"If you come with me to the station and make a full confession, I will visit Judah's grave every two months while you're incarcerated. I will lay flowers and a stone on his grave. I will recite the kadish. I will do those things, Michael, over a headstone that bears Judah's true name, and those of his father and mother."

I paused, scratching the number on my arm.

"I'm giving you a chance to do right by Talia, by Judah, and by Willie Ackerland and his mother. If you don't confess, it will be hard for them to be reunited. Malka may not believe that the boy she's been raising is not really your son. What would Talia want you to do, Michael? What would she tell you to do?"

He didn't answer for a long while. Outside the chirping of a songbird was drowned by the guttural bark of an angry dog. A woman in a neighboring building called out something in Yiddish. Light fell across the bed in the corner, where I was sure Michael had spent endless nightmare-filled nights. The apartment no longer felt cold. I was filled with a bleak sadness.

After what might have been five minutes, Michael reached down, picked up the beer bottle, brought it to his lips, and drained it. He wiped his lips and placed the bottle on the floor once more. Then he stood up.

"All right," he said. "Let's go."

34

I had worried Henrietta would not look kindly on my suggestion that she share her story with a reporter, but she jumped at the idea. "This way my Jacob's name will never be forgotten," she said.

The three of us met in Café Tamar the day after I walked Michael to the police station, after I went to see Henrietta and told her I'd found her son. I waited outside for Henrietta and introduced her to Birnbaum when she arrived. I had already filled him in as to the basic outline of the case—the motive, the perpetrator, the reason behind the method of killing and the disfigurement of the bodies—and his police contacts were sure to provide him with additional information. It was a sanitized, much-abbreviated outline, of course. I had held some things back—Mira Roth's desire for vengeance, Manny Orrin and his pictures, Alon Davidson and his assault on me, and Mr. Strauss and the assassin he had hired to kill me. The latter had a lengthy criminal record. Reading between the lines of various newspaper reports, it was clear that the police had no leads as to who killed him.

If Birnbaum had caught on that I was withholding information, he did not voice any protest. On the contrary, he was as happy as a boy on his birthday who had just been gifted the item he'd most longed for.