"I'm sorry. Please forgive me but murder is never convenient," she said, wedging behind him, afraid he'd shut the door in her face.

"We're sitting shiva."

Her blank look and foot inside the door forced him to explain.

"A ritual mourning. Shiva helps acknowledge our suffering while we pray for the dead."

"Please excuse me, this will only take a few minutes of your time," she said. "Then I promise I'll go."

He put his scarf over his head and led her into the dark-paneled living room. An open prayer book rested on the polished pine sideboard. The dining-room mirror was swathed in black cloth. Lit tapers sputtered in pools of wax, giving off only a faint light. Women clad in black, moaning, rocked back and forth on sticklike chairs and orange crates.

She kept her head down. She didn't want to breathe the old, sad smell of these people.

A young rabbi, his ill-fitting jacket hanging off him, greeted her in a jumble of Hebrew and French as they passed him. She wanted to flee this apartment, so dark and heavy with grief.

She overheard French rap from a radio in a back room, where sulky teenagers congregated by an open door.

The crime-scene tape was gone but the insistent noise of the leaky faucet in the dingy bathroom and aura of death remained. She'd always see the scuffed black shoe with the worn heel and the vacant white face carved by that swastika. An odd, tilted swastika with rounded edges.

The crime-scene technicians had left neat stacks of Lili Stein's personal items on the rolltop desk. The bloated angelfish and tank were gone. A knitting basket full of thick needles and multicolored yarn spilled out across the hand-crocheted bedspread. Issues of the Hebrew Times were piled in the corner and beside the bed.

"Yours?" She picked up a folded section. The paper crinkled and a color supplement fell out.

"Maman ignored French newspapers," he said. "Refused to own a television. Her only extravagance was a subscription to the Hebrew newspaper from Tel Aviv."