I drew up the shutters and threw open the windows. I showered and shaved and combed my hair. I made myself some black coffee but no breakfast. I was still full from yesterday.
Near the corner where Hamaccabi Street connected with King George Street stood the Levinson Drugstore. The Levinsons were a pair of chemists who operated their store together. They also had one of the only three telephones on Hamaccabi Street and the only one available for public use. It stood by the window of their drugstore and was attached to a small meter that calculated, based on distance and time, how much was owed for each call. Shortly after nine that morning, I entered the drugstore, found the phone unoccupied, and rang Reuben's office number. When he came on the line I told him I wanted to meet with the officer who had written the report on Yosef Kaplon's suicide.
"You're still working on that?" Reuben asked. "Didn't you get what you need from the report and the suicide note?"
"I still have a couple of questions."
"All right. Well, I don't have the file before me. You remember the officer's name?"
I had copied it into my notebook when I read the report. "Benny Regev."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Reuben?"
"Just a second," he said. I heard a small thump as he laid the receiver on his desk, then a chair scraping, and finally a door closing.
"Sorry," he said when he came back on the line. "I want to keep this private. Regev is not the sort of guy who talks to civilians about cases. I don't think he'll talk to you."
"Can you make the connection?"
"I can try. Regev, well, he's not the nicest sort. And he won't talk to you. Not without a reason."
"I see," I said. "Tell him it will be worth his while to see me."
Reuben fell silent. I almost smiled. My friend was one of the only truly honest policemen I had ever known, irrespective of country. I had not been lily-white myself, though on the scale of corruption, I was near the bottom. But Reuben was clean. Too clean. The most he would ever make would be sergeant. Other officers would never trust him completely. Perhaps that was why Reuben had been given a desk job. Less chance to get in the way of a take.
"Don't worry, Reuben. There's nothing illegal or even immoral about this. The guy's dead and the investigation is dead too. I just want to get some information that wasn't in the report. If I need to pass on some money for Regev's time, then so be it."
After a moment, he exhaled audibly. "All right, Adam. I'll try. But just so you know, Regev's a bastard."
"I'll keep that in mind," I said.
"Where can I reach you?" Reuben asked.
"I'll be moving around all morning. I'll call you after lunch, say one o'clock."
"Fine."
I hung up, paid Mr. Levinson what I owed for the call, and headed out to where Yosef Kaplon had lived and died.
Kaplon had rented an apartment on Bograshov Street, between Moria Square and Bar Kokhva Street. It was a three-story square building, with one large apartment on the first floor, and three small ones on the second and third. A sycamore tree loomed on the sidewalk, casting its shadow on half of the building's facade. Near the entrance to the lobby, someone had dropped a piece of bread with what looked like jam spread on it. A column of industrious ants were marching like infantry back and forth from the bread to their nest.
The police report said that Mrs. Greenberg, the landlady, was the one who had discovered the body. She lived on the ground floor. The smell of fried onions and kasha wafted from behind her door. A radio was playing within. A slow piano piece. I knocked. A moment later the door opened.
Mrs. Greenberg was somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties. Her face had been marked by both time and habit. The lines by her mouth and between her wide-spaced eyebrows had been etched by habitual frowning. She was giving me that frown now as she peered up at me through her black-rimmed glasses. Her chin and nose were both narrow and sharp, and her hair, more gray than brown, was pulled back in a bun so tight that it seemed to stretch her skin taut across her forehead and cheeks. Her eyes were light brown and made larger by her glasses. Her forehead was tall, her hair beginning beyond where her skull started to curve. I suspected that the tightness of her bun had something to do with her receding hairline. She was wearing an ankle-length beige dress with reddish vertical stripes. Her hips were wide and the skin under her fleshy arms dangled like forgotten laundry on a line. A wedding ring adorned her left hand, and a slim necklace of golden links hung around her wrinkly neck. She was holding a long wooden spoon in her right hand, and for a moment I recalled childhood stories of witches stirring wicked broths in their forest dwellings.
I sensed that I had disturbed her. I guessed that this would have been the case regardless of when I'd come calling or what she had been busy with at the time.
She asked me what I wanted and I told her I would like to see Yosef Kaplon's apartment.
Her mouth turned down in disapproval. "Haven't you people been through the place enough by now? What's more to see?"
Like Milosh, she mistook me for a policeman. Apparently, you never lost the look.
There were laws against impersonating a police officer, and the punishment for breaking them could be severe, but, as luck would have it, she didn't ask me specifically whether I was one, so I decided not to correct her assumption.
"I'd like to take another look, Mrs. Greenberg. I want to clear a few things up."
"You know that the officers told me I can't get rid of his things for a month. 'We need to look for next of kin,' they told me." She snorted. "He didn't have any next of kin. They all died in Europe. I should know. He'd been living here for nearly a year. No family. But they said they must work according to the protocol. If no one turns up after a month, then I can finally clear the apartment. And what am I supposed to do till then? Will the police pay his rent for him? You know, food costs money, especially these days."
Lady, I thought, you could go without food for a month and still be plump by camp standards.
I decided to lie. "With luck I'll find something that will lead us to a next of kin."
"He didn't have any, I tell you."
"He may have had a distant cousin somewhere. We're looking into it."
A hopeful glimmer of greed came into her eyes.
"So," I said, "can you take me up?"
She looked behind her. Sizzling and popping sounds were coming from within. The smell of her cooking was thick and rough. It made me queasy. Maybe she did a bit too.
There was a look of reluctance on her face. She didn't want to abandon her cooking. I wanted to be away from her. A meeting of interests.
"I see that you're busy, Mrs. Greenberg, so give me the key, and I'll let myself in. I won't be long. I'll drop the key back on my way out."
She shrugged and went hunting for the key, muttering under her breath. A minute later, I was on the third-floor landing, opening the door to Kaplon's last place of living and recent place of death.
Kaplon's apartment was slightly larger than mine, consisting of a small bedroom, a medium-sized living room, a long and narrow kitchen, a compact bathroom with a shower but no tub, and a tiny balcony with a waist-high wrought-iron railing.
The mirrored cabinet above the sink in the bathroom contained what you would expect it to: toothbrush and paste standing in a glass, shaving cream and brush, cologne, scissors, a nail clipper, a roll of adhesive bandages, a bottle of iodine. There was also a bottle of sleeping pills. Perhaps Kaplon had trouble falling asleep, or perhaps the pills kept the nightmares away.
The shower looked clean. The toilet bowl, however, was not. It was spattered with green and yellow and brown flecks. Vomit, I thought. But whose? Kaplon's apartment suggested that he was a neat man. He would not have left the toilet soiled. He had been drunk the night he told me about his experiences in Auschwitz, I reminded myself. Maybe he didn't see the point in bothering to clean up when he was soon going to slit his wrists. I flushed the toilet twice, but the dirty flecks still adhered to the bowl. Another thing for Mrs. Greenberg to whine about.