Bethlehem Road Murder Read online

  “There are no lumps, and no flaws, either,” Solomon explained to Michael, as if he had never been there, and Yair cleared his throat from behind.

  Now Solomon palpated the sternum. Michael, as he looked at the metal table, again forced himself to detach the scene from the whole body and the life that had been in it. If Solomon, whose skinny body leaned over the corpse and whose small round bald spot gleamed at the back of his head, had looked back he would have discovered to his satisfaction how pale Sergeant Yair had gone. But Solomon did not turn around to check up on “the boy”—that is how he referred to Yair over the phone, when he recommended not bringing along “some virgin boy who is going to faint here”—who wavered on his feet for a moment, then steadied himself as the pathologist sketched with the scalpel a thin incision from the sternum to the pelvis. Then the pathologist sketched a parallel incision, and then made them both deeper, one after the other.

  “First I cut into the cartilage,” he explained to the air in the room. “Have you already taken out a sample of fluid from the skull?” The assistant nodded in alarm, and his light eyes darted from the corpse to Solomon’s face. He hurried to the implement tray and put the ladle that he took from it into the cavity of the skull and dipped out some turbid liquid that he poured into a clear plastic container. Then he tightened his mask, wrote the date and time on the container and set it aside.

  “Come, help me get this out,” said Solomon to the assistant. “Did you know that all the internal organs from the tongue to the larger intestine are attached to one another, huh?”

  Michael sensed Yair’s obedient nod and thought about how keen the young sergeant had been about coming to the autopsy.

  “It’s part of the job. Right from the outset I should have been there, only you said I didn’t need to yet,” he had argued on the way here, when Michael warned him about the sight of the naked body in the autopsy theater.

  “It’s not just the body they operate on,” he had warned him then as he lit a cigarette—already with the thought of the exposed and gleaming metal surface and the stiff body lying there, bringing the disturbing smell of decay to his nostrils—”it’s also all the rest. Outside on the lawn everything’s very pretty, and in the lobby, too, but if you go down a few steps to the basement, you see all the bodies lying there waiting for autopsies, and they’re not always covered.”

  “I’ve already seen so many cows and mares. Believe me, it’s not so easy to see a mare that you’ve raised spread her legs and die. And haven’t I been at autopsies to see what happened to them?”

  In a fatherly way Michael commented that there was nevertheless a certain difference between animals, no matter how beloved, and human beings.

  “I didn’t even know her when she was alive,” insisted Yair.

  Michael wondered whether to persevere, since sooner or later the sergeant would have to be present at an autopsy. Yet nevertheless he heard himself say: “You’ll begin to think that it’s you under the flesh,” and, again in a fatherly way, he tried to explain to the youngster, who was exactly the same age as his son: “You can’t remain indifferent to it.”

  “Why should I remain indifferent?” wondered Yair. “There’s no need to be indifferent. Why indifferent? After all, it’s shocking, and she’s a young woman. If you get shocked, so you have to be shocked, and that’s normal. You don’t die from being shocked.”

  The simplicity of this statement silenced Michael and led him to think about his own first years on the force, when he tried time after time to “take it like a man” at autopsies, especially during their first moments. He attributed the alienated concentration and the almost scientific curiosity he had ultimately developed to his strenuous war against shock, which he wanted to distance from himself as fast as possible. Yair’s words and his way of looking at the world with an innocent and contented gaze amazed him, and he often wondered why this young fellow from the moshav in the Jezreel Valley happened to become a police detective. Twice he had asked him this directly, and Yair had found it hard to explain. In reply to Balilty’s crude questions—”If you’re such a farmer, then why didn’t you go study agriculture?”—Yair would reply with his dreamy smile, which spread his tanned face and narrowed his dark brown eyes. “It just worked out that way,” he said at most, and shrugged.

  Hearing this answer Balilty would snort loudly, which meant: “That’s no answer.” And Yair would smile again and say nothing.

