Whoever it was, they hadn't busted the lock. So either they'd picked it, or they'd had a key. I didn't think it was Mr. Gafni, but not because I trusted him to tell me the truth. The simple fact was that Gafni had no need to lie to me. He had every right to visit the apartment, and it wouldn't have seemed odd if he'd done so.
So it wasn't him. Then who? The person Moria wrote about in her note? And what had he or she come for?
Next I listened, but that taught me nothing. The only sounds originated from outside the apartment. The growl of a truck engine. A man on the street below hollering some unintelligible message. A gust vibrating the windowpanes. The apartment itself was as silent as the corpse that had recently lain in it.
On pegs by the door hung a woman's coat and a leather handbag, and I went through them both. The coat yielded nothing but a pair of knitted gloves and a woolen cap. The bag contained Moria's ID card, a pencil stub, a trifling amount of cash, a handkerchief, a receipt from Schwartz Department Store, a couple of hairpins, and a crumpled shopping list that looked weeks old and included the most mundane of products. In short, zilch.
A couple of paces and I was smack in the middle of the living room. Not much had been squeezed into it, but enough to make the narrow space feel stifling. There was a couch that could sit two, a low bookcase, a pair of chairs and a square dining table by the window. The window had frilly white curtains that were pulled back and shutters that hung open. The view offered little in the way of beauty or inspiration—just more aging residential buildings, with slack empty clotheslines strung between them, under a dispiriting gray sky.
I turned my back on the drab panorama and faced the living room once more.
Everything appeared in order. The mysterious visitor had not looted the place. They had come looking for something specific, and they had either found it, or they could not bring themselves to toss the apartment. Or maybe they feared making a racket. I doubted the walls between the apartments were thick.
I went over to the bookcase. The books were perfectly aligned, none of the spines protruding, as though they'd been lined with a ruler. All the books were novels, all in Hebrew, mostly translated works by authors such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte and John Steinbeck. Serious stuff. Nothing as lowbrow as the Westerns and adventure novels that were the staples of my literary diet.
Gazing upward, I saw a few damp spots on the ceiling, along with several discolored patches where someone had lazily slapped paint over old ones. Cracks webbed from one corner, as though a giant spider had settled into the stone and was in the process of expanding its lair.
A squat heating stove stood by a wall, but, of course, no fire burned in its belly. The apartment was freezing, as though the walls were porous and winter had seeped in. I wondered how adequate the heating was, or if the apartment bled warmth as easily as it allowed in cold.
Shivering inside my coat, it struck me that, while Moria Gafni had lived better than many Israelis, she could have afforded finer accommodations with the help of her father. Yet she had chosen not to. Which indicated that she had been a proud woman.
The kitchen was the size of a wafer. The counters were clear, the sink clean, the drying board vacant. The trash can was empty. Was the garbage removed post-mortem, or had Moria done it prior to her death? Judging by the manner in which she'd arranged her books and the orderliness of her kitchen cupboards, I suspected she might have.
Back in the living room, I headed for a white door that opened onto a small bathroom. The water in the toilet, motionless for over a month, had grown a disgusting film of crud. Grimacing, I flushed the filth away, wincing at how loud the pipes groaned and belched.
The top shelf of the medicine cabinet contained toothpaste, a toothbrush, nail clippers, and makeup. The bottom shelf held headache pills you could buy in any pharmacy, a roll of gauze, a bottle of iodine. No real medicine. The tub was on the smallish side. It might have fitted a teenager if she was petite and wasn't keen on stretching her legs. Looking at it, I realized I didn't know how tall Moria had been. I hadn't asked her father, and why would I? What possible bearing could it have on the investigation?
But now I was curious.
I exited the bathroom and entered the bedroom, heading straight for the single narrow closet. Its door was open, revealing just two shelves and a rack. Moria's clothes lay folded and piled in perfect order. Her dresses hung straight, including two nurse dress uniforms. I unhooked one of the nurse dresses and held it up before me, estimating Moria's height by its length. She'd been a short woman. Five one or maybe two. Just right for the small tub. And about the same height as the prime minister of Israel. Shaking my head, bemused by my rambling thoughts, I returned the dress to its hanger and closed the closet. Then I turned to study the rest of the bedroom.
Apart from the closet, there was a dresser; two paintings, neither of which would have made Van Gogh tremble with envy; and a bed, somewhere between a single and a double, set tight against the near wall. Attached to the wall at the corner of the room beside the bed was a small cabinet, its door closed. No sign of the pill bottles. Either the police had taken them, or someone had thrown them away.
A large depression dented the middle of the pillow. Made by Moria's head? The blanket was bunched up at the foot of the mattress, which was bare. Someone had removed the sheet. The mattress was white. Under the glare of the overhead light bulb, I could see the spiraling outlines of the springs enclosed within.
The bed stood a foot above the floor. I peered under it and found nothing but floor tiles. I went to the dresser next, crouched, and examined the knobs on each of the three drawers. No dust. The nameless visitor had opened these. Thinking that there might be fingerprints, I left the knobs untouched, gripping both sides of the drawers to tug them open.
