Murder in Jerusalem (35 page)

“Yes. I'll be fifty-one in another two months,” he said, once again stretching his lips into a distorted smile, while his soft gray eyes suddenly clouded over. “Why are you interested in the state of my health?”

“It's a standard question,” Michael explained. “We don't wish to put people under unnecessary strain, like with Matty Cohen.”

“You people also believe Matty Cohen had a heart attack because of the investigation, and all the tension?” Rubin asked. “In his condition he shouldn't have agreed to undergo the investigation. I specifically told Zadik—oh, well, what does all that matter now?” Rubin waved his hand dismissively and looked with anticipation at Michael.

Michael did not respond; instead, he repeated his question, while pretending to give his undivided attention to the papers in front of him. Did Rubin have any special health problems?

“No. None,” Rubin answered.

“Do you take any medications on a regular basis?”

Rubin flashed him a guarded look. “No, I don't. Sometimes I take an aspirin for headache or back pain, and something for allergies when the seasons change—I'm allergic to cypress trees—but nothing out of the ordinary. How does all this concern Zadik?”

“We're asking the same questions of everyone,” Michael stated, “just as we asked everyone where exactly they were this morning when Zadik…”

“Yes,” Rubin said distractedly. “Eli—is that the guy's name?—he already asked me that during questioning. That was considered an official interrogation, was it not? I told him I was right here, with Dr. Landau from B'tzelem, the human rights organization. We were working on the report for Friday's program. Don't you have that information?”

“Apparently I do,” Michael said, mimicking Rubin's own distracted tone of voice. “But I don't have all the reports in front of me at this moment, I only have—” He dug around inside the manila envelope and fished out a small spiral notebook. “So I've been asked to question you again.”

“I was here the whole time, as I told them,” Rubin said.

“And you're certain—sorry for asking this again—you're certain that you had no contact from here with Benny Meyuhas?”

“Absolutely positive,” Rubin answered, his body tense. “I wish I had—this whole situation is completely out of hand, believe me. I was looking for him like crazy before this, before they found Zadik. I wanted to tell him his production of
Iddo and Eynam
had been approved—that is to say, that he can complete it—but I couldn't find him anywhere. I haven't heard from him since yesterday. It just doesn't make any sense to me, I'm worried about him. I can't understand how he hasn't even called me, at the very least—”

“And you have no idea who this person was who allegedly took him away?”

“Why ‘allegedly'?” Rubin asked, incredulous. “That's what Sarah said. She was there in the house, wasn't she?”

“Benny Meyuhas and Sarah have a very close relationship,” Michael noted.

Rubin shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “People say that the relationship between a director and his actors is always close.”

“Oh, come on,” Michael said, “we're not children here, you know what I mean.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Rubin countered.

“I'm asking you,” Michael said. “I'm asking you whether he spoke with you about this young woman, Sarah, and I'm asking you to tell me anything that comes to mind about the man who picked up Benny Meyuhas—who you think that could have been, even if there doesn't seem to be any grounding in fact for your ideas. And I'm also asking you about Benny Meyuhas's relationship with Zadik, and where you think he might be, because under the present circumstances he is not only a suspect, it's also possible that his life is in danger. You certainly understand that he is very shaky right now, that he could harm himself. You two are very close friends; this is no time to conceal things.”

“That's true, we're very close friends. Even more than that,” Rubin said. “We're brothers. Benny Meyuhas is my brother.”

“You're speaking metaphorically, right?”

“A brother you've chosen to be your brother is often closer than a biological brother,” Rubin said, lowering his gaze.

“You've known each other since you were kids,” Michael stated, his eyes on a photograph in the right-hand corner of the corkboard. It was the same photo of a school field trip he had seen, framed, at Benny Meyuhas's house, featuring a youthful Benny and Rubin and a third friend, along with Tirzah.

