Murder in Jerusalem Read Online Free PDF

admit it’s explosive?”
    â€œExplosive?” He pursed his lips as though tasting the word. “All right, I’ll give you that. Or at least it’s the start of something explosive, if we must use such words. But an explosion is also destructive, they may not even let you screen it, especially if that’s all you’ve got—”
    â€œI got two more,” Natasha said, bending down to her canvas bag.
    â€œYou have two more,” Rubin said, correcting her. He gazed toward the window pensively. “Since when?”
    Natasha stood next to him, gazing out the window. “Look,” she said, alarmed, “what is all this? All those flashing lights, police vans, maybe…something must have happened, something awful. Look,” she said, moving aside.
    Rubin looked. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard to see from here. Shall we go down and check it out?”
    â€œMaybe we can just call and ask. Here you go,” she said, holding out the videotapes. “I have two tapes that I am now giving you, I know how much you like it when I speak properly. What do you mean, ‘since when’?”
    â€œSince when is it over between you and Hefetz?” he asked, ignoring the tapes in her outstretched hand.
    â€œSince today, since now, a half-hour ago,” she answered as she inserted the video into the monitor and rewound it. “Anyway, his wife is coming back tomorrow. During the two weeks she was gone I understood…okay, never mind. I’m already twenty-five, I can’t waste my whole life on…”
    In her worn jeans, her thighs seemed gaunter than ever, the look on her face vacant.
    â€œYou’ve got something there,” Rubin said. “I’m in favor of family, kids.”
    Natasha chuckled. “Sure you are,” she said with a smile. “That’s why you’ve got a family and children.” As soon as she said it, she shut up and looked at him with misgivings. She had overstepped the boundary.
    Rubin did not respond.
    Natasha was dismayed. She knew that since the breakup of his marriage to Tirzah eight years earlier, there had been no other woman in his life. Everyone noticed that he was careful not to get mixed up in any kind of binding relationship with a woman. Rubin, who had been known at Israel Television throughout his marriage to Tirzah as a real Don Juan, as someone who always maintained two or three relationships with women “of every age and every color,” as Niva, the newsroom secretary, put it, had been uncharacteristically discreet in the past few years. No one knew to whom he was giving “limited, no-illusion pleasure,” as Daphna from the film archives quoted him as describing it. With all the women he had had affairs with, according to rumors, Rubin maintained good, cordial—even friendly—relations. With everyone, that is, except perhaps Niva; Natasha had twice glimpsed Niva trying to speak with Rubin, who would brush her off. Everyone—in the canteen and the newsroom and the hallways—everyone talked about the child, how he resembled Rubin. Rubin thought no one knew about the boy, and Natasha had no intention at all of being the one to tell him what people said behind his back. Only a few days earlier Niva had said something about a gift for the kid’s seventh birthday. Natasha wondered whether Tirzah knew about the boy. People said Rubin refused to see him. They said Niva had tricked him, set a trap, that she had thought if she had a baby, Rubin would agree to live with her. But the opposite had happened, sometimes that is how things play out. Natasha was dismayed: maybe now that she had reminded Rubin that he himself had no family or children, she had ruined everything.
    â€œYou look awful, Natasha,” Rubin said, and in his voice she was surprised to discern not anger, but compassion. “Have you eaten anything today? You look