The first drawer housed socks and underwear, all jumbled together as though someone had pawed through them. There were also a few wool stockings, which probably proved useful during the winter months. Nothing out of the ordinary apart from two pairs of silk stockings. These weren't cheap; one could sell these. The unknown visitor had either overlooked them or decided for some reason to leave them behind.
The second drawer held a large hairbrush, a pair of scissors, four squat candles, a book of matches, and two photo albums. The top one contained photos of the dead woman. There was Moria at one of the gates to the Old City, before Jerusalem had been carved in two, her arms spread wide as though to encompass the universe. There she was again, in a public garden I didn't recognize, leaning against a tree, her expression inscrutable. A third photo showed her in profile, staring off into the middle distance, her face serious and pensive. She had lost some of the adolescent freshness that I'd noticed in the photograph her father had given me, and in its place had gained a heavy dose of grown-up seriousness, as though a set of grim circumstances had plunged her deeper into adulthood than the mere passage of time could have done.
Other photos showed her at her job, wearing her white dress and nurse's cap—reading a thermometer, holding up a syringe with playful menace, standing at the entrance to the hospital where she had worked. There were other nurses around her in the last picture, and I went over each of their faces, committing them to memory.
The next several photos showed her in the company of either or both of two women, and I flipped back to the group photo, determining that indeed the two women were also nurses and had worked with Moria. Removing the photos from their mooring, I studied their backs, hoping to learn the two women's names, but they were blank. I returned all the photos but one into the album. The last, the one that showed Moria and her two friends most clearly, I slipped into my pocket.
The second album contained older photographs. There was Moria as a child of six or seven, her smile as big as the sky. There she was as a baby, lying on a blanket, staring up with huge eyes. There were many photos of Moria with an older woman who must have been her mother. Gafni had been right: the two looked very much alike.
Speaking of Gafni, he was nowhere to be found in the album. This was no accident. He had been excised from it. I could tell because some of the photos contained bits and pieces of him—a severed hand with his unmistakable porcine fingers, a shoe tip, a sliver of trouser leg, a slice of his bald head. The rest had been cut off and discarded. The little that remained could not be surgically removed without harming the image of Moria's mother in the process.
Running a fingertip along the cut edge of a photo, I wondered what had led Moria to perform this amputation on her recorded past. Could she not bear the sight of her father? Was it insufficient to sever all ties with him, and this was her attempt to expel him from her past and memory? Whatever had caused her to do this must have been terrible. No wonder Gafni wouldn't tell me about it. Gafni must have been unaware of the contents of this album. He wouldn't have left it in the apartment if he knew it existed.
In the third drawer, I found a notebook with a smooth brown cover. About half of the pages inside had been ripped out. Those remaining were blank. Was this where Moria had jotted her shopping lists? Where she had scribbled little reminders? Brushing my thumb over the surface of one of the surviving pages, it occurred to me that this was the same size and type of paper on which Moria had written her suicide note. I wished I had it with me to make sure, though the value of such certainty was unclear to me.
In addition to the notebook, the drawer held a framed diploma from the nursing school where Moria had studied, several pencils in varied stages of use, a number of empty envelopes, a strip of stamps with a few stamps missing, a sewing kit with an embroidered top, a few letters and memoranda from her workplace, and a pen. Scratching the pen across one of the envelopes left a zigzagging line of black. It might have been the pen Moria had used to write her suicide note. Had she returned it to the drawer before taking the pills? It seemed an odd thing to do just before killing herself.
Also in the drawer was a small box full of ticket stubs to various cinemas in Jerusalem—Eden, Smadar, Edison, Tel-Or, Zion, Orion. Staring at a fistful of stubs, I got an image of Moria Gafni sitting in a darkened cinema, her eyes bright, staring rapt at the flashing action on the screen. Moria, I decided, had relished the temporary escape movies offered and had wanted to cling to that feeling for as long as possible. As I allowed the stubs to flutter back down into the box, I couldn't help but think that eventually reality had proved so harsh that no escape, no matter how brief, remained possible.
Under the ticket stub box was a batch of thank-you notes written by formerly sick children and their parents. They painted a picture of a devoted nurse, kind and patient and helpful. Apparently, Moria had been good with the little ones, knew how to raise their spirits, to make them laugh despite their illnesses. She had given the children and their parents hope. What could have made a woman like that lose her own hope and choose to end everything?
The door of the bedside cabinet had a handle the size and shape of a small mushroom. Dust powdered it. Apparently, the visitor had found what they were looking for and had no need to check the cabinet. I pulled open the door and found myself staring at a pack of condoms; a glass vial of perfume; a pair of fat, partially melted candles; a pack of cigarettes; a box of long matches; and a well-thumbed English paperback with a cover that suggested a risqué plot.
