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“But you said they died of heart attacks.”

“You remind me of my mother. No matter what disaster you told her had happened that day, she’d wave it off and say, ‘Worse things happen at sea.’ Listen, death that looks like a heart attack can be brought on at any time by injecting a person with insulin. Okay? A tiny hypo could be rigged on the bottom of a ring on the killer’s finger. He could tap the victim’s leg in a consoling way, or just a friendly good-bye kind of thing, and the victim wouldn’t feel it. Secich had security twenty-four hours, a guard inside his room and another one outside by the door, but
then even the guard inside could be looking right at it and think nothing of it.”

“Wouldn’t insulin show up in the autopsy?”

“Sure it would, but only if it’s done right away: within eighteen hours, maybe less. With Secich the Russians hauled him out of here and then flew the body straight back to Moscow before there was any autopsy. Besides, the murders could be done another way. It takes a little more finesse, some basic knowledge of human physiology, but the advantage is it wouldn’t leave a trace of any kind! All you’d need is to inject a little air bubble, Meral. When the bubble hits the heart it’s instant death without a trace. Come on, I know all different ways where there’d be no suspicion, where the cause of a death wouldn’t show up in tests.”

Meral’s eyes began to narrow with concern.

“You really think that all three of these deaths were murders?”

“So what else am I to think? That they’d just seen their hospital bill?”

“You seem so emotionally invested in this, Moses.”

“Eddie Shore was a wonderful person.”

“Then if so, why would anyone want to kill him?”

“I don’t know. All I know is those CIA agents came around, and that if you want to have somebody killed, then a hospital’s the absolutely perfect place to do it. People die here. They die here all the time.” He looked off for a moment, and then back. “And then there’s this other thing.”

“What?”

“About an hour before he died someone came into Secich’s room with the lytes, his electrolytic balances. Sometimes we
send down to the lab and we order them to see if the patient’s maybe losing too many nutrients from vomiting or maybe diarrhea. The ’lytes are tested, then sent up from the lab.”

“What are you getting at, Moses? That some doctor killed these people?”

“Now you’re talking like you did back in school in Ramallah when you suspected Sister Joseph had stolen your lunch. Doctors
order
the ’lytes, they don’t deliver them, Meral. They’re brought up by one of the attendants. Do we really need an Arabic Inspector Clouseau?”

Meral turned his head and looked out of a window.

“So now help me to figure out
this
one, Meral. Two days after Shore dies, I run into Dave Fuchs, Shore’s doctor, and we’re talking about how we couldn’t guess this was coming. Then Fuchs tells me something very strange: he says one of our volunteer attendants—I think you might know him from the Casa Nova. He works there part time. Name’s Wilson?”

Meral turned back to Mayo.

“Oh, yes, Wilson. Yes. Yes, I know him.”

“Well, he tells me Wilson came to him the next day and he wanted to know what had happened, and that Fuchs had called down to the lab about an hour before Shore died and ordered his ’lytes and said to send them straight up to Shore’s room, and not as usual the desk, because that’s where Fuchs said he was going to be. But when Wilson went up there the room was dark, he said, and there was only a night light on and Shore was sleeping. Fuchs told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about, he wasn’t even in the hospital that night! It’s all crazy, Meral. Weird. It’s all wrong.”

Meral stayed silent and impassive

Mayo leaned forward intently, hands flat on the top of his desk.

“I’m not delusional, Meral. Understand? I’ve got a strong instinct about this thing. You know all about instinct don’t you,
boychick
? You invented it. I know there’s something wrong here. I know it in my blood. Why would someone fake the ordering of ’lytes to Shore’s room?”

“I think I’ve read enough Hercule Poirot novels to guess at that one.”

“Which is what?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you. It might only feed into your paranoia.”

“Meral, where did you learn such big words? Did those mischievous sisters at Ramallah teach you that one and then told you it’s a fish with little razor-sharp teeth? Those Catholic nuns will stop at nothing to break a man’s mind. Okay, come on now! What’s your theory. Or Hercule Poirot’s. Or whoever’s.”

“Well, if Shore was really killed in the way that you imagine, it could be because the killer wants suspicion thrown on Wilson. It would be someone who wants Wilson put away or even dead.”

“Throw suspicion on Wilson for a murder?”

“I’m just entering your fantasy,
habibi
.”

“It’s not a fantasy,
bubbi
.”

Meral gave a diffident shrug.

“Why don’t you bring this up with Shlomo?”

Mayo leaned back in his chair, aghast.

“Shlomo? Shlomo Uris, my idiotic nephew and totally useless boy Inspector of Police who went tapping on the walls of
the Tomb of Christ once looking for an entrance to a secret passage? Please be serious,” Mayo answered.

