LITMIR.BIZ

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shnorrer said, “Ani mayveen.” He looked at Decker.

      Decker blew out air, then took out a twenty from his wallet and gave it to the man. The shnorrer pocketed the money, muttered some blessing, then moved on to the next mezuzah down the hallway.

      11

      Even though it was the job, Marge felt like a snoop. Decker had warned her about the feeling. True she had gone through other houses from the rafters to the baseboards, but in those cases, the occupants had been alive. Though Marge had no evidence that the Yaloms were dead, it didn’t look good. Though the paper still came and the mail was still being delivered, the only living things left in the Yalom place were houseplants.

      So with key in hand, courtesy of Orit Bar Lulu, Marge plundered through items, bit by bit, with no one standing over her shoulder, nobody protesting her presence, or cussing her out.

      They couldn’t have just fallen off the planet!

      Within three hours, she had amassed an abbreviated biography of the Yaloms’ lives, had discovered private matter … secrets.

      Dalia Yalom was on the pill and was a hidden lover of the soaps. To wit: magazines featuring daytime serials stowed in a hatbox, along with an autographed eight by ten glossy of a handsome but plastic man. Dalia’s closets were well stocked although there wasn’t an obscene amount of clothing for a woman of her means. But she did have odd tastes. A shoe collection made up of dozens of sneakers—beaded ones, painted ones, embroidered ones. She had tennis shoes made of everything from buckskin to terry cloth, from silk to see-through plastic. A variation of the glass slipper.

      Though Marge had sifted through the shoes, one by one, she had found nothing. Satisfying herself that the master bedroom was devoid of clues, she’d moved on to the boys’ rooms.

      She’d found Dov’s small stash, not much more than a few measly crumbs of cannabis. Dov’s escape from an overbearing father. She’d also discovered voluminous writings and stories crammed into three binders in the back of his closet. In light of what Decker had told her, Dov’s stories about loneliness and alienation had come as no surprise.

      What had surprised Marge had been the secret poetry of the older brother, Gil. Here was a sensitive soul. The writing was amateurish, excessive as only teens can be, but it was thoughtful. The older boy’s poems spoke of flowers budding in a mire of human greed, of good emanating from a cesspool of evil, of the birth of a child cradled from the ashes of the fire. Marge wasn’t quite sure to whom or what the kid had been referring, but the message seemed unusually positive for an adolescent.

      Marge had looked and Marge had learned.

      Decker fingered the Israeli passports with gloved hands. “Where’d you find these?”

      “In a billfold inside the Cross briefcase.” Marge pointed to a black-leather attaché with a gold clasp. “I didn’t even see this luggage set the first time around because the attic closet has such an odd shape.”

      “The briefcase was hidden?”

      “Not at all,” Marge said. “I just didn’t see it. I thought the closet door just led to finished attic space. At that point, the roof comes down at such a severe angle, you can’t even stand up. So I just poked my head inside and saw the area was empty. It wasn’t until the second time around that I actually ducked inside—at much expense to my back muscles—and saw the space was actually a closet that wraps around the house. There’s this huge storage area on the other side containing the main family luggage. I’ll show it to you if you want, but I’ve already been through it all. The rest of the valises were empty.”

      Decker sorted through the papers inside the case—Xeroxes of birth certificates, Social Security cards, insurance cards, INS papers. He wondered where the originals were. If Yalom took the papers with him, why did he leave behind the passports?

      Because the two passports he held were the originals. And they were up-to-date. He said, “You didn’t find the boys’ passports?”

      “Nope,” Marge said. “And I looked. That could be significant. If the boys whacked the parents, maybe they took an international one-way flight.”

      Decker thumbed through Yalom’s passport—pages of stamped entries back into the States, Yalom’s residing country. Then there were many other pages of foreign ink—Canada, Mexico, countries of Western and Eastern Europe including Russia, entries from the Far East, Latin America, and Africa. Lots from Africa—Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Liberia, Angola, Sudan, Ethiopia, Zaire, plus a host of other countries Decker didn’t know existed.

      Dalia’s visa was simpler—stamps from Western Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States every time she reentered the country.

      Marge said, “Yalom was quite the Phileas Fogg.”

      Decker said, “You sound skeptical about something.”

      “An Israeli going to Russia? I thought the Jews were leaving Russia for Israel.”

      “Yalom’s a diamond dealer,” Decker said. “Russia has diamond mines.”

      Marge paused. “Oh.”

      Decker said, “What were you thinking about?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe Yalom was helping some of his countrymen to get out of Russia … something like that.”

      Decker didn’t answer.

      “Farfetched, huh?”

      “I wouldn’t say that,” Decker said. “You see a passport like this, you wonder what’s going on.”

      “I’m thinking the guy’s an agent. Maybe that’s why the family disappeared.” Marge took his passport and leafed through it. “Lots of Third World countries.”

      “I noticed.”

      “Okay, so South Africa has diamond mines. His travels there make sense. But what’s in Namibia or Angola?”

      “Don’t know.”

      Marge handed the passport back to Decker. He flipped through the booklet again. Several entries for each African state he had visited. “I don’t even know why he’d even bother going to South Africa. From what Yalom’s partner told me, VerHauten brings the uncut stones to market in Antwerp, Belgium. The cut stones are bought in Israel.” Decker recapped his conversation with Gold.

      Marge said, “So Yalom—even being a diamond dealer—really has no need to go anywhere except Antwerp and Israel.”

      “If I understood Gold correctly, that’s true.”

      “And if Russia is only dealing with this VerHauten, what could Yalom possibly hope to gain by going to Russia?”

      “Only thing that comes to me is maybe Yalom’s talking to people sub rosa,” Decker said. “Maybe he’s making inroads that Gold doesn’t know about.”

      “He’s double-dealing his partner?”

      “It’s been known to happen.”

      “His partner finds out, gets mad, and whacks him?”

      “It’s been known to happen.”

      “I still like the idea of him being an agent,” Marge announced. “What else could explain all that traveling?”

      Decker laughed softly.

      “Go ahead,” Marge said, testily. “Scoff.”

      Decker smiled again. “No, it’s not that.” He glanced around the house. “I’m just thinking that Mossad must pay pretty damn well.”

      “Didn’t you say the wife paid for the house?”

      Decker nodded. “I’ll ask Gold about his partner’s wanderlust.”

      “Maybe they’re in some kind of covert operation together, Pete,”

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