A Debt of Death
(Adam Lapid Mysteries #4)
Jonathan Dunsky
Books by Jonathan Dunsky
Ten Years Gone
The Dead Sister
The Auschwitz Violinist
A Debt of Death
The Unlucky Woman (short story)
The Payback Girl
For Keren
1
The dead man was lying facedown in a puddle of blood and rainwater.
I didn’t think he was dead at first. My initial impression was that he was a drunk who’d had five or six too many and had stumbled to the curb and passed out. It was the positioning of his body. It didn’t look like dead people often do, with their limbs sticking out at angles that no living soul could tolerate. He looked peaceful, relaxed, like he was in the midst of a deep sleep.
It was only when I crouched down beside him, meaning to nudge him awake and off the wet pavement, that I noticed the blood. I had missed it at first, partly because of the dim lighting afforded by the streetlight five feet away, and partly because the blood had mixed in with the water in the puddle, which had diluted its natural redness to a barely discernible lilac.
I didn’t know it was Nathan Frankel until I turned him over and saw his face.
His eyes were open and, as bad luck would have it, they were staring right at me. I swore, and for some inexplicable reason I had chosen to do so in German. This made me swear again—this time in Hungarian.
His mouth hung slack and open, and there was blood on his lips and chin. His tongue had sunk back toward the rear of his mouth like a rolled-up sock. His face was bleach white, and when I removed my right glove and pressed two fingers against the artery in his neck, the skin felt cold.
There was no pulse. I hadn’t expected to find any. I had seen more dead people than most morticians were likely to lay eyes on over the course of their career. I could tell by his face that Nathan Frankel was quite dead.
I suppose it was groundless hope that led me to check his pulse anyway. And as experience had taught me, when all you have left is groundless hope, you might as well start grieving.
Catching sight of his eyes again, I noticed that they held not the glassy, vacant stare common to the dead, but a mixture of expressions that I could only guess at. Fear, imploration, resignation, accusation?
I muttered another profanity, a particularly juicy Hebrew one I had learned recently and that for some reason had stuck in my mind.
Running my eyes down from Nathan’s face, I noticed the bloodstains on his jacket. It was unbuttoned, and when I drew it open, I saw his drenched shirtfront and the two stab wounds in his torso.
One was on the right side of his stomach, just under the ribs. The other was lower and almost dead center, about where his navel would be. They were bleeder wounds, the sort that wouldn’t kill you fast, but rather would leak out your life drop by drop until you croaked.
Looking around the body, I noticed that there wasn’t as much blood as I would expect there to be. I raised my head, scanning the sidewalk past the body and spotted a trail of red droplets snaking its way north up the pavement. So he had been stabbed somewhere else and had managed to stagger all the way down here.
Was he coming to see me? If so, he had fallen short by about thirty meters. I shook my head in anger. Goddammit. Without a conscious thought, I curled my right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on my thigh.
Suddenly I heard a sound behind me. I whipped around, ready to launch myself up from my crouch, fist cocked. But it was only Greta. She stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed, grasping my coat in both hands.
“You left this behind, Adam,” she said in a tremulous voice, her eyes on Nathan’s body. “I saw it and ran out after you…” Her words trailed off and she gulped, closing her mouth with a smack. “Is he…?”
I nodded, lowering and unclenching my fist. “He’s dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. You better call the police.”
She had installed a telephone in the café two weeks earlier and now went to put it to good use. It was past eleven at night and the air was dry and very cold. I slipped my glove back on. I looked up and down the street, but there was no one in sight. Knowing I had a couple of minutes at most until Greta returned, I squatted by Nathan again, studiously avoiding his eyes, and quickly went through his pockets.
One trouser pocket yielded a ring of keys and a pack of mint chewing gum; the other a cigarette lighter, a near-full pack of Camels, and some change. I put everything back where I’d found it and started working on his jacket.
No gun, no knife, no weapon of any kind. In his right-hand pocket was a ticket stub to a movie at Migdalor Cinema, dated eight days ago. The left-hand pocket was empty. The wallet I found in the inside breast pocket.
I took it out and did a quick search. ID card, which listed an address on Arlozorov Street; ration strip; a receipt from a radio store; what appeared to be an old grocery list written in a tight, cramped scrawl; and a wad of banknotes in the bill compartment. I counted them. Two hundred and thirty-two liras.
I removed two hundred liras, folded them, and stuffed them in my pocket. The thirty-two remaining liras I slipped back into the wallet and then returned it to the pocket from which it came.
I had just about finished doing that when I heard a woman gasp. I turned and there was Greta, looking at me as if she was seeing the real me for the very first time, and what she saw was dirty and immoral and depraved.
“I can explain,” I told her.
She said nothing.
“I did not steal this man’s money, Greta. You need to trust me on this.”
Still she said nothing. I could see the struggle in her face. She desperately wanted to believe I was not a thief, yet her eyes told a different story.
I let out a sigh, got to my feet, took Nathan’s money out of my pocket, and held it out to her.
“There’re two hundred liras here. You keep them for now.” After a slight hesitation, she reached out and plucked the bills from my hand. I bent down, got Nathan’s wallet from his jacket, and counted the remaining banknotes before her eyes. “Thirty-two. All right?”
She nodded slowly, frowning, not sure where I was going with all this, the two hundred liras clasped in her hand.
“You got through to the cops?” I asked after I put the wallet back in its place.
“They’re on their way. The policeman I spoke with said he’d call an ambulance.” She shrugged. “I told him it was no use, but he insisted.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “An ambulance is as good a way as any to haul away a corpse. You okay?”
Greta shuddered. She was still holding my coat in one hand. She thrust it at me. “Here. Put this on. No use catching a cold.”
I smiled in relief. Greta’s maternal instincts were kicking in. It was a good sign. It meant she was on her way to trusting me again. I slid on the coat. “You better head inside and get your own coat. And put the money away before the cops get here.”
She gave me a puzzled look but went inside without comment.
I lit a cigarette and stood puffing away over the corpse of a man whom I had only spoken with for the first time three days ago, but who was in a way as close to me as a brother. From where I was standing, I could no longer see into his dead eyes, but I imagined them still fixed on me. Despite my coat and the warm cigarette smoke in my mouth and lungs, I felt a finger of ice brush along my spine.
Greta emerged from the café and came to stand beside me, now wrapped in a long, gray coat. The coat had a belt looped through it and Greta cinched it tight around her midriff. She hugged herself across her heavy chest.