical report for a minute,” Michael said; Balilty’s incessant chattering was getting to be more than he could bear. “First of all, there are these marks, the bruises on Tirzah’s neck, as though someone had a firm grip on her. But the pathologist can’t determine exactly when. It could be from her argument with Benny Meyuhas, which was a few days before that. The pathologist says that couldn’t be, but still—”
“What?” Tzilla said, taken aback, “you want to tell me that Benny Meyuhas is a wife-beater?”
“What are you so surprised about?” Lillian exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you think that just because someone’s a celebrity he must be a decent human being.”
“Not just any celebrity,” Tzilla said, standing her ground. “He’s the most respected director in television, the most—how shall I say it, someone that everyone knows is reputable—and now with that film of his, the story by Agnon. And the man looks, well, he certainly doesn’t look like a wife-beater.”
“What exactly, in your opinion, does a wife-beater look like?” Lillian asked with forced calm. “Do you think he has some sort of crazed look about him or something? I—in Narcotics, where I used to work, there were lots of … one thing I learned was that if someone wants to hide it, he hides it; it’s not like a common criminal, where you can see it written all over him. With a white-collar guy there’s no external sign that gives him away, especially if he’s a drug addict.”
It seemed that Tzilla was about to say something, but Michael cut her off. “In any case,” he concluded, “you can see in the report in front of you what the pathologist has to say. He writes ‘inconclusive’ at the bottom of the first page.”
“One thing’s for sure: there’s something very strange about this accident,” Tzilla muttered. “How can a pillar fall on you, and you don’t move aside? And what about how Eli heard him saying, ‘It’s because of me’? They must have had some serious argument.”
“But,” Lillian reminded them all, “in the affidavit it says that Benny Meyuhas was on the roof the whole time. He never left.”
“That’s not exactly true,” Michael said. “There was a break. Two in fact, one for food and one for cigarettes or something. The first was at ten o’clock and the other was”—he paused to thumb through his papers—“at eleven-thirty, when they sent for the sun gun. But who knows? He’s the director. He couldn’t very well disappear without someone seeing him.”
“Sure, and people could have gone to the bathroom, too,” Balilty noted. “Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. But if you ask me, we don’t have a case here. Nobody has a motive, and someone from the outside, well, there was a guard on duty and it doesn’t make sense that—even if someone had the key to the back entrance, we don’t know of anyone who—like who? Who?”
“We don’t know yet,” Michael emphasized. “In fact, we don’t know anything yet. The question is whether to start poking around or not. The decision is based more on intuition than on some particular finding.”
“What about the digoxin they found in Matty Cohen’s body?”
Lillian piped in. “If we add Tirzah’s accident to the surplus of digoxin in Matty Cohen’s blood—”
Balilty cut her off. “Even though it fits in with the general picture, the guy was taking digoxin for five years, he was a bona fide heart patient. It appears he accidentally took too much of the stuff. We don’t have a case, it’s just that …”
While he was speaking, Tzilla passed around additional copies of the medical documents to her husband, who gave them a quick look and handed them to Lillian.
Michael waited until Lillian had passed them on to Balilty and said,
“In any case, two dead bodies in under twenty-four hours, each an accident, and with some connection between the two of them—I think it’s a bit … how shall I say it—”
“Okay,” Balilty protested. “There is such a thing as coincidence, don’t you think?” He smiled. “Well, then again, not where you’re concerned, there’s no such term as ‘coincidence’ in the Ohayon dictionary, is there?
But there you have it,” he said, a note of victory in his voice, “you always disagree with me, but this time it turns out you’re wrong.”
“I haven’t said anything yet,” Michael reminded him. “But, yes, this time, too, I have this—never mind, we’ll give it another day or two, we’ll put it on the back burner, but we’ll keep our feelers out. I have to go back there in any event to talk to Hefetz, since he can’t make it over here. They’ve got something big on tonight’s program, and you,” he said, pointing to Eli Bachar, “you’re going back to Benny Meyuhas’s place like we talked about?”
Eli Bachar glanced at Tzilla, and for a moment it seemed to Michael that he saw a flicker of fear in his eyes; Tzilla lowered her gaze and shrugged. “It won’t take very long,” Eli said. He looked at Michael and smiled. “Today’s our anniversary,” he said quietly. “We thought we would …”
Michael looked at them both. “That’s right,” he said, remembering.
“The first night of Hanukkah. How many years has it been? Fourteen?
You celebrate according to the Hebrew date?”
“Fifteen years. How could you not remember?” Tzilla said, scolding him. “You orchestrated the whole thing.”
“Well,” Balilty said mockingly, “in fact he was only the go-between, that’s all, I remember how Eli—”
Michael gave him a look: all they needed now was for Balilty to start telling about how Eli Bachar had had this “fear of commitment,” and how he had given Tzilla such grief until Michael had finally intervened, speaking with him and arranging matters. Balilty lowered his gaze, grinning, but stopped talking. Michael summed up: they would meet again the following morning.
On his way out of the room Eli Bachar said suddenly, “I can’t believe what an idiot I am! I don’t understand how I didn’t think of this earlier: Benizri told me he was with the Hulit workers, but I saw with my own eyes, when I got here I saw the wives, they were standing outside waiting for the men to be transferred from here to—and Shimshi’s wife said to me, ‘Benizri is our only hope, we’re waiting for him to come.’
So how … where was he?”
Balilty stopped. He was fingering a cigar he had pulled from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “Don’t worry.” He chuckled. “It’s nothing urgent. And anyway those things always come out sooner or later.”
c h a p t e r e i g h t
For a long moment Michael stood in the doorway of the large room, quite close to the two death notices—one announcing the death of Tirzah Rubin, the other that of Matty Cohen—and took note of the goings-on. It was impossible to recognize the place from that same morning: now, people were rushing helter-skelter, completely absorbed in preparing for the broadcast, so that anything other than the news—even the deaths of Tirzah Rubin and Matty Cohen—
was shoved aside. People stood around the conference table, reading the sheets of paper that had been placed on it, talking among themselves, and shouting to others in the inner rooms. Telephones rang from every corner, muffling the sound of the computer printers busy spewing out pages: one mobile phone burst forth with Carmen, while another one, quite near by, rang to the theme for Mission: Impossible again and again until Dror Levin, the correspondent for political parties, picked up the phone and shouted, “Hello! Hello!” a look of exasperation on his face. Through the glass partition Michael could see Danny Benizri standing behind the graphic artist in her room, pointing out something to her on the screen, and in the next room he caught sight of a translator named Rivi as she spoke with a young woman in jeans and a red sweater who was gesticulating and pointing to another cubicle, where a correspondent for foreign affairs was hunched over the keyboard in front of him, typing and
