Murder in Jerusalem (6 page)

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I want to get something straight here,” Zadik said, bending forward and looking straight at David Shalit, who had thrust his fingers into his reddish curls, pulling them down over his forehead. The young reporter tugged at his turtleneck again, scratching at the itchy spot and making it bulge even larger. He leaned back in his chair as Zadik said, “What exactly are we talking about here?”

“She's suing them both, Bassiouny and the doctor,” David Shalit said, banging the table. “Both of them! There's no gag order on
their
names, she's free to ruin them. But as for her, not a spot of dirt on her! Imagine tomorrow some chick popping up and claiming that I…that you…”

“First of all, it was the judge who gave the order. Are you responsible for that? No, you are not responsible. Did you give the order? No, you did not give the order. The judge did,” Hefetz said, stealing a glance at Natasha.

“So, he gave the order!” David Shalit was shouting now, his face redder than ever. “For once let's just blow it off. I'm sick of all these girls who fuck like rabbits and shout, ‘Rape, rape!' These days any chick can say she was raped and ruin some guy's life even though she was the one who—”

“There's nothing we can do about it,” Zadik said, cutting him off. “When the story was first broadcast, Bassiouny's name and the doctor's were revealed. As I've already mentioned, we're Israel's official television station, we're the last ones who can violate—”

“Right, but the court says there's no factual basis for the case, so now she claims they've slandered her and she's taken them to court—”

Tzippi, one of the assistant producers, opened the door from the reporters' room next door to ask which translator was due in. “The Turkish defense minister still needs to be translated,” she informed them.

David Shalit stood up and moved to a chair against the wall, next to the junior secretary who was taking the minutes. “Stay right here, we're not finished yet,” Hefetz ordered. He wiped his large face with his hand. “It's so damn hot in here. Will someone turn the heating down?”

“You want me to call Maintenance?” Niva asked in mock innocence as she removed her foot from the chair and returned it to her clog. “Suddenly you've forgotten that we have no control over the heating?”

“I can hear just fine from over here,” David Shalit said, “and as for speaking, there's no point in me saying anything. Nobody's listening anyway, and I'm not the one who makes the decisions around here.”

“What's this about ‘military documents' written here?” Zadik queried. “What's the story about military documents?”

Hefetz leaned forward and massaged the back of his neck. “I told you about this,” he said, fatigued. “I told you: they found some top-secret military documents in the garbage. We've shot it, but there's still no text. Look, I've given it eight seconds, two words per second.”

The door to the reporters' room opened again and Tzippi plodded toward Hefetz, buttoning with difficulty the plaid flannel shirt that barely covered her burgeoning belly. “You could die from the heat in here,” she complained. “This temperature is definitely not for pregnant women.” She repeated her need of a translation from Turkish of the report sent in by the military correspondent.

The telephone rang again. “Hefetz,” Niva called, “Bezalel's on the line. What do you want to ask him? Hefetz, I'm talking to you, what did you want to ask him? Hefetz, are you listening? I'm talking to you, am I not? Answer me already!” Her tone was that of a petulant child, her thin lips set in a crooked slant of dissatisfaction.

“Just a minute,” Hefetz shouted. “I need to make a calculation here, don't I? What's he got for us? Ask him if he's got anything new before we finish the lineup. When we've heard from him we can put out an updated lineup, ask him exactly…here, let me talk to him.”

All at once the sights and sounds grew indistinct to Zadik. As if under water, he could hear people talking around him, as if through a sheet of glass he could see the news director pull Karen aside, he could hear the assistant producer phoning Turkey from the foreign correspondents' room and Erez verifying the details of a survey done on the
Popolitika
talk show and Karen asking, “What's this about Clinton? Why is ‘Clinton' written here?” And Erez, answering her before turning away: “No clue.”

“People,” Zadik said authoritatively, because this is what they were waiting for, for him to say something—anything—authoritative. “Let's keep on track, stick to our timetable, there's no going overtime because
Popolitika
is going to be longer than usual today.”

“So is the lineup okay? You haven't said,” Erez complained.

“Other than the piece about Moshe Leon, your stories are garbage,” Zadik answered.

