Bethlehem Road Murder Page 4

  “No one here is going anywhere,” declared Ada Efrati. “These aren’t times for trips abroad.”

  “Are you trying to say that everyone has stopped living because of the new intifada?” Balilty gave a challenging look to the contractor. “If that’s the case then we can close down the shop, if we live by the situation, isn’t that right? Are you from Beit Jalla?” He turned to the contractor.

  “Beit Jalla,” he affirmed.

  “I live in Gilo. Maybe it was from your house that they sniped at our neighborhood. Huh?”

  “Leave that to the army and the border police,” Ada Efrati said, and laid her fingers on the contractor’s arm, as if trying to protect him.

  “Those leftists,” snorted Balilty as they went out. “They spit on them, they get wet and they say it’s raining.”

  Chapter 2

  Dr. Solomon wiped his hands on his gown and stretched the rubber gloves over them. “I’m dressing in your honor, see? In your honor I’ve put a new long gown on me,” he warbled in the direction of Sergeant Yair, and pulled the cuffs of the gloves up his forearms. Then he went over to the gleaming table where the body had been placed and touched the raised head, the hair spread over the stainless steel headrest. On the smooth surface, which glittered in the metallic light, the mane of hair surrounding the skull looked like the silken tassels of a black scarf interwoven with threads of red. Without pausing, he peeked into the crushed mouth and then raised his head and said: “A few teeth have remained whole—we’ve taken a print, and of the gums as well. There are two fillings in the wisdom teeth. Who puts fillings in wisdom teeth nowadays?”

  He went silent and held his hand out to his assistant, who wiped his brow, which shone in the blue neon light, and handed him the scalpel. Its long, sharp blade glittered as it was placed on the metal shelf, to the right of the raised head, in synchronization with the notes of the Hasidic tune the pathologist was humming to himself. Even when the pathologist swiftly rolled up the white sheet to reveal the naked corpse—the yellowish grayness looked like a kind of scum that disfigured the tawny skin of the living woman—and even when he scolded Yair and the others for their tardiness, he did so in the melody of a yeshiva student arguing a Talmudic question. Now, as he began the incision along the width of the brow, very close to the frame of hair, he stopped humming and was silent.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” explained Sergeant Yair when they arrived, following instructions from Michael. “It was the American Powell and the day before the holiday. We were stuck at the exit from Jerusalem, stuck like—”

  “The eve of the holiday isn’t until tomorrow. Trust the Jews—they begin a holiday on the eve of the eve of the holiday. Because of you I slept only three hours. Why didn’t you sound your siren? Also because of the eve of the holiday? What are you police for? I thought the police force was above holidays. Isn’t the police force above everything?” He continued to address all these questions to the crushed head of the corpse, whose mouth remained wide open.

  “Even sounding the siren wouldn’t have helped. Gridlock, I tell you, really gridlock,” Yair explained as he fixed his eyes on the blue edges of the white sheet that Solomon was rolling up. Along its edges were written the words “Ministry of Health—The Forensic Institute.” “You can’t drive through there as if you were an ambulance. We had to help them clear the road, no?” There was no embarrassment evident in Yair’s voice because of this excuse, the obvious feebleness of which he had pointed out on the way to the Institute.

  “Not if I’m waiting for you,” Solomon answered, and glanced at Michael, who was continuing to look at the smashed face, at the neck and the belly, and was trying not to avert his eyes from the narrow waist and the curve of the hips and the dark tangle of pubic hair. He preferred not to apologize to Solomon, whose yellow-brown eyes glistened cold and cunning and cruel through the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. Michael preferred leaving the job of conciliation to the young sergeant, whose simplicity and frankness vaporized even Solomon’s acrimony. He gazed distractedly at the blue bruises on the stiff thighs, at the toenails that had been lacquered bright red, his mind troubled by the confrontation with Balilty. He heard Yair say: “You can’t imagine how many cars we saw there, one on top of the other, and two traffic policewomen who were simply incapable . . . Just to get a bit of order there took me twenty minutes, and there wasn’t enough personnel and—”

  “The main thing is that you’re here,” muttered Solomon, and after he had tossed the white sheet far from the operating table, he spread his arms and with a half-bow he said: “Voilà.”

