The two sat for a long moment without speaking. Finally Rubin said, “We’re wasting time here, your time. I refuse to continue our conversation until you’ve kept your promise and let me speak with Benny Meyuhas.”
“Wait,” Lillian said, and she left the room.
Tzilla was already waiting outside the room, and she pulled Lillian quickly to the far end of the corridor to fill her in on the latest developments in the apartment in Mekor Haim. She suggested having Rubin wait in the hall and recited—with the help of the note she had jotted down—the question Michael had asked her over the phone.
“What? What was that?” Lillian asked. “What are we talking about?
What doctor? The one from his interrogation?”
“Believe me, I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. He didn’t even ask you to wait for an answer,” Tzilla said. “He only requested that you ask the question, right before you send him out of the office.
We need it on video, that’s what Michael said.”
“Okay,” Lillian said uneasily. “I just don’t like asking what I don’t understand myself.”
“Who does?” Tzilla countered. “But after this we’ll be waiting for you with coffee and sandwiches in the little office.” Lillian was about to return to Balilty’s office when Tzilla called after her. “Wait a second, wait until I’m behind the wall.” Lillian watched as she hurried down the hall, her long silver earrings—which had become her trademark over the years—swaying from side to side.
“Okay,” Lillian said to Rubin when she returned to the office. He looked at her with anticipation. “He’s still in conference”—Rubin guffawed at her use of the word conference, though she ignored him—“but it’ll be over soon, and you can … in the meantime you’ll have to wait outside the office until Chief Inspector Ohayon is available.”
“I insist on speaking with him,” Rubin proclaimed. “I have all sorts of … I request … no, I’m not requesting, I am insisting on speaking with Ohayon as well. Would you let him know?”
“I already have,” Lillian said in a strained voice. “He knows.”
“And?” Rubin asked. “What did he say?”
Lillian sucked air into her lungs and filled her cheeks, then exhaled noisily. “He asked me to ask you,” she said, standing next to the door, her hand on the doorknob, “if you know who shot the doctor in the back.”
Afterward, when they watched the video, the members of the Special Investigations Team argued among themselves about the meaning of the expression on Rubin’s face when he heard the question. “The fear of God nabbed him,” Balilty claimed, while Eli Bachar opined that Rubin’s face was apathetic and that his expression gave nothing away. As for Lillian, she thought fear and apathy produced similar reactions, especially where facial expressions are concerned.
She felt that Rubin was stunned and had not actually comprehended what she was asking, at least for the first minute.
c h a p t e r s i x t e e n
Just before dawn, Michael brought Benny Meyuhas back to his office at police headquarters in the Russian Compound and told him to wait there with Sergeant Yigael, who had suddenly turned up. (Ever since finding the bloodstained T-shirt in the foreign correspondents’ room at Israel Television, he had attached himself to the Special Investigations team like a small boy trailing after a gang of boys older than himself, ready and willing to be of service at any time.) After providing them with coffee and hot pita bread, Michael joined the rest of the team for an emergency meeting in Balilty’s office.
At two in the morning Michael had stopped his interrogation of Benny Meyuhas and had holed himself up with Shorer in the kitchen for more than an hour. When they emerged, the district commander instructed Balilty, Sergeant Ronen, and Nina to return to headquarters with him. Balilty, who was eager to hang around until the interrogation was completed but was compelled—by the unmistakably decisive look in Michael’s eyes—to obey orders and return to the Russian Compound to take part in interrogating Hefetz, was now opening the meeting with a report to all the assembled, including Tzilla (and her lists) and Eli Bachar, whose green eyes were ringed in red from fatigue, and Lillian, who seemed wide awake and was standing behind Sergeant Ronen’s chair, expertly massaging his neck and shoulders; she desisted only when Balilty began recounting how Hefetz had secretly slipped out of the building.
“He left after it was already dark, after six o’clock; that’s always a kind of dead time over there before the shit hits the fan,” Balilty said. “I found out about it completely by chance,” he muttered, though no one in the room fell for this offhand remark that concealed a declaration of his own special talents; by his own testimony, he could “squeeze juice out of rocks.” “You see, I was talking with Ezekiel the auto mechanic, the guy who takes care of Ruta’s car”—the tribulations of Ruta, Balilty’s wife, and the old Fiat she refused to part with, were known to all —“because I stopped by to settle an account with him. He’d stayed late at the garage, he was sitting with his bookkeeper in the back, must have been about seven o’clock. Or seven-thirty, I can check. Anyway, Ezekiel tells me that a little while earlier, an hour or two, he saw Hefetz ducking into the Iraqi hummus place. You know which one I mean,” he said, turning to Michael. “We used to go there, over on Jeremiah Street, behind the junk-yard. Little place, they cook the hummus on an old paraffin stove, like in the Old City. Do you remember what I’m talking about?” Michael swiveled his head, though it was not clear whether in confirmation or merely to encourage Balilty to get on with it. “In any case,” Balilty continued, “Ezekiel the mechanic sees Hefetz stealing into the Iraqi place
‘like a thief,’ that’s what he said about Hefetz: ‘He looked to the right and looked to the left and dashed in like the place just swallowed him up.’
That’s how he described it. But it gave me the tiniest lead, something I could hint at with Hefetz to let him know I was aware he’d left the building. And that’s not all: I told him that this was exactly the same time another murder had been committed and that he, Hefetz, could be considered a suspect. That’s when everything turned smooth as butter with him. Could I have another cup of coffee?”
“But he closes up at three-thirty, four o’clock, the Iraqi,” Eli Bachar remarked as someone passed Balilty a half-full cup of Turkish coffee.
“Most of the time that’s true,” Balilty said, “but if you’re an important guy,” he said with a sigh, “or if you’re coming to meet the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority on the sly, then the restau-rateur himself —if you consider the Iraqi hummus place a restaurant—
opens up for you, actually waits there for you till you show up.”
“Hang on, I don’t get it,” Sergeant Ronen said. “Who does the Iraqi guy know? Which one was he waiting for?”
“Both of them,” Balilty answered impatiently. “Hefetz and Ben-Asher. He’s known them both since they were kids. They were in school together in Baghdad, then they were neighbors in Israel, in the camps for new immigrants. All three of them, or maybe just two of
them, I’m not clear on that. Anyway, what’s important here is that they’re some kind of gang, the three of them, since way back,” he said, holding his hand just above the floor to indicate how small they were back then, “and together they hated the whole world: the camps and the European Jews and the teachers and the Jewish Agency.
Everybody! So the Iraqi opens up his place specially for them. He has this room in the back where he lives. Did you people know that?”
Everyone waited with anticipation, hoping he would reach his point soon, but Balilty would not be rushed. “With me, if I go there after, say, three o’clock, I don’t have a prayer in hell of even getting a crumb of pita bread. ‘Kitchen’s closed,’ they tell me. But Mr. Hefetz and Mr.
Ben-Asher? Whatever they want. That’s the way it is, not that I care, I mean we’re just talking about a lousy hummus joint, but—”
“Tell me, Balilty,” Eli Bachar said, “why can’t you just get to the point? Just for once!” Michael flashed him a look—fatigued but austere—and Eli Bachar shut his mouth, pulled his cooling mug of coffee toward himself, and stared at the window facing him, outside of which the sky was still dark.
“I already told you the point here: he left the building. It’s recorded in the security officer’s ledger, he was out for an hour and a half,”
Balilty said. “And he was sitting with the director general. They’re making plans: cutbacks, savings, stuff like that. If you ask me, it’s an ass-licking, ball-busting plan. Seems like Zadik’s death saves the director general a lot of trouble.”
