Murder in Jerusalem (12 page)

“You don't say,” Matty Cohen mumbled as he licked his lips, which were suddenly parched. “Is there…is there any water around here?” he asked as he rose from his chair and made his way unsteadily to the urn. He peered inside, poured himself a tepid glass of water in a Styrofoam cup, and drank it down in one gulp.

“I'm very sorry,” he said as he sat back down. “I didn't look down on my way back out, I don't know if she was still there, but when I was on my way to the roof she was standing with someone and talking, I mean…” He fell silent. Eli Bachar, who had noted the hesitation in his voice, folded his arms and waited. He hoped that through patience he would hear the end of Matty Cohen's sentence, since people cannot—as Ohayon had taught him—stand silences. But Matty Cohen did not continue speaking. His puffy face was contorted with some effort, the nature of which Eli Bachar was hard pressed to identify, and his eyes were half shut as though he were trying to decipher the details in a picture he was carrying around inside himself.

“They weren't just shooting the breeze,” Eli Bachar guessed.

Matty Cohen shot him a startled look. “What do you mean, ‘They weren't just shooting the breeze'?” Eli Bachar thought he heard a note of insult or desperation in Matty Cohen's voice. “I can't tell you what…because I really don't know who she was talking to. I don't have a clue.”

“Not even whether it was a man or a woman?” Eli Bachar persisted.

“Not even. Nothing. It was pretty dark in there, I don't even…If Tirzah hadn't spoken, I wouldn't have known it was her. Even now I'm not completely sure.”

“It's actually very important for you to be sure it was Tirzah, very important to remember exactly what she said. You have no idea just how important it is.”

Matty Cohen regarded him with a look of confusion. After a while his face brightened, as though finally comprehending something. “Is it because of the insurance?”

“Yes,” Eli Bachar said, since he had no intention of sharing any of his thoughts at this stage. “Because of the terms and conditions. It's a completely different story if this is an accident.”

“But I'm telling you everything I know,” Matty Cohen said pleadingly. “I'm really trying, but what am I supposed to do? On the way to the roof I was thinking about Benny Meyuhas and on the way back not even about that and the whole matter—I mean, we're only talking about a couple of minutes here, for crying out loud, from when I nearly reached the roof to when I turned around after her phone call.”

“The people filming up on the roof didn't hear the phone ringing?”

“Which? What? My cell phone? Like, who?”

“The people on the roof,” Eli Bachar said in a new attempt, “or even Tirzah. If she was down below, wouldn't she have heard the ring? Wouldn't she have reacted, noticed that you were there. Called to you, or to someone?”

“No,” Matty Cohen said and shook his head strenuously as if to emphasize his own words. “I didn't want anyone to know that I was…that…nobody knew that I would be turning up in the middle of filming. I set my cell phone on vibrate so no one would hear. It was in my pocket. I was standing right next to the door to the roof, I could see it was my wife phoning, and all I said was, ‘What?' when I answered. She spoke and then I said, quietly, ‘I'm on my way.' Nobody could have heard that, certainly not on the roof, it's completely open up there and there's no way, but not down below, either, nobody could…”

“So then you immediately started running back in the same direction?”

“I told you, I was afraid my kid—”

“No one knew you were there?” Eli Bachar asked again.

“No, it was a secret, you know, I wanted…I needed to catch them in the act, because there had already been a decision to stop filming.”

“How can that be?” Eli Bachar asked, surprised. “Israel Television decides to stop a production, and people keep working on it anyway? How is that technically possible?”

“First of all,” Matty Cohen said as he lowered his head and scrutinized his fingers, “such a decision is made without fanfare, we didn't want to…nobody knew about it yet, only Benny Meyuhas himself and his producer, Hagar, and maybe I said something to Max Levin, I don't remember exactly. We didn't want a big ruckus on our hands, but I'm pretty sure Hagar told someone else. She's so committed to Benny Meyuhas that…for many years she—”

“Now I get it,” Eli Bachar mumbled. He removed a crumpled piece of paper from his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read in silence the names written there. “That's why you're not on this list.”