  Sergeant Yair, who was standing very close to Michael, looked at the corpse. From head to foot he looked at it, then mumbled: “Isn’t it a waste of all that beauty?”

  “Isn’t it a pity, the loss of something pretty,” chimed Solomon, “and why aren’t you wearing gloves?” With two fingers he adjusted his thick horn-rimmed glasses, and then with his arm he rubbed the hooked chin that gave his profile the look of an old witch and with his right hand he fingered the surgeon’s mask that drooped around his neck.

  “I . . . I didn’t think that . . . I don’t intend . . . I don’t need to touch anything,” replied Yair suspiciously.

  “You never know,” said Solomon, with an amused glint in his eyes at the sight of the scared expression on the young sergeant’s face. He pulled the mask up onto his face and nodded to the assistant who was standing at his side, his body taut in the green gown, and then strode quickly to the corner of the room. The door of the tall steel cabinet groaned and creaked under his hand as he opened it, and he rummaged among the shelves and came back with two pairs of latex gloves and two white masks. Without a word he handed them to Sergeant Yair and Michael.

  “You’re new here,” commented Solomon after he glanced at Yair. “Where’s Eli Bachar? I miss his pale cheeks. How pale he went the last time he was here—and Balilty?” he said, and snorted. “Our terrible macho man who is even afraid to come in here.” He pressed the button on the recording device, and after he checked the microphone that dangled from his neck, he quietly stated the date and described the body prior to the autopsy.

  It was in the silence that now prevailed, as the pathologist passed the knife along the forehead, that Michael allowed himself to feel how annoyed he was by the melodious humming that had become one of Solomon’s trademarks (“For this he became a pathologist?” Balilty once complained. Balilty usually explained his absence from the autopsy as being caused by both a terrible headache and this annoying humming. “Even the dead don’t stop him from singing. This one even sings when he eats. He should have been a cantor.”). Michael, who was now listening to the sound of the blade and the sounds of the recording device, which the intern had switched on the moment the scalpel touched the bluish, dark skin, thought that the humming was aimed at distracting attention from the tic that every few seconds distorted the left side of the elderly pathologist’s face from the corner of his mouth to his eye, which would shut tight and then open again at brief intervals. Now he cut behind the scalp, and with a single motion pulled away the skin of the scalp with the cascades of hair. “You see, I’m not detaching it entirely,” he commented to Sergeant Yair. “It remains attached, and then we’ll put it back.”

  “Yes, yes,” the intern hastened to say, as if this were directed at him, and in a heavy Russian accent, which was not muffled by the mask, he added: “This I have already seen more than once.”

  “Take the magnifying glass out of my jacket pocket, and the tweezers,” said Solomon sharply, and the assistant hastened to where the pathologist’s jacket was hanging next to the steel cabinet. He took a magnifying glass out of a pocket and then he rummaged among the implements on the tray and held out a delicate forceps. “There’s no tweezers, just this,” he said in alarm. “That’s fine,” the pathologist replied, and leaned over the pulp of the face. “Here,” he cried, and waved the forceps. “Didn’t I tell Balilty that I would find it before you? Di
d I or didn’t I?”

  The repeated mention of Balilty’s name annoyed Michael. His conflict with the intelligence officer was still echoing in his mind. Balilty was in fact the reason they were late for the autopsy. When he’d arrived with Sergeant Yair at Jerusalem police headquarters in the Russian Compound, after he had supervised the removal of the body from the roof space, Ada Efrati was waiting for him at the entrance to the building. “Have you already given a statement?” he asked her.

  She shook her head in negation. “I waited for you,” she said in a trembling voice.

  “But for that you don’t need me. Anyone can . . . ,” he said in astonishment.

  “I,” said Ada Efrati, shaking her head, “am not speaking to that Balilty. I simply don’t want to see that creature, and not his assistant, either. And no one is going to make me.” Her voice grew sharp and she was obviously angry when she said: “For years I’ve been hearing that this is the way things are conducted here, but I didn’t believe it.”

