Murder in Jerusalem (32 page)

Inside Zadik's office there stood a bookstand on which were arranged trophies and a number of collections (flags, matches, wine corks) and a shelf that held bottles of alcohol—not a proper bar, just a shelf; behind this was a curtain, the bottoms of which had been shoved aside as if someone had pushed the bookstand from its place and neglected to straighten the edges of the curtain. When Michael had bent down and looked from down below, he noticed suddenly a light-colored wood surface and the hint of a door frame. He exited the office and walked down the hallway, opening door after door and looking in. The narrow metal cabinet stood quite close to one of the doors, very nearly hiding it. When he pressed on the doorknob, he did not expect anything to happen, when suddenly a small space opened in front of him, a square niche that led to another door. He tried opening that one, too, but something was blocking it. He pushed hard against the door and felt something on the other side moving. All at once he could hear the voice of Yaffa from forensics on the other side of the door. “What's going on?” she called, taken aback. “Someone—who is it, who's there?”

“Hang on a minute,” Michael had said, dashing back to Zadik's room. Together they moved the bookstand and pushed the curtain to the side, revealing the other door.

“Wait,” Yaffa said quietly. “Excuse me for a moment.” She nearly toppled him while she dusted the doorknob and the bookstand for prints.

“They used this door,” Michael said. “They opened this door, didn't they?”

“Sure,” Yaffa said, eyeing him with frustration. “They probably opened it today, otherwise we would have found something, at least some dust, cobwebs, something. Look, nothing,” she said scornfully. “Not even—well, what did you expect? Maybe you hoped that someone would enter, kill a person, and then leave signs on the door and the knob? At least a palm print, a thumb. Something.”

“Nothing at all?” Michael asked.

“Nada,” Yaffa mumbled. “There are prints on the bookstand and the bottles and all that, but not on the door. In any event, not fingerprints. But we'll find something else, don't worry, something will turn up. Just like they taught us, ‘Every time you touch something…”

“…you leave a trace,'” Michael completed the sentence in a near whisper, and sighed.

“Why can't you believe that?” Yaffa insisted as she bent down to the foot of the bookstand and carefully lifted a single hair from the floor with a pair of pincers. “Do me a favor,” she said before he had a chance to answer, “bring me a small plastic bag from the sack next to the door, or tell Rafi and he'll give you one.” He hadn't even moved a muscle when she called out, “Rafi, anybody, I need to bag a hair,” and Michael, who was standing between Yaffa and a young man he did not know, was handed a bag, which he passed on to Yaffa. “You haven't answered me: do you or don't you believe it?” Yaffa sat down on the rug, placed the hair in the bag, and sealed it, then looked at him expectantly.

“What? That every time you touch something, you leave a trace? Experience shows that's true, generally,” he said pensively. “But we know that often it's just a matter of luck, and—”

“When's the last time we didn't come up with something for you?” Yaffa said, offended. “If you consider all the times we've worked together, I would have thought you'd—”

“No, no, no,” Michael hastened to appease her. “That's not at all what I meant. You're a terrific team, there's no question about it. It's just that there's always—”

“It's true that things are tough at first,” she agreed; even though she had not let him finish his sentence, she knew what caused his doubts. “Until you make some sense of it all, until you get a handle on all those details, it seems like you'll never get any real answers. But something turns up, it always does,” she concluded, though it was unclear whether she was trying to convince him or herself. Her long ponytail bobbed up and down when she added, “At least in this case we were very lucky to get here so quickly, before anyone could…it's lucky they called you so fast. Who called you? Ronen?”

“Yes.”

“Was he a plant here? Gosh, now I understand why he hasn't been at work. Did Zadik know about him?”

“He did,” Michael said with a sigh. “He agreed to it because of Matty Cohen.”

Although little time had passed since he had spoken with Zadik, it seemed to Michael as though their conversation about the results of the postmortem performed on Matty Cohen had taken place eons ago, and that ages had passed since he had told Zadik about the excessive quantity of digoxin found in his body. “What's digoxin?” Zadik had asked. “Isn't that something given to heart patients? I think I've heard of it, I think I even saw Matty taking it. Or maybe he just told me about it.”

