The kerosene heater was of no use; the room was terribly cold. It was a Jerusalem cold—dense, powerful—of old stone rooms. Schreiber stood rubbing his hands over the soot-covered grid of the heater. “She didn’t want to call you people,” he said casting a look of reproach at Natasha. “It took me a while to convince her, but in the end I told her she could do whatever she wanted, but there was no way I was getting mixed up with them.”
“Who’s ‘them’?” Michael asked.
“These religious fanatics,” Schreiber said. He moved to the half-open door and lit a cigarette there. “It’s pretty clear they did this, don’t you think? Believe me, I know those people.”
The room was very small, most of the space taken up by a single bed in disarray. A few sweaters lay in a pile upon it, and at the other side of the room, in a niche in the thick wall, was a clothes hook with several shirts and one skirt hanging from it. There was a pile of books on the floor next to the bed, and perched on a woven-straw stool stood a book in Russian, open facedown. A makeshift kitchen stood facing the doorway; there were water spots and mold on the wall near the electric burner, a single pot and pan hanging there, and a dish rack with three plates, two mugs, a few spoons, two forks, and a knife.
Behind a half-open door there was a bathroom: a toilet, a sink, and a faucet with a shower hose.
Michael looked around the room; everything was utilitarian and meager except for a blue vase with a clutch of wilting wild daffodils that stood on the only table in the room, and a long, narrow print in a thin wooden frame hanging over the bed. The print showed a solitary and peculiar tower standing erect in an empty brown field; one side of the tower was brightly lit and the other shaded, the shadow extending from two people, small and displaced, posed in the middle of the fore-ground. He wondered how it was that in spite of the bright white light on the illuminated side of the tower, the picture exuded the feeling that the light did not have the power to illuminate this world, as though the shadows had overwhelmed it and the blackness in the background was about to flood the entire picture. Four flags blew loftily in the wind from the top of the tower, but even these brought no happiness. The mood of the entire picture was one of regret, of interminable loneliness. Who had painted this picture, he wondered, and why did it disturb him so? Underneath it, in a corner of the bed, folded in between the wall and the simple wooden table on which stood the vase of daffodils and a few plates with the remains of dried-up hummus and pita bread, was Natasha, huddled under a gray army blanket and shaking nonetheless. Michael looked into her clear blue eyes and saw no fear there.
“It’s like she doesn’t care,” Schreiber said, “but at first, from the shock of it, she screamed. After that, nothing. She wanted to clean it up. It took me a long time to convince her to call the police. I didn’t let her touch all the blood and filth, I wanted you to see it as it was… .
Anyway, I took pictures of it all,” he said, adding in a faint voice, “It was her idea.”
“What was Natasha’s idea?” Michael asked. From outside the apartment they could hear the forensics people arriving, and Balilty’s voice a moment later. “Taking pictures?”
“No, taking pictures was my idea,” Schreiber said. “Calling you was her idea,” he explained, lowering his eyes. “She said that you—”
“Schreiber, shut up already,” Natasha said. Her voice burst forth
from between her narrow hands, which were wrapped around her small face.
“What? What did I say wrong? Didn’t you tell me to call him? You said he was the only one worth his salt.”
“There’s no reason to hurt people’s feelings,” Natasha mumbled, looking out the half-open door. “There are other people here.
Everybody needs a good word.”
The wives of the striking workers had watched Natasha’s flop on television, too. In the living room of the Shimshi household in a town near Israel’s northern border they kept their eyes on the enormous television—which took up the entire surface of the glossy brown con-sole—and listened as Natasha at first made her highly emotional announcement (they were waiting for the item about their husbands) and then her retraction and apologies. “Corrupt, the whole lot of them,” muttered Esty, Rachel Shimshi’s sister-in-law. “Everywhere you look, it’s all just filth.” She laid her hands on her protruding belly.
Rachel Shimshi looked at her suspiciously, as though she were predict-ing the future.
“I don’t want to just sit here doing nothing,” Esty said. “If you’re gonna put up a fight, you can count me in too.”
“A pregnant woman isn’t going nowhere,” Rachel Shimshi declared, narrowing her eyes as she did whenever she was angry. “That’s not what I’m talking to you about. I just want you to get your hands on the keys, that’s all.” She stood up and went to the kitchen. Esty, too, stood up from the couch facing the television and followed Rachel into the kitchen, where she leaned against the marble countertop watching her sister-in-law slowly soaping dirty glasses of tea.
“You’re not gonna leave me at home just when you’re standing up to the whole world,” Esty exclaimed.
Rachel Shimshi placed the clean glasses upside down on a towel she had spread over the formica table and looked at Esty. “Don’t waste your breath,” she said quietly. “No chance I’m letting you join us, and that’s final.”
For the first time in all the years they had known one another, Esty stood up to Rachel, spreading her hands behind her to grab hold of the countertop for support; she refused to accept her sister-in-law’s authority. Her heavy breathing resounded in the kitchen. “You’re not going to tell me what to do,” Esty told Rachel, “I’ll decide for myself.”
She nearly burst into tears because as soon as she had said this she was full of remorse; she had not intended to sound so aggressive, and she most especially did not wish to hurt the feelings of Avram’s older sister Rachel, who had always treated her so well. “It’s biting the hand that feeds you,” her mother would have said, may she rest in peace. Rachel had brought over a big pot of stuffed vegetables, had left Dudy alone at home, and had come to light the candles with her on the second night of Hanukkah. She’d brought doughnuts, too, had done everything as though she had no worries of her own, as though Shimshi were not being held in police custody and all that. Everything just so that she, Esty, would not be alone. And now how was she behaving?
She took a deep breath and continued. “I’m not letting you get into this all alone, you need as much help as you can get. So let’s call all the girls, everyone will come with you.”
“I don’t even have a driver’s license,” Rachel Shimshi muttered.
“But I do, and so do Sarit and Simi,” Esty reminded her. “Lots of them do. For once, let other people handle this. You don’t have to do everything on your own. I’ll call Tikki, wait’ll you see what we’ll make of this.”
“But how are you going to manage with that belly? How are you going to lug boxes full of bottles? They’re heavy, even when the bottles are empty.”
“Okay,” Esty said while dialing the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. “So I won’t do any lugging, other people will do it. Okay?”
“The ultra-Orthodox?” Michael asked. “Because of Natasha’s news broadcast?”
“No. That was bullshit. Peanuts,” Schreiber said dismissively. “No, I’m talking about something—” He looked at Natasha with apprehension.
After a moment she spoke. “It’s something very serious, nothing to do with financing yeshiva students. I was intentionally misled, they wanted to get me into trouble to keep me from pursuing the big issue,
and to keep me off the air. Now I really don’t know if they’ll ever let me broadcast anything ever again.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll let you,” Schreiber assured her. “Hefetz will let you, he’ll convince Zadik.”
“Maybe. Maybe,” she said, glancing at the front door. “But who’s going to tell Hefetz?”
“I understand you don’t wish to reveal your sources,” Michael said,
“but you’re going to have to give us some kind of lead, point us in the right direction, anything. We’ve got to know at least what the issue here is.”
Natasha regarded him with suspicion, then glanced again at the door. Michael hastened to close it. “There,” he said, “no one can hear.
It’s only us.”
“It’s,” she began, hesitantly, “it’s that a while ago I heard, it happened that I, well, I came across something really big, I mean big money in the hands of Rabbi Elharizi, and not just him. Others too.
Whole suitcases and boxes of dollars and gold, everything. It’s being smuggled abroad.”
