"There's a difference between a onetime murderer and a repeat offender."
"Yes, there is. If you manage to prove Isser is guilty of those crimes as well, Mr. Lapid, I would be extremely happy. Happy enough to give you a bonus."
"You actually want your husband to be a multiple murderer?"
"Only if you can prove it. I have no preference if you can't."
My mouth went bone dry. I wondered how Dahlia could have ever loved her husband if she hated him so much now. Or maybe she had loved him with such ferociousness that there was no middle ground anymore, no possibility for tepid emotions. Maybe his betrayal had catapulted her straight from an incandescent love to a red-hot hatred. So that now she not only believed the worst of him, she actually prayed for it.
"It might be time to reconsider your decision to stay in your apartment," I said.
"Don't worry about my safety, Mr. Lapid. I can handle Isser."
I couldn't see how that was possible, but I didn't argue. She was the sort of woman who would not be budged.
"Any other crimes you suspect my loving husband of committing?" she asked.
"Just one. Emil Polisar."
"Emil? But Emil shot himself when—" She paused and drew in another breath. "You don't say. You think Isser killed him as well?"
"I'm not sure of anything at the moment. What I want you to tell me is if you know your husband's whereabouts when Polisar died."
"No idea. But he wasn't with me. That I remember."
"Did he have reason to hate Polisar?"
"Not that I know of. Maybe he simply developed a taste for murder."
"If that's the case, are you still sure you can handle him?"
"I have no doubt."
I wanted to ask her how she could be so confident. Instead, recalling Greta's concern for my safety, I said, "Does your husband own a gun?"
"I've never seen him with one."
Which did little to bolster my sense of security. For if Isser Rotner had indeed killed Eliezer Dattner or Emil Polisar or both, he was no stranger to firearms and might have one stashed somewhere.
I scoured my mind for additional questions, but found none. I was about to bid her goodbye, when a violent cough thundered over the line, crackling like an artillery barrage from a not-too-distant front. I tore the receiver from my throbbing ear and held it at arm's length until it died down.
"Are you all right, Mrs. Rotner?"
"Quite," she said, her voice back to its usual magnificence. "One thing has just occurred to me, Mr. Lapid."
"What thing?"
"It's the unsettling realization that if Isser has managed to hide the fact that he's killed three or four people, he's a much better actor than I ever gave him credit for."
The way she said it made me think that this troubled her far more than the possibility that he was indeed a multiple murderer.
26
"It's strange," Leon Zilberman said, "what goes through your mind when you hear terrible news. The day I learned Anna was killed, the first thought that popped into my head was, Dear God, not again."
We were in the living room of his apartment on Mapu Street, where he had moved three years ago. One of his former neighbors on Rashi Street had given me the address when I'd gone looking for Zilberman there that morning.
"What do you mean, not again?"
He took a sip from his glass. It was tea, and by its whitish-brown color, he had added just a dash of milk. A lot of Israeli parents drank their tea that way, saving most of their rationed milk for their children.
Zilberman had two, a boy and a girl, five and three. Toys and doodled paper were strewn all over the living room. It gave me a twinge seeing that homey mess, knowing it had been put there by happy, laughing children.
"It wasn't the first time one of us was killed," Zilberman said.
And there it was, the opportunity I was looking for. As I'd made my way from Greta's Café to Zilberman's apartment, I tried to figure out how to work the other deaths into the conversation. I'd decided to focus on Anna and try to slip them in somehow, but Zilberman had done it for me.
"Eliezer Dattner, you mean?"
"Yes, even though Eliezer's death was totally different from Anna's. He was shot by an Arab in Jaffa; she was knifed in the heart of Tel Aviv. But both were murders."
"And there was also Nahum Ornstein," I said.
"Nahum wasn't murdered. He drowned in his bathtub. A stupid accident."
"I understand he smoked hashish."
Zilberman nodded. "I told Nahum to lay off the stuff, but he just laughed and told me not to worry, that it didn't affect him much. And until he drowned, it looked like he was right. He never forgot a line or missed a cue."
"Seems odd then that it would cause him to drown in his own bathtub, don't you think?"
He shrugged. "You smoke that crap and drink a full bottle of wine on top of it, and you're liable to get hurt." He took another sip and made a face. "Listen to me, the man was a friend of mine and he's dead. I shouldn't be talking this way."
Zilberman was thin and loose-limbed, with a shock of wheat-colored hair. A little shorter than average, not handsome but not homely either, with a straight nose, a manly jaw, and a mouth that took up just a little too much space on his face. I recognized him from King Lear. He had played Kent.
He'd answered his door in an undershirt and khaki shorts that showed skinny legs sporting dense yellow curls. He'd asked me inside and apologized for the mess. When I'd asked him if his children were around, saying that murder isn't an appropriate topic for young ears, he said his wife had taken them shopping before a trip.
"She's taking them to the kibbutz later today to visit her parents," he'd said. "I'll be joining them in a week, after our final performance of King Lear. Not that I'm all that sure I'll be welcomed. Her parents, both staunch socialists, still haven't forgiven me for taking their daughter to Tel Aviv, where all the capitalists live. And if they knew I plan to vote for the General Zionists, they probably wouldn't let me through the kibbutz's gates." He laughed to show he was joking. Judging by the laugh lines webbing his eyes, he did that often.
Now I asked him, "Did everyone know about Ornstein's drug habit?" thinking that whoever did could have staged Ornstein's death.
"Pretty much. No one really cared. Theater people are pretty open-minded about this sort of thing."
"How about Dattner's Arab lover?"
Zilberman tilted his head a notch, regarding me with new appreciation. "You certainly know a lot about us, Mr. Lapid. No, that wasn't common knowledge. I didn't know about it until after he was killed. And neither did Ofra, of course."
"Ofra Wexler? Why do you say of course she didn't know?"
He grimaced, then shook his head and muttered to himself, "One of these days, I really should learn to keep my big mouth shut."
Leaning forward, I made my voice friendly and inviting. "Don't be hard on yourself, Mr. Zilberman. I'm a good detective. Either you tell me or I'll find out some other way. You have my word no one will know the information came from you. Okay?"
I could see him struggling with it, but eventually he sighed and said, "Ofra and Eliezer were an item. So you can imagine how she felt when he was killed and she learned he'd been sleeping with this other woman behind her back."
I kept my face blank, but inside me everything was churning. After my talks with Birnbaum and Dahlia, I had pretty much settled on Isser Rotner being the killer and had practically eliminated Ofra from consideration. Because Rotner had ample reason to kill Dattner and Ornstein, while Ofra had none. But this was no longer the case. Now Ofra did have a motive to kill Dattner. A most powerful motive. Vengeance.
"Ofra was humiliated," Zilberman said. "After that, she never joined us for our after-show gatherings."
So that was why she hadn't been at Café Kassit. Even though Dattner had died twelve years ago. Sure seemed like a long time to hold on to a sense of humiliation.