"Yes," he said again.
"Were you still following me last Thursday?" I asked, referencing the day I'd killed the assassin Strauss had sent after me.
"No. I stopped after Davidson attacked you. You believed my lie that I just happened to be there at the right place at the right time. If you saw me again, you'd know I was tailing you."
So Michael had not seen Yossi Cohen follow me down to the beach. He did not witness my taking Cohen at gunpoint into the shed and emerging from there alone.
"Michael," I said, "if you don't come with me to the station, I will tell the police everything I know. It won't be enough for a conviction. It may not even be enough for an arrest. But it will pique their interest. They'll have their eye on you. You won't be able to visit your son's grave ever again."
His lips curled into a bitter smile. "That's an empty threat, Adam. After all, if I'm locked up in a cell, I won't be visiting his grave either."
"No," I said. "But I will."
He stared at me without saying a word.
"If you come with me to the station and make a full confession, I will visit Judah's grave every two months while you're incarcerated. I will lay flowers and a stone on his grave. I will recite the
I paused, scratching the number on my arm.
"I'm giving you a chance to do right by Talia, by Judah, and by Willie Ackerland and his mother. If you don't confess, it will be hard for them to be reunited. Malka may not believe that the boy she's been raising is not really your son. What would Talia want you to do, Michael? What would she tell you to do?"
He didn't answer for a long while. Outside the chirping of a songbird was drowned by the guttural bark of an angry dog. A woman in a neighboring building called out something in Yiddish. Light fell across the bed in the corner, where I was sure Michael had spent endless nightmare-filled nights. The apartment no longer felt cold. I was filled with a bleak sadness.
After what might have been five minutes, Michael reached down, picked up the beer bottle, brought it to his lips, and drained it. He wiped his lips and placed the bottle on the floor once more. Then he stood up.
"All right," he said. "Let's go."
I had worried Henrietta would not look kindly on my suggestion that she share her story with a reporter, but she jumped at the idea. "This way my Jacob's name will never be forgotten," she said.
The three of us met in Café Tamar the day after I walked Michael to the police station, after I went to see Henrietta and told her I'd found her son. I waited outside for Henrietta and introduced her to Birnbaum when she arrived. I had already filled him in as to the basic outline of the case—the motive, the perpetrator, the reason behind the method of killing and the disfigurement of the bodies—and his police contacts were sure to provide him with additional information. It was a sanitized, much-abbreviated outline, of course. I had held some things back—Mira Roth's desire for vengeance, Manny Orrin and his pictures, Alon Davidson and his assault on me, and Mr. Strauss and the assassin he had hired to kill me. The latter had a lengthy criminal record. Reading between the lines of various newspaper reports, it was clear that the police had no leads as to who killed him.
If Birnbaum had caught on that I was withholding information, he did not voice any protest. On the contrary, he was as happy as a boy on his birthday who had just been gifted the item he'd most longed for.
"This is a great story, Adam," he said, grinning widely as he perused the notes he'd taken of our conversation. "Perhaps the best of my career. They'll talk about this in the cafés on Dizengoff for weeks."
Birnbaum held onto Henrietta's hand for longer than he had any business to, and for a second it looked like he was about to bend over at the waist and kiss it. Instead, he gave her hand a gentle pat before releasing it, and, in a warm, compassionate voice I would not have believed he possessed, said, "I know it's not easy to talk about such hard times and experiences, Mrs. Ackerland. I appreciate you meeting with me today."
I left them so they could talk in private and took a table at the opposite end of the café, reading a western I had picked up from Goldberg's store earlier that day. They sat together for more than an hour, Henrietta doing most of the talking, Birnbaum scribbling feverishly in his notebook. Occasionally, they'd pause when Henrietta choked up or had to wipe away her tears. Finally, I saw them both rise from their chairs and shake hands again. I came over and asked Henrietta if she was all right. Her eyes were red and she looked exhausted, but she nodded and said that she was fine, happy. "Tomorrow I shall see my son. It's what I've been dreaming about for ten long, lonely years."