  “He’s a little cuckoo, your agricultural Buddha,” Balilty once said at a special investigation team staff meeting, a moment after Yair had left the room to fetch coffee.

  “He’s a sweetie,” Tzilla had said then, “just adorable.”

  Eli Bachar stared at her: “Adorable?! What’s so adorable about him? Anyone can keep quiet a lot and smile. What’s so adorable?”

  But Tzilla just giggled, shaking her head in a coquettish way that shook the long silver earrings she wore. “You’re all just jealous, that’s the thing.”

  “Jealous!” said Balilty dismissively. “What’s there to be jealous about? Am I your husband or something?” His head indicated Eli Bachar. “He can be jealous all he wants—that’s why he’s a husband. But me? Why should I be jealous of a baby who’s never been abroad, who doesn’t know anything and who hasn’t seen anything. What have I got to be jealous about, tell me.”

  “Of his innocence,” said Tzilla. “Yes, his innocence, that looks at things from a different angle.”

  “He’ll get over it,” promised Eli. “Believe me, a year or two, and maybe even sooner. Once or twice at Abu Kabir, and when he finds someone who has shot his children and afterward the wife, too. The first time he sees a burnt family, he’ll get over it, this joie de vivre and the innocence, both.”

  “He’s already seen such things,” said Tzilla. “Don’t forget that he was the one who found the little girl that pervert left to dehydrate beside the wadi with all the signs of rape. And all the change I’ve seen in him? He just became sadder and—” Then Yair came back into the room holding a plastic tray of glasses and coffee and milk and sugar, with the proud look in his eyes of someone who had managed to overcome all obstacles.

  “I promised Hannah at the cafeteria that I’d bring it back the moment we’re done, because she doesn’t have enough cups,” he explained as he set down the tray, and to Balilty he said with satisfaction: “I even got sweetener for you, and she doesn’t let anyone take it out of the cafeteria.”

  Michael was careful not to express his opinion. It seemed to him that his own affection for the youngster, and not Tzilla’s, was what had aroused the jealousy in Eli Bachar, who usually got along with the people on the special investigations team without any difficulty (apart, of course, from Balilty, with whom he had a long-standing grudge and with whom each case provided only a temporary truce). Eli Bachar, who was devoted to Michael with all his heart, especially since he had shared his deliberations about whether to marry Tzilla—he had even insisted that he, Michael, and not Tzilla’s father be the godfather to their two sons—never managed to conceal his suspicion of those whom his chief liked. Michael watched him as he slowly and deliberately stirred his black coffee, his chin propped on his left hand, his green eyes staring at some invisible point. It was amazing to see that an experienced investigator like Eli Bachar could see the new sergeant as a threat.

  From the very first moment Michael had felt a deep affection for the youngster, perhaps because of his eager look, except for those moments he withdrew into himself, and maybe the affection was stirred because he was out of the ordinary—his calm naiveté and the contemplative expression with which he would offer weird examples from the field of agriculture to demonstrate some police problem. Now, too, as he looked at the corpse, there was neither shock nor disgust in his soft brown eyes, but rather a kind of quiet, inner sorrow. He had not even told Shorer about his liking for this youngster, because he thought that he would again tell him—as he had told him when he had first introduced Yair to h
im—”But he’s not like Yuval at all, haven’t you noticed? Your son resembles his mother, and this fellow—maybe he reminds you of yourself when you were a youngster. Everyone has been telling me how much he resembles you. Maybe there’s something in it, his height, and the eyes, and even his eyebrows. But the facial structure is completely different. He doesn’t have those cheekbones of yours . . .”

  Michael, to whom the definition of his feelings as fatherly sounded crude and simplistic, protested. He thought of Yair as a kind of pupil—a student from whom something could be learned about innocence that wasn’t sentimental. The naturalness with which Yair learned about the new world, the curiosity and the naturalness with which he related to everyone—he did not even develop suspicion toward Balilty, and he also totally ignored Eli Bachar’s demonstrations of hostility—captivated him, as if Yair’s mere presence on the special investigations team was itself comforting.

