Bethlehem Road Murder Read online

The thought of Balilty now made him clench his jaws again.

  “What do you want?” Balilty had said to him the night before, while they were still in his office. “There are Arabs around there. Maybe they raped her. Those Arabs, if you don’t scare them, you can’t get anything out of them. Furthermore, if they left the door open, anyone could have gone in, isn’t that so? And also since when have you become such a goody-goody? I know them, don’t I? I work with them all the time, and you don’t.”

  “I didn’t know that that was called ‘work,’” said Michael coldly. “I call it something else.”

  “What? What do you call it?”

  “Shameful behavior,” said Michael.

  “Do you hear yourself?” protested Balilty. “Look at how you’re talking to me, as if I were some . . . What self-righteousness! Am I to blame that he’s an Arab? Huh? If he’s an Arab I can’t interrogate him? In a minute you’re going to file a complaint against me, huh?”

  “You know that he was with the two women. He has an alibi. He met them—”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” yelled Balilty. “This phony leftist talk of yours is worse than . . . than that corpse that is already two days old, and where did we find it? In a house that he was going to renovate with his workers, also Arabs. You know that he has a battalion of workers? And that all of them are from Beit Jalla? He’d already been in that house, and maybe he had already seen the corpse and kept quiet so as not to get involved.”

  “And you,” said Michael in fury and despair. “What have you done? You’ve taught him that it really isn’t worth it for him to get involved.”

  He looked at the corpse again. The sight calmed his anger. Despite his anxieties, he knew that this woman, whose corpse they had found in the attic of the house that was about to be renovated, was not one of those missing persons for whom no one was going to look. And even if no one looked for her, it was clear that through systematic work that would not even take a very long time they would arrive at a definite identification: a chic woman, young and pretty, who was certainly not homeless, a woman with a steady job, who had friends and acquaintances. She was not just some streetwalker or drug addict.

  “Do you see any drug use here?” he asked.

  “Not in this examination,” mumbled the pathologist, who was again examining the arms closely. “Maybe in the analysis of the blood and the fluids. But there’s also no sign in the pupils.”

  It could be positively assumed that her identity would be ascertained, but nevertheless Michael was still disturbed by her anonymity, and even more disturbed by his anxiety about the next stage, once her identity became known and they would have to find out who had murdered her. This feeling, which came back to haunt him time after time at the sight of an unidentified corpse with no clue to lead them to the murderer, usually faded once the investigation began to roll and they began to reconstruct the story in which the explanation lay hidden. And if it didn’t really fade, at least it shrank into a corner that released him from grappling with it, at least during his waking hours, because in his sleep he would grind his teeth, sometimes until his jaw hurt.

  “Can you tell whether there had been sexual contact before the murder?” asked Yair.

  “Not without a smear,” said Solomon. “Only after we check the smear we took from the vagina, because she’s not a little girl any longer. At a very young age, or very old, when there are signs, it is possible to tell just by looking because . . . Never mind. We’ll know. What is certain”—the smile in his voice could be heard from behind the mask—“she wasn’t a virgin anymore, unless she’s a new Mary.”

  Of three or four in a room, thought Michael, remembering a poem by Yehuda Amichai, there is always one who will prefer vulgarity as a defense against . . . Against what did Solomon have to defend himself? Michael knew that five years before retirement, Solomon’s heart was already hardened against the corpses in which he rummaged. But in fact what else did he really know about the pathologist? A few crumbs of information he had picked up during the course of autopsies, each of them containing a surprise: for example, that he had been brought to Israel from Hungary after World War II, a year-old baby, and that during the first years he grew up in a kibbutz; or that during the period that preceded his medical studies, he lived in Mea Shearim and tried to be a yeshiva student and “fled from that, too,” as he’d put it, while pointing at the corpse he was dissecting, “from the frying pan into the fire.” And Michael also knew about his long marriage: Solomon’s wife, a distant relation of his and older than him, had come down with Parkinson’s disease years ago. Michael was once at their home and had met her and had shaken her trembling hand, hesitantly and fearfully. Years ago, when Solomon had been called to an autopsy on the first night of Passover, right during the hours of the festive meal, he told Michael, “We don’t have anything, the two of us, my wife and I, no siblings and no brothers and no anything. We’re free as birds. We don’t have to give an accounting to anyone: ‘Yes we’re coming, no we’re not, yes we’ll invite them, no we won’t,’” and a moment later he began to hum slowly and quietly, reconstructing the catchy melody from the Passover liturgy, “Dai daiyenu, dai daiyenu”—“It would suffice us . . .”