Michael had explained to him that the popular medication, produced from the digitalis plant and sold commercially from as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century as an efficient way of increasing and stabilizing heart rate, was also a dangerous drug. “Medical professionals and heart patients alike know,” Michael said, explaining to Zadik what he had learned from the pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Matty Cohen, “that the main problem with digoxin is the narrow range of proper dosage and the fatal side effects the drug produces when just a little too much is consumed.” He thought to himself about the name of the plant—digitalis, responsible for the digital beat—and a digital ticking began resounding in his ears. Zadik had sat up straight in his chair and, clearly rattled, placed his hand over his chest, then stretched his fingers to feel his left arm. Michael added that for that reason, the level of digoxin in Matty Cohen's blood had been constantly monitored, and shortly before his death it was found to be fine. The autopsy, however, had revealed that the quantity of the drug in his bloodstream was four times normal.

“Four times?” Zadik said, horrified. “How could that be? Does that mean he took too much by accident? Or not by accident?”

“It's hard to know,” Michael said. “It's hard to know whether he ingested it himself, accidentally or not, or whether it was given to him.” He imagined the sound of different heartbeats, the normal and the abnormal—terrifying, galloping, exaggerated.

“What does that mean, it was given to him? Are you saying someone poisoned him?” Zadik was astounded. “Don't joke about this—what do you think we do here, poison people? Anyway, you're just talking off the cuff, there's no proof, is there?”

Nonetheless, Zadik did not put up much of a fight about approving Sergeant Ronen for “employment,” and Ronen started work immediately as a temporary electrician for the Maintenance Department (“Only because you gave me your word of honor that he won't go near the files, trying to figure out who our informer was,” Zadik had warned Michael, “and because I trust you, and because of this business with the digoxin, even if you can't pin anything on anyone”). So that was how Ronen was able to contact Michael the moment Aviva alerted the security officer; thanks to Ronen, Michael had managed to arrive on the scene before the doctor and before the forensics team.

Now he was looking at the mass of blond curls on Aviva's head as she leaned forward, her hands over her face. He noted the bright red of her long fingernails against the background of her starkly white hands. In his head her voice resounded—not the feeble, lifeless tone she had been using for the past hour, but the nasally, whiny voice she had used to repeat, over and over again, what he had heard her saying after they broke into Zadik's office as she stood near the desk: “How can this have happened? I never left my desk, and nobody…” She kept repeating this until the moment she collapsed, as fate would have it into the arms of the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, who had been summoned, and before they could get a tranquilizer into her. “Just so you know,” the doctor had told him, “she could sleep for hours now.” But only one hour had passed before she opened her eyes and sprang to her feet, so they were able to bring her in for the prolonged questioning that was just now coming to an end. Afterward she was completely exhausted, her limbs sprawled limply. She said, leaning over the desk, “Now I'm simply tired, I don't even have the strength to get up from this chair.” She lowered her head to her folded arms and fell fast asleep.

