With an acute sense of defeat, I leaned back, raising my eyes to the corner of the ceiling, where that spiderweb of cracks reigned. What had gone through Moria's mind when she'd looked upon these cracks? Did they mirror the fissures that had spread through her life, finally shattering her will to live?
I remained there for a good few minutes, the heat of my exertion deserting my body and the cold of the apartment beginning to seep through my skin.
Then the apartment door handle rattled, followed by a knock. Daniel was on the other side, a mop in one hand, a bucket in the other. He wore a sheepish expression.
"I figured since you're here, I might as well wash off the mud I left."
He came inside, set the bucket in the middle of the living room, and began cleaning.
"Find anything?" he said, moving the mop back and forth.
"No," I said bitterly. "Sorry if I made too much noise."
"Don't worry about it. You do what you need to do."
He finished cleaning all the mud, moved to the doorway to Moria's bedroom, and touched the cratered wood where his fist had landed. He made a face. "I'll need to get this fixed before another tenant moves in. Is it true that Moria's father is keeping the apartment?"
"Just like you heard, till the end of next month. After that..." I shrugged.
"So I have a little time," he said, touching the wood again.
"Know of any cheap hotels in the area?" I asked, and he thought for a moment before giving me a name and an address.
"It's pretty basic," he warned. "Not that I ever stayed there, mind you, but that's what I heard."
"I'll check it out. Thank you."
He emptied the bucket in the tub, picked up his mop, turned to leave, but then stopped and asked, "You think this man, the one Lillian saw, you think he and Moria were really lovers?"
"It seems likely."
"You think he's the reason she killed herself?"
I considered the clandestine nature of their trysts and the contents of Moria's note and gave a noncommittal shrug. "I don't know, but I suppose it's possible. She wouldn't be the first woman to kill herself over a broken heart or something of that nature."
Daniel nodded a couple of times, and a muscle flexed in his jaw. "That son of a bitch," he said.
"Let's not jump to conclusions, all right? Like I said, I don't know if this man, whoever he is, had anything to do with the suicide."
He nodded again, and we shook hands. He asked that I let him and Lillian know of any development in the investigation, and I said I would, though I had no intention to.
I returned all the furniture to its place. Then, figuring other neighbors might prove as fruitful as the Shukruns, I knocked on the other doors in the building. Moria's fellow third-floor tenant was old, half blind, and more than half deaf, judging by how loudly he asked me to raise my voice. Predictably, he had seen and heard nothing useful.
No one answered the door of the apartment that shared the second floor with the Shukruns'. On the ground floor, the first door I knocked on was answered by a man who proclaimed that Moria had committed a grave sin by taking her own life. Other than that, she'd always seemed nice. In the second apartment lived a woman who said Moria had always been polite but reserved. She respected her greatly for her work as a pediatric nurse.
"My nephew was hospitalized in her ward," she said. "My sister told me she was the best nurse of the lot."
She knew little of Moria's life. If I wanted to learn more, she suggested in a somewhat malicious tone, I should talk to the second-floor neighbor, Lillian Shukrun. "She's the sort of woman who likes to know everything, always watching, always sticking her nose in other people's business."
I did not tell her that I'd already talked to Lillian and liked her quite a bit.
Overall, my second search of Moria's apartment and talking to her neighbors had both ended in abject failure. But I was nowhere near done. I was now more determined than ever to unravel the mystery of Moria's death. To discover the identity of the person in her note. To, perhaps, grant her a measure of justice.
While I was canvassing the building, I saw that Daniel hadn't cleaned the mud in the lobby and stairs. Maybe he would get to it later. Or maybe, in washing Moria's apartment, he was repaying a debt for his dead son the only way he knew how. Either way, I felt good about leaving Moria's apartment as clean as she'd left it when she died.
12
I almost didn't find the hotel. A scrawny building, it stood near the middle of Yehudit Street, about a ten-minute walk from Moria's apartment, and sported a faded sign that blended almost perfectly with the hotel's facade—both were streaked and smudged with all manner of black and gray. Inside, there was a poorly lit lobby that smelled of damp. The walls looked as though they'd last been painted during the Crusades. Incongruously, an ornate metal light fixture dangled from the ceiling, suggesting a long-forgotten glory, though only one of the sockets housed a bulb. The man behind the counter was fifty-something, with sallow skin, a bald dome of a head, and rheumy, bulging eyes. He eyeballed me over a newspaper he'd been reading, taking in the bag I was carrying, but did not utter a word of greeting.
I told him I needed a room.
He quoted a nightly rate that struck me as only mildly exorbitant. After a bit of haggling, I gave him some money, and he handed me a key. The creased leather key fob bore the number 9 and a name: Hotel Shalem. The clerk pointed a bony finger at the stairs. "Third floor. Second door on the left."
There were five doors in total. Two on either side of the corridor and one at the end. The two doors on the right had brass room numbers. The two on the left had only faint outlines where numbers had once hung. The door at the end had neither. I pushed it open and discovered a bathroom. Basic, Daniel had said, and he'd been right. One bathroom to a floor.
My room was small and cramped. There was a chair and a dresser. No closet. Just a coat hanger with one broken hook. The bed was a single and set very low. I tested the mattress and found it sagging and lumpy but adequate. The bedclothes looked clean, but their color had dwindled with age and repeated washings. The scent of cigarettes of lodgers both recent and ancient clung to the walls and furniture and the air itself like barnacles to an unattended ship.
The window resisted my efforts to open it, but finally yielded with a grating squeak, rising halfway before getting stuck. A minute of futile heaving later, I gave up, sitting on the bed before the half-open window, a cold wind rushing into the room, coiling its chilly fingers around me.
I took out the gun and the two magazines and weighed them in my hands and in my mind. Should I take them with me or leave them here? I could stick them in my bag, but I didn't trust the hotel keeper to not go through my stuff. Then again, I did not like walking around with a gun for no reason.
Too bad there wasn't a handy bedside cabinet with a hole in the wall behind it.
I settled on pulling out the bottom dresser drawer, stashing the weapon and magazines in the small space beneath it, and then sliding the drawer back into place. Not as good a hiding spot as Moria's, but I figured it was safe enough for the time being.
I wanted to keep the window open as far as it would go to air out the room, but if it started raining again, I might return to find everything drenched. I left it open a crack and headed out.
My stomach was grumbling. It was past noon, and I hadn't eaten since early that morning. I ducked into a café on the corner that had pictures of the Old City on its walls. I ordered bean soup and bread. The soup was hot and salty, the bread dark brown and rough. I tore up the latter and dunked its pieces into the former and started eating with relish.