“A month before her death, she visited the United States,” Michael said. “We think she might have gone to meet him.”
“No way!” Rubin said, visibly agitated. “She went for work, two weeks on a business trip. Most of the time she was in New York, she had meetings with producers—I don’t know, I suppose she could have been on the West Coast too …” A note of caution crept into his voice.
“I don’t know the details of her trip, I never had a chance to talk to her about it afterward,” he said.
“In fact, she spent three days in Los Angeles,” Michael informed him. “We know this for sure. We have the details on her hotel and her meetings there,” he said without altering the expression on his face; in actual fact, he had no such information. “Don’t you think she would have met up with Sroul there?”
“No, I don’t,” Rubin said. “Do you want some more coffee?”
“Why don’t you think so? Don’t you think that if she’d gotten as far as Los Angeles—even if she was on business—she would have taken the time to try and find someone who had been so very important to her in her youth? In her place, wouldn’t you have tried?”
“If that’s true, she didn’t mention it to me,” Rubin said flatly. “Not to me, and not to Benny. Benny would have told me about it.”
“Do you have Sroul’s address?”
“Why are you so interested in him?” Rubin asked in a tone of wonder, though Michael thought he could discern a hint of agitation, too.
“It seems fairly natural that we would be interested in him, especially since the last person who saw Zadik alive was an ultra-Orthodox man whose skin was badly burned. It only seems natural to think it was your friend Sroul, don’t you think?”
“That’s impossible,” Rubin said after a short silence. “Sroul didn’t have any connection to Zadik, he never even met him. Why would … ?
And if Sroul had come to Israel, don’t you think we would have known about it?”
“I’m asking you that very question,” Michael said. “That’s exactly what I’m asking you: if he were to come to Israel, would he contact you or Benny Meyuhas?”
“There’s no question about it,” Rubin said. “I would know about it in advance. No question.”
“Tell me,” Michael said slowly. “Sroul’s well-off, isn’t he?”
“How should I—I think he’s done well for himself, maybe in diamonds,” Rubin said reluctantly. “He married an American woman, ultra-Orthodox, her father was in the diamond polishing business.
They were rich. She, the eldest daughter, was born with some kind of birth defect; a paralyzed hand or something. I don’t know all the details, but they married them off to one another because, well, she was the kind they had to find someone for.”
“You’ve never met her?” Michael asked, surprised. “Didn’t they invite you to their wedding?”
“No, I’ve never met her,” Rubin said. “I met up with him only twice, years ago, in Los Angeles. He didn’t even bring me to his home, I didn’t understand why. That is, I did understand why. It was because he had a new life, he didn’t want to remember who he had been before. It was strange between us, he … he wasn’t the same person I’d known. He’d become this Orthodox Jew in the full sense of the word, saying bless-ings before taking a bite from a piece of fruit, or when he came out of the bathroom. You know what I’m talking about?”
Michael nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked.
Rubin thought for a while before answering. “Seventeen years, I think. I’m not sure,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “It’s hard to keep in touch after so many years. We didn’t even exchange greetings at Rosh Hashanah, or talk on the phone for that matter. I felt he wasn’t interested in keeping in touch. That was the feeling he gave me. And he didn’t like what I do for a living.”
“Why not? Because of your politics? Is he politically right-wing?”
“Not exactly,” Rubin said, restless. “He was … he became anti-Zionist. I mean, in his opinion he became a true Zionist, like the Neturei Karta sect, the ultra-ultra-Orthodox kind who don’t think a Jewish state should even have been established in the Land of Israel before its time, before the arrival of the Messiah. Sroul said it was a profanity, that sort of thing. It was unbelievable. Suddenly someone you knew as well as you knew yourself was talking like some evil spirit had gotten inside him. I saw there was no sense talking to him. Our second meeting was a disaster.”
“And what about Benny?”
“What about him?”
“Was he in touch with Sroul?”
“Not at all. Just like me. He met with him more often than I did, maybe four times, because Benny’s stubborn and thought maybe he could change Sroul’s mind. But they broke off contact ten years ago or so, and Tirzah, too.”
“And yet,” Michael said, glancing down at a pile of yellowing newspapers, journals, photographs, and cassettes stacked nearby, “and yet he was the one who financed the production of Iddo and Eynam, and you are the one who solicited the money from him, right?”
Rubin sat up straight in his chair. For a long moment he did not speak, then, clearly rattled, he regarded Michael. “That’s … Benny can’t ever know about that,” he said, his voice choked. “I don’t know how you got hold of that information, nobody in the world knew about it but Zadik and me. And Sroul, of course. Even Tirzah didn’t know, and certainly not Benny or Hagar or anybody else. That was my secret with Zadik; Zadik was a man of his word, he would never have leaked that to you people.
Benny’s ego completely depended on the belief that finally his talents had been recognized. You think they would have ever let him do a project like this without outside funding?”
“But it wasn’t seventeen years ago that you were in contact with Sroul, it was more like a year and a half,” Michael stated dryly. “This isn’t the time to hide things like that, and I am asking you to tell me exactly what and how, all the details. And for that purpose,” he said as he placed a recording device on the table, pushed the play button, and stated the date, the hour, and the name of his interviewee, “I will record this conversation.”
“You think the Orthodox Jew who visited Zadik was Sroul,” Rubin said ponderously. “I can’t say I didn’t think of that, but I prefer—”
“I will ask you to tell me in detail how you made contact with him and what monies were transferred for the purpose of the production Iddo and Eynam, ” Michael stated pointedly.
Rubin looked around as if hoping to gain time, though this time he did not try to offer refills on coffee. “Okay,” he said at last, “I thought somebody had to help Benny express his full potential. He’s fifty, like me. If a man can’t do what he’s been dreaming of all his life by the time he reaches fifty … you have no idea how many people he approached to produce the Agnon story and how many times he was rejected. I wanted—I’m telling you, Benny is like a brother to me. My only brother.”
“Sroul, too, if brothers are measured in their willingness to come up with two million dollars,” Michael noted.
“In that sense, yes,” Rubin said. “I knew that if I asked him for the money, and if it was for a story by Agnon and not some of the usual political stuff or something too contemporary, that he’d give it.”
“You met with him,” Michael said as he consulted the spiral notebook in his hand, intentionally taking his time; he recalled exactly the dates marked in the secret files from Zadik’s office, but he was listening to Rubin’s heavy breathing and sensed the tension in his body even before Rubin stretched his legs. “You met with him exactly two years ago during Hanukkah, in Los Angeles.”
“I went to his house,” Rubin admitted. “Without phoning in advance. I waited for him, ambushed him really, I had the address from … from family of his in Israel, he had this relative in—never mind, I don’t even remember. I knew he had five kids, I knew all along what was happening with him … you could say I’m the sentimental type, I couldn’t accept the way he’d cut himself off. I don’t take no for an answer, as you know from my work, from my program. My whole life, I’ve set my mind to something—anyway, I went there, waited for him, ambushed him, pleaded with him. He agreed. Even an ultra-Orthodox Jew can perform a good deed for a secular Jew! That’s how he came to be the secret, silent producer. Nobody knew about him, our shadow producer. The agreement was that no one would ever know, and I had no intention of talking about it with anyone, but you already—I don’t know how you found out—”