  Now Sergeant Yair’s face evinced evident curiosity. He stood very close to them as they spread open the lungs and he observed every stage and followed the large Latin letters the Russian assistant wrote on the caps of each plastic container into which he poured the fluids from the stomach cavity.

  “Who wants to do the sewing?” asked Solomon. “Do you want to sew?”

  The assistant nodded.

  “So sew, and put everything in right. Maybe I’ll just . . .” And he replaced the scalp, sewed it in back and sewed it on the forehead. “I just have to do this myself, so it’ll be nice.”

  The assistant shrank in silent protest.

  “Fine, now you can put everything back,” said Solomon. He moved aside and pulled the mask up onto his forehead, where it stayed like a loose cloth ribbon.

  “You’ve forgotten the brain,” said Sergeant Yair. “You’ve already sewn her up and it’s still here in—” He went silent all at once, as he followed the movements of the assistant, who was pushing everything, including the brain, into the stomach cavity.

  “Don’t worry,” Solomon said dryly, and pulled off his gloves. “When the dead are resurrected, the brain will also go back to its place. The main thing is that it’s here, and anyone looking from the outside won’t see a thing. Anyway, there are people whose brains are in their bellies. She will be as if she were newly dead,” he said sarcastically. “Believe me, she’s ready for Our Lord the Messiah.”

  “So what did we have here?” Despite himself, Michael was pulled into the pathologist’s cynicism. “A smashed face and strangulation—that is, vice versa—a break in the tongue bone, a broken cervix, a torn main artery and a twelve-week pregnancy?”

  Solomon took off his gown and nodded.

  “About six or seven in the evening? The day before yesterday? That is, approximately”—Michael looked at his watch—”if it’s now two A.M., then thirty or thirty-one hours ago?”

  “Exactly right,” replied the doctor, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes stared at the white wall opposite him as if what was beyond it would be revealed there. “But you’ll get the printed report.” And then he returned to the tune he had been humming and polished the lenses of his glasses with a paper towel that he pulled from the dispenser near the steel cabinet. “You’ll get it in the morning. First thing in the morning.”

  Chapter 3

  For nearly half an hour Netanel Bashari had been waiting at the entrance to the Vayashuvu Banim Legvulam Synagogue at the corner of Railroad Street and Naftali Street, and the whole world was getting on his nerves. He was waiting for his sister Zahara, for whom he had canceled an important meeting, and Zahara hadn’t shown up. Maybe she had made a mistake about the time or the day, because Zahara wasn’t a person to cancel an appointmen
t without letting you know, nor was she forgetful. Nevertheless, he was sorry that he had not reminded her this morning about the appointment they had made for two o’clock in the afternoon. This meeting was important to her, because she wanted to check out, together with him, the acoustics both in the synagogue hall and in the front courtyard, where the temporary sukkah tabernacle, with all its decorations, was already standing. Now, during these long moments at the gate, her plan to sing this evening—the eve of the seven-day holiday Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles—seemed even more absurd than it had when she’d first proposed it.