“Those are heartrending human stories!” Erez cried out, agitated.

“Heartrending? They're garbage, a big heap of—”

Suddenly, both television monitors began broadcasting from the wall opposite the conference table. “Turn down the volume,” Zadik instructed Aviva. “We should only have the pictures, why is there sound? They should be silent now.”

“Why is it always me?” Aviva grumbled. “I don't even have the remote, Erez took it, he wanted to see something on Channel Two. Turn down the volume on the monitors,” she said, looking at Erez.

A voice shouted in from the graphics room. “What time are we lighting the first Hanukkah candle this evening, before or after the broadcast?”

“Are you kidding? Before, of course it's before, every year it's before,” Niva shouted back as she retrieved a sheet of paper from the computer printer. “Here's the updated lineup,” she announced, pulling the perforated edges off the page.

Danny Benizri stood up and stretched, and Zadik caught sight of his profile, his flat stomach. That's the way he had looked when he was Benizri's age: twenty years earlier when he tucked his shirt into his trousers, nothing showed, certainly not this mountain of a belly under his shirt and jacket that precedes him wherever he goes.

Danny Benizri straightened the hem of his black knit sweater. “What about the people laid off at the Hulit factory? Why did you make that item number twenty-seven?” he asked bitterly. “I'm talking to you, Erez, don't pretend you don't hear me.” Benizri shot Erez an angry look, which Erez returned with a shrug of his narrow shoulders and a nod of his head toward Hefetz. Benizri, the correspondent for labor and social affairs, glanced at Hefetz. “Tell me, Hefetz, did you notice that?” he demanded to know.

“That,” said Erez, “is out of the lineup completely today. No layoffs at Hulit, we've already got enough stuff on the strike.”

“And what about the murder in Petah Tikva?” David Shalit asked. “Last night I brought you eyewitness reports from the neighbors and all that, it's not anywhere in the lineup.”

“The murder in Petah Tikva is out,” Erez answered indifferently as he fiddled with the zipper on his blue sweater.

“Out?” David Shalit was astounded. “How can you pull a story like that? A guy knifes someone just because he complained about the noise from his car horn? Does that seem like a normal everyday occurrence to you? As far as I'm concerned, that should be our top story!”

“Can't do anything about it,” Erez said nonchalantly. “We're going with Moshe Leon instead. Hey, did someone turn off the heating? It's freezing in here.”

“Niva!” shouted Zivia, one of the assistant producers. “We don't have a studio in Tel Aviv. Did you hear me?”

David Shalit called out to Erez, “You want the text for your lead? You're going to have to write it yourself.”

“Oh come on, give it to me now and I'll write it down,” Erez said.

“I don't want to now,” said David Shalit defiantly. As he turned his head he blinked his small blue eyes—which appeared even smaller behind the thick lenses of his eyeglasses—and caught the glance of Eliahu Lutafi, the correspondent for environmental affairs. Lutafi had been around for years, and his hesitant speech gave him an air of helplessness, which invariably brought out a certain malaise in Zadik, a feeling of guilt for not having promoted him all these years. “Did you want something from me, Eliahu?” David Shalit asked.

“No, nothing. I mean, that is, if…if you're not giving him the lead just now, if you're free for a minute, I'd like you to see the report I've prepared on rubbish on the Tel Aviv shoreline,” Eliahu Lutafi requested. “I could use some feedback.”

Niva picked up the receiver. “It's Liat on the line, she's having trouble with the satellite, I can't—”

“‘A stinking mess like this is inhuman,'” Erez read aloud. “It's from the text of the report on garbage,” he explained to Zadik.

Zadik pored over the new page that Niva had handed him. “Miri,” he called out without looking up, “have you gone over this yet? There're no markings to indicate you've been over this.”

The language editor rose heavily from her place and went over to Zadik.

