He raised his head and gave me a smile. Reuben's smiles were as wide as his heart was big. They radiated light as bright as a flashbulb. I sometimes wondered how a man who had seen the horrors of war could conjure such smiles. I certainly couldn't.
He had received the nickname "Ant" for saving my life. It had happened in October 1948, during Operation Yoav, when we fought the Egyptian Army in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. We were both infantrymen, and on that day our unit found itself pinned down by fire from an Egyptian machine-gun position. Four of our men had already died, and our unit was unable to advance. To this day, I'm not sure what came over me, but suddenly I found myself sprinting forward, zigging and zagging while a hail of bullets chewed into the desert sand at my feet. After what seemed like an hour, but what was actually less than thirty seconds, I made it to the foot of the small dune on which the gun position perched and lobbed two grenades into it.
The explosions silenced the Egyptian fire. I clambered up the dune, peered into the firing position, and saw two mangled bodies beside the blood-drenched Browning M1919 machine gun. I was about to signal the rest of my unit to advance when I heard a loud pop and felt a searing pain in my belly. A third Egyptian soldier had survived the grenades unscathed by cowering behind some crates at the far end of the gun position. He had shot me and was about to do so again. I raised my rifle and we fired simultaneously. I saw a spurt of red where his left eye had been and felt a massive punch to my chest. The force of the blow knocked me backwards, and I rolled down the side of the dune to the soft desert sand below. There I lay, unconscious, bleeding from two bullet wounds.
I would have died that day were it not for Reuben Tzanani. He had lifted me on his back and carried me over a kilometer to the rear of our lines, where I received the emergency treatment that saved my life. I heard all this much later, after I'd regained consciousness in the hospital in Tel Aviv. At first, the doctors thought I would not survive; then they feared I would be permanently handicapped. But I recovered fully, and, in five weeks minus two days, was discharged.
Reuben's actions that day were made all the more remarkable by the discrepancy in our physiques. I was six foot three, while he was five foot four with army boots on. I also outweighed him by forty pounds at least. For being able to carry more than his body weight, and for saving my life, he received the nickname "Ant." For my actions that day, I received a medal, the rank of sergeant, and was celebrated as a hero in the newspapers and on the radio. I'd always felt that, of the two of us, Reuben was the true hero.
Reuben was a slight, gentle man, who seldom raised his voice. But his tender appearance hid a rock-solid interior. He was one of the bravest soldiers I'd fought alongside of and one of the finest, most honest men I'd ever met. The latter, I suspected, was why he had not made it far on the police force and why he was given an office job instead of a street assignment. The ugly truth was that to get ahead in the police, you couldn't be as pure as a lily. You had to have some dirt on you.
"Adam," he said, "come in. Come in. Clear that chair and sit down. Want me to get you some coffee?"
The second chair—the one not currently occupied by Reuben—was laden with a tall stack of papers. Reuben motioned me to set the papers on the floor, which I did. Sitting down, I said, "No coffee for me, Reuben. I know what police station coffee is like."
He laughed. Then his face turned serious as he picked up a slim brown folder from his desk. He looked from the folder to me.
"I peeked at it. It's pretty brutal."
"I understand they were killed with a knife," I said.
"They were. But that wasn't the extent of it." He grimaced. "To do such things to anyone is unimaginable, but to a baby…" He shook his head and seemed to gaze into a place deep inside himself.
He had the smooth dark skin common among Yemenite Jews and soulful eyes of such a deep brown that it verged on black. His hair was the color of coal and cut in short, thick curls. His features were soft, rounded, almost cherubic. He was thirty years old, four years my junior, but appeared no older than twenty-five. He was dressed in his police uniform, which was, as always, pressed to perfection.
"I think I can handle it, Reuben," I said gently.
He blinked and nodded and handed over the folder. "I don't doubt it, Adam. But what good would it do your client to know the grisly details of her son's death?"
"I don't plan on telling her," I told him, running my hand over the smooth cover of the file folder. "Not yet."
He lifted an eyebrow. "Don't tell me you're going to investigate this case."
"I am going to do exactly that."
"After ten years? What can you hope to find?"
"I don't know. But it's the only way I can think of to help my client. And I know something the cops who worked this case ten years ago did not. I know the victims' true identities. It may lead to nothing, but it does give me reason to hope I can find out something the original investigators didn't."
"Still, after ten years…" He paused, tapping a forefinger on his desk. "You know, Adam, if you're keen on catching criminals, the place for you is in the police force."
"Why? You think if I were a cop, I'd be allowed to work on this case?"
"A case this old? No chance. We're overworked and understaffed as it is. All right, I see your point. But there are other cases, more recent cases. A man like you, who was a police detective—you belong here."
We'd had this conversation before. Reuben couldn't understand why I didn't join him in the police. I never explained to him that I had spent too long in uniform, following other people's orders. I did it in Auschwitz because to do otherwise would have led to my being killed. I did in the army because I wanted to live a free man in an independent country. But I never wanted to do it again.
"It's not for me, Reuben."
He shrugged. "Well, can't blame me for trying, can you? About the report, it doesn't leave the station. There's a vacant room at the end of the hall. Read it there, then bring it back when you're done, okay?"
"Okay. Thank you."
I rose and was almost at the door when he said, "Adam." I rotated to face him. I had never seen him look so grave. "I hope you catch this guy. Whoever did this, he needs to pay."
13
I found the vacant office, closed the door, and sat at the empty desk. I opened the folder and found two copies of the investigation report, one in Hebrew and the other in English. The latter was addressed to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the Palestine Police Force. The CID had been the British unit that oversaw all investigations of major crimes during the Mandate of Palestine. It ceased operations in 1948 when the Mandate ended and Britain evacuated all its forces from Palestine.
I set the English version aside and began reading the Hebrew report.
The bodies of Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland (they were identified in the report by their false names: Esther and Erich Kantor) were discovered at nine in the morning on August 27, 1939, by their landlord, Abraham Sassoon. Mr. Sassoon was replacing a burnt-out light bulb on the third-floor landing when he caught the familiar coppery scent of blood. He followed his nose to the door of the apartment occupied by the victims and saw that the wood around the lock was scarred and gouged, as if someone had tried forcing it open. Sassoon tried the handle, but the door was locked. He knocked several times with no answer.
Increasingly worried, Sassoon went to his ground-floor apartment, got the spare key, climbed once more to the third floor, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. He found the two bodies in the bedroom. "I didn't need to check," he told the police later. "I could tell they were dead."