Murder in Jerusalem (10 page)

“Hey there!” Azriel called to him, alarmed. “What are you doing to her?”

“Don't worry, I was a combat medic in the army,” Danny Benizri said. In one swift movement he lifted her into his arms and unfastened the hooks of her bra, raising the cups off her chest and exposing her small, white breasts. He was surprised at their erect firmness, and the fact that he was even noticing them suddenly embarrassed him, so that he looked around to see whether anyone else was watching. He slapped her cheeks lightly; she nearly slipped out of his arms, but he held on tightly, and with his foot pushed open the door of the Volvo so that it would not close. “Shimshi,” he shouted, “Shimshi, it's dangerous what you guys are doing.”

“Not at all,” called back the younger of the two men standing near Shimshi lighting a cigarette. “It's all a big act. She learned it watching soap operas.”

“Shimshi,” Benizri warned, “I'm telling you, I was a medic in the army, I've seen things. This is dangerous. You can't know if she has some kind of medical problem, you can't take that chance. She could have asthma or an allergy or even diabetes—”

“Asthma. She has asthma attacks,” Azriel said, raising himself to his full height. “I told them, but they won't listen.”

Danny Benizri covered her with her wool jacket, climbed out of the car, and stood close to Shimshi. “Listen to what I'm telling you,” he whispered. “This could end badly, it could…she could suffocate, and then you guys are totally screwed. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Get her out of here, fast. If something happens to her, the police will come in here full force, explosives or not, and they'll be pulling bodies out of here. I'm telling you, it'll be a disaster.”

Mauling his wool cap between his fingers, Shimshi glanced toward his cohorts as they walked toward the trucks.

“Let her leave now,” Danny Benizri said. “Get her out of here before you have a disaster on your hands, and I…Get her out of here and keep me here in her place. I'll be your hostage.”

“I'm not in this alone,” Shimshi whispered, folding his cap. “I can't make a decision like that on my own, I need to consult with my men.”

“So consult with them. Quickly,” Benizri said, glancing at the monitor. He saw the director general of the Finance Ministry blinking at the social worker brought into the studio in place of him.

Shimshi stepped aside and gathered the men around him. Danny Benizri climbed back into the car and placed the minister's head in his lap.

“Got any water?” he asked Azriel, who quickly opened the front door of the car and handed him a small bottle of mineral water.

“I always…I keep a bottle on hand in case of…” Azriel stammered.

“Do you know if she has an inhaler?” Benizri asked. At the same time he pulled the purse from under her head and opened it. “Does she have Ventolin or something?”

“Hey, what's with you?” Azriel asked, stunned. “What are you doing, taking her purse…that's the minister's private stuff, you can't…”

Danny Benizri searched through the purse, found an inhaler, opened the minister's mouth, blocked her nose, and pressed on the inhaler.

Azriel stood next to the car, and from where Benizri was sitting, he could see only his hands, the knuckles of which Azriel was busy cracking. “God help us,” Benizri could hear him mumbling.

Shimshi sidled up to the car, shaking his head. “She stays put,” he said. “We're only willing to let her leave after we've reached a deal.”

“Shimshi,” Danny Benizri pleaded, “did you explain to them how you guys are complicating matters? This is serious, there'll be dead bodies here, I'm telling you.”

“Nothing I can do about that,” Shimshi said quietly. “She stays put until we have a deal. If she leaves, nobody will talk to us. They won't give us the time of day.”

“How can there be a deal?” Danny Benizri asked, his eyes on the monitor. “How can you possibly reach a deal under these circumstances?”

“You're going to get it for us,” Shimshi said. “That's why you're here. We'll explain what we want, and you'll get it for us. It's all up to you now.”

