He sighed. "You know how it is, Adam, most people don't want to get involved. Some said they saw nothing, that they were facing the wrong way and that it all happened too fast. Others said they couldn't tell who got physical first."

"What caused the fight?"

"The guy who got sliced said Davidson made some remark about his wife. She was in the bathroom when it happened, so she saw nothing. Davidson swore the guy was lying. The witness corroborated his version."

"What's the name of the witness?"

"Let me see…Saul Mercer."

I frowned, reaching into my pocket for my notebook. I began flipping pages. "What was that name again?"

"Mercer. Saul Mercer. Why? You know him?"

I found the right page. What I read there got my mind working. "No," I told Reuben. "Never met the man."

"That's all I have on Alon Davidson. That one arrest. Other than that, he's clean."

I thanked him and once again he invited me to drop by to see his children. I said that I was too busy at the moment, but maybe when I was done with the current case, I'd pay them a visit.

I placed another call, this time to Itamar Levine's law firm in Haifa. The secretary who picked up told me he'd gone home for the day. I asked her whether he had a phone at home and she said he didn't. "He'll be in tomorrow," she said. "Call back then."

There was a falafel stall by the bus stop and the vendor filled a pita for me with falafel balls and salad and a liberal amount of tehina. I sat on a metal bench and ate. When I was done, I wiped my mouth with the paper napkin the vendor had provided and balled it up and tossed it in the trash. Then the bus arrived. Forty-five minutes later I was back in Tel Aviv. Forty minutes after that, I was at the Tel Aviv harbor.

Walking down the pier, I came upon a grizzled, weathered-faced man who was rolling up the sail of a fifteen-foot boat and asked him if he knew where I could find Alon Davidson. He said he hadn't seen him that day and pointed to two men who were smoking on the pier fifty feet further south. "They're Davidson's men. Ask them."

The two men were both Bulgarian Jews, recent arrivals in Israel, and their Hebrew was heavily accented and rudimentary. But we managed to communicate, and one of them, the one who spoke better, told me Davidson had gone home a few hours ago. "He be back—I not know, tomorrow in the morning, maybe?"

I told them I'd come by tomorrow and they both nodded as if they didn't care, which they probably didn't. They didn't ask who I was or why I was looking for their boss.