Orange Grove Mystery

British police who have spent the past year vainly trying to keep Palestine's Jews and Arabs from each other's throats were faced with a new poser last week. In a shallow grave in an orange grove near Tel Aviv was discovered the moldering body of Jacob Zwanger, onetime Soviet Vice-Commissar of Harbors for the Black Sea region. The police discovered that he had been stabbed 17 times and strangled in the basement of a nearby house owned by Reuben Schenzvit, gunrunner and onetime salesman for the late munitions tycoon, Sir Basil Zaharoff. In the house was a radio transmitting set powerful enough to reach Europe, a dozen microphones and dictographs. Leading from the basement to the orange grove was a 400-yd. tunnel.

Schenzvit, ostensibly a land agent, was charged with murder. Arrested with him was a crony, Joseph Miller, a Nazi agent employed by the Third Reich to prevent Jews in Palestine from getting proscribed money out of Germany. Schenzvit had made a fat living during the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, by selling arms to both sides. He also shipped girls to South America, was still doing so until his arrest. Schenzvit and Miller met in Palestine, went into the arms-racket together, had a neat arrangement whereby Schenzvit sold guns to the Jews, Miller to the Arabs. The murdered Zwanger, employed by Schenzvit, sealed his own doom by knowing too much.

To this thick plot another ingredient was added when the electrician who had installed Schenzvit's radio committed suicide. In his house the police found charred papers showing Italian writing. For months there have been rumors of Italian agents subsidizing riotous Arab leaders to embarrass Britain. The police, looking next for a "beautiful blonde spy" said to have been in Schenzvit's confidence, declared: "We have crossed the trail of one of the most important and alarming espionage rings in the history of the Near East." Among other things, Schenzvit was "plotting to free Palestine from Britain's rule."

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