The Jerusalem Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan
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Ryan?’ he said.
I nodded. I never used my title in public, but Talli might have used it when she rang the reception. I took the phone.
‘Hello.’
‘I’ll be at your hotel in one hour. Be ready.’ The voice was Talli’s, but the friendliness was gone. In its place was a distinct hardness, the sort of attitude she probably reserved for her most disrespectful students, the ones who insulted her in a lecture.
The line went dead.
‘She’s on her way,’ I said.
An hour later we were in the hotel lobby. I went outside to see if she was coming. It was cool, but my suede jacket was enough to keep me warm. After a while I went back inside.
An hour and a half later we were still waiting.
By then it was nearly eleven. I called the Hebrew University. A receptionist answered. She checked, then came back and told me that Dr Talli Miller was not available.
By 11.30 a.m. I was properly pissed off. We took turns
going back up to the room. God only knew what had happened to Talli. Had I misheard her about the time? No, I couldn’t have. I even tried asking the hotel if they could bring up the number of the person who’d called me. They couldn’t.
For something to do I looked up the main hospitals in Jerusalem and went to their websites on my phone using the hotel lobby Wi-Fi. I was thinking about calling them, asking them if a Dr Susan Hunter had been admitted. We might just get lucky. I took a note of their telephone numbers. I was about to start calling when Talli appeared through the revolving main door of the hotel. Her hair was a mess.
She came towards us, looking solemn. She wasn’t the person I’d remembered from the last time we’d met. That had been someone who’d laughed a lot, poked at you, filled any room she was in with her energy. All that was gone.
After brief hellos, she said, ‘Let’s go.’ She motioned for us to go with her.
‘What happened to being here in an hour?’ I said. I tried not to sound too irritated. I don’t think I succeeded.
‘Do you want my help or not?’ Her cheeks were puffed up and bright pink, as if she’d been running.
‘Where are we going?’ Isabel was playing the part of the unruffled partner. She was smiling sweetly.
‘To the Hebrew University. Simon Marcus is expecting you. He’s waiting.’
‘Let’s go then,’ I said.
It took only twenty minutes to reach the Edmund J. Safra Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was located on the spine of a hill a little to the west of the city centre. The buildings were modern concrete lecture and administration blocks. In between them was dry-looking grass, tall thin cypress trees, short pine trees, and the occasional palm tree.
Talli said Simon Marcus was holding a symposium that lunchtime in one of the teaching labs for his graduate students.
She drove us there in a pale blue beaten-up old Mercedes. She excused its appearance by telling us how badly academics were paid in Israel, and how high their taxes were these days.
We passed a sign for the Manchester teaching lab. Groups of students were hanging around outside the next building. Talli went straight up to the nearest person in one of the little groups and began talking. We waited a few feet away by a concrete bench. She was back with us in a minute.
She threw her hands up in the air. ‘Simon’s not here. It’s not like him, they say. He hasn’t even texted anyone.’ Her eyes rolled.
‘I spoke to him just before I met you. He told me he’d be here.’ She sighed. ‘Something must have happened.’ She looked at me accusingly.
I stared back at her. If something had happened to him she couldn’t blame it on me. On the way here I’d told her about Max Kaiser being burnt to death and about Susan Hunter disappearing. I was starting to regret having said anything.
‘One of the students has gone to look for him. I don’t know what to do after that.’ She waved a hand through the air dismissively, then sat down heavily on the bench.
A few spots of rain fell. Then a downpour started. We all ran.
Talli had parked her car in an underground car park near the sports centre. Once inside the doorway we shook off the rain and walked, squelching, towards the lower floor. As we turned a corner I heard a voice call my name.
I turned.
A young woman with an earnest face and shoulder-length curly black hair, wearing a pink, rain-spotted t-shirt and pale blue jeans was walking fast towards me. She waved, as if she knew me. Isabel was a few paces ahead of me. Talli was even further on. Then she went up to the next floor, the floor the car was on.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ the woman said.
‘I am.’
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘When did we meet?’ I had a vague memory of her, maybe from the early days in Oxford. We used to get a lot of interns passing through when we first set up the institute.
She bent her head to one side, glancing over my shoulder.
I turned. Isabel was beside me. ‘Hi,’ she said, in a friendly manner. Talli’s car started up with a roar on the floor below. The noise of the engine filled the air.
The girl was backing away. She looked as if she’d expected me to remember something else about her. ‘I have to go,’ she said. She turned and walked away fast.
‘What was that all about?’ said Isabel.
I shrugged. ‘I think I met her in Oxford.’
‘You don’t remember her?’ said Isabel.
‘We get a lot of exchange students who intern at the institute. Some of them send long pleading emails. I stopped reading them. Beresford-Ellis does all that now. Maybe she was hoping for another job.’
Talli’s car was right behind us. She beeped the horn. We got in.
As we drove off the campus I kept an eye out for the girl, but I didn’t see her. Talli’s phone rang. She pulled over to take the call. We were parked in a dangerous place, half blocking a side road leading back into the university.
Within a few seconds I had figured out who she was speaking to. It was Simon Marcus.
Talli spoke in Hebrew, looking at us, gesticulating. Then she went silent. She was listening.
‘You don’t remember that girl?’ whispered Isabel.
‘We used to have a party before the interns left each May. We used to hire a room at the Randolph in Oxford and drink all night. We were asked to leave the last time we did it. Someone let off a fire extinguisher in one of the stairwells. It was a nightmare.’
Isabel shook her head mock-disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you don’t remember people.’
That incident was the real reason we abandoned the intern parties, calming things down after our first years of successes. We’d been lucky no one had sent a picture of the foam on the stairs and people rolling in it to the media. We’d been applying for new research grants that year, and a picture of one of our researchers wielding an extinguisher would not have made good PR.
Talli was talking quickly on the phone. She sounded angry. Then she was listening again.
‘What did Irene think of these parties?’ Isabel asked quizzically.
‘She enjoyed them,’ I said. ‘But that was ten years ago.’
Isabel looked away.
She’d told me early on that an old boyfriend used to drink himself into oblivion. She’d finished with him when he’d refused