  “My father wanted me,” Yair once told him, “to find something new, different, just to be sure, as there’s no future in agriculture here, and it’s clear that we won’t be able to live from it. How can you make a living from it, with all the droughts and the dry years and the foreign workers and all the economic problems? At first, I went to study at university, but I didn’t know what I wanted. That is, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but you can’t study veterinary medicine anywhere in Israel and I didn’t want to study in Holland or Switzerland. I didn’t want to leave here. I love . . . Never mind, I didn’t want to. It was also impossible economically. So I did a general BA and I started criminology. I don’t know why, because what would I do with a general BA? What kind of job can you find with that? And just at that time a friend of mine told me that you were recruiting and the work is interesting, so I just gave it a chance.” He had only confided these things to Michael, but even him he had told nothing about his life in Jerusalem on weekends, when he always went back to his parents at the moshav.

  Nevertheless he blanched now facing the corpse, and stepped back, and as he rushed out of the operating theater he held the mask over his mouth. And Michael, too, felt the familiar wave of nausea, when the buckets were placed at the foot of the corpse, and Solomon and his silent assistant spread the stomach cavity wide open and working together pulled out the internal organs, like anchors on long, heavy chains. Together they placed them on the table, and the sweet stench of decay flooded the large room and penetrated through the mask he hastened to pull up on his face. In face of the death that filled the entire room and flowed into all his pores, to what avail were all the preparations and methods of alienation (a woman he once knew, an amateur painter, had told him that she had sat at the bedside of her dying mother, whose legs had been amputated because of a complication of diabetes, and had drawn in pencil all the smallest details of the stump)? Yair, who came quietly back into the room, wiped the skin of his face, which had gone gray, with the back of his hand and looked with suspicion at the pathologist, who continued with what he was doing.

  The heart, red and moist, was laid on the scales and weighed, and then the assistant passed it to Solomon, who cut it open and examined the valves and the ventricles and muttered: “The heart is perfectly normal; she would have lived to be a hundred.” The lungs were also spread out, one after the other, on the stainless steel surface. “Nothing special here, either,” Solomon summed up, “so we’ll check the stomach. Have you put out the bucket?”

  In the momentary silence came the sounds of the dripping of the stomach fluids into a black plastic bucket. Solomon raised his head and said: “According to this, it was even earlier than we had thought. What was it you said to me earlier about an ATM?”

  “There’s a piece of receipt from ten P.M.,” said Michael cautiously.

  “Going by what I see here,” said Solomon, indicating the contents of the stomach, “by ten o’clock she was no longer with us.”

  “So when?”

  “I would say six or seven, no later. Don’t forget that we’ve gone off daylight saving time, and it’s already dark by five, five-thirty, if you see what I mean. And there in the attic it was black as Egypt, and the temperature had already gone down. It’s October.”

  “But the receipt,” said Michael musingly, “the slip from the ATM. That means that—”

  “That’s already your job, not mine,” remarked Solomon with satisfaction, “and permit me to remind you that such things have already happened: People don’t need to be alive for money to be withdrawn from an ATM with their cards.”

  “Yes,” mused Michael, “the slip was in the pocket of her coat, and the hour is still visible. But it could be that it’s someone else’s account, or that someone knew her secret code number. How many people know someone else’s PIN?”

  “Not a lot,” agreed the pathologist.

  “What this means,” added Michael, “is that someone left there shortly before ten, withdrew money and came back and planted the receipt in her pocket. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  He had addressed the question to Yair, but Solomon hastened to reply: “Like I told you, it’s not my field, thank God. I don’t deal with hypotheses, only facts. And that,” he said, pointing to the stomach that was spread out on the large tray, “very simply, is a fact.”

  “It couldn’t have been later? After six or seven?”

