I got lucky and caught a bus that was only slightly less warm than a furnace. I sat beside an overweight woman who mumbled to herself in singsong Italian while she stared out the window as if at a picture show. Behind me, two men spoke in animated Yiddish, while in the seats in front of me, a mother was busy hectoring her eight-year-old daughter in staccato Polish. That was the soundtrack of Tel Aviv, a cocktail of languages and dialects and accents all pouring past and into each other.

The bus ferried me across town and deposited me near the middle of Rothschild Boulevard. I trekked north, past Bilu Elementary School in whose basement the Tel Aviv Chamber Choir was conducting a rehearsal. Harmonious singing accompanied me as I made the turn to Lunz Street and located the building where Esther Grunewald and Willie Ackerland had lived and died.

There were six apartments, two to a floor. Esther and Willie had lived in number six. I examined the labels on the mailboxes in the lobby, hoping to find that the people who had lived in the building ten years ago were still in residence. Another disappointment. Of the six mailboxes, only one name was familiar to me—Sassoon, the landlord's name—and it appeared on two of the boxes, numbers one and six. I frowned. Did a relative of the landlord now occupy the apartment where the double murder had taken place?

I mounted the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the door marked six. No answer. Back on the ground floor, I rapped on the door to apartment one and heard a gravelly voice rasp at me to wait a minute.

A swarthy, pockmarked man of around fifty opened the door, holding a cigarette in one hand and a steaming coffee glass in the other. The cigarette was fat and Turkish, the coffee thick and the color of mud. I could not determine which emitted a stronger smell. The man wore a white undershirt tucked into black slacks. His arms were covered in dense black curls. More curls sprouted from his scalp and to them he'd pinned a small black kippah. He was five foot six, with a spare frame and dark, heavy-lidded eyes that were now peering up at me.

"Abraham Sassoon?" I asked.

He nodded. "And you are?"

I gave him my name and told him the reason for my visit. The corners of his mouth drew down to form a mournful arc when I mentioned the murders.

"Come in," he said. "Come in."