A picture of Esther's face was pasted on the left side of the card. Henrietta Ackerland was right. Esther had been very beautiful. It was as if her face had been carved from marble by an artist's hand. Her eyes were large and deep, her forehead tall, her mouth luscious, her cheekbones high, her nose pert, her features symmetrical. Her hair was pulled back, and not a strand of it was out of place. To have been reduced from such exquisite beauty to a bloodied mangled mess seemed sacrilegious, not merely criminal.
The second identity card bore the name Erich Kantor. I took out the picture Henrietta had given me and compared it to the picture on the card. The boy in the second picture was older, of course. He had been six months old when it was taken. But the resemblance was evident. These two pictures were of the same boy.
"You came so close, little one," I found myself muttering to the dead boy in the photos. "So close."
There was another picture in the file. This one showed both victims together. Esther was sitting on a park bench with Willie on her lap. He was a big boy now, nine months old perhaps, chubby-cheeked and healthy looking, and was leaning back into Esther, like young children sometimes do with their parents. Esther wore her hair loose and had on a red summer dress and a necklace of pearls tight around her long neck. Willie had on black shorts and a blue shirt that looked a little too big for him. He was smiling a crooked little smile and his eyes twinkled. She had her arms around him and was smiling broadly. The smile elevated her beauty from exquisite to dazzling. She exuded such joy and warmth that my mind rebelled against the notion that she was dead. Mira had been right when she told me Esther had grown to love the boy with whom she had been entrusted. They looked utterly happy and carefree in each other's company. No one would have doubted for a moment that the two were mother and child.
I reread the list of items the police cataloged in Esther's apartment. A pearl necklace was not among them. Nor was any other kind of jewelry—a friend of Esther's had reported her owning some earrings and rings, nothing very expensive. A handwritten note in the margin of the item list read "Killer swiped all jewelry."
Returning my attention to the picture, I recognized the location: Gan Meir Park in Tel Aviv. A date had been scrawled on the back. August 22, 1939. Just four days before the murders.
Would Henrietta Ackerland like to have this picture? Would it ease her hurt to see that her son had been happy when he died? Or would it augment her pain to see him so happy with another woman? I couldn't really say. With a pang of guilt, I slipped the photograph into my pocket. Reuben would not have approved of me taking anything from a police report, but I figured it would do no harm. If I hadn't asked to read this report, no one would have ever laid eyes on it again.
I kept on reading.
Sergeant Shabtai Rivlin was the detective in charge of the case. His notes were written in a black pen, and his handwriting was cramped and slightly crooked. But it was legible, and his notes seemed thorough enough.
His first interview was with Abraham Sassoon. The landlord identified both woman and child as his tenants. Sergeant Rivlin went on to interview the rest of the neighbors, workers in various nearby stores where Esther had shopped and at a dance club she often frequented, and her colleagues at the law firm where she'd worked as a secretary. All expressed shock at the murders. All had nothing but good things to say about the victims. None could point the finger at anyone who might wish to see either Esther or the boy they knew as her child dead. At no point did Rivlin interview any Irgun member or any of the other passengers who were on board the
Rivlin had reached out to police informers to see if they'd heard any chatter regarding the murders. He had also pursued the jewelry angle by visiting pawnshops and bringing known fences in for questioning. Neither effort yielded any results.
Rivlin worked the case hard for two weeks and made increasingly infrequent entries over the next four. But it was soon clear that he had hit a dead end. No leads emerged. No suspects appeared. The case quickly grew stale, then cold. Finally, it was abandoned and set aside.
I read the file through twice, scribbling names and dates and places in my notebook, adding my impressions as I went along. Nothing jumped to grab my attention. There was no eureka moment.
I had a look at the English version of the file, but it appeared to be nothing more than a translated copy of the Hebrew report, most of it typed. One thing the English report contained that the Hebrew one did not was a document, dated four weeks after the murders, in which Rivlin detailed his actions during the investigation and explained his lack of progress.
