"Yes, but now that we have a country of our own again, we need to come together."
"With time, maybe we will."
"I hope so," Greta said. A frown etched deep lines in her forehead. "So the only remaining mystery is the identity of the woman Haim Sassoon saw fighting with Esther a few days before the murders."
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," I said. "I know who she is."
"You do? Who?"
"Yael Klinger."
"How do you know that?"
"The same way I discovered Michael was the killer: by accident. I was walking up King George a couple of days ago when I happened to see two men unloading produce from the back of a Tnuva truck. It reminded me of something Alon Davidson said. The night he kissed Esther by the docks, he said he saw her getting out of a truck. Moshe Klinger drives a truck for Tnuva. I paid a visit on Haim Sassoon yesterday and asked him whether the woman he saw with Esther had fiery red hair. The question triggered his memory and he said that she had. Yael Klinger has fiery red hair."
"So Esther and Moshe Klinger—"
"Were having an affair of some sort. I don't know when it began or how serious it was. They must have met pretty rarely, on nights Moshe Klinger was in Tel Aviv and Esther did not meet with Clapper. That was the reason the Klingers never had another immigrant stay with them. Yael Klinger did not want to risk her husband having another affair. It also explains why they moved so soon after Esther and Willie were killed. They needed a fresh start, at a place where there were no memories of Esther." I paused and scratched my right eyebrow. "So it turns out that Esther wasn't perfect after all. She had her faults like the rest of us."
"And she knew love before she died," Greta said. "It's good that she had that, at least."
"Yes, I suppose you're right."
Greta took another sip of coffee. She put down her cup and laid her hands on the table. Looking toward the café window, she said, "From all you told me, Esther was a woman worth knowing. I lived here, in Tel Aviv, in 1939. I might have seen her a dozen times. But somehow I think I never did. I can't help but think I would have remembered her if I had." She turned her head to face me. "Any news from Henrietta?"
"We spoke on the phone this morning. She's at the kibbutz. She met her son yesterday."
"And how was their meeting?"
"I didn't ask."
"Aren't you curious?"
"No. Not really."
"Why ever not?" Greta said. "That was what you were working to achieve, isn't it?"
I finished my coffee and examined the black residue at the bottom of the cup as I considered and rejected several replies. The truth was, I did not want to hear of Henrietta's happy reunion with her son because it would bring to mind the fact that I would never be reunited with my daughters. I wondered, not for the first time, why I found it so easy to talk to Greta about some things, and was utterly incapable of sharing others with her.
Finally, I said, "I'm just not. Henrietta did sound happy, that I can tell you. Ecstatic. The kibbutz has given her a room. They'll make her a new member soon if Birnbaum comes through, and I'm sure he will."
"That's good," Greta said. She paused, then said gingerly, "And Mira Roth?"
I forced a small smile on my lips. Greta, ever the matchmaker, had sensed a reason to be hopeful. I hated having to disappoint her. I hated the truth I was about the tell her even more. "I went by the hair salon this morning," I said, striving to keep the bitterness I felt out of my voice. "I brought with me the pictures of Esther I'd taken from Manny Orrin. I thought Mira would like to have them. She told me she never wanted to see me again. I feared as much. She adores Michael, and I brought about his arrest."
"But she can't fault you for that," Greta protested. "He's guilty."
"Mira knows that, but it doesn't change how she feels about it. In her mind, her helping me landed Michael in jail and brought shame upon the Irgun. She also resents the fact that I went to the police instead of coming to her when I learned that Michael was the killer."
Greta was silent for a long moment. "Maybe with time, she'll see things differently."
"I doubt it. Mira is the sort of woman who doesn't forget things easily. No, I think there is no future for the two of us."
"I'm sorry, Adam," Greta said.
I looked out the café window onto Allenby Street, where streetlights did battle with the darkness of night. A couple strolled past the window, arm in arm. The laughter of the woman came in faint and lovely through the glass. Loneliness settled in my stomach like a paperweight. I would sleep badly that night. My dreams would be cruel.
"Me too," I said. "Me too."
A Note from the Author
Dear Reader, (it’s strange talking to you without knowing your name, but I’ll give it a try).
Writing has its own rewards, but having your novel read by another person is uniquely gratifying. So I want to thank you for reading Ten Years Gone. I hope you had a good time with it.
The greatest pleasure I get as a writer is to hear from readers. So drop me an email at contact@jonathandunsky.com with any questions or feedback that you have, or even just to say hi.
Before you go, I’d like to ask you to do a little favor for me. If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review on its Amazon page. Independent authors such as myself depend on reviews to attract new readers to our books. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d share your experience of reading this book by leaving your review on Amazon. It doesn’t have to be long. A sentence or two would do nicely.
Still here?
Great!
I thought you might be interested in knowing about how this book came to be, and how close it came to never being written.
Ten Years Gone traveled a bumpy road on its way to publication. The initial idea came to me sometime in 2015, when I was still living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, before I moved back to Israel. At the time, I belonged to a writers’ group, and one of the other members suggested that I write a novel that takes place in Israel, because that is the country I know better than any other.
I took her advice to heart, but made it a lot more difficult for myself by setting my story not in the present, but almost seventy years in the past, shortly after Israel gained its independence. Needless to say, my knowledge of that period of time was far from complete, so I had to do quite a bit of research in order to be able to paint a vivid and accurate picture of what life was like in Israel at that time.
The reason I chose this time period was that the character of what I felt could be a great series of books had sprung in my mind one day out of the blue. That character was the yet unnamed Adam Lapid.
What I knew about Adam at that time was that he was a holocaust survivor who now worked as a private investigator in Israel. I knew that he had lost all his family in the holocaust and that he was a loner by nature. Then more details came to mind, such as his country of birth (Hungary), the fact that before the Second World War he’d been a police detective in the Hungarian police force, and that after the war had ended, he spent some time hunting Nazis before coming to Israel, where he fought in Israel’s War of Independence.
After that I painted a physical picture of Adam, his fields of interest, his nature, and his views on life, death, crime, and justice. Naturally, no one could emerge from Auschwitz without being fundamentally altered by the horrors he or she experienced there and, as you read in this novel, Adam has been changed drastically by the hardship he’d faced and all that he’d lost at the hands of the Nazis.