  He wondered what had gotten into Zahara, who for months had been arguing with him about a solo concert for inhabitants of the neighborhood. First she had considered holding it at Linda’s house and afterward, when she had decided on the synagogue, she had presented the idea to Netanel with great enthusiasm, and was insulted by his dismissive response and got angry. Even after he had apologized for the ridicule and made do with merely expressing mild reservations, her anger had not subsided, until he had given in and agreed that on the eve of the holiday she could put on what he called her “folklore spectacle.” And it was just because of that quarrel—if that’s what you could call her outburst, to which he tried not to react—that he was now even more disturbed: Maybe Zahara really was censuring him inside herself, and maybe even distancing herself from him.

  The “spectacle” included the establishment of a small neighborhood museum in a room of the synagogue where Zahara planned to display “the splendor of Yemenite culture”—that is how she defined it—“a culture that monsters like the murderer of the prime minister and Rabbi Meshullam”—who not long ago had led a violent but abortive Yemenite “liberation movement”—“had caused to be completely forgotten because of their deeds.”

  In the large basement of the synagogue, she had already stored cartons full of photographs she had collected since her childhood from her grandmother and her mother and her aunts (and which she had also purchased on occasion), lengths and scraps of cloth and embroidered dresses, furniture and kitchen equipment, goldsmiths’ tools and tailors’ tools and cobblers’ tools (among them old pliers and a small mallet), and tin wires and a small drill that were used by pot menders to repair cracks in earthen vessels. Zahara intended to display all these in rotating exhibits in the back wing of the synagogue, and through them show “varied facets of Yemenite life.”

  He swallowed without a word her application to the members of the synagogue board, and the plans they had approved in his absence, despite his known reservations, and he tried to logically explain to her his theoretical position and his fears that a museum of the Yemenite heritage might blur the synagogue’s progressive image. He held back and did not say to her that her absorption in the study of the community’s roots and her family looked like a kind of perversion, which of late had aroused his concern as well as his opposition.

  He felt a modicum of pleasure when he mused on the new spirit he had breathed into the synagogue, which had stood half-empty for years, during which nobody came to pray there except a few oldsters from among the Persians and the Iraqis who were still in the neighborhood. It had been he himself who had initiated the move to persuade the neighborhood elders to open the synagogue to others as well and to make it progressive and integrative (“modern” was the word he had used with the handful of old men who were faithfully in attendance there on Friday nights and holiday eves), a place that Ashkenazim would also attend, and especially the new inhabitants of the neighborhood, the ones who had arrived after the Six Day War from the United States, from South Africa and from Europe (on condition that they were “traditional” and not “really black”—which he had no hesitations about calling the extreme ultra-Orthodox in front of the board).

  Why was Zahara so angry at him? All he wanted was to turn the desolate building into a social center that would also host cultural events and family celebrations. It had taken a lot of effort to overcome the objections of the regular worshipers, who were leery of an Ashkenazi takeover; and he had maneuvered among them with diplomatic patience until he obtained their agreement. “American and French Jews,” he promised them, “aren’t ordinary Ashkenazim. It’s not like the old-timers here from Poland and Russia. They’re not really Ashkenazim at all”—thus he argued, and he had even invoked the name of his father, who was a favorite of the congregation and whose indifference was luckily interpreted as a positive stance.

  He had fulfilled all his promises: He had promised to renovate the building and “make a palace of it,” and now, five years later, even if it wasn’t quite a palace, no one could deny that it had been splendidly renovated; he had promised that the building would be “a home for all the residents of the neighborhood,” and indeed almost every night it was the venue for cultural and social activities, like the Community Center in the upscale neighborhood of Rehavia. Even now, five years after he had persuaded the dozen elderly worshipers to give him his way, an occasional sigh of satisfaction arose in him when he recalled the agreement he had managed to extract from them, be it because he was from a Yemenite family or because the years had taught them that they could not fight the changes the neighborhood was undergoing.

  And how could Zahara accuse him—him!—of “social indifference,” after he had invested most of his spare time in the renovation, and had also gladly taken upon himself the job of sexton and had even—without even revealing a glimpse of his burning desire to sing—taken on the role of cantor during the High Holy Days. And after all that, Zahara was accusing him of utilitarianism. The accusation was really hard to understand, because all in all, what did he want? To strengthen the ties within the neighborhood? Anyway, this was a neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else, so why did he have to unite them into a single congregation?