“What list?” Matty Cohen asked, dismayed.

“The list of who was in the building last night, when the accident occurred. You're not listed because nobody knew…but Zadik knew, he's the one who told me.”

“Zadik knew,” Matty Cohen agreed. “Of course he knew, he's the one…I mean, I didn't make the decision to stop filming on my own. But he didn't know that it was last night that I was planning to show up. Nobody knew that.”

“What about the guard? The person in charge of security? He didn't see you enter?”

Matty Cohen poured water into the foam cup, shook his head, and took a long sip. “No, he didn't see me. He couldn't have seen me, because I came in the back way, from the parking area in the back.”

Eli Cohen threw him a puzzled look. “What parking area in the back?”

“There's a small parking lot behind the String Building. All the old-timers here know about it, there's an entrance from there up a flight of stairs and straight into the building. The door is locked, but there are people with keys. Senior staff. That enables us to park behind the building and enter without anyone—”

“What does that mean, ‘senior staff'? Who does that include?”

“Well, department heads have a key, but lots of other people, too: carpentry shop workers, people in the Scenery Department, people involved in the big shows produced in the String Building. I suppose the people who produce
Popolitika,
you know, there's this big studio downstairs for the Friday-evening programs, that sort of thing. So the people working on those shows, the regulars, they have keys. It's hard to say anymore who does and who doesn't.”

“What I would like to ask of you,” Eli Bachar said, stealing a glance at his watch, “is that after your meeting you'll come down to police headquarters at the Russian Compound. I have an idea—”

“That's impossible,” Matty Cohen said, visibly dissatisfied. “I've got to speak with Rubin after the meeting to see what's going to be happening with this
Iddo and Eynam,
and then this afternoon…I can't
not
be at the funeral, it's bad enough I didn't know…”

“You'll be back in time for the funeral,” Eli Bachar promised. “I personally will bring you back in time.”

“But what…why do you need to—”

“First of all I need a signed statement from you,” Eli Bachar said. “And second, there's…I had this idea about memory. You'll see. Trust me.”

“But first I've got to get to this meeting,” Matty Cohen said reproachfully. “I've got a few matters that can't be postponed.”

“I'll be waiting for you here,” Eli Bachar promised, “either in this room or in Aviva's office.”

“You want me to send Max Levin in?” Matty Cohen offered.

“That's all right, I'll call him,” Eli Bachar said, accompanying him to the door. From there he watched Matty Cohen enter Zadik's office, saw Aviva talking on the phone. She swiveled her chair toward the window and lowered her voice.

When the door to Zadik's office closed, Eli Bachar motioned to Max Levin to step into the little office.

“I'm a wreck,” Max Levin said as he sat in one of the two upholstered chairs near the wall. “There's no blood left in my veins, only coffee. I'm simply a wreck, a total wreck.” He looked at Eli Bachar, fatigued. “I already told them everything last night. I don't have anything more to add.” Eli Bachar took in the small, wrinkled face while Max Levin rubbed his red eyes. “Thirty years, right from the beginning I'm here. All those years you work close to someone, your lives are all tangled up with each other, and suddenly, in a single moment—”

“I just want to go over what you told us yesterday, and your signed statement,” Eli Bachar explained. He read aloud the details of the moment Max Levin had discovered Tirzah's body under the marble pillar, how he had happened to be there because he had been looking for a blue horse for Benny Meyuhas's production, how the guard wouldn't let in Avi, the lighting technician who had been sent to fetch the sun gun, how he, Max Levin, had gotten him in. “Is that just the way it was?” he asked in the end, and Max Levin nodded and added, “Her whole face was crushed…blood…it was…” And he fell silent.

“So, you don't have a key to the back entrance of the String Building?” Eli Bachar asked matter-of-factly.

“You'll find this funny,” Max Levin said with a sigh. “I'm the person who came up with that back entrance, and I always use it because most of my work takes place at the String Building, that's where my office is. But I had left the keys in the pocket of my jacket, and when I came at night I was wearing a windbreaker…because Benny Meyuhas called me—”

“Tell me, is it always like that?” Eli Bachar asked. “Do you always work so late into the night?”

