The investigation had been brief, almost perfunctory. There had been no witnesses—none who came forward, at least—and no evidence to point the investigators in the direction of the culprit. Reading the various reports, I got the distinct feeling that the British investigators had not exerted themselves to apprehend the killer. Dattner's death was written off as just another ethnic killing. Tragic but unavoidable, and perhaps best left alone so as not to rile up the Arab public against the British.
The perfect murder—if I was right.
"Learn anything useful?" Reuben said.
I shook my head. "Not yet. How about you?"
"This guy?" He gestured at Amiram's open file. "A career criminal. Been in and out of prison a bunch of times over the past dozen years. Never been arrested for a violent crime, though. Robbery, dealing in stolen goods, that sort of thing."
Just like Meir Gadot had told me. I wondered again if he was okay.
Reuben turned a page, and I returned my attention to the file in front of me. I began studying the crime scene photos, but nothing stood out. I had just picked up the eighth photograph when I heard Reuben mumble, "Hmmm, this is interesting."
"What is?" I said, still examining the photo.
"There's a name here I think I remember. From the other file I gave you."
"This file?" I said, meaning Dattner's.
"No, the other one, of the dead actress, the one found in Trumpeldor Cemetery."
That stopped me. I lowered the photograph and looked at Reuben. "What name?"
"This one," he said, turning the file over to me, pointing to where the name was printed. "Isn't this one of the people interviewed by Inspector Meltzer at the time?"
Indeed it was.
I sat back, gripping Amiram's file in hands that seemed to have lost sensation, my breath suddenly shorter, my mind storming with questions.
"What is it, Adam?"
"I'm not sure yet," I said. "But I think you were right. I would like to take a look at this file."
"Go right ahead. And here, take this, put it back where it belongs, okay?"
He held out a photograph across the desk. Taking it, I saw it was Amiram's mugshot, taken in January 1947. The black-and-white coloring made his eyes even more sinister than they'd been in real life.
But I didn't dwell on his eyes for long. Another aspect of his features had seized my attention. It was the trim beard darkening his cheeks and chin and neck, the tidy mustache blackening the strip of flesh between his nose and bloodless upper lip. With a sense of mounting urgency, I began flipping through the file, hunting for other pictures. I found one from an earlier arrest, in August 1939. He had a beard and mustache then, too, and presumably also on May 28, 1946, when Anna died.
But had he been imprisoned or free on that date? And what about the days on which Dattner, Ornstein, and Polisar died?
I turned over pages until I found Amiram's rap sheet. It listed all his arrests and convictions. It was a lengthy list.
He first went to jail in January 1939, serving four months for pickpocketing. It didn't take long before he was back in a cell, this time serving six months for burglary, beginning in late August 1939, meaning he was out when Dattner was shot. His next incarceration began in April 1941. So he was free when Ornstein died, as well. The charge was multiple robberies, and he got a heavy sentence—five years. He was freed in April 1946, one month before Anna met her end. Greta had wondered why the killer had not struck in six years, and I'd had no answer to give her. Until that moment. Now I knew why. The killer had been behind bars.
Amiram's next stint in prison began in February 1947. He was let out after one year, in February 1948, three months before the Egyptian air raid that claimed Brigitte Polisar's life, three months before Emil Polisar supposedly shot himself in grief.
Amiram Gadot. A man not averse to killing. A man comfortable using either a gun or a knife. A man with a beard, and, I now recalled, an exceedingly light, almost gliding walk. The sort of walk that might strike a drunken Eliyahu Toledano as strange, but do so in a way that did not leave a distinct impression on his mind.
A man who had accused me of getting involved in things that didn't concern me—which at the time I thought meant his partnership with his cousin, but now understood to mean something else entirely. A man who had tried to kill me hours after I had goaded both main murder suspects, including the one whose name was printed in Amiram's file, to make an attempt on my life.
It all fit. I had my answer. I now knew that Amiram Gadot had killed Anna Hartman, and who had told him to do so.
33
There was a knot of about a dozen people in the small dirt yard at the side of the building on Shalom Aleichem Street. Silent men and weeping women. And one distressed mother who was dragging away an eight-year-old boy by the arm while the boy was protesting loudly, digging his heels and trying desperately to pull free from her grip.
"Stop it!" the mother commanded. "Come on now. We're going inside."
"But I want to see," the boy pleaded.
"You've seen enough already. You'll have nightmares, is that what you want? Besides, show some respect. Now stop giving me trouble, or I'll tell your father about this when he gets home, and then you'll really be in for it." Even that threat did not squelch the boy's protests, but he stopped struggling physically, and his mother hauled him into the building and up the stairs. I turned my attention to the small crowd.
The people assembled formed an impenetrable curving wall, and it was only when I came closer that I was able to see what had drawn their interest. When I did, my heart gave a lurch and my breath caught in my throat.
For sprawled on the ground, arms and legs outstretched haphazardly, was Ofra Wexler. Her eyes were half open, her mouth lax, and around her crushed head was a halo of fresh blood.
As I looked at her broken body, I thought of her name in Amiram Gadot's file and recalled Leon Zilberman saying that Ofra had always had terrible luck with men. I thought now what I should have thought then, that no woman was ever described as having always had terrible luck with men if the men in question numbered less than three.
"What happened?" I asked one of the onlookers.
"She jumped," he said, then his gaze drifted upward, and I followed it to see curtains flapping in and out of an open window three stories up.
"When did it happen?"
He gestured toward the building. "That boy found her not ten minutes ago."
"Did anyone call the police?"
"Someone just went. Dear God, what a tragedy."
You don't know the half of it, I thought, turning away from him and hurrying into the building. I had five minutes at most to check out Ofra's apartment before the police arrived.
Her door wasn't locked. Inside, everything was as I remembered but for the sheet of paper loaded into the typewriter and the confusion of printed pages across the desk. The note in the typewriter was brief and to the point. Ofra confessed to killing Eliezer Dattner, Nahum Ornstein, and Anna Hartman—the first for betraying her, the second for breaking her heart, and the third for overtaking her professionally. She expressed remorse and stated that she wished to live no longer.
The pages scattered around the typewriter were poems, dozens of them. These poems did not deal with love or nature, as Leon Zilberman might have assumed, but with hate, resentment, and vengeance. The objects of these dark emotions were easy to determine at a glance. The three murder victims—Dattner, Ornstein, and Anna.