  It was simply hard to believe the kinds of complications faced by those trying to change something—Rabbi Stieglitz, for example, who had come to them from the ultra-Orthodox community of Kiryat Mattersdorf. You could go out of your mind when you came up against this insensitivity on the part of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Jerusalem municipality, who sent them a rabbi like that who entirely ignored the unique spirit of the place, who wouldn’t even allow every Jew, provided he observed traditions, to participate in the cultural-religious experience offered by the neighborhood synagogue. Stieglitz had come just an hour ago and announced that the sukkah, which everyone including the children had been so busy building since the moment Yom Kippur was over, was not a strictly kosher sukkah! And why? Because only half of it was covered with branches, and therefore a pious Jew could not sit in it. “A bridegroom of the Torah,” ruled Rabbi Stieglitz, “will not sit in a sukka that is not kosher.” And now, at two in the afternoon, two hours before the holiday was to begin, who was there to put branches over the half of the sukkah roof that was left open to the sky? And it wasn’t just the missing branches—Rabbi Stieglitz had also condemned the artistic program and had suddenly remembered that it was “forbidden to listen to a woman sing lest she stir lust.” It was a good thing that at least these comments had been spared from Zahara, who was late for their meeting.

  Everything annoyed Netanel Bashari today. As he was standing in front of the sukkah while the rabbi was examining its branch roof, he had seen Linda in the silver Rover—and he’d known very well to whom it belonged. And indeed, after a moment Moshe Avital stepped out of it, opened the door on her side, extended a hand to her in a courtly gesture and carried her shopping bags to the door of her house. You might think, Netanel had said to himself, that any divorced woman here was easy prey and that any filthy vermin could just snatch her up. And how he worked her over with his courtly manners, that Avital, a Moroccan pretending to be French, and an irresponsible skirt chaser. And how Linda had looked at him, at that Avital-Abutboul, with such grateful eyes, and when she saw Netanel standing there she had waved gaily to him with her white arm, as if he were some mere acquaintance. And he, Netanel, just stood there
across the way with Rabbi Stieglitz, furious at the sight of the brown gate that shut behind the two of them as they walked up the path through the front yard to the little house with the flat roof. And how many times had he warned Linda not to trust anyone who changes his name from Abutboul to Avital and acts French! Just thinking about it was enough to nauseate him. And he, Netanel, who had never even thought about changing his name—his own sister accuses him of trying to become Ashkenazi.

  And Linda? How easily she had waved away his warnings, with all the wolves circling her house from the moment she’d got rid of that drunken Russian! How she had giggled and asked whether he, God forbid, was jealous, as if she hadn’t heard the story of Avital who had destroyed, but completely destroyed, the Shalevs’ marriage, and as if she had not seen Avigail Shalev going around at night with that Avital, when her husband was working alone day and night in their architects’ office on the bid for the new Hilton.

  Because of Rabbi Stieglitz, who had transferred his gaze from the car to his interlocutor, Netanel stayed where he was and did not cross the street and did not open the gate and did not follow her into the house, as he had done several times during recent months in similar circumstances. From the looks Rabbi Stieglitz was giving him, it appeared that the rumor about the latest neighborhood scandal had also reached his ears. Hagar had caused it one night before Rosh Hashanah, when she banged on the brown gate and called out his name so that the whole street could hear. No one had opened the gate for her, and it could not be proven that he had really been there at Linda’s house. Afterward, instead of “being entirely open,” as he had promised to Linda he would do at the first opportunity, and as a decent person should do, he found himself conciliating his wife with a declaration that he had just been out for a walk because he couldn’t fall asleep. And to make the story believable, he also told her how he had happened to run into David Baruch, a friend of his since childhood, and how the two of them had sunk into a nostalgic conversation, and how this conversation had stretched out from their past to their future.