“Benny Meyuhas called me, it was urgent. And because…” He stopped talking a moment, then muttered, “I've been working with Benny Meyuhas more than, well, nearly thirty years, so he gets special treatment from me. He can ask me for something in the middle of the night, and he only calls me if it's really urgent,” Max Levin explained, stroking his wrinkled, grizzled cheeks and clicking his large, white teeth, which were too perfect to be real.

“What was so urgent here?” Eli Bachar asked. “There were so many of you here—actors, a lighting technician, Tirzah, you—why at night?”

“These were night scenes, I explained that yesterday,” Max Levin said. “From
Iddo and Eynam,
a project that Benny Meyuhas has been working on for years. The screenplay was written years ago, and filming started three months ago, and now…it's almost finished.”

“But why at night?” Eli Bachar persisted. “It's December, dark already around five p.m., why is it necessary to film in the middle of the night?”

“No, you don't understand,” Max Levin said, propping up his head by putting his elbows on the dusty glass desktop. “They needed the moon. They were filming Gemullah, the heroine of the story. She walks on roofs at night, she suffers from moonsickness. That's the way it is in the story by Agnon,” he explained. It seemed to Eli Bachar that he heard a note of pride in the last sentence, as though Max Levin knew that he, Eli Bachar, was not familiar with the story by Agnon, which was in fact true but which he had no intention of revealing.

“I understand,” Eli Bachar said with assurance, “that Matty Cohen was there last night. What was he doing there?”

“I only heard this morning that he was there,” Max Levin said carefully, stealing a cautious look at Eli Bachar. “He's the head of the Production Department, in charge of the money. Didn't you ask him that? He was just sitting with you, wasn't he? Last night he didn't come to…but what's that got to do with anything?”

“It's just that I understood he was coming to put a stop to the production,” Eli Bachar explained. “So did he?”

“Nobody saw him there. If he was there, he left before—” Max Levin's voice was full of scorn. “Nobody is going to shut this production down in the middle, even if it's over budget. It's not…it's a project that too many people…have taken too seriously—”

“So how is it that if so many people are involved in it,” Eli Bachar asked, “and so much money, and people are putting in time in the middle of the night—how is such negligence possible?”

Max Levin explained at length the way Tirzah worked and ran her operations, how she never permitted a soul to touch the things she made, even he, Max Levin, who had worked with her for thirty years: “And believe me, she knew I am a very responsible person, she knew very well, but still she did not allow me.” He clasped his knotty fingers and gazed intently at the blackened edges of his large fingernails. “Nobody was allowed to touch her stuff,” Max Levin said, “nobody was responsible for it but her, and that's just…I don't want to use the word ‘fault,' but it's only her fault. She would have told you that herself.” He continued to talk, about Tirzah's perfectionism, about the way she insisted on getting every detail right, about long hours they had worked together, he as the head of Props and she as head of Scenery, and about how—in spite of her pedantry—everyone loved her, how they went out of their way to help her. “Everyone: the workers, the seamstresses, everyone.” Especially on this project,
Iddo and Eynam,
not so much out of respect for Benny Meyuhas—“Not that he isn't respected, he's very respected, he's still an important director even if they haven't been letting him take on projects he wants for years. But he's a person who keeps his distance, who doesn't really relate to people personally”—but rather for her, since Benny was her husband. “Well,
as if
her husband,” he corrected himself. “They lived like husband and wife for seven or eight years, ever since she split up with Rubin. But Rubin is Benny Meyuhas's friend, too, until this very day, even though his wife…” He wiped his eyes and paused for a long moment.

“Never mind all these details,” he summed up, “it's a terrible tragedy. But nobody but Tirzah is to blame. That is to say, not exactly to blame, but she's responsible…I mean…” He stopped speaking and cast a look of sheer misery at Eli Bachar. “Any way you try to say it, it sounds awful,” he said. “But that's the truth. I'll tell you that, and anyone else will, too. Avi the lighting technician, everyone.”