cigarettes constantly in their mouths. They walked around with their noses in the air, laughing and making fun of everything around them, snobs who had worked in the Polish film industry and thought they knew everything. But ultimately they were refugees. On the other side of the canteen were the Israelis. We were all young, we didn’t know a thing … in the seventies I would arrive from the army, from reserve duty—I was an officer—and I would show up at the canteen and I wouldn’t know where I belonged. I mean, who should I sit with? The young people or the editors? With the Poles or—none of them are left, the Poles. They died, they left. Who knows where they went. But there was always shouting, there was never quiet like there is today. You could never hear the monitor like you can right now, and nobody’s asking for it to be turned down. I see they’ve put on some rerun, I asked them to find something for the time being. But I didn’t think …”
Hefetz entered the canteen and regarded the two tables around which people were sitting, then raised his eyes to the monitor. Michael followed suit. “What, then, is your opinion on the role of the author?”
a young interviewer was asking with exaggerated emotion, his bald head and round face shining. He touched his small, dark beard. Two panelists began speaking at the same time, then both fell silent. They looked at one another, embarrassed, then one of them, the younger one, pointed to the other, inviting him to speak, and so the other—
whose pinched face and narrow lips gave him the severe look of a monk—leaned forward and explained that the present era and the media had completely undermined the status of the artist in general and the writer in particular. “People no longer read,” he exclaimed bitterly. “If you don’t give them soft porn or some story about incest in the family—”
“Incest is always in the family, isn’t it?” said a woman on the panel, smiling slightly as she tossed her reddish curls, while the second man, the younger one, said, “I’ve actually noticed that readers—personally, I’ve had lots of feedback on my book The Gypsy from Givat Olga, and lots of excitement. Readers have written me quite positively about the erotic bits in the book.” On the screen there appeared three books, the camera focusing at length on the book he had just mentioned.
“What is this? Where did they dig this up?” Hefetz shouted as he rushed to the telephone. The woman on the screen was saying, “You asked about the role of the author? Well, the author’s role is to see the truth and to tell it; sometimes she even has to lie in order to tell it beautifully, effectively, but—” Hefetz slammed down the receiver just as the broadcast was cut short and in its place appeared a caption: OUR
REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING WILL RESUME IN JUST A MOMENT. Niva rose from her chair in the corner of the canteen and approached them with heavy, shuffling footsteps, her clogs dragging.
“Here’s the list you asked for,” she told Michael with open animosity, handing him two sheets of paper. “All the names and their jobs and their reasons for needing to be here. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Michael ignored her question, eyed the pages she had handed him, and said, “If this is the case, then all the people listed in the left-hand column should be available for questioning now.”
Niva nodded.
“And where are they now?”
“In the newsroom, like we were told. They’re waiting for you to take them in. Isn’t that the way it works?”
Michael left the canteen and went up the stairs to the newsroom.
Sergeant Yigael was waiting for him in the doorway and informed him excitedly that Tzilla was looking for him. “She says they’ve given you a cell phone, sir,” he said, unsure how far he should push this. “She says
you never have it on. But I told her there’s no reception in the canteen.” Michael fished around in his pockets; his phone had remained with Eli Bachar, who undoubtedly had left it off. “She asked for you to call her,” the sergeant said. “She said it was urgent.”
Yaffa dialed her own cell phone for him, mumbling something about intelligent people with no technical sense at all, and handed it to him. Without fanfare or small talk Tzilla told him he would need to attend a meeting of the Special Investigations team “before police headquarters turns into a madhouse, what with everyone being investigated.” She added, “Everyone’s already waiting for you. There’s a van outside waiting to bring you here.”
“There’s so much material that it’s hard to know where to begin,”
Tzilla complained when everyone was already seated, busy eating and drinking. Only after eight o’clock, during a scheduled break in the investigations and searches, was she able to gather the entire team for a meeting. “In any event you people need to eat something,” she had claimed to Michael. “After such a long day and being involved with investigations you couldn’t very well have had time to eat. Balilty’s brought pita bread and hummus and fixings”—she pointed to the table in the corner of the room—“we’ve got everything, coffee, too, just get Eli here for me since he hasn’t been answering his cell phone or his beeper, and bring Balilty back from wherever he popped out to for a minute, I have no idea where, but that minute has stretched into half an hour just like always with Balilty: if you manage to catch the guy you can never let him go.” While she was talking she opened the door and looked out into the hallway. “Danny Balilty,” she called out. “Has anyone seen Danny Balilty?”
Two doors opened, and in one stood Balilty. “What are you shouting for?” he asked, feigning innocence. “I told you I’d be there in a minute, didn’t I? Geez, what’s the big deal? Are you people waiting for me? Everybody else is already there?”
Michael smiled as he listened to Tzilla assure Balilty that they were waiting only for him, but at that moment he heard Eli Bachar’s voice as he entered, breathing heavily, asking, “Is there coffee?” He sank into a chair, then noticed the Hanukkah menorah in the corner, three candles burning. “What’s going on here?” he bellowed. “Since when do we celebrate Jewish festivals around here, like little kids or the Orthodox?”
“As long as we’re on the topic of children,” Tzilla said, “why don’t you pop home sometime? The kids haven’t seen you for two days and I can’t leave here. Your mother brought them in earlier to light candles and we tried to find you, but there was no reaching you. Anywhere.”
“So that’s it,” Eli Bachar mumbled. “I knew that menorah looked familiar. Isn’t that the one Dana made in kindergarten?”
Michael sighed and fished a new toothpick from his shirt pocket.
“Try a cigar,” Balilty counseled him. “Hold an unlit cigar in your hand and see how satisfying that is.”
Michael regarded him for a moment, then shook his head. “Too soon,” he said. “Too soon, too close to when I gave up smoking. Try me again in another month.”
“If you haven’t gone back to cigarettes by then,” Balilty teased him.
Michael ignored the comment, Balilty’s invitation to a duel.
“Let’s get started,” Michael said. In a quiet voice he read out the known facts from a summary prepared by Tzilla, mentioning the two previous deaths and Matty Cohen’s digoxin, and emphasizing that Zadik’s murder removed any possibility that the other two deaths could have been accidents. “The assumption under which we are working—
until we have reason to believe otherwise—is that we’re talking about a single murderer,” he concluded.
“About the digoxin,” Lillian asked, crinkling her forehead, “did Matty Cohen take too much of it, or what?”
“Four times too much,” Tzilla said. “He took four times what he should have.”
“On purpose?” Lillian asked.
“He neglected to inform us,” Tzilla answered coolly.
“I’d like to suggest,” Balilty interjected, “that we deal with Zadik first and move backward, because with Zadik the case is clear. We’re talking about half an hour, hour maximum. Pretty tight alibi.”
“It only looks that way, like it’s really clear,” Eli Bachar said. “Lots of people were in the building, dozens of them. Do you have information on everyone who was around?” he asked Tzilla. She explained that
there was no list of the employees, only the guests, who were made to show identification before entering the building.
“First of all,” Michael explained, “it certainly seems we’re looking for someone on the inside, I’d say someone very much on the inside.
Not a guest.”
“Because of the door,” Lillian noted.
“Because of the door,” Michael agreed. “It’s clear that if the murderer entered from the hallway door, then it has to be someone who knew about it, which in my opinion narrows the possibilities considerably.”
