professional judgment …” Tzilla turned the television off.
“I’m off, going to set everything up,” Balilty said. “Your client couldn’t wait. He didn’t phone, he came in himself, so you can have a quick word with him yourself. Maybe we’ll get something new out of him.”
“Show him in,” Michael instructed Tzilla. He pushed all the papers on his desk into a single pile.
“You’re going to give me a heads-up beforehand, right?” Balilty asked.
“Rest assured, Balilty,” Tzilla teased him. “Rest assured and get out of here already. I’ve got it all under control, so you can relax.” She took his arm and pushed him away from the office, then returned a moment later with Rubin.
Rubin muttered a hesitant hello from the doorway, and Michael motioned him to sit in the seat facing him. Rubin seated himself and gazed at Michael expectantly. After a moment of silence he said, “I’ve come to take Benny, and I don’t know what I need to—”
“I have a few more small questions for you,” Michael said absentmindedly as he flipped through the papers. “Questions that arose during the interrogations through the night. Ah, here are the papers I was looking for,” he mumbled, as if chastising himself. He held his pen as if ready to write and said, “In the matter of the digoxin, we wanted to—”
“Again?!” Rubin exploded. “This business with the prescription again? I told that young woman, Lillian, I told her that—”
“Please,” Michael said in a fatherly manner, “there is no need for anger. You must admit there is something peculiar here: as you know, Matty Cohen died suddenly, and we found—”
“I don’t want to hear this nonsense anymore!” Rubin said, cutting him off resolutely, emphasizing every word. “It’s a waste of everyone’s
time, and I feel like some sort of scapegoat here. What’s wrong, you can’t find anyone else to pin things on, so it’s either me or Benny? Is that the way things are shaping up? Simply because Tirzah was …
Look here, are you prepared to arrest me?” He held his hands in front of him, his fingers clasped and his wrists together. “I do not belong in this place, and you know it, but if you wish to arrest me, then be my guest, go ahead.”
Michael said nothing.
“And if not, then please tell me what’s happening with Benny Meyuhas and where you’re holding him so that I can take him with me, because he doesn’t belong here either. This country is still a democracy, and in another minute I’m going to phone up a top-notch lawyer. Do you understand?”
Michael said nothing.
“So if that’s the way you want it,” Rubin said, rising from his chair,
“I’ll simply be on my way, with or without Benny. I’m coming back with my attorney.” He moved to the door; Michael made no move to stop him. Next to the door, his hand on the knob, he turned around and said, “Just tell me where you’re holding Benny. That much at least you owe me.”
Michael shrugged, glancing at the papers in front of him. “We’re not holding him anywhere,” he said as if surprised. “He went back to work hours ago.”
Rubin froze in his place, let go of the doorknob, and stared at Michael in shock. “Work? What work?”
“Filming missing scenes from Iddo and Eynam, ” Michael said, as though the matter were clear.
“Now?” Rubin asked in a shaky voice. “He’s gone back to Iddo and Eynam?”
Michael shrugged again. “We told him he’d been given the go-ahead, and he said he only needed another week to wrap up shooting.
He said every minute they weren’t working on it was a waste of time, and his producer was waiting outside …”
Rubin stared at Michael for a minute, then opened the door and stepped out of the office.
Michael waited a moment, then dialed the phone. “Can you hear me?” he asked into the receiver. He listened, then continued. “Rubin left a minute ago, so the time has come.” Again he listened, adding,
“There’s nothing we can do about it, we’ve spoken about this. You’ve got to phone him right now. Now. Ring him on his mobile phone.”
After another pause he said patiently, compassionately, “I know. I know. But you’ve got no choice. You’ve got to phone this friend whom you love—or loved—and take him with you. Right away.”
After that Michael glanced at the door to his office and at the receiver of his telephone, now resting in its cradle, and allowed a few minutes of inertia to pass before instructing Tzilla to continue as planned.
“Seems funny to bring our cameramen and equipment in there,”
Balilty whispered to Tzilla.
She ignored him, speaking instead into the transmitter.
“Everything’s ready, everyone is in position.”
Once again, the illusion that the whole world can turn into one huge ear appeared in Michael’s mind. But in this case there was an eye, too: his own, as it peered, alongside Shorer, whose noisy breathing he could hear (and which made Michael feel safe and protected for a moment, the way it had fifteen years earlier when Shorer had brought him to work with him and had kept him nearby while they were on duty) as they stood next to one another in one of the nooks used for scenery storage. They were watching Benny Meyuhas, who was kneeling down and cupping his hands around a low, quivering flame in one of the memorial candles placed by the seamstresses and the members of the Scenery Department near the spot where Tirzah’s skull had been crushed. Balilty had been in charge of clearing the building of people and instructing Benny Meyuhas exactly where he should wait.
First they heard the ringing of a telephone and then the sound of Benny’s hoarse voice as he said, “I’m here, in the String Building, by the scenery flats. Near where Tirzah …” After a moment they could hear him continue: “So I’ll wait for you here, of course I’ll wait.”
Michael knew Balilty was responsible for the dimness in the corridor—the nook where he and Shorer were hiding was completely dark—and this was why Rubin’s voice sounded hesitant and anxious as he called out to Benny Meyuhas.
“Here I am,” they could hear Benny answer him in a feeble voice.
“Arye, I’m over here, near where …” He stood up. “Where the candles are.”
It seemed to Michael as though Rubin’s heavy breathing was audible through the whole corridor; a moment later they could hear him cry out in a surprised, nearly mocking voice, “This is where you are?
Lighting candles like some teenage girl on the anniversary of Rabin’s death?”
Benny Meyuhas returned to his kneeling position on the floor, and Rubin bent down, leaning on his heels, beside him.
“They told me you’d returned to work,” Rubin said, astounded.
“That they’d let you go. Is that true?”
“They let me go, but I haven’t gone back to work yet,” Benny Meyuhas said, his head bent. “I only said I’d come back here.”
“I see,” Rubin said. A long silence stood between them, until suddenly Meyuhas said, “Tell me, Arye, do you ever think about that doctor?”
“What doctor?” Rubin asked, taken aback. A moment later he said,
“Oh, the doctor. The Egyptian one. No, never. What made you think of him?”
“I think about him a lot, I’ve been thinking about him all through the years. I can’t seem to forget him,” Meyuhas said, his voice crack-ing. “I think about who shot him in the back as he started walking away.”
“Benny,” Rubin said, sounding worried, “why are you … all these years we haven’t said a word … we haven’t said a single word about it, we never talked about it. And now suddenly you’re thinking about it?
What’s it got to do with anything?”
Benny lowered his head and said nothing.
“It was only us there, Benny,” Rubin said imploringly. “We’re the only two left. Sroul’s dead—if we keep our mouths shut then it’s all over, they don’t have a case against us. Why did you have to go and bring up that Egyptian doctor?” He glanced around the area.
“There’s no one here, Arye,” Benny said. “It’s just the two of us, alone. How did you know Sroul’s dead?”
Rubin did not answer.