“I’ve heard he’s quite sharp,” Meral told him. “The point is Hadassah is Jerusalem Sub-District, Moses. That’s his province, not mine. I can’t intrude.”

“But you did with that crazy Christ killer!”

“That was personal. I did no investigation. And besides, Moses, murders are rare in my province, most especially something as exotic as this. I solve murders in novels. This is life.”

“Well, I’m not letting go of this thing. Not by a long shot. I’m going to keep digging.”

“Yes, do that. You’re good at that, Moses. You should.”

“What’s the matter with you, Meral?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your face, Meral! Look at your face! I’ve never seen such unhappiness in all my life.” Mayo stood up. “That’s the trouble with doctors these days,” he declared. “You come into the examining room and they’re flipping through pages in your file checking blood test results instead looking at the patient’s face, which is where the whole story is at times.
Lots
of times. Okay,” he said, moving, “come on.”

“Come on what?”

“Come on into the examining room. I want to check a few things.”

“Afraid I haven’t got the time.”

“Then make it!”

Twenty minutes later Meral was buttoning up his shirt while Mayo was folding up a blood-pressure sleeve. “Well, you’re healthy,” Mayo said. “Does that depress you? Look, you’ve got to start taking medication. I keep telling you to see someone. Do it, Meral. Please! And then this guilt you keep carrying
around. You know, they’re saying now when somebody’s dead a few minutes and we’re able to do something right for a change and we bring them back to life, they say they saw this bright light at the end of a tunnel and it helped them review their whole lives, all the things they did wrong.
You
have a life review every ten minutes!”

Back in Mayo’s office, Meral plucked his policeman’s beret from a wall hook, walked over to the front of Mayo’s desk and looked down at his boyhood friend, who was sitting with his elbows propped and the sides of his head lowered into his hands.

“I’m not letting go of this,” he vowed. “I am not.”

“Take care,” the policeman said softly, and then he turned and walked slowly to the open office door where, before stepping out into the bustling hall, he stopped and turned around for a long look back.

W
here do you get these things?”

“What things?”

“You know, the morphine. Syringes.”

“Does it matter?”

“Then they’re stolen, I presume?”

“Are you interrogating me?”

“Ah, you’re smiling that archangel’s smile!”

“Let’s replace these old dressings. Come on now. Sit up.”

“You’ve changed.”

“Yes, I know.”

“It’s much stronger now.”

“What?”

“That light. That terrifying inner light of yours. It’s stronger and worse, much worse, than before.”

“How worse?”

“More painful. It feels like forgiveness.”

A
nd so Shore comes to Israel, mysteriously dies, and you’re telling us he wasn’t on a mission? Always traveling, researching, giving speeches: he’s your perfect secret errand and delivery boy. Come on, we know that. My question is, what was he delivering
here
?”

They were in the office of Moshe Zui, the forty-three-year-old lawyer-investigator with the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet. Its fifty-two office complex was blandly hidden behind a single fortified entry door on the second floor of
a Tel Aviv building housing fast food-shops and a variety of stores that offered everything from eyeglass repair to women’s clothing. A plaque on the agency’s door bore the anonymous legend B
EST
P
RODUCTS
.

“Come on, come on,” Zui prodded. “We know you tore ass to his hospital room. Own up! We’re all friends here, not so? What’s the problem?”

Zui was speaking to William Sandalls, a high-ranking agent of the CIA with the cover of American embassy “attaché,” who now sat in a chair in front of Zui’s desk. An ex-Army full colonel with years of duty in Japan, Sandalls was tall and slightly chubby, favored blue-tinted seersucker suits, and had crew-cut blondish hair, a freckled face, and a little snub nose that helped to give him the look of boyish innocence he was constantly trying to project, although the mischievous twinkle in his eyes always fought it. He held his hands out to Zui, palms up.

“Listen, what can I say?”

“Quite a lot. But you won’t.”

Zui turned his head to meet the gaze of another Shin Bet agent in the room, Lod Evert. He was standing with his back against a wall with folded arms. Zui lifted his eyebrows at him. Evert nodded and Zui turned his attention back to Sandalls. “So okay, we
do
know what he was up to,” he admitted. “He was carrying information so explosive you couldn’t risk it being intercepted, or maybe being compromised by a mole, and so Shore had to carry it in his head and was supposed to transmit it to your ambassador in person.”

“Oh, so you know that. Big surprise.”

“We try. Now what was it Shore was going to tell him? Some attack about to come? Some information that could
topple the State? Our prime minister, Golda Meir, dyes her hair?”

“Look, whatever it was, no one knew it but Shore. Not even us.”

“What
color
she dyes it?”