“You’ll give up smoking, too, when you get to be my age,” he said.
“My ripe old age,” Balilty said. “Don’t forget to say, ‘my ripe old age.’”
He approached Nina, took her hand in his own, and examined the diamond. “So what’s this all about?” he asked. “Have you gotten engaged?” The look in her eyes, which lit up in shades of brown and green, was enough to make him stifle his smile; he clucked in sympathy when she told him the ring had belonged to her mother, who had died several months earlier.
In the meantime, they entered the first room on the right, which, due to its low ceiling, appeared small and oppressive. The forensics expert explained that this was one of three rooms, and that it appeared the man had not been in the apartment for very long: the kitchen was nearly empty of food and the rooms nearly bereft of furniture. He told them that the fully dressed body of a man had been discovered on the narrow bed pushed up against the wall. An overcoat had been found hanging from a simple wooden chair next to a bare table, and the fringes of a gray wool scarf that had apparently been draped around the dead man’s neck had been moved aside by the doctor, who was at that moment examining him. The forensics expert told Shorer, “I’m pretty certain he was strangled, like this”—he grabbed the ends of the scarf—“with hands and perhaps the scarf. Can you see?” he asked, turning to Michael. “Even under the beard and the burn marks you can see—on his neck, on his forehead, under his eyes, wherever you get a glimpse of his skin—that the coloring and the spots indicate this is the face of a man who has been strangled.”
Michael glanced at the gaunt body; rigor mortis was already setting in, and he turned his gaze to the bare walls instead. The room was damp and smelled of mold. Emmanuel Shorer shoved aside an electrical cord that extended from a space heater near the bed. “Didn’t they even turn it on?” he asked, to which the doctor shook his head.
“It’s thanks to the cold that his body is so well preserved,” the doctor explained. “However, this didn’t happen days ago, it’s only a matter of hours—six or eight, perhaps—there are all kinds of signs. We’ll only know after the autopsy.” He rolled back the sleeve of the dead man’s sweater and also that of the gray flannel undershirt beneath it and carefully examined his arm. The inner forearm was full of red and blue
bruises. “Hemorrhages,” the doctor told Michael. “It seems he was receiving injections. Look here,” he said, as Michael drew near and bent down to the bed. “On the one hand it doesn’t appear … but he was also very thin, there’s no question about it. We’ll be a lot smarter after the autopsy. But there’s something else here—”
“He could have simply rotted here,” Nina said, cramming her hands into the back pockets of her tight jeans as she approached the bed.
“Is that how you dress for work?” Balilty asked from where he was standing in the doorway. He pointed at her black leather boots with stiletto heels.
“I was on my way out on a date,” she explained testily, “when I was called here. You see what a responsible person I am? Anyway, as I was saying, the person who strangled him was counting on the fact that the apartment was empty and no one was expected here. The guy would have rotted here for a few days, that was the idea. But thank God the neighbor found him. If she hadn’t—”
“Doesn’t anyone live here?” Balilty asked. “This place is completely empty. I looked in the kitchen, the fridge looks about a hundred years old.”
“Does he have a name, this man?” Shorer asked. “Is this the person we’ve been looking for or not?”
“It is,” Nina confirmed. “We know it not only from the composite drawing but also from his passport, which says his name is Israel Hayoun, I’ll show it to you in just a second—” She hurried from the room, returning a moment later with a brown envelope wrapped in plastic. “He had two passports, one Israeli and one American. He entered the country on his American passport. Here’s the stamp from two days ago, look right here.” Then she pointed to a corner of the room. “Those were his belongings, there’s his suitcase, we’ve had an initial look through it all.” Michael thought there was something heartbreaking about the old brown suitcase, the kind he had not seen for years, similar to one he had found in the attic of his former father-in-law, Yuzek. That one had been tied with rope, and now, just as then, images of detachment, expulsion, and loneliness rose in his mind.
“Two shirts, a sweater, a pair of trousers, underpants, undershirts, socks, two of everything; a Bible he got in the army—the date’s written inside—a prayer book, two old photos in frames, and this book of poems. You understand poetry, right, Michael?” she asked as she handed him a thin brown volume with yellowing pages that was falling to pieces and held together by a thick rubber band. “Look, there’s a dedication. I don’t know anything about Israeli poetry,” she mumbled.
“Only Russian.” She watched as Michael carefully removed the rubber band and gazed at the first page. Underneath the title Stars Outside was written, in black ink, “To our Sroul, on the occasion of having completed seventeen winters. From Tirzah and Arye.”
Michael intended to say something about the poet Natan Alterman and how an entire generation of Israelis had grown up with his poems—
as he himself had—and he very nearly recited the line, Even in that which is old and familiar there is a moment of birth. But one look at the impervious expression of this lonely, abandoned man—even the word “abandoned”
seemed too festive, too pretty, too Alterman-like in the face of the emptiness and neglect surrounding them—caused him to change his mind.
Instead, he said, “Have you checked it all out already? Have the forensics people been through his belongings? May we handle them?”
“Yeah, they’ve been through it all,” Nina confirmed. “They’re in the bathroom now, checking … what is it you want to look at here?” she asked as Michael knelt down to the pile of clothing in the corner and extracted two photographs he found underneath a few shirts. He studied them for a while, then passed one to Shorer, who was standing over him, asking to have a look.
“All right,” Shorer said as he gazed at the stained, yellowing photograph that featured the gang they recognized from the photo in Benny Meyuhas’s house and on the corkboard in Arye Rubin’s office at Israel Television. “There’s no question about it, this is our man.”
“You mean the name on the passport and the burn marks on his face and hands weren’t enough for you people?” Nina asked. “I knew this was the guy from the minute I laid eyes on him. I was sure of it, even though he doesn’t look exactly like the composite. How many men could possibly fit this description?”
“One in Jerusalem, maybe two in all of Israel,” Balilty remarked. He was standing in the center of the room, staring at the body. “Tell me what gives with this apartment. There’s nothing here, just a couch and
space heater in the living room, a few pieces of furniture in here, and a nearly empty fridge. What is this place? Who found him, the neighbor?
Where is she, this neighbor?”
Michael listened to Nina explain that the apartment had remained empty because of a legal entanglement due to a divorce: “The owners of the apartment—his sister and her husband,” she said, indicating the dead man, “can’t reach an agreement. Believe me, I know how that goes: the apartment gets stuck, it’s neither for rent or sale. The neighbor told me that this guy’s sister lived here until just two months ago, didn’t want to leave because she was afraid if she did he would take control and walk off with everything. So what happened was that they both lived here. They didn’t talk to one another, but lived together. He was on the living room couch, she was in here, in the bedroom. They didn’t utter a word to each other, made one another’s life hell but neither one gave in. Finally— this is what the neighbor says, she’s on good terms with the sister … Hey,”
Nina said to Shorer, “do you want to hear it from the neighbor herself ?
She asked that if you do, we should go over to her place because it’s pretty hard for her to look at … him …”
“He, she, them,” Balilty complained. “Don’t these people have names?”
“Why don’t you just tell us for the time being, later she can come give her testimony,” Shorer said, looking at Michael. Michael nodded, then stepped aside and motioned to Eli Bachar.
“What? You want me to go down and talk to her?” Eli Bachar said, casting a look of animosity in Balilty’s direction.
“Take Lillian along and get the woman’s testimony,” Michael said.
“In any case there are too many people hanging around here.”
“But do they get to stay?” Eli Bachar asked, looking at Balilty and Sergeant Ronen. He muttered something else, but Nina flashed him the look that a teacher gives a pupil who is disturbing the class, then spoke in a loud
