I picked up the three letters and went to the kitchen. Magda was chopping vegetables—carrots and cucumbers and tomatoes. I gazed at her finely shaped back and hips, at her hair that caught the light from the small kitchen window. She ceased chopping and tilted the cutting board over a large bowl, scraping the vegetables into it with her cutting knife. She set the board and knife in the sink and turned. She gave me a questioning look, as if wondering how long I had been standing there.
I held up the letters. "You should read these. Especially the last one."
I took the salad bowl and some plates and cutlery she'd laid out and placed them on the dining table in the living room. I went out to the balcony, got a cigarette burning, and stood puffing smoke into the Jerusalem air. Two soldiers strolled by in the street below, bearing smiles reserved for quiet times between wars. They looked very young.
Directly across the road was a narrow four-story hotel with small balconies facing the street. On one of the balconies stood a plump middle-aged man with a trim woman of a similar age. Each held a glass of what seemed to be red wine, and they were chatting pleasantly. Their clothes seemed fine and foreign, and neither showed a hint of a tan. Probably Jews from America or another foreign country, now coming to visit the newly reclaimed homeland.
Magda emerged from the kitchen, holding a handkerchief to her eyes. I could see that her tears were happy ones. The third letter made it clear that her husband had wanted to confide in her, to tell her everything that had happened to him. He just didn't know how to go about it. Had he not died, he would have revealed all his secrets to her when the time felt right. The letter showed that she was not at fault for his reticence. In fact, it showed the opposite, that he'd loved her so much that he was about to bare the darkest recesses of his soul before her. For a moment I envied Meir Abramo. He had moved on. Not all the way, but a considerable distance. And he had loved.
"If you hadn't come here today," Magda said. "I don't know when I would have brought myself to read these. Maybe I never would have." She wiped her eyes and nose. Her tears were supplanted by resolve. "You will find who did this, Adam? You will find this murderer?"
"I will do my best."
"But you can't be sure."
"No," I said, knowing that bad people often got away with their crimes. Sometimes they had to change their identity, mask their appearance, or flee to foreign lands, but more often than not they remained in plain sight. They got married, had children, obtained a job. Led regular lives. Some became successful, respectful, attained new power. Their crimes remained hidden, forgotten, and so did their victims.
"What I can promise is that I will keep at it until there is no more point to it."
"Good," she said, with a simple finality, as if it were already done.
She turned and drew a chair for herself. "Let's eat," she said.
Lunch was simple and good. And strange. Here I was, sitting at a table in another man's apartment, sharing a meal with his attractive wife. And the man happened to be freshly dead—murdered—and the wife just over a week into her widowhood.
And she was more than simply attractive. Her slender figure and graceful features belied her inner strength. Her character had a warrior's core. She could get sad, despondent, weepy, but she would not break. Out of nowhere the awful thought flashed through my mind that Magda Abramo would have likely survived Auschwitz, and the food suddenly tasted like ashes in my mouth.
We spoke of minor things while we ate. I told her a bit about my life in Tel Aviv, and she spoke of living in Jerusalem. "The Arab bombardments were terrible, and the siege even worse," she said. "The Jews in the city were on the verge of capitulation." I told her of Operation Nachshon, and she told me of the exquisite joy she'd experienced upon seeing the supply trucks trudge into the city, some of them sporting bullet holes and shrapnel dents.
Neither of us spoke of her husband. We both knew that after the meal was done, we would have to talk about him. Not about the pleasant things, but about the day his body was found. I needed all the details she could give me, and they would mostly be painful ones.
I felt an array of emotions throughout the lunch. It was pleasant and tasty, and I was hungry. But there was also that sense of a final meal before a battle or a long night patrol. I was now fully committed. Not just to Milosh—who had started this whole thing—and not just to myself, either. Those two commitments had gotten me thus far. Now I was personally committed to Magda Abramo. And this commitment dwarfed all others. Milosh would have accepted failure with a shrug—him hiring me was a spur-of-the-moment thing, a momentary emotional reaction to the shocking suicide of an acquaintance. Likewise, despite my sense of wrongness regarding Kaplon's death, I would have moved on eventually. Magda Abramo was a different matter. She would carry the death of her husband to her grave. Regardless of what life brought her—whether she remarried, had more children, or found enough purpose for ten lifetimes—Meir Abramo would always be with her. She was owed the truth. And I intended to get it for her.
We cleared the dishes and spoke in the kitchen while she rinsed the plates and cutlery and put them away to dry. I needed to know more about the moment in which she'd found her husband hanging dead. I didn't ask her if she was feeling up to it. I just began asking my questions.
"What did he use for the hanging?"
She looked surprised. "A rope. Could it be anything else?"
I explained that people sometimes hanged themselves with belts or tore their bedsheets to strips and tied them into a makeshift noose.
"It was a regular rope," she said. "Thick and brown and coarse. The police took it. Why would that be important?"
"It may not be," I said. "It's too early to tell. An investigation is often like that. You collect tidbits of information and details. You soak it all up like a sponge. Then your mind starts working on it: making connections, stringing loose threads together, arriving at conclusions. Sometimes things that seem inconsequential at first end up pivotal."
I scratched my forehead. "You said that you came home to find him. When did you leave the house? When did you return? He died somewhere in between."
"It won't help you much, I'm afraid," she said. "I was away for four days. I left on Friday morning and came back on Monday. I'd gone to visit my cousin in Kibbutz Mishmarot. She and her husband and two children live there. I took David with me, of course."
A four-day window of death, I thought, but could it really be that long? Jerusalem was not as warm as Tel Aviv, but a body would smell pretty bad after three or four days. In all likelihood, Meir Abramo had been dead for no more than two days when he was discovered. Anywhere between Saturday, August 26, and Monday, August 28. I filed the information in my mind. It might come in handy.
"Why didn't your husband go with you?" I asked.
"He had to work. Both on Friday and on the following Sunday. Money's tight. He didn't want to take any time off."
She was done with the dishes, and she poured herself a glass of water. I watched the muscles in her throat work as she drank it.
"Did anyone know you were going away on this visit? Apart from your husband and your cousin, of course."
She thought about it. "I told Mrs. Hersch, I think. Meir could have told someone. Maybe his employer at the clothing store, Mr. Shitrit." She gave me the store's address. "There is also a café he sometimes stopped at on the way home from work, but I don't know if he had any close friends there. Some were at the funeral, I think, but I didn't catch their names."
"No one else? No one at the grocery store? Maybe someone overheard you talking with your cousin on the phone."