“What?” Natasha asked, confused.
“Did he take you seriously?”
“What do you think?” she asked mockingly. “He’s twice as old as me, director of the newsroom, married for about a million years, has grown children. You think he possibly could have been serious?”
“Don’t you believe someone could actually, seriously, fall in love with you?” Michael asked.
She stared at him for a while, then lowered her eyes and said, “I have
no idea what that is. What does it mean that someone loves someone else?”
“How about Schreiber? He seems to look after you, and he’s willing to take risks for you.”
“Schreiber?” she asked, embarrassed. “It’s like, well, mercy on his part. He’s this guy with a great big heart. But that doesn’t have anything to do with love.” She rested her head on her arms again. “I’m exhausted,” she said, her voice muffled. “If you want a written statement from me, let’s get it done now, before I fall asleep on your desk.”
At six in the morning, when the sky was still completely dark and it had begun to rain again, Balilty and Schreiber were already in Michael’s office. They were stirring sugar into their coffee when Balilty’s ears perked up at the sound of footsteps running down the hall, followed by noise from transmitters and wailing police sirens.
“What’s going on?” Balilty asked. “You call your radio monitors, and I’ll call mine,” he said to Schreiber. “Let’s see who gets some answers first.
“Hey, there’s no reception here,” Balilty said, and walked out into the hallway. Schreiber followed him, and the two returned to the office after a few minutes.
“I don’t believe it,” Balilty said. He turned to Michael. “What is it you like to say? ‘How wondrous are the ways of God’?”
“That’s not exactly what I say,” Michael corrected him.
“Okay. How does it go again?”
Michael sighed.
“All right, I’m sorry. ‘There’s no end to miracles.’ That’s what he says,” Balilty expounded to Schreiber.
“Poor women,” Schreiber said.
“What? What happened?” Natasha asked as she pulled one boot over a wool sock.
“It’s the wives of the fired workers from the Hulit factory,” Schreiber said.
“What happened to them?” Natasha asked.
“They’re in big trouble,” Balilty said, scratching his forehead. “I can sympathize with them, but they’re in big trouble. You won’t believe this: all the company vehicles, like seven trucks—”
“What did they do?”
“I’ll tell you what they did,” Balilty said. “They stole them, drove off with seven company trucks all on their own. Then they filled them up with bottles, emptied out all the warehouses. The drivers came to work this morning and found nothing: no trucks, no—”
“Where are they now?” Natasha asked.
“On their way to big intersections, nobody knows which. They’re planning to dump the bottles there, block traffic. In short, big trouble.”
“Can’t somebody stop them?” Natasha asked.
“Nobody has yet, I guess it’s still got to be organized.”
“Is Danny Benizri with them?” Natasha asked.
“Are you crazy?” Schreiber asked. “You think he’s going to get himself into trouble and take part in something like this?”
Natasha shrugged but said nothing.
“Would you?” Schreiber asked pointedly. “Would you go with them, Natasha?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “Anyway, it’s some story.”
“Don’t mind her,” Schreiber said to Michael. “Ambition has warped her brain.”
c h a p t e r t e n
What, should I just start talking? This is hard for me, and with that tape recorder I’m … never mind, it’s hard for me to talk.
Starting this morning when I woke up, I had this bad feeling. It feels like days or even weeks have passed since this morning; look, it’s not even dark outside yet, it’s only been a matter of hours. All of this has happened in the space of one day, and right from the beginning I had this feeling that I just didn’t want to start this day. Sometimes you open your eyes in the morning and before you can even think your first thought, you have a bad feeling, like you do after a dream, a bad dream. I dreamed something, too, I don’t remember exactly what.
These last few nights I’ve had trouble—I used to fall asleep in a second.
Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you that if Aviva has a bed and a pillow, she’ll be sleeping like a baby in an instant. That’s the way I’ve been since I was a small child. But I guess this whole matter with Tirzah and Matty Cohen has gotten to me. I, I wasn’t particularly close to either of them, but you know how it is when people work together for years.
Tirzah was at Israel Television from the beginning, from when it was established, and I’ve been around for a while too, nearly twenty years, from the age of twenty-two. When somebody dies like that, so suddenly, I just … and then all these rumors about Tirzah, if it was an accident or not, well, they set me on edge. But even before, before I saw him, the ultra-Orthodox guy with the terrible burns, standing there next to my desk—I hate when people creep in like that—I was sitting with my back to the door for just an instant, talking on the phone, I had swiveled my chair around for a split second and suddenly there he was, standing next to me. No one can get into Zadik’s office without me seeing, nobody. There’s no other way into his room, that is, no other way that anyone used, until—okay, you know about all that. But anyway, everything passes by me first: telephones, meetings, people. And I didn’t leave my desk for a minute, never even had a chance to drink a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom. I was even supposed to leave early today.
“Nothing’s clear to me anymore, nothing. I don’t understand anything at all: I mean, how is it possible that someone so … so … disfigured, so completely burned—burn marks all over his face, his hands, his neck—how could someone like that just pass through unnoticed?
Nobody remembers seeing him. How can that be? Didn’t he catch anyone’s eye? People are telling me that it’s winter, everyone’s all covered up in layers of clothing. But his hands? I saw them, his hands, and I’m still upset by it. And his face! Can you imagine how frightening that is?
Here’s this bearded guy in a long, black trench coat and a hat, he could fit in in any of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, but his voice sounded like one of ours, I mean, his way of talking was normal, pleasant, no Yiddish inflections, no accent; a real native-born Israeli Hebrew. He came through the security officer, I know this for sure because they called me from downstairs, and they said, ‘Aviva, there’s somebody here who says he has an appointment with Zadik.’ I checked his appointment book, and there it was: Zadik had told me to write the letter S. I didn’t ask any questions, I just wrote it in.
Afterward the guy left Zadik’s office and disappeared as though nobody had ever laid eyes on him. Did you people see him after that?
Did you find him? I’m telling you, he disappeared.
“It’s been a day of disappearances. Everyone disappeared. You could be sure that if you really needed somebody, they would disappear. It started first thing in the morning, these disappearances. First there was the news about the wives of the laid-off workers, how the trucks with the bottles disappeared and the women disappeared. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Like in Naples. Once I was in Naples, just for a day, but I’ll never ever forget it because I was with this guy—I can’t tell you who because everyone knows him, and I can’t really call him a miser because on the other hand—well, all in all, he was a miser. Never mind.
Married, a miser, there we are in southern Italy, in Naples for the weekend, which is appropriate because it was more of an end ing than a weekend. Anyway, why was I talking about this? Oh, yeah, because of the wives of the workers. In the end it turned out they took the trucks, drove them, dumped the bottles, the whole works. That’s how it was in Naples, too. There was a train strike. Total anarchy. Take a red traffic light, for example. That didn’t obligate you to stop, it was more like a suggestion—
so anyway, in the morning they reported, one by one, that the stolen trucks were hitting all the most