“Since we were kids,” Rubin said, following his gaze. “I'm an only child, Benny, too. My parents were old: Holocaust survivors. My father died when I was twelve. My mother is still alive. Benny's folks were old, too, I think one side of the family came from Turkey, and the other—I don't remember, maybe Bukhara. Things were pretty tough in his home. His parents didn't have any children, and after ten years of marriage his father took another wife and had three daughters with her. Then suddenly Benny's mother got pregnant and he was born. The father divided his time between the two houses and ran around trying to make a living to support two families. They were poor, we weren't. We had reparation payments from Germany, they got welfare. Benny would come to my house, I would help him with his homework. We played soccer, that's how it all started. We became inseparable.”

“And what about Sroul?” Michael asked, gazing at the photograph.

After a long pause Rubin sighed. “Yeah, Sroul, too. Who told you about Sroul?”

Michael did not respond.

“We met Sroul when we were fourteen, in the ninth grade. He was…he came from a Revisionist household, his father had come from Iraq and married a Polish Jew; in Israel he was part of Menahem Begin's inner circle, a member of the Irgun…I don't remember exactly, I think he was in the Jewish Underground; wherever Begin was, he was there too. After that Sroul came along with us to the youth movement and the immigrant camps. Caused a big scandal in his house, they wanted him to be in the Beitar Youth Movement and all that….” Rubin fell silent, then after several seconds, added, “But he doesn't live in Israel any longer.”

“He left after the war,” Michael said. “Because of his injury.”

“He lives in Los Angeles, became ultra-Orthodox,” Rubin said bitterly. “At first we kept in touch, but it's been years since…” Rubin's voice faded out but Michael waited in silence. “We haven't spoken in years,” Rubin said.

“Only Tirzah did,” Michael said simply, as if stating a fact. “She's the only one who kept in contact with him all these years.”

“Tirzah!” Rubin said, astonished. “No way! What did Tirzah have to do with—”

“She was your girl, not just yours but Benny's and Sroul's too. That's her in this photograph, isn't it? The Three Musketeers and all that?”

“Sure, she was once, when we were young, but—”

“A month before her death, she visited the United States,” Michael said. “We think she might have gone to meet him.”

“No way!” Rubin said, visibly agitated. “She went for work, two weeks on a business trip. Most of the time she was in New York, she had meetings with producers—I don't know, I suppose she could have been on the West Coast too…” A note of caution crept into his voice. “I don't know the details of her trip, I never had a chance to talk to her about it afterward,” he said.

“In fact, she spent three days in Los Angeles,” Michael informed him. “We know this for sure. We have the details on her hotel and her meetings there,” he said without altering the expression on his face; in actual fact, he had no such information. “Don't you think she would have met up with Sroul there?”

“No, I don't,” Rubin said. “Do you want some more coffee?”

“Why don't you think so? Don't you think that if she'd gotten as far as Los Angeles—even if she was on business—she would have taken the time to try and find someone who had been so very important to her in her youth? In her place, wouldn't you have tried?”

“If that's true, she didn't mention it to me,” Rubin said flatly. “Not to me, and not to Benny. Benny would have told me about it.”

“Do you have Sroul's address?”

“Why are you so interested in him?” Rubin asked in a tone of wonder, though Michael thought he could discern a hint of agitation, too.

“It seems fairly natural that we would be interested in him, especially since the last person who saw Zadik alive was an ultra-Orthodox man whose skin was badly burned. It only seems natural to think it was your friend Sroul, don't you think?”

“That's impossible,” Rubin said after a short silence. “Sroul didn't have any connection to Zadik, he never even met him. Why would…? And if Sroul had come to Israel, don't you think we would have known about it?”

“I'm asking you that very question,” Michael said. “That's exactly what I'm asking you: if he were to come to Israel, would he contact you or Benny Meyuhas?”

“There's no question about it,” Rubin said. “I would know about it in advance. No question.”

“Tell me,” Michael said slowly. “Sroul's well-off, isn't he?”

