“So what do you make of all this?” Shorer asked him.
“It’s all pretty clear,” Balilty said as he looked with disgust into his Styrofoam cup before slurping down the rest of the coffee. “This Ben-Asher, I don’t need to tell you his whole life story, you can read about it in the papers. But what’s important to keep in mind about him is how much he wants to screw the European Jewish establishment, the people he thinks screwed him. Nobody knows exactly how he worked his way into the system; he started off at Israel Radio in the Arabic Department and moved over to television, first on the station that broadcasts from the Knesset—the one nobody ever watches—and then later he was in charge of bringing Egyptian films for screening on Friday afternoons.
Sometimes I used to watch them myself because of Hanna, my sister-in-law, my little brother’s wife. And then suddenly, I don’t know how—what do I mean, ‘I don’t know how,’ that’s the way everything works around here—suddenly the guy’s director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Ever since then, the gig’s up, nothing’s going to remain the same, you’ll see. A real upstart, that Ben-Asher. Between him and Hefetz there’s going to be a lot of score-settling to come. They’ve already informed Rubin that he’s been relieved of his duties.”
“All right,” Shorer said, “but you’re not implying that Hefetz is in some way involved in Zadik’s death, are you?”
“No, I’m not implying any such thing,” Balilty said with a smile. “It doesn’t seem that way. He would have been named director of Israel Television at some stage anyway; believe me, that was part of the plan.
No way that Hefetz could have done it: he was in the newsroom when Tirzah Rubin was murdered, there were witnesses, except for a couple of minutes when he was with Natasha. But even then what’s-her-name—
Niva—saw them.”
“So what are we wasting our time on this for?” Eli Bachar asked, enraged. “Don’t we have enough work to do as it is?”
“First of all,” Balilty said, “I’d like to point out that if Hefetz could leave the building so easily without anyone noticing, then other people could too. Not just today—I mean yesterday—which was a particularly tough day, but on other days, too. And anyway, it’s just a side story, you know, so we won’t get bored. We all already know the story of Zadik’s death, right?”
“Right,” Michael said, “but we don’t have enough—for the time being, we don’t have enough of a case. Maybe when forensics gets the DNA results—”
“But it’s clear we’re talking about Zadik’s blood on that T-shirt,”
Lillian reminded them. “It says so in the preliminary report.”
“The blood is one thing,” Balilty was quick to point out, “but we still don’t know who the T-shirt belongs to. And there’s that gray hair that could be—”
Michael’s beeper sounded. He looked at the display screen and said to Tzilla, “It’s from the forensics lab at Abu Kabir. Give them a call, would you, and see what they have to say.”
“Already?” Eli Bachar asked, incredulous. “What could they possibly find that quickly? It’s only been three hours since—”
“First of all,” Balilty said, “three hours is a pretty long time, and second of all, maybe they found something really important.”
Tzilla dialed the phone, and when she was put through to the pathologist, she handed the receiver over to Michael. He listened for a long moment, then said, “Hang on a minute, I’m going to put you on the loudspeaker, we’re holding a short team meeting right now.”
Everyone in the room could hear the distraught voice of the pathologist: “Final stages, spreading, terminal,” he was saying.
“What?” asked Lillian, alert and tense. “What was that?”
“Cancer, that’s what. Our Sroul had cancer,” Balilty announced.
Into the loudspeaker he said, “Dr. Siton, can you tell us where? Which kind?”
“Lung cancer.” The pathologist’s hoarse voice crackled through the speaker. “It seems he only had a few weeks left to live. When a person’s living, you don’t make such predictions, because you can never really know, but since this man is no longer with us, I can tell you—off the record, it won’t appear in my autopsy report—that it was only a matter of weeks. Incidentally, in America they tell the patient the truth to his face because they’re afraid of being sued for malpractice.”
Shorer stood and approached the loudspeaker. After informing the pathologist who he was, he asked, “What does this mean physiologi-cally? How would it have affected him? I mean, is it right to assume that strangling him would have been quite simple, since the illness itself involves difficulty in pulling air into the lungs?”
“Yes,” the pathologist answered, a note of sarcasm in his voice. “It’s easier to strangle someone who is about to stop breathing anyway.”
“Excuse me for a moment, Dr. Siton, this is Michael Ohayon again. I have a question: in the state he was in, wouldn’t he have required assistance of some kind—an oxygen tank or something?
“Naturally,” the pathologist said through the speaker. Michael gave Nina an inquisitive look; she shrugged as a way of saying she knew nothing about it. “There must be some sort of oxygen tank in the vicinity, no doubt about it.”
“There was nothing of the sort there,” Nina said, a look of panic spreading across her face. “We took apart the entire apartment, there was nothing—the only place we didn’t touch was under the sink, it appeared nobody had touched anything there for ages.”
“Impossible. There must be something,” the pathologist declared.
“He could not have managed without oxygen—take a better look around. It won’t necessarily look like an oxygen tank, there are small models—something called a cannula, looks like a pair of eyeglasses.
It’s two holes in a tube that you wear on your nose like a small mask, with a pipe running from it to the patient’s back, where a little tank—
which looks like a thermos—sits in a backpack. There must be one somewhere in that apartment, and a tank, too, even a small one. Didn’t you find anything that even—”
“Yes!” Nina cried suddenly. “There was a thermos! Silver, I didn’t understand … it was in the kitchen, I thought … we checked for fingerprints, but we only found the dead man’s. Nothing else. The thermos was in a kitchen cupboard, looks like some futuristic soda-making machine. Is that right?”
“Send somebody to bring it in,” Michael told Tzilla. “Right away.”
Turning to Nina, he said, “What about those glasses? Wasn’t there a pipe attached to a mask that looked like a pair of glasses?”
“No,” Nina said. “But we weren’t able to check the surroundings because it was dark. Maybe it’s outside. We’ll be able to search as soon as it’s light outside and the rain has let up.”
“How could a man in his condition,” Shorer asked the pathologist,
“manage such a long flight?”
“I’m sure he was given steroids. We haven’t checked his blood yet, but I’m certain we’ll find steroids. Lots of them, and strong ones,” the pathologist said. “There are anabolic steroids that can keep you on a constant high for days. They give you the false impression that you have strength. Afterward you crash, if the steroids don’t finish you off first.”
“Excuse me,” Sergeant Ronen asked when the doctor had finished speaking, “but why are we so concerned with lung cancer and oxygen masks? The guy was strangled to death, there’s proof of it. So why is it important—I mean, isn’t it more important for us to finally hear what Benny Meyuhas had to say?”
“We’ll get to that,” Michael assured him, “in just another minute.
But first of all this is of the utmost importance, since we did not understand until now what it was that prompted Sroul to come forward now and tell Tirzah Rubin a few weeks ago something that had been bothering him for more than twenty years.”
“What, you mean like because he was going to croak?” Eli Bachar asked. “Like he wanted to confess before he died?”
“But he was religious,” Lillian said. “Don’t you people know that religious Jews don’t do confession before they die? I mean, what are we talking about here, gentiles?”