“This text,” Zadik said, incredulous, “is even more subversive than last night's. You people can't talk that way about the Likud World Congress.” But Miri did not hear the end of Zadik's sentence, because at that very moment the telephone next to which she was standing rang and Benizri, who was positioned next to another phone and rolling his eyes to the ceiling in dramatic desperation, was talking into the mouthpiece as if to a deaf person or an idiot. “I won't wink at you, I'll simply adjust my tie—” But the rest of
his
sentence was obscured by Niva, who was shouting, “Hey, wait a minute, what's going on here? Look!” Something in her tone caused everyone to fall silent and look toward the monitors on the wall. Doors to the adjacent rooms opened, and Tzippi, Zivia, and Liat, the assistant producers, stood watching, along with Irit, an intern with the foreign correspondents.

Tamari, the graphic artist, was standing in the doorway to the graphics room. “On Channel Two they're saying there are some terrorists in the tunnels on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc road,” she said.

“I heard they've taken a hostage,” said Ye'elah, the cultural affairs reporter who had just rushed in, breathless, to the newsroom.

Everyone in the room was staring at the monitors: not their own Channel One, which was showing a studio with an interviewer and two guests—an older man and a young woman—but rather the competition, Channel Two, which was showing a reporter in a military parka with a microphone, interviewing a policeman.

Hefetz slapped his thighs in anger. “Channel Two beat us to it again,” he complained aloud.

No one moved to turn up the volume. At the bottom of the screen there was a caption: SUPERINTENDENT MOLCHO. “Where is this? What's going on?” Niva asked, agitated.

“Can't you see? Look, it's the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc road,” David Shalit said impatiently.

“So, what's happening there?” Aviva asked. The caption now read, ENTRANCE TO THE TUNNEL ON THE JERUSALEM–ETZION BLOC BYPASS ROAD.

For a moment there was utter silence in the room. The loud ringing of a telephone was the only thing to break it.

“The telephone's ringing, are you people deaf?” Niva asked. “It's the hotline, someone's got to answer it. Is someone picking up? Aviva, answer it, it's the hotline!” When the telephone next to her began ringing too, she picked it up without taking her eyes from the television screen. “I don't understand,” she was saying into the mouthpiece. “Talk clearly. Are they from Hamas or what?” Just then the opening notes of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 rang out noisily from a mobile phone, sending Niva scrambling for her large black leather bag. After fishing through it madly, she managed to extricate a silver cellular telephone, took a look at its display panel, pursed her lips, and said, “Yes, Mother, what is it?”

Zadik stood in front of the wall monitor, watching the interviewer and his two guests, whose lips were moving soundlessly.

“What are you doing at the supermarket on Agron Street?” Niva shouted into her phone. “Oh, Mother, we agreed that you wouldn't leave the house until I get there!”

“Hello?” Aviva said into the receiver of the hotline. “Hello? Yes, he's right here, just a minute. It's for you,” she said, handing the phone to Zadik.

Zadik listened for a moment, raised his head and announced, “Quiet, everyone, you can calm down; it's not terrorists.”

Only then did someone raise the volume on the monitor so that it was possible to hear the military correspondent from Channel Two summarizing the turn of events: “And so,” he said, facing the camera, clearly emotional, “we now have official confirmation. This is not a terrorist attack. To sum up events, we know that at six-forty-five this morning a tunnel on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road was blockaded by four trucks parked inside the tunnel. It appears that the car of the minister for labor and social affairs is trapped—”

“Turn down the volume!” Zadik shouted. “I don't understand why Zohar isn't on the air! How is it that their military correspondent is there but ours isn't?”

“As of now you no longer need a military correspondent there,” Aviva said spitefully, as she removed her makeup kit from her purse. “Didn't you hear him? It's not a military maneuver, it's just some strikers, and they've kidnapped what's-her-name, Madame Minister Ben-Zvi.”

“Yeah,” said Hefetz, “but we didn't know that until now. Zohar was on his way there, now I get where he was headed so fast before. He should be right there with their correspondent. Never mind. Benizri, get down to the studio, we'll interrupt programming. Go on, get down there!”

“Here, here he is!” Aviva announced, and everyone looked to the Channel One monitor, where they could see Zohar, microphone in hand, a thick gray wool scarf wrapped around his neck. He was speaking into the camera, but there was no sound. A second later the image disappeared, and in its place a caption: TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAY TUNED.