“How should I—I think he's done well for himself, maybe in diamonds,” Rubin said reluctantly. “He married an American woman, ultra-Orthodox, her father was in the diamond polishing business. They were rich. She, the eldest daughter, was born with some kind of birth defect; a paralyzed hand or something. I don't know all the details, but they married them off to one another because, well, she was the kind they had to find someone for.”

“You've never met her?” Michael asked, surprised. “Didn't they invite you to their wedding?”

“No, I've never met her,” Rubin said. “I met up with him only twice, years ago, in Los Angeles. He didn't even bring me to his home, I didn't understand why. That is, I
did
understand why. It was because he had a new life, he didn't want to remember who he had been before. It was strange between us, he…he wasn't the same person I'd known. He'd become this Orthodox Jew in the full sense of the word, saying blessings before taking a bite from a piece of fruit, or when he came out of the bathroom. You know what I'm talking about?”

Michael nodded. “When was the last time you saw him?” he asked.

Rubin thought for a while before answering. “Seventeen years, I think. I'm not sure,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “It's hard to keep in touch after so many years. We didn't even exchange greetings at Rosh Hashanah, or talk on the phone for that matter. I felt he wasn't interested in keeping in touch. That was the feeling he gave me. And he didn't like what I do for a living.”

“Why not? Because of your politics? Is he politically right-wing?”

“Not exactly,” Rubin said, restless. “He was…he became anti-Zionist. I mean, in his opinion he became a
true
Zionist, like the Neturei Karta sect, the ultra-ultra-Orthodox kind who don't think a Jewish state should even have been established in the Land of Israel before its time, before the arrival of the Messiah. Sroul said it was a profanity, that sort of thing. It was unbelievable. Suddenly someone you knew as well as you knew yourself was talking like some evil spirit had gotten inside him. I saw there was no sense talking to him. Our second meeting was a disaster.”

“And what about Benny?”

“What about him?”

“Was he in touch with Sroul?”

“Not at all. Just like me. He met with him more often than I did, maybe four times, because Benny's stubborn and thought maybe he could change Sroul's mind. But they broke off contact ten years ago or so, and Tirzah, too.”

“And yet,” Michael said, glancing down at a pile of yellowing newspapers, journals, photographs, and cassettes stacked nearby, “and yet he was the one who financed the production of
Iddo and Eynam,
and you are the one who solicited the money from him, right?”

Rubin sat up straight in his chair. For a long moment he did not speak, then, clearly rattled, he regarded Michael. “That's…Benny can't ever know about that,” he said, his voice choked. “I don't know how you got hold of that information, nobody in the world knew about it but Zadik and me. And Sroul, of course. Even Tirzah didn't know, and certainly not Benny or Hagar or anybody else. That was my secret with Zadik; Zadik was a man of his word, he would never have leaked that to you people. Benny's ego completely depended on the belief that finally his talents had been recognized. You think they would have ever let him do a project like this without outside funding?”

“But it wasn't seventeen years ago that you were in contact with Sroul, it was more like a year and a half,” Michael stated dryly. “This isn't the time to hide things like that, and I am asking you to tell me exactly what and how, all the details. And for that purpose,” he said as he placed a recording device on the table, pushed the play button, and stated the date, the hour, and the name of his interviewee, “I will record this conversation.”

“You think the Orthodox Jew who visited Zadik was Sroul,” Rubin said ponderously. “I can't say I didn't think of that, but I prefer—”

“I will ask you to tell me in detail how you made contact with him and what monies were transferred for the purpose of the production
Iddo and Eynam,
” Michael stated pointedly.

Rubin looked around as if hoping to gain time, though this time he did not try to offer refills on coffee. “Okay,” he said at last, “I thought somebody had to help Benny express his full potential. He's fifty, like me. If a man can't do what he's been dreaming of all his life by the time he reaches fifty…you have no idea how many people he approached to produce the Agnon story and how many times he was rejected. I wanted—I'm telling you, Benny is like a brother to me. My only brother.”