I didn't know what I expected to find. Some undefined vestige, some ember of the two fires of life that had once blazed here and had been abruptly extinguished. I certainly did not expect to find bloodstains, physical evidence, or some other clue left by the killer. In the end, I found nothing. Whatever mark Esther and Willie had left on their home was gone or beyond my sensory capabilities.
We were crossing the living room toward the apartment door when, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a blinding flash, like light being reflected from glass. I turned my gaze toward the south window, but all I could see was a strip of blue sky and below that the buildings on the opposite side of the street.
Back on the ground floor, I asked Mr. Sassoon where I might find his son.
"Haim? He's with his army unit up north. He's due back tomorrow morning. But why do you want to talk to him? He has no information that can help you."
"Maybe something will come to him that didn't ten years ago."
He appeared doubtful, but said I was welcome to return at any time. We shook hands and he wished me the best of luck.
Lunz Street ran east to west between Yehuda Halevi Street and Rothschild Boulevard and was two hundred meters long from end to end. I started on the eastern side and began knocking on doors. Only half my knocks were answered, and only half of those by people who had lived on Lunz Street at the time of the murders. One woman, clutching a baby to her hip, turned white as a sheet when she learned of the atrocity that had happened on her street. Another informed me that her upstairs neighbor had always struck her as strange. "I'd take a look at him if I were you," she suggested with a whisper. "He's a suspicious one." The neighbor in question turned out to be a portly, gentle-faced man in his late fifties who had emigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1947. Another neighbor, a black-bearded man in his early forties, remembered the murders well, and Esther even better. "What a beauty she was," he said wistfully. "It's always a shame when a beautiful woman like her dies." And what did he think of Esther, besides her looks? He told me he had never exchanged a single word with her. Willie he mentioned not at all.
By the time I'd made it to the building directly opposite the murder scene, I was hungry and thirsty and frustrated. All my stair-climbing and door-knocking and questioning had yielded nothing. Esther remained a mystery to me. I trudged up the stairs to the third floor with a heavy tread, cursing under my breath for my arrogance in believing I could solve this hopeless case, and knocked on another door.
At first there was no answer, but I could hear shuffling noises from within. So, my foul mood getting the better of me, I pounded on the door with my fist, jarring it in its frame.
The man who opened the door partway looked frightened to see me. I smoothed the scowl off my face and told him I was sorry if I'd disturbed him. He muttered something that sounded like "It's all right," but might have been something else. I mechanically gave him what had by now become my standard opening, which was to give my name and ask how long he had lived on Lunz Street.
"Since 1935," he said.
Good. Four years before the murders.
"Did you know Esther Kantor?"
A slight hesitation. A jerky shake of the head. He was under average in height, thirty-two or thirty-three years old, and had a face rich with poor features—pasty skin; beady brown eyes; small mouth with pencil-thin, colorless lips; an almost nonexistent chin; and a hook nose with gaping nostrils.
"She was the woman who was murdered on this street with her baby ten years ago. Ring a bell?"
"No."
It might not have rung any bells for him, but it did for me. Warning bells. He was the first neighbor who'd lived on Lunz Street at the time of the murders who claimed not to remember them. Murders were rare in Tel Aviv, and the double murder of a woman and baby was the rarest among the rare. It would take a singularly insular person not to know of such a murder, especially when it happened in the building across the street from his own.
I studied the man with revived interest. His name, I knew from a small sign on his door, was Manny Orrin. Now I noticed the furtive brown eyes that twitched onto mine and away like a pair of agitated flies, and the way his bony hand gripped the half-open door, hairless knuckles turning white. He was blocking the doorway with his narrow body, not just depriving me of physical entrance, but blocking my line of sight into his apartment. I shifted my body sideways, angling my head slightly to try to peer past him, but he turned his body in relation to mine, effectively depriving me of the view.
"Mr. Orrin," I said, plastering on a sheepish smile. "I've been on my feet for many hours and I, well, I would be grateful if I could make use of your bathroom."