I riffled through the pages of the paperback. They crinkled and spewed a dry papery scent. The pages weren't yellowed though. This was the sort of book one read in the privacy of one's home, not on a park bench on a sunny day. It was a stark contrast to the books Moria had kept in her living room, and the only book in a language other than Hebrew.
The perfume had an alluring flowery scent. Nothing discreet or subtle about it. Sima Vaaknin sometimes wore the same perfume or one very similar. I picked up the pack of condoms—open and near depleted—and wondered whom Moria had worn the perfume for, for whom she had bought the condoms. Was it a single man or several? Was the person mentioned in her suicide note her lover? Or was he her client?
Thinking about this, and about Sima, brought back the memory of Gafni exiting her building, floating high on the cloud of his recent debauchery. Gritting my teeth, I slammed the cabinet door shut.
I stood unmoving in the middle of the bedroom and allowed the cold silence of the lifeless apartment to wrap around me like a shroud. Up until a few minutes ago, what little I'd known of Moria Gafni had been nothing but surface details. Now, a deeper and more vivid picture was forming.
She had led an active sex life. She had loved to dream and fantasize. She had been a dedicated nurse. She had healed children. She had devoted her life to doing good. Yet her suicide note hinted at a bad deed she had done, had been made to do, and that had led her to choose death. What could it have been? Was it whatever had caused the rift with her father? Or was it something more recent?
Hungry for answers, I let my gaze roam around the room—skating over the white walls, the closed window, the dresser with its silver-screen souvenirs and grateful letters, the closet with its orphaned clothes—and saw nothing that hinted at the solution to the mystery. Only when my eyes completed their circumnavigation and returned to the bedside cabinet did I pause and cock my head. A sudden suspicion that something wasn't right began niggling at me.
I opened the cabinet again, picked up the paperback, frowned at it. Again I thought how different it was to the other books in the apartment. But that wasn't the only thing that was off. The rest of the items in the cabinet—the condoms, the perfume, the candles, they were all a bit too much. Like a story told in excessive detail or the way a mannequin can look unnervingly fake precisely because it is too perfect. Some lies are like that. They're like a set piece: nothing out of place, everything exactly right. Too much so.
Then it struck me that a good way to look like you've got nothing to hide is to appear to be a person who is unabashed when most people would be. Like an unmarried woman who keeps condoms by her bed where they can easily be found. And also that the best place to hide something is right next to a display of openness so stark that it allays any suspicion of concealment.
A man searching this bedroom would open this cabinet and get an instant, clear picture of who Moria Gafni was—a promiscuous woman and proud of it. He would sneer, or let loose a derisive comment, or imagine how it would feel to be in her bed. But he would not look too closely at the cabinet, figuring he had already seen everything there was to see.
And maybe that was the intended effect. Maybe there was something more to be found, and right there.
With a spark of excitement, I examined each item in the cabinet in turn and found nothing new. I ran my hand over the surface, top, bottom, and sides. Just wood, a little grainy to the touch.
Then, when I had just about decided I was the victim of wishful thinking, my gaze latched onto the screws at the corners of the cabinet. I tugged on it, but it was bolted tight. Earlier, in one of the kitchen drawers, I'd seen a number of tools, including a screwdriver. I got it and loosened the screws so that the only thing keeping the cabinet from falling was my grip. I tossed the screwdriver on the bed and lowered the cabinet onto the floor.
Then I looked at the section of wall behind it and felt my jaw drop.
I saw a pistol. Black and menacing as a dense forest on a moonless night. Lying like a forgotten relic in a small cavity that had been excavated in the wall. Beside the gun lay two magazines. The bullets nestled within them glinted like the mischievous smile of a child whose secret had been exposed.
The manufacturer's name—COLT—was embossed on the grip in big letters. I knew the model. A Colt Auto Pocket, a .25 caliber. A small pistol meant to be carried in a pocket or a purse. No hammer, so nothing would snag when you pulled it out. The barrel was short, which would lower accuracy, but at close range, it could kill as effectively as any instrument of death, provided the shooter had a steady hand. Such as the hand of the woman who'd penned the suicide note?
For a moment, I stared dumbfounded at the weapon, trying to wrap my mind around it being in Moria Gafni's possession. What would a nurse be doing with a pistol? Why would she keep it hidden? And why, once she had determined to kill herself, did she elect to swallow an overdose of pills in lieu of blowing her brains out?
I was so engrossed with these questions that I failed to hear the apartment door squeak open, and only realized that I was no longer alone on the premises when heavy footfalls sounded from the living room. Pulse quickening, I moved fast and was at the doorway to the bedroom in time to see the man turn around from the bathroom, into which he had poked his head.
He was a big man, six feet tall and wide across the shoulders and chest. He had on workman's pants and a thick woolen shirt that stretched taut over his bulky torso. The hands protruding from the ends of his sleeves were hairy and knotty and balled into fists the size of cannonballs. He was swarthy and rough-faced and was giving me a scowl so fierce that his heavy eyebrows nearly collided above his bulging nose.
A burglar? I thought for a second, but then I noticed his boots. They were caked with mud. One mystery solved.