 

Eli Bachar stood in the small anteroom leading to the director's office and watched the people gathering there in front of the television monitor. Aviva's desk, with its telephones and computer, stood under the window, between the entrance to Zadik's office and the door to the left, which led to the room known as the “little office.” The little office contained a desk, a few chairs, an armchair covered in orange plastic, a large, empty hot-water urn, several coffee mugs, and a container of artificial sweetener. The room had the look of a place meant for the director's more intimate meetings, or gatherings of senior staff members. From the way the mugs were arranged and from the layer of dust that had collected there, it was clear that no one had used it in a while. Zadik opened the door for him and instructed Aviva to summon Max Levin, head of the Props Department, along with Avi the lighting technician. Both were now standing in front of the monitor in the secretary's office, while Eli Bachar himself stood in the doorway, watching what was transpiring there.

It was possible to learn exactly how matters were handled and settled right there in the hallway in front of the office of the secretary to the director of Israel Television. With great interest Eli Bachar watched Arye Rubin, the man responsible for exposing the bribery scandal that had rocked the Israel Police and brought about the dismissals of several high-ranking police officers and the commander of the Northern District, turning Rubin into the most resented man among all the district commanders. The scandal had also undermined relations between the director of Israel Television and the local district commander, and—there, Arye Rubin had just slipped quietly into Zadik's office and shut the door behind him. Too bad: it was precisely that conversation which Eli Bachar would like to have heard. Four other people were already crammed into the crowded anteroom, but the secretary would not let them enter until the door opened and Zadik called them. That young woman with the wool scarf was leaning in the doorway biting her fingernails.

Eli Bachar had seen her earlier, standing in the hallway; now she was glancing in turn at her watch and the door to Zadik's office as though her life depended on what came out of there. She's not beautiful, this young woman, there is something hungry about her drawn face—that's what Michael Ohayon would say if he were describing her; it was he who had taught Eli Bachar how to look at people. He could not predict what Michael would say about Aviva, the bombshell secretary, who was constantly playing with her blond curls and who had not taken her eyes off him, even when she was whispering on the telephone, which never stopped ringing. He had trouble discerning the true nature of the way she stared at him; ostensibly she was watching him with suspicion—testing him, as it were—but there was something else, a certain sparkle, that made it seem she was making eyes at him.

They were all watching the small television screen mounted on the wall, and from every office you could hear the voices of Danny Benizri from inside the tunnel and the director general of the Finance Ministry, who was now sitting in the recording studio with Nehemia, the host, and with a very fat woman who clearly had once been attractive; at the bottom of the screen a caption flashed: SARIT HERMONI, SOCIAL WORKER. The broadcast flipped back and forth between the two locations, and everyone watched in silence; only Aviva continued whispering into the phone so as not to disturb the people gathered around her. Everyone was behaving as if they were in a command room at the outbreak of a war, in spite of the fact that nothing was happening there, where they were, but rather on the screen. Matty Cohen was sitting next to Aviva's desk; Zadik had suggested that Eli Bachar speak with Matty after their meeting, since he had been there the night before and there was a chance Matty had even seen Tirzah. (“Too bad we weren't talking about the messiah,” Aviva had exclaimed in her nasally voice when Matty walked in. “We were looking for you before. Where have you been?” Matty Cohen had drawn near and said, “I was in the emergency room at Hadassah Hospital with my kid, that's where.” He had fallen heavily into a chair and added, “I am dying for a cup of coffee, I didn't sleep a wink all night, haven't even changed clothes. I've been wearing this suit since yesterday. Look,” he said, pointing at a spot on the end of his tie. “Well,” Aviva had replied, “you can at least take off your tie. What are you so dressed up for? Got some reception, a meeting with the minister?” “I told you,” he retorted, “it's from yesterday, and yesterday there was a meeting of the board of directors with the minister. I couldn't…”) And now he was watching the monitor, his hands folded across his enormous belly. Eli watched him with interest, trying to figure out how people could let themselves go to the extent that their breathing sounded as if they were choking on their own corpulent flesh. This Matty Cohen did not even look very old, not much beyond forty.

“Give us a few minutes while we figure out what's going on there,” Zadik had told him when he had left him in the little office. But Eli Bachar was no clueless little schoolboy: he refused to sit alone in a closed room. That was why he was now standing in the doorway, listening to Matty Cohen say, “They've gone completely insane,” without taking his eyes off the screen. “Who's ever heard of such a thing?”

