"Because you don't know nearly as much as you think."
"So tell me," I said, doing my best to hide the spark of excitement that had lighted up somewhere behind my breastbone.
She shook her head slowly. "I don't think I should. It's sensitive, you see. It wouldn't be proper."
Which was just pretense. What she was doing was dangling a piece of forbidden information before my nose and hoping I'd bite. And I had no choice but to do just that.
I withdrew a half-lira note and held it out to her. "For you. And there's more where that came from. If you'll tell me what I wish to know."
She yanked the bill from my hand, folded it twice, and tucked it away in her dress.
"Well," she said, "I suppose it would do no harm, given that Anna and her family are all deceased. It may even do some good, since you are investigating her murder."
More pretense. She did not care one bit about Anna or her family, and unlike many of the people I'd talked to during this investigation, she did not possess the acting skills to hide it. In fact, she looked eager to share with me whatever sordid secret she hoarded.
She said, "Before Anna first arrived, I received a letter from her parents. The letter contained a set of instructions. I was asked to keep my eye on Anna, to make sure she behaved with the utmost propriety and did not develop any relationships with men."
"I take it this was not a usual request."
"I've never received such a letter before or since."
"And you agreed to do it?"
"Of course. I saw it as my duty. If I could help the girl retain her honor and dignity, it would be a source of great pride."
"But Anna made it difficult?"
"Very much so. She was headstrong and rebellious and immoral to the core. No wonder her parents shipped her here. It wasn't for the education, but to keep her out of whatever sinful activity she was involved in over there."
Over there, meaning Prague, Czechoslovakia, a capital that, three years later, would fall prey to the Nazis. And not too long after that, all of Anna's family would be killed.
"If she gave you so much trouble," I said, "why didn't you kick her out after one year? Your desire to help her?"
"Yes. Yes, that's what it was precisely."
Only it wasn't. I was sure of that. "You weren't paid extra for this additional service?"
A hint of pink tinted Mrs. Chernick's pasty cheeks. "A little. Much too little to justify all my frustration with the girl, I can tell you that."
It was not a little, I was sure. Though I was certain Mrs. Chernick found great joy in making Anna's life miserable, she would not have done so without adequate compensation.
"Do you know the details of Anna's sinful activity in Prague before she came here?"
There was that smile again. That greedy smile. I parted with another half lira.
"I tried to get it out of her," Mrs. Chernick said. "For her sake, not out of any personal curiosity. Just so I could look after her better, you understand."
"Of course," I said, impatient for her to get to the point.
"She refused to talk about it. Always answered vaguely, with a haughty smile, like she enjoyed keeping secrets from me. She was quite pretty, and she knew it. Knew that men wanted her. And she thought that made her better than me. Because she was younger and prettier and..." A spasm of mental pain cut across her face, and for a moment she looked vulnerable and forlorn, but then the old spiteful sourness resurfaced. "But she was simply sinful and wicked, nothing more. A wicked girl."
"Mrs. Chernick," I prodded gently, "you were going to tell me about what happened in Prague."
"I'm getting to it. My first clue was that the money for Anna's room and board did not come from her parents. It came from a Mr. Artur Goslar of Prague. I asked Anna if he was a relative, and she got a funny look on her face and said he was a friend of the family. This made me curious, so I asked an acquaintance of mine who had come here from Prague in the early '30s if she knew the name. She told me Artur Goslar was a leading Jewish industrialist in Czechoslovakia. A rich man."
She paused and licked her lips.
"For a time, she said, Goslar was embroiled in a scandal. The details were hazy, but the overall picture was clear. He had entangled himself with a young girl, too young for marriage even. Not that it mattered, because he was married himself. Apparently, Goslar had to grease some palms to make the incident go away."
"But this must have happened long before Anna came here," I said. "She would have been a child."
"True. The girl in question wasn't Anna. But it said something about Artur Goslar and his inclinations. And, coupled with the instructions I received from her parents, it was evident to me what had happened."
"That Goslar had an affair with Anna, and when it was discovered, he had paid to send her away. To Tel Aviv."
"Exactly."
I thought about it. It made perfect sense. It explained why Anna had been sent to study in Gymnasia Herzliya and not her brother, and also how her family could afford it. Goslar had picked up the tab. Though, apparently, he did not spring for new clothes.
Still, there was no hard evidence of this.
"Were you ever able to verify it?" I asked. "Or is this simply an educated guess?"
She looked at me as though I were a simpleton. "I told you about the letter and about how she behaved around men. What further proof do you need? In all likelihood, she seduced Artur Goslar with her indecent behavior."
She'd forgotten, it seemed, Goslar's previous involvement with a young girl. She blamed it all on Anna. She loathed her that much.
But, perhaps, the cause and effect were reversed. Perhaps Anna was not born the flirtatious, dissolute girl Mrs. Chernick had known. She might have become that way because her first experience with sex was in an illicit affair with a much older, married man. An affair that caused her family to ship her to another country. That might change a girl fundamentally, like any crime changes its victim. And a grown man, a married man, taking on a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl as his lover is committing a crime. At least in my book he is.
All this was supposition, but if true, it made the tragedy of Anna's death that much graver. Because long before she was robbed of her life by her killer, the girl she'd been had been taken advantage of and altered irrevocably.
Perhaps this was why she had not been dating anyone. And also why she might have chosen to have an affair with another married man. Isser Rotner.
I said, "Do you know what happened to Artur Goslar?"
Mrs. Chernick shrugged her bony shoulders. "Dead. All that money and all that crystal wouldn't have done him any good when the Germans came."
"Crystal?"
"That's what they made in his factories. Glassware, crystal. My acquaintance told me his products were very good."
Which might have been true, but I was thinking about something else. What Ofra Wexler had told me about Anna's father, that he had worked in a glass factory.
I couldn't be sure, but I imagined that Anna had come to visit her father and caught Goslar's eye. And that was how it started. Not that it made much of a difference how they met. Knowing the particulars wouldn't help me catch Anna's killer. And Artur Goslar was beyond any earthly punishment.
I reached into my pocket, took out a pair of lira notes, and held them high. Mrs. Chernick's eyes went to them like a moth to flame. I said, "Is there anything else you can tell me about Anna and her stay with you? Anything of interest that happened during those three years?"
Her eyes flicked to mine and then back to the money. She thought about it and then shook her head. "There's nothing else."
"After she graduated, she left?"
Mrs. Chernick nodded. "And I never saw or spoke to her again. Which was just fine by me. And the next time I heard of her was when they found her dead."