He continued sitting there for a moment, facing her, reliving the ruckus that had taken place in her office even before they had completed their investigations. The police commissioner and Emmanuel Shorer, who was serving as Jerusalem district commander, had asked him to sit with them in the little room next to the secretary's office; a moment later they were joined by Natan Ben-Asher, director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, who was wearing a dark pinstripe suit, the corner of a handkerchief poking out from his breast pocket. His hair was dark (“You think he dyes it?” Yaffa had asked in a whisper before he entered the room) and shiny and combed back from his high, prominent forehead and his puffy cheeks. He looked around, removed a checked handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers—which he used to meticulously wipe clean one of the empty chairs in the room—hiked up his trousers, and sat down, muttering all the while, “What a terrible disaster, simply horrid, I have no idea…,” and then fell silent. He regarded them and added, wagging his finger, a nervous quiver to his voice, “First you must investigate the security angle here. I have no doubt this was an assassination, it has to do with the political situation.” He repeated this assertion several times. When the police commissioner wondered whether they might need to close down Israel Television, Ben-Asher flew out of his seat to point at the monitor, which was broadcasting there, just as in every room in the building. “The nation's official television station will not be shut down!” he declared. Ben-Asher raised the volume on the monitor and said, “Do you see what's happening here? Look!” They watched a live broadcast as Danny Benizri climbed the metal steps of a semi trailer; on the top step he stopped to interview Rachel Shimshi, who was sitting in the passenger seat, leaning toward the steering wheel, her hands cuffed to the wheel. “I'm not unlocking them!” Rachel Shimshi shouted hoarsely. “I'm not taking off the handcuffs, and I'm not getting rid of the metal chain. Tell everybody that I'm…that we're…we have nothing more to lose!” Ben-Asher said, “You want Channel Two to report this?” In the background they could hear Danny Benizri talking to Rachel Shimshi. “You're desperate, you've lost all hope—” Rachel Shimshi said, “I want everyone to know, I want our husbands to know, that we're with them one hundred percent. Everybody else left them alone to rot, but we wives believe what they did was right.
We're
not going to leave them alone to rot.”

“If you think about it logically,” Danny Benizri tried to say, but she cut him off in an instant. “Don't talk to me about logic,” she shouted. “Don't try to find any logic in the way people behave when they're desperate. You can't ask desperate people to behave logically. That's the way it is all over the world, this is a democratic country, with justice and all that. We're not going to move the trucks. Only way I'm leaving here is if someone takes me by force,” she cried, looking to Esty, who was sitting in the driver's seat. “You can't move her without using force either,” she announced and pointed at Esty's protruding belly. “We'll see how you guys manage with a pregnant woman. What are you going to do with her?”

“They interrupted regularly scheduled programming for this live broadcast,” Ben-Asher told them with satisfaction, as though a body had not just been removed from the adjacent room. “One does not shut down this kind of work.” He hastened to add, “There is no time to lose; as tragic as the circumstances are, it will be necessary to appoint a replacement for Zadik to ensure continuity here. We shall endeavor to do our jobs, and you shall endeavor to do yours. As for Zadik, I feel quite certain you will find his untimely death is due to the work of terrorists. Awful, this is simply awful. Just two months ago he became a grandfather—”

“Eighteen months ago,” Emmanuel Shorer corrected him.

“What was eighteen months ago?” Natan Ben-Asher asked, confused.

“His grandson was born a year and a half ago,” Shorer said, looking past Ben-Asher. “Do you have a candidate to replace Zadik, someone who can take over immediately? Who would it be? Say, Arye Rubin?” he guessed.

“No. Not Rubin,” Ben-Asher said quickly. “We need Rubin to continue with his reports.” Slowly, carefully emphasizing every word, he added, “Rubin is proof that we are a democratic state, even if he is quite radical. I told Zadik, may he rest in peace, I talked to him about Rubin's one-sided reporting. After all, any other institution would have—”

“Who were you thinking of?” Shorer asked pleasantly, looking straight into the small eyes of the director general of the Broadcasting Authority, who was wiping his face with his handkerchief.

“I will tell you whom I've been considering,” he said, “and with the authority vested in me I will carry out this appointment immediately. I have the full backing of the communications minister and the prime minister himself.”

The police commissioner expressed astonishment. “You mean to tell me that the prime minister and the communications minister already know about…this situation? When did you have time to inform them?” he asked.

“First of all, I spoke with the cabinet secretary from the car on the way here,” Ben-Asher said coolly, clearly self-satisfied. “I didn't want them to hear about it from leaked information. And I explained to them that we need to mobilize immediately. Beyond that, I have had discussions with the prime minister about general policy with regards to Israel Television…” Suddenly a note of hesitation crept into his voice and he added, as though walking on eggs, that “Zadik—how shall I say it?—was a dear man, truly, but rather impulsive. That was certainly, for me as well, part of his charm—”