“They're not insane at all,” retorted Niva, the newsroom secretary, who was leaning on Aviva's desk perched like a stork, one foot in a wool sock removed from its heavy clog and resting on her other calf. “They're not insane, because you really can't get anywhere without resorting to violence.”

“But they won't gain anything!” Hefetz, the newsroom chief, shouted at her. Earlier, Eli had watched him trying to speak with the girl standing in the doorway, biting her fingernails while staring intently at the door to Zadik's office. She appeared to be the only one there uninterested in what was happening in the tunnel, her only interest being Zadik's door, as if she were awaiting some redemption from there. “What will they gain? Will they gain anything this way? No, they won't gain anything!”

The telephone rang, but Aviva did not answer. Her eyes did not move from the screen; she was transfixed.

“Listen.” Matty Cohen was speaking to him suddenly in a quiet voice. “I want to tell you something, when this,” he said, indicating the monitor, “is over. Zadik told me you're, well, looking into what happened last night, and I—” He looked around suspiciously, then waved his hand as if sorry he had said anything at all. “Later, I'll tell you later, when this is over,” he repeated, wiping his shiny forehead and loosening his tie.

There are rare moments when the news media bring about true, immediate, and visible changes in reality itself. Such was the moment when Danny Benizri metamorphosed from a reporting correspondent or even a negotiator between warring camps into an active factor in attaining an agreement between the workers and the Finance Ministry. Thus, as Eli stood watching the monitor, he saw how, all at once, the broadcast moved from the television studio to the tunnel, where Danny Benizri was acting as spokesman to the workers. “You're standing there,” he would tell Ohayon later, “and suddenly you see how the director general of the Finance Ministry has been pushed into a corner on live television! I couldn't believe my eyes! He had no way of getting himself out of it! All at once you see Shimshi dictating to Benizri, and on a split screen, what can I tell you? I felt like, I just couldn't believe my eyes! I'm telling you, we were all standing there watching, everybody who was in that room, and not one of us was breathing!”

Not only in Aviva's office, but in the halls and the canteen and the control rooms and the foyer; everywhere in the building and, it would appear, everywhere in the country, people had stopped to watch and listen. Shimshi, his voice hoarse with smoke, dictated the text of the agreement that the director general would sign, which Danny Benizri repeated word by word. Utter silence reigned in Aviva's office when the monitors broadcast Danny Benizri, seen standing next to the labor minister's car, saying, “Nehemia, perhaps the director general will take a pad of paper and write…”

“Danny,” the studio host said, cutting him off, since just then the camera had returned to the studio, and the director general of the Finance Ministry was whispering something to Nehemia, who nodded and said to the camera, “Can you hear us?” while the director general hastened to say, “This is no way to handle matters.”

One of the people present in Aviva's office could have been expected to interject a sarcastic comment in response to the words of the Finance Ministry's director general, but they all remained silent, as Danny Benizri returned to the screen from inside the tunnel.

“You have no choice, sir,” Danny Benizri said, hunched over with cold. He gestured to the gray Volvo. “Mrs. Ben-Zvi has got to be taken out of here quickly, her condition is…” As he spoke, the camera returned once again to the studio, where someone had entered and was, at that very moment, placing a pen and paper in front of the director general.

“I don't believe it,” Matty Cohen whispered without removing his eyes from the monitor. He wiped his face again.

The monitor was showing the tunnel again, Benizri and Shimshi standing next to the trucks. Shimshi's face could be seen clearly as he issued a warning: “He'd better be writing this down, 'cause I'm not gonna repeat myself.” Shimshi turned to the men behind him and shouted, “Quiet, keep it down!” To Benizri he said, “Go on, get started. Tell him to get started.”

In spite of all the preparations, the people crammed into Aviva's office were stunned to listen to the television correspondent reciting in rhythm, as if dictating. “The director general of the Finance Ministry promises to…” Benizri turned to Shimshi for confirmation.