I could hear him breathing fast and heavy above me. Then, through eyes that were sending me blurry, unfocused images, I caught him shifting his weight and saw his foot rushing toward me. I could do nothing to defend myself. My arms were limp and useless. I couldn't even brace myself for the kick before his foot drilled itself into my stomach. I let out a choked grunt and folded in half, retching violently. Bile rose to the base of my throat, clawing to get out. Breathless and in agony, an incongruous, panicked thought shrieked in my mind. Don't throw up. Mustn't waste food. Who knows when you'll eat again. The shock and pain had transported me back to Auschwitz, where starvation was the norm.

"You been filling my wife's head with poison, you little shit. Telling her all sorts of lies about me and Esther Kantor." He had a rough voice, hard and merciless. I could make out his outline. Elena was right, Alon Davidson was not a man you were likely to mistake for another. Massive, both in height and width—though exactly how tall I could not determine from where I lay. He shifted his feet, the soles of his shoes scuffing against the pavement. Then he kicked me again, in the lower stomach, right where one of the bullets I'd taken in the war had left a scar. All the air went out of my body. I couldn't draw breath and my vision turned dark.

He said, "I'm going to make you hurt." Then came a click and the smell of sea salt and fish close to my nostrils, followed by the awareness that he had crouched down beside me. He grabbed my hair again, pulling my head up, and if my eyes were open, they weren't sending my brain any signals, because all I saw was black. I knew that pain was coming, bad pain, like the time a sadistic prison guard in Auschwitz had whipped me a few dozen times and I thought I would die from agony.

I tried bracing myself for the pain, for that was the only thing you could do when you were helpless and about to be hurt. You could suffer through it with as much dignity as you could muster so that later, if there was a later, you could stare at yourself in the mirror and not drown in shame and self-loathing.

So I told myself to be ready, to take it without shaming myself, that there would be a day of reckoning, of revenge. There had to be. I wasn't about to die in the street like a dog, not after all I'd survived. But another voice, a nasty voice I barely recognized as my own, whispered that I knew full well that people die anywhere, anytime. Even good people. That death has no order or reason. It simply takes what it wants when it wants.