“Two hundred liras,” she said. “That’s a great deal of money.”
She was right, of course. It was more than what many Israelis earned in six months.
“I wonder how he got it,” she said.
“He was a criminal. That’s how.”
She looked at me. “You know him, Adam?”
I nodded, taking a final drag from my cigarette before dropping it to the pavement and crushing it under my shoe. I stuck my hands in my coat pockets. “His name is Nathan Frankel.”
“How do you know him?”
I was about to answer when a pair of headlights swung into view at the corner of Allenby and Balfour. The police car coasted to a stop, its lights washing over Greta and me before settling on the body. Two men climbed out. The younger one, the driver, was in uniform, while the older one was dressed in civilian clothes. The uniformed cop froze at the sight of the body, shedding about a decade off his early-twenties face, looking like a petrified ten-year-old. The older one noticed and said, “If you’re going to lose your dinner, Elkin, do it on the other side of the car.” He cast a quick glance at Nathan’s corpse, sucked on his lower lip for a second, then turned to Greta and me. “I’m Inspector Leibowitz. You the one who called?”
“Yes,” Greta said.
Leibowitz shifted his gaze to me. “And who might you be?”
I gave him my name and told him I had helped Greta close up the café and that I had been heading home when I came upon the body.
“Did you touch anything, Mr. Lapid?”
“He was lying facedown when I found him. I turned him over and checked his pulse. That’s all.”
I could feel Greta’s eyes on me. I dared not return her gaze. Leibowitz wouldn’t have any reason to assume I was lying, but I knew that his natural suspicion, the weapon of every good detective, was primed and ready. In a murder case it always is. For the moment, Greta and I were the only two people Leibowitz could connect to the body. There was no one he could consider as suspects but the pair of us. I wasn’t about to give him any cause to believe that we were colluding to keep something from him.
“You could have spared yourself the trouble,” he said in a flat tone, fishing a small notebook and pencil from his coat. He checked his wristwatch, flipped open the notebook, and muttered as he wrote, “January 7, 1951. Eleven thirty-four p.m. Allenby Street, Tel Aviv. One male stiff.”
He was a thin man, age forty-three or forty-four, dressed in a black coat and rumpled blue slacks and dark shoes. He stood five seven or eight and had a slightly bent posture. His hair was light brown, with early touches of gray. Beneath the hair was a tall forehead that sloped sharply to a pair of questioning eyebrows that shaded two very dark, slightly bulging eyes. Under the eyes he’d developed bags of the sort that wouldn’t go away even if he slept for twenty-four hours straight. An eagle’s beak of a nose and a wide, unsentimental mouth completed the picture. His was a weary, hard-bitten face that gave the impression that he’d heard all the jokes there were to hear and had judged them unfunny. He reminded me of other cops I’d known, cops who took a dim view of the world and the people who inhabited it, who expected the worst of their fellow man and were suspicious of anything better.
He turned to Officer Elkin. “Get on the radio and tell them to send over a photographer and a corpse wagon.”
“The dispatcher I talked to said he’d call an ambulance,” Greta said.
Leibowitz grunted. “Much good would that do.”
At that moment we saw the harsh lights of the ambulance glide down from the north. It screeched to an abrupt halt before us, and a man wearing a white doctor’s coat and carrying a black bag jumped out. Leibowitz told him he could put his bag away and asked if they would stick around to take the body to the morgue when the police were done with the scene.
The doctor shook his head resolutely. “No way. That’s not our job.”
Leibowitz didn’t argue. “Fine. You can go.”
“You guys shouldn’t bother us with this sort of thing. We might be needed elsewhere, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll make sure to educate the boys at the station. Now get lost, will you?”
The doctor said something under his breath that would have made a lady blush, then got in the ambulance. It swung a U-turn and sped away.
“Goddamn quack,” said Leibowitz.
He stepped closer to the body and did a methodical circuit around it, checking it from all angles. By the tilt of his head, I could tell he had spotted the blood trail leading north. He didn’t follow it. He didn’t have to. The sky had cleared in the evening. There would be no rain that night. The blood would last a while longer.
Officer Elkin leaned out of the police car. “Dispatch said they sent someone to roust Sabban out of bed. He’ll bring his camera along.”
Leibowitz half-smiled. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about it. They say how long they’ll be?”
“Ten minutes, fifteen tops.”
Leibowitz nodded and crouched down beside the body, at almost the exact spot where I had done so earlier. He ran his eyes over the corpse, noting aloud for the benefit of Elkin, and maybe for his own as well, the two stab wounds. Then he started poking through Nathan’s pockets. He went through them in just about the same order as I had, stopping and rising with the wallet in his hand.
“Nathan Frankel,” he said, holding up the ID card from the wallet. “Twenty-five years of age.” Then, with his back to Greta and me, he took out the money and counted it silently.
“How much is there?” I asked.
Leibowitz stiffened. He jerked his head around to stare at me. A deep frown etched his forehead. It was obvious my question had caught him completely by surprise.
“Why do you ask? You didn’t touch this wallet, did you?”
I shook my head. “Like I told you, I only turned him on his back and checked his neck for a heartbeat. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
He kept on looking at me with that frown on his face for a minute longer, unsure whether or not to believe me. Gradually the frown smoothed itself out, but not completely.
“Twelve liras,” he said, his dark eyes probing my face, trying to read my mind. I would have bet that over the years more than a few suspects had crumbled during interrogation under the pressure of his gaze.
I kept my expression neutral. From the corner of my eye, I could see Greta’s face. It was a good thing Leibowitz was giving me his full attention, because she had a stunned look about her. I sent her a silent message, “Don’t say a word,” and she didn’t. Greta was no fool.
Leibowitz waited for me to speak, almost challenging me to. Like all good investigators, he was familiar with the incredible power of silence. Most people find silence disconcerting and feel compelled to break it by opening their mouth to say something, anything. Often a man might hang himself by revealing things he shouldn’t, just because he finds the silence in the interrogation room unbearable. Of course, Leibowitz was unaware of the fact that I was no stranger to this technique and therefore immune to it. After all, I had once been a police detective myself.
He finally gave up after about a minute. He slipped the wallet into his coat pocket, closing the flap.
“I’ll need your contact information,” he said, all formal now. “Addresses and phone numbers, if you got them.”
Like nearly all Israelis, I did not have a telephone in my apartment and neither did Greta. She gave him the number of the café, and I said I could be reached there most days. Leibowitz jotted the information in his notebook.
What followed were a few minutes of general questioning. I could have guessed the questions before they came out of Leibowitz’s mouth. Hadn’t I asked similar questions on multiple occasions years ago? Only when I’d asked them, I had done so mostly in Hungarian and a couple of times in Romanian.