Building as well. And suddenly, a door! Right in the middle of the hallway! Where has it been hiding all this time?”
Hefetz was the one who told him the tall, narrow metal cabinet had been leaning against the door all those years, causing everyone to forget about its existence, and that the cabinet had only recently been moved. “They forgot about it?” Michael asked. “Forgot? I mean, they knew about it once and forgot?” Hefetz squirmed under Michael’s scrutiny and spread his arms as if confounded. “I don’t recall that I knew about it, maybe I did once, I can’t swear by it. But even if I did, I didn’t know that I did.”
Rubin intervened. “You don’t pay close attention in a place you know really well, someplace you walk around every day. Whatever you take for granted ceases to exist. A cabinet has been standing here for years, but if you ask us what’s inside it, we won’t have a clue because it’s not in use. Once upon a time office supplies were stored there, I only just remembered that now; paper, staples, that sort of thing. It was kept locked then. Now too, no? It was your people who opened it up, right?”
“Yeah, it was us,” Eli Bachar confirmed. “But nobody had a key. Not for the cabinet, and not for the door.”
“I’m sure nobody saw it, the cabinet was hiding the door for years,”
Niva said. The conversation took place just after Zadik’s body had been removed by stretcher; before the investigation at police headquarters they sat in Hefetz’s office, near the newsroom. “But I’m telling you,” she said excitedly, “we didn’t even notice that someone had moved the cabinet, even though there are plenty of observant people around here. I couldn’t tell you whether that cabinet was moved yesterday or today or even a week ago. I simply didn’t notice. My eyes are always on the ground when I walk, and how much do I actually get around here?”
“That’s just it,” Arye Rubin said. “Paradoxically, it takes someone from the outside to discern details that we are blind to. You see,” he said to Michael in wonderment, “it was a good thing you were wandering around the hall.”
Inside Zadik’s office there stood a bookstand on which were arranged trophies and a number of collections (flags, matches, wine corks) and a shelf that held bottles of alcohol—not a proper bar, just a shelf; behind this was a curtain, the bottoms of which had been shoved aside as if someone had pushed the bookstand from its place and neglected to straighten the edges of the curtain. When Michael had bent down and looked from down below, he noticed suddenly a light-colored wood surface and the hint of a door frame. He exited the office and walked down the hallway, opening door after door and looking in. The narrow metal cabinet stood quite close to one of the doors, very nearly hiding it. When he pressed on the doorknob, he did not expect anything to happen, when suddenly a small space opened in front of him, a square niche that led to another door. He tried opening that one, too, but something was blocking it. He pushed hard against the door and felt something on the other side moving. All at once he could hear the voice of Yaffa from forensics on the other side of the door. “What’s going on?” she called, taken aback. “Someone—who is it, who’s there?”
“Hang on a minute,” Michael had said, dashing back to Zadik’s room. Together they moved the bookstand and pushed the curtain to the side, revealing the other door.
“Wait,” Yaffa said quietly. “Excuse me for a moment.” She nearly toppled him while she dusted the doorknob and the bookstand for prints.
“They used this door,” Michael said. “They opened this door, didn’t they?”
“Sure,” Yaffa said, eyeing him with frustration. “They probably opened it today, otherwise we would have found something, at least some dust, cobwebs, something. Look, nothing,” she said scornfully.
“Not even—well, what did you expect? Maybe you hoped that someone would enter, kill a person, and then leave signs on the door and the knob? At least a palm print, a thumb. Something.”
“Nothing at all?” Michael asked.
“Nada,” Yaffa mumbled. “There are prints on the bookstand and the bottles and all that, but not on the door. In any event, not fingerprints.
But we’ll find something else, don’t worry, something will turn up. Just like they taught us, ‘Every time you touch something …”
“… you leave a trace,’” Michael completed the sentence in a near whisper, and sighed.
“Why can’t you believe that?” Yaffa insisted as she bent down to the foot of the bookstand and carefully lifted a single hair from the floor with a pair of pincers. “Do me a favor,” she said before he had a chance to answer, “bring me a small plastic bag from the sack next to the door, or tell Rafi and he’ll give you one.” He hadn’t even moved a muscle when she called out, “Rafi, anybody, I need to bag a hair,” and Michael, who was standing between Yaffa and a young man he did not know, was handed a bag, which he passed on to Yaffa. “You haven’t answered me: do you or don’t you believe it?” Yaffa sat down on the rug, placed the hair in the bag, and sealed it, then looked at him expectantly.
“What? That every time you touch something, you leave a trace?
Experience shows that’s true, generally,” he said pensively. “But we know that often it’s just a matter of luck, and—”
“When’s the last time we didn’t come up with something for you?”
Yaffa said, offended. “If you consider all the times we’ve worked together, I would have thought you’d —”
“No, no, no,” Michael hastened to appease her. “That’s not at all what I meant. You’re a terrific team, there’s no question about it. It’s just that there’s always—”
“It’s true that things are tough at first,” she agreed; even though she had not let him finish his sentence, she knew what caused his doubts.
“Until you make some sense of it all, until you get a handle on all those details, it seems like you’ll never get any real answers. But something turns up, it always does,” she concluded, though it was unclear whether she was trying to convince him or herself. Her long ponytail bobbed up and down when she added, “At least in this case we were very lucky to get here so quickly, before anyone could … it’s lucky they called you so fast. Who called you? Ronen?”
“Yes.”
“Was he a plant here? Gosh, now I understand why he hasn’t been at work. Did Zadik know about him?”
“He did,” Michael said with a sigh. “He agreed to it because of Matty Cohen.”
Although little time had passed since he had spoken with Zadik, it seemed to Michael as though their conversation about the results of the postmortem performed on Matty Cohen had taken place eons ago, and that ages had passed since he had told Zadik about the excessive quantity of digoxin found in his body. “What’s digoxin?” Zadik had asked. “Isn’t that something given to heart patients? I think I’ve heard of it, I think I even saw Matty taking it. Or maybe he just told me about it.”
Michael had explained to him that the popular medication, produced from the digitalis plant and sold commercially from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century as an efficient way of increasing and stabilizing heart rate, was also a dangerous drug. “Medical professionals and heart patients alike know,” Michael said, explaining to Zadik what he had learned from the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Matty Cohen, “that the main problem with digoxin is the narrow range of proper dosage and the fatal side effects the drug produces when just a little too much is consumed.” He thought to himself about the name of the plant—digitalis, responsible for the digital beat—and a digital ticking began resounding in his ears. Zadik had sat up straight in his chair and, clearly rattled, placed his hand over his chest, then stretched his fingers to feel his left arm. Michael added that for that reason, the level of digoxin in Matty Cohen’s blood had been constantly monitored, and shortly before his death it was found to be fine. The autopsy, however, had revealed that the quantity of the drug in his bloodstream was four times normal.
“Four times?” Zadik said, horrified. “How could that be? Does that mean he took too much by accident? Or not by accident?”
“It’s hard to know,” Michael said. “It’s hard to know whether he ingested it himself, accidentally or not, or whether it was given to him.” He imagined the sound of different heartbeats, the normal and the abnormal— terrifying, galloping, exaggerated.
“What does that mean, it was given to him? Are you saying someone poisoned him?” Zadik was astounded.
