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took in Danny Benizri’s long, dark, narrow face as he straightened up, rubbed the thin pink scar that ran from his right eyebrow toward his ear, and nodded in confirmation.
    â€œOne could even say there was a certain symbolic meaning in the way Tirzah…,” Zadik said, now refusing to allow the telephone or Niva or anything else to prevent him from saying what he had prepared and practiced since six o’clock that morning, “…by a scenery flat, near the scenery room. A terrible accident, but…” Just then he noticed the murmuring around him, sentence fragments ringing in his ears: “Did it happen quickly?” Miri, the language editor, asked Aviva. Karen the anchorwoman butted in. “Yes. She didn’t suffer.”
    Zadik raised a finger to each temple and pressed hard. He had not slept all night. Only at four a.m., after he had sat with a police officer and answered all his questions, had he informed Rubin. After that he sat with Rubin for an hour or longer while Rubin, pale and trembling, shook his head, buried his face in his hands for a long moment, straightened up, wiped his forehead, and said angrily, “How could you have let Benny see her like that? Why didn’t you call me? I was in the editing room, you didn’t even try to find me. Who was with him? I’ve got to get over to Benny’s, I’ve got to see him.”
    Zadik could not for the life of him understand how someone like Arye Rubin could mourn a woman who had left him years earlier, or how he had remained best friends with Benny Meyuhas, the man she had left him for. No one even understood why Tirzah had left Rubin. It was clear how much he loved her, even if she’d been no raving beauty, even if he’d had dalliances with other women. Rumor had it that women were crazy about Rubin. He, Zadik, himself had seen Rubin in action more than once, most notably on a business trip they had made together to England ten years earlier; he would never forget the way the young assistant to the director of the BBC archives had looked at him. She was a platinum bombshell, like Jayne Mansfield—who remembers Jayne Mansfield today?—with the body of a starlet. Rubin and the girl had disappeared that same evening for twenty-four hours. To this very day, if he needed something from the BBC, he asked Rubin to use his connections there. He’d heard that the young lady had been appointed to an important position there and that she had had two husbands since then, but for Rubin she was willing to toss everything aside and meet him at any opportunity, even once during a stopover Rubin made on the way to the United States. Rubin had never told him all this, but someone had seen him; maybe it was Matty Cohen himself, he couldn’t be sure. But with Tirzah it was something altogether different; everyone knew it was she who had left Rubin, and not vice versa, though no one knew why. If it was because of other women, well, Rubin had always had someone on the side, so that was nothing new. Maybe, in fact, Tirzah hadn’t actually known about the other women and had suddenly heard about them from someone for the first time. Maybe someone had informed her.
    Zadik stole a glance at Niva and caught her profile, noticed how she had aged in the last year: the sagging double chin, the wobbly flesh of her neck, everything betrayed her age, no matter that she had cut her hair as short as a boy’s and dyed the stubble bright red, as if she had suddenly been frightened by her own longtime self-neglect and had decided to make one last feeble effort. But nothing would help—not even a diet. He would love to ask her how she felt now that Tirzah was gone, how she really felt, but he would not dare. What was there to ask? The path to Rubin was obviously clear now, maybe Niva would get him to commit to her and the kid and all that. It was strange to think that Tirzah had gone to live with Benny Meyuhas; he had