The Unlucky Woman by Jonathan Dunsky

Author:Jonathan Dunsky [Dunsky, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-01T05:00:00+00:00

8

Reuben Tzanani handed me the police report. It consisted of six pages. One of them was typed, the rest handwritten in pencil. "You can read it here if you like, Adam. I doubt it would take you very long."

I nodded and read the report while sitting before his desk at the police station on Yehuda Halevi Street. He, in the meantime, filed away a small mountain of papers in two metal filing cabinets that stood against one wall of his tiny office.

He had the window open, and the city provided a lively soundtrack to my reading. It took me fifteen minutes to read the report twice, jotting some notes in my notebook as I went along.

All told, it wasn't much. A routine report about a car accident. Time, place, the names of the driver and the woman who was injured. Baruch Elron was the driver. Clara Lipkind was the victim.

The report contained interviews with witnesses to the accident. Four people in total, all women, gave their descriptions of what had happened. Based on these, the conclusion arrived at by the reporting officer and later approved by his lieutenant was that the driver was not to blame. Reading the interviews, I could not fault their decision. Nurse Golobinski would not have been pleased with me.

After thanking Reuben and giving a vague promise to drop by and visit him and his family in the very near future, I left the police station and made my way north to Sirkin Street. Baruch Elron lived there.

He wasn't in. His wife told me I should look for him at a nearby café. I went over there and found him sitting alone at a table near the rear. A cup of coffee and a plate dotted with crumbs sat on his table next to a batch of newspapers. He was reading Kol-Haa'm, the paper of the Israeli communist party, when I came over and introduced myself.

He was plump and in his forties, with thinning brown hair, a bulbous nose, and pouches under two narrowly spaced eyes. He looked very tired, and his expression was somber. It turned even more so when I explained what I was there to see him about.

"You want to know what happened?" Baruch Elron said, rubbing one rounded cheek with a short-fingered hand. "I must have told that story a hundred times since it happened. And I've run it through my mind ten thousand times at least. I suppose talking about it again wouldn't hurt. Besides, it's not like I have anything better to do."

He gestured for me to sit and flicked a final glance at the newspaper in his hand before crumpling it and tossing it on a nearby chair. "First time I ever read that rag. I'm the farthest thing from a communist there is, but it's better than sitting around going crazy, you know?"

"Because of the accident?" I said.

"Because of the accident. I can't think of much else since it happened. The sound of the impact, how she flew through the air, seeing her lying there on the pavement with blood gushing from her head.

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