An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery

by Robert Rosenberg

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The press, the publicity, it’s perfect. For sales. Forget everything he said about suing you. He loves you. You’ve got the perfect excuse why you can’t go on tour.”

  “Someone is dead, Tina,” Lassman reminded her.

  “Of course, I know. Poor girl. But it really solves our problem, doesn’t it?”

  And Lassman had to agree. Meanwhile, Cohen asked Mathis to ask the hotel expert for the fastest connection from Frankfurt to Tel Aviv. Nobody tried to stop him. He wouldn’t have cared if they had. He didn’t care if people thought he was running into hiding.

  8.

  The first available flight out of Frankfurt that night was to Rome. From there, he caught a flight to Tel Aviv. He bought a first-class ticket and rode with a sleepy English rock and roll band and some bankers allowing themselves giddiness with celebration after signing a half-billion-dollar deal.

  Cognac helped him sleep most of the way, but it was an uneasy race home ahead of the dawn, made uneasier when he saw the morning’s tabloids at the newspaper stand at the arrivals hall at Ben-Gurion. His photo, getting into a car outside the hotel in Frankfurt, was on the front page of the morning Ma’ariv. He had avoided all the press in Germany —except Lassman, of course, who had stuck to him, like Tina, all the way to the airport.

  But he had heard a Hebrew question among those shouted at him in the lobby when he was escorted out in a pack of security, and at the bottom of the stairs outside the hotel, where Koethe’s black Mercedes S600 waited to take him to the airport, more reporters doused him with TV camera lights, flashing cameras, and questions while he, Tina, and Lassman got into the car.

  The headline in Ma’ariv asked “Who Tried to Kill Avram Cohen in Germany?” with a subhead reminding the reader that Cohen was “the secretive millionaire detective” whose “controversial autobiography” had been published in the United States. He didn’t buy the paper. Instead he strode briskly to his car in the long-term parking lot. Dawn caught up with him on the road to Jerusalem, the white sun blaring into his bleary eyes. All he wanted was a hot shower, a drink, and his bed. Traffic was already thick coming into the city, but he caught a green wave of traffic lights from the foreign ministry all the way to Liberty Bell Park, and from there, it was only a couple of blocks home. Getting out of his car in the tin-walled shack that had long served as the garage in the corner of the property in the little side street off Emek Refa’im, he could hear the phone ringing in his upstairs apartment. He didn’t rush to answer.

  So he ignored the speaker playing the message on the answering machine as he came into the apartment, dropping his bag on the living room-turned-study floor, unbuttoning his shirt, kicking off his trousers, and unbuckling his belt as he headed to the bathroom.

  When he came out of the shower, there was another voice, a second message. It was an American TV network “trying to reach Deputy Commander Cohen—for the second time.” Cohen didn’t respond. As soon as the man hung up, the phone began ringing again.

  Cohen went to the machine, rubbing his hair with a towel, absentmindedly turning on the computer to collect his e-mail, as he picked up a pair of half-spectacles he had lately needed to read—because of the computer, he forlornly admitted to himself—and peered down at the answering machine. Through the little plastic window he could see the tape had come to its end. In the five years he had owned the machine, it had never done that before.

  He looked at the phone for its fourth ring. At the end of the sixth, the machine would answer. He answered on the fifth.

  “Hello?” he asked gingerly.

  “Is this Avram Cohen?” a screechy-voiced woman asked.

  “Who is this?”

  “I think it’s too bad they didn’t get you,” the voice shrieked at him. “You should rot in hell, you Arab-lover.”

  He hung up, unplugged the phone, and looked at the monitor screen.

  Through the second phone line, the computer was connecting to his Internet provider. The two modems whistled at each other and within a minute