Read Online Murder in Jerusalem by Batya Gur - Free Book Online Page B

it’s really a bunch of unemployed workers, then I’m the one that should be there, don’t you think?”
    â€œListen, buddy,” Hefetz said, cutting him off, “where’s your jacket? Get yourself down to the studio right now, we’re breaking in to the program. You read me?”
    â€œMe?” Benizri protested. “There’s no reason for me to be in the studio. I told you, I should be—”
    â€œYou will do what you’re told to do!” Hefetz bellowed. “And one more thing: Niva, are you listening? Get me the documentary about the Hulit workers, the one Benizri showed on Rubin’s program about a year ago. Get it fast.”
    Niva punched in the numbers on the internal phone. “The line at the archives is busy,” she said quietly, and Zadik could have sworn he heard a note of satisfaction in her voice. “It could take hours,” she said, her eyes fixed on the screens. Once again Zohar was on the screen, standing in front of the tunnel, a microphone in his hand, behind him pillars of smoke billowing forth. The picture disappeared again, and again the screen read TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES, PLEASE STAY TUNED. The picture on the second monitor showed the correspondent in a military parka. “It’s Sivan Gibron, the Channel Two military correspondent, their news department’s latest acquisition,” Hefetz declared as he tugged on his nose with fervor. “What a lucky break this guy gets on his first day on the job,” he complained. Just then Zohar returned to the screen, along with his voice. The room fell silent as everyone listened to Zohar announce, his voice choked with emotion, that it had been “planned like a military operation: four trucks manned by workers from the Hulit factory trapped the car of the minister for labor and social affairs. It was the minister’s driver who alerted the police…”
    â€œWe’ve never had anything like this before,” Hefetz said as he slapped Zadik on the shoulder. Hefetz’s gesture could have been interpreted as an expression of nervousness or anxiety, but the yellowish sparkle in his brown eyes indicated a totally different kind of excitement, an eagerness that was not entirely foreign to Zadik himself, but which had no place that morning, after the tragedy, and Zadik was about to remind Hefetz of the fact that just hours earlier they had lost Tirzah, but just then he saw, in the doorway of the newsroom, not far from where Natasha stood leaning on the door frame as though she had no interest whatsoever in what was happening in the tunnel on the Jerusalem–Etzion Bloc bypass road, Inspector Eli Bachar, who was looking at him and gesturing to him. Zadik skirted his way around the reporters and assistant producers, two maintenance workers standing in the doorway of the foreign correspondents’ room, the language editor, the graphic artist, and everyone else who had heard that something big was taking place and had rushed in for an update, until he was facing Eli Bachar, and, with an odd sort of schadenfreude owed to the circumstances that were preventing him from giving Bachar his full attention, Zadik said, “So, you see how it is….”
    The inspector nodded. “I heard on the way over. What a catastrophe.”
    â€œYou’ll have to give us a few minutes,” Zadik said. “I haven’t had a chance to prepare people yet.” He raised his eyes to the monitor and saw, on the screen, a policeman standing next to Zohar, listening to him. “One of your men. You know him?” Zadik asked. Eli Bachar blinked—he had long, dark eyelashes like a woman’s, and narrow green eyes and a high forehead, only his chin was too small for such a face—and answered reticently, “Yes, that’s Superintendent Shlomo Molcho, a decent guy.” Zohar’s voice was filling the newsroom now that someone had turned the volume up