"I get that," I said. "No one likes to see people they know get murdered. And I get that you liked Esther. But why do you care enough about her and Willie Ackerland to spill your guts to me? Word is you Irgun members are a tight-lipped bunch. Yet here you are, giving me names of other members, telling me all sorts of things, and I don't understand why you're doing it."

"I feel responsible."

"Why would you? Did you have anything to do with their deaths?"

"Of course not," she said vehemently. "How can you think such a thing? It's simply the fact that I had a part in bringing them here, to Tel Aviv, where they ended up dying."

"And you're willing to break the law, act the vigilante, perhaps go to jail for many years just to avenge them? It's more than most people would do."

"Maybe I am not like most people."

That I could believe. But I was still not satisfied with her answers. I leaned forward, elbows on knees, my eyes glued to hers. "That's all it is, Mira? Just some vague sense of responsibility? Nothing more?"

She answered without hesitation. "Nothing more."

I searched for a tell, some sign she was not being truthful. There was nothing. She looked completely honest. I held her gaze for a minute more, and when she didn't flinch or avert her eyes, I gave up. "Okay. I need to get going."

Mira nodded and rose to her feet with me. At the door I turned to her. "If you're keeping anything from me, Mira, now's the time to tell me."

"I told you everything I know," she said, and if she was lying, she should have considered a career in theater.

I nodded and reached for the door handle. I had the door half open when I felt her hand on my forearm. Her fingers were cool.

"Adam," Mira said, and for an instant it seemed she was about to say something important, "good luck."

"Yeah," I said.

From Frishman I turned south to Dizengoff Street. At Dizengoff Square all the benches were taken. Dogs on leashes barked greetings at each other. Around the central fountain strolled men and women. Some were dressed in light, airy clothes appropriate for the climate, while others were encased in heavier, more formal attire, which they had brought with them from much cooler lands and from which they could as yet not bear to part. There was laughter and chatter and a sense of optimism. For a fleeting moment it seemed that this was not a country that had just emerged from a terrible war and whose very existence was precarious, but a normal, peaceful land inhabited by people who were not intimately acquainted with disaster and forever fearful of it.