  “Maybe eight, tops,” said Solomon. “Definitely not after ten.”

  “So we found her almost twenty-four hours later?”

  “Be grateful. You could have found her two months later, or never, if it weren’t for the renovations.”

  “Somebody would have looked for her,” said Michael.

  “And if they were looking for her?” argued Solomon. “If they were looking for her, would they have gone there? Into that tile roof? I heard that the house has been neglected for years.”

  “No, not years, just months, since it was sold,” said Michael, “and no one had gone into the space under the roof for more than forty years now.”

  Sergeant Yair, who did not appear to be listening to the two of them, moved closer to the wide-open corpse. “Don’t touch anything,” Solomon warned him in a nasal voice that indicated he too was breathing only through his mouth.

  “I’m not touching anything,” said Yair. “I’m just looking at all those puddles inside. Look how much blood there is at the bottom around the spine.”

  Michael looked at the blood that had collected in the bottom of the stomach cavity, and involuntarily he blinked at the sight, but he did not turn his face away.

  “It seemed to me . . . ,” said Yair, “when I saw the uterus—this is the uterus, isn’t it?” He pointed to the large tray with the internal organs over which the assistant was leaning. “It seemed to me that it was too big.”

  Solomon froze to the spot. “Very good, young man,” he said without astonishment. “Come here, Ohayon. Get closer a moment, please. I have a surprise for you.”

  Michael moved closer to the tray on which the internal organs were spread.

  “Before we spread the lungs and analyze the contents of the stomach,” said Solomon severely, “before anything else, there is one thing that is very clear. Do you see this uterus? We opened it very carefully, we didn’t cut it in half and we didn’t make lateral incisions, because it is very enlarged. More than seventeen centimeters without measuring, just eyeballing it. This is a uterus of pregnancy, maybe ten or even twelve weeks. What a waste, what a waste.”

  Michael looked without saying a word. He remembered that Solomon and his wife were childless.

  “I knew it!” whispered Yair. “Right away I saw that it was very enlarged.”

  “What are you, a gynecologist? You, who until you vomited were a virgin?” thundered Solomon.

  “No, of course not. I don’t know anything about women. But I had a mare—”

  “Here we aren’t talking about horses. Here we have a fetus in the third month, which is about nine or ten centimeters long. It is already the size of a fist. Look, I
’m taking it out.” Solomon used scissors to separate the tissues. The color returned to Yair’s face. In his large palm, on the surface of the glove, Solomon held a lump of tissue covered in mucus. “I would estimate, nine centimeters without the placenta. Weigh the placenta,” he said to his assistant. “We already had something like this once, the fifth month, with a really developed fetus, almost a person. Do you remember?” Michael, to whom he had turned his head, nodded. “That was the one you found inside the carpet in a car, right?”

  “Yes,” said Michael, “but then we knew who she was. No one had taken away the documents or the purse.”

  “You’ll know this time too,” said Solomon. “No matter how long it takes, in the end you’ll know. This isn’t someone off the streets. Disgraceful,” he muttered. “Disgraceful. A pregnant woman. What a waste.”

  “Yes. Definitely,” said Michael. In the bottom of his heart he had never managed to feel certainty in his ability to solve crimes, the certainty that everyone around him seemed to have, especially Balilty. Only with Emmanuel Shorer, who eighteen years ago had convinced him to leave his doctorate in history and join the police and who since then had moved on to command a district and then the entire police force—only with him did he speak of his panic, and Shorer would listen seriously to his anxieties, year after year and case after case. And the last time, when he was already police commissioner, he summed them up by saying: “I’m not trying to tell you that it’s not like that. Sometimes there are things we don’t solve; I don’t need to tell you that. But maybe it’s best that you are never certain. Maybe it keeps you from getting burnt out. Would you rather be like . . . like Danny Balilty? Pleased with yourself all the time? Because you know, Balilty isn’t really self-satisfied. He just looks that way.”