  Michael looked at her with concern, trying to control his breathing, which had accelerated. “What happened? Maybe you’ll explain to me what happened?”

  “He,” she said in a strangled voice, “he took him into a room downstairs and we didn’t want him to take him alone and . . .”

  “Take it slowly,” said Michael. “Who? Who took whom?”

  “That creature, Balilty, with another fellow he said was his assistant, took Imad to a room downstairs and—”

  “Imad? The contractor from Beit Jalla?”

  “Imad Abu Salah, just because he’s a Palestinian. They took him to a room downstairs. Shoshi the architect and I went with them. She stayed downstairs and I waited for you here because—”

  “What do mean ‘downstairs’?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that he separated us from him and told us to wait upstairs but we went down anyway. That Balilty person came out of the room after three minutes, and his assistant two minutes later, and Imad stayed there in the room, with the door shut. And an hour later—we were standing by the door, in the corridor—nothing had happened. I try to open the door—and it’s locked. They locked him in like that, for an hour, without saying anything . . . And Imad is just like me—he was there by chance. And I just opened the door. That is, I tried but it was locked, and I spoke to him through the door and he said that they had gone to check his papers and his situation with the income tax people and whether he had paid value-added tax and so on, and whether there was anyone in his family who had been convicted or suspected of membership in Hamas or hostile activity. Do you understand? A person comes to testify that he found a body in a house before renovations, and those are the things they ask him! They’re just giving him a hard time, for no reason. So I left Shoshi by the door and I came to wait for you and—”

  “Wait for me inside,” Michael said, and led her quickly to the bottom floor. The architect stood there in the faint glow of the corridor light-bulb, pale and trembling, and looked at him as he tried to open the door to the room that during his first years on the police force had been his office.

  “It’s locked,” she whispered. “You can only hear.”

  Michael knocked on the door and called to Balilty. Total silence prevailed behind the door. After a long moment, it opened and Balilty came out quickly and closed the door and stood in front of it. “Excuse me,” Michael said, and moved him aside with a swift movement—Balilty obeyed, silenced by surprise—and went in.

  A young policeman with freckles and red cheeks stood over the contractor, who was sitting with his face buried in his hands. “What happened?” he asked the policeman, who shrugged.

  “Routine,” he answered. “Nothing.”

  Michael repeated the question and this time he looked at the contractor, who had taken his hands away from his face and directed an exhausted look at his documents, which were spread out on the table. “I don’t know what they want,” said Imad. “I gave them my ID card, I gave them my license. I gave them my business permit—no good. Everything is no good.”

  “Get out of here,” said Michael to the ruddy policeman, who was looking at him with astonishment, anger and fear. “Get out, get out!” he roared. “And I don’t want to see you here ever again. This is the end of you here, the end! What’s your name?”

  “Sergeant Yaron Levy, sir,” answered the policeman in a parched voice. “Chief Superintendent Balilty told me—”

  “Get out,” said Michael in exasperation, and waited for him to leave. “Filth,” he spat before the door was completely shut.

  “Come closer, Ohayon,” called the pathologist now. “You’re too far away.” Michael moved closer to the forceps and looked at the blood-covered splinter of wood.

  “Do you remember what old Dr. Kastenbaum used to say?” asked Solomon.

  “Every contact leaves a trace,” recited Michael obediently.

  “Good for you,” muttered the pathologist. “And look, you can see just how right he was. Were there red fibers from the scarf inside the cuts in the neck? There were. Now there is also this little splinter, and it’s not from a broomstick,” he promised. “This, I think—just from superficial observation but we’ll send it to Forensics to make sure—is actually from that piece of wood you found. Construction lumber, maybe from scaffolding, maybe even in the attic where they found it. You have to check that thing—there will be traces of blood on it. I’ve told you time and again that everything leaves traces on everything.”

  “But we found them,” cried Sergeant Yair. “Don’t you know we found them? Didn’t they tell you that the CID found bloodstains on the board we took out of the water tank?”

