He rose. "Say, weren't you in the papers a year or so back? Something about Operation Yoav?"
I was surprised when the discomfort that usually arose when I was asked about the day of my injury did not materialize. Perhaps because this man was also a warrior. Perhaps because of the matter-of-fact manner in which he had presented his question.
"Yes." I didn't elaborate.
He slapped me on the shoulder. "Nice work." That was the extent of his commendation. I liked that. No platitudes or flowery praise, just a crisp acknowledgment of a job well done, which was how I saw my actions in the war.
At the door, I stopped and offered him my hand. His grip was firm and warm. With his other hand he gestured at my forearm.
"You were there, in the Nazi camps?"
"Yes," I said.
"I understand it was terrible. I'm glad you survived."
It was an odd thing to say, but he seemed completely sincere when he said it. Still, I couldn't think of a proper reply. What should I have said? Thank you?
"I met a camp survivor during the war," he went on. "A French Jew. One night before a big battle in the Galilee, he started telling me what he went through during the war in Europe, how the Germans put him and his family on a train to Poland, to a concentration camp. All his family was dead, he was the only one left. Once he started talking, he didn't stop. Not for a second all through that night. Neither of us got any sleep. I think he felt compelled to tell his life's story because he was worried about the upcoming battle, worried that if he got killed, there would be no one who would know his story or that he had ever existed."
"What was his name?"
"Pierre. Pierre Levi."
"What happened to him?"
Michael Shamir pointed to his neck. "The next day he caught a bullet right here. Died on the spot."
I got lucky and caught a bus that was only slightly less warm than a furnace. I sat beside an overweight woman who mumbled to herself in singsong Italian while she stared out the window as if at a picture show. Behind me, two men spoke in animated Yiddish, while in the seats in front of me, a mother was busy hectoring her eight-year-old daughter in staccato Polish. That was the soundtrack of Tel Aviv, a cocktail of languages and dialects and accents all pouring past and into each other.
The bus ferried me across town and deposited me near the middle of Rothschild Boulevard. I trekked north, past Bilu Elementary School in whose basement the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir was conducting a rehearsal. Harmonious singing accompanied me as I made the turn to Lunz Street and located the building where Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland had lived and died.
There were six apartments, two to a floor. Esther and Willie had lived in number six. I examined the labels on the mailboxes in the lobby, hoping to find that the people who had lived in the building ten years ago were still in residence. Another disappointment. Of the six mailboxes, only one name was familiar to me—Sassoon, the landlord's name—and it appeared on two of the boxes, numbers one and six. I frowned. Did a relative of the landlord now occupy the apartment where the double murder had taken place?
I mounted the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door marked six. No answer. Back on the ground floor, I rapped on the door to apartment one and heard a gravelly voice rasp at me to wait a minute.
A swarthy, pockmarked man of around fifty opened the door, holding a cigarette in one hand and a steaming coffee glass in the other. The cigarette was fat and Turkish, the coffee thick and the color of mud. I could not determine which emitted a stronger smell. The man wore a white undershirt tucked into black slacks. His arms were covered in dense black curls. More curls sprouted from his scalp and to them he'd pinned a small black
"Abraham Sassoon?" I asked.
He nodded. "And you are?"
I gave him my name and told him the reason for my visit. The corners of his mouth drew down to form a mournful arc when I mentioned the murders.
"Come in," he said. "Come in."
He offered me coffee and seemed not offended when I declined. We sat in two chairs that were more comfortable than they looked. Sassoon smoked and drank his coffee. I added to the stinging odors that pervaded the room by lighting a cigarette of my own. Bluish-black smoke swirled in the air between us. He told me about the day he'd discovered the bodies, touching his
"You heard nothing during the night?"
His answer echoed the one he'd given Rivlin in 1939. "Not a thing. It has troubled me ever since, that I slept peacefully in my bed while a ruthless, depraved murderer was killing two of my tenants a mere two floors above my head."
"Are you a heavy sleeper?"