  “So then we’re fine,” said Solomon. “Did you write down that the jaw is broken, and the cheekbones?” His assistant nodded, and above the mask his startled eyes darted back and forth between the pathologist and Sergeant Yair.

  “Write it down, write it down, don’t worry,” said Solomon to him gaily. “I’ll correct your mistakes in Hebrew. They send them here straight off the airplane,” he explained to the air in the room, “and I have to correct their autopsy reports. He writes everything in Cyrillic letters, Hebrew but in Cyrillic letters. What do you say to that?”

  No one answered.

  “You can saw now,” Solomon said, and moved aside. His assistant, who held the handle of the long saw in large fingers to which the latex gave an unreal look, began to saw around the skull. “Gently!” cried Solomon. “Look how much dirt there is here, and you,” he said to Yair, “move aside. It makes sparks fly!” And Yair moved.

  Michael’s face lifted to the wall of its own accord as Solomon removed the brain from the skull cavity and placed it gently, as if it were alive, on the scales that stood next to the metal table.

  “Why is he doing that?” whispered Yair anxiously. “Why is he weighing it?”

  “To find out whether it is of normal weight,” answered Michael.

  Solomon said into the microphone: “Five hundred and-sixty-one.” Then he turned to Michael: “Okay, we have here hemorrhages as well as cracks in the skull. So they hit her on the head, beat it, hit her in the face but they apparently didn’t throw her down on the floor. In any case I hadn’t thought that was how it went. I thought that first they strangled her and then they smashed her face in. Here, look at the tongue.” He held the tip of the tongue and wiggled it from side to side. “Do you see how it’s loose? It’s already clear that there was strangling here. Give me forceps,” he said impatiently, and the assistant hastened to hand him forceps. “That’s too big. Give me the medium size.” The assistant obeyed in silence, and Solomon lifted the tongue and pointed with the tip of the forceps. “Broken, you see,” he said, and wiggled the tongue. “It’s completely free.”

  Michael nodded.

  “And without checking, I’m sure there’s a break in the cortex, but we’ll see in a moment. Do you know what a broken cortex looks like?”

  Even though he hadn’t directed his question at
anyone, Yair answered him, if hesitantly: “I think it’s when the upper vertebrae, the ones nearest the skull, are affected, then—”

  “That’s where the medulla oblongata is,” interrupted the assistant, in his heavily accented Hebrew. “The lowest part of the brain is responsible for breathing and the cardiac system and the blood vessels. If it is affected—there’s death.”

  Yair nodded with the expression of a student, and Solomon ran the scalpel from the chin down to the sternum, and while he was making the incision deeper he said to the corpse: “Take some new chewing gum out of my gown pocket for me.” Immediately the intern peeled off his gloves and extracted a green packet from the pocket of Solomon’s gown.

  “Anybody want some?” asked the pathologist.

  No one answered.

  “Later, when we get to the stomach, you’ll change your minds,” warned Solomon. “Put it in my mouth,” he ordered his assistant. “Nu, slip it under my mask and then take new gloves.” Solomon spread out the tawny skin of the neck and with a victorious glance indicated the upper vertebrae. “You see? Broken, just like I said, and look at the trachea. Crushed. Did you see?” Without waiting for a reply he ordered, “Forceps,” and this time the assistant hastened to hand him large forceps. A moment or two later Solomon pulled a dark lump out of the neck cavity and muttered: “We’ll open the esophagus. Open it, but carefully. There are scissors over there.” He gestured with his shoulder toward the tray. “Take the big ones, but first weigh this. What would we do without this Russian immigration? We’d be lost,” he said, and fixed the assistant with his eyes. “Do you realize that we have only four Israeli doctors here, and one of them is a woman, and all the rest, all the helpers and the interns, are Russians or Arabs?”

  Michael was silent.

  The assistant weighed the lump that had been extracted from the throat and told Solomon its weight, and the pathologist repeated the figure into the mouthpiece of the microphone. Michael followed the motion of the scissors that cut into the esophagus, and the hands of the assistant that spread it open carefully and flattened it out on a stainless steel tray. “Everything is fine,” the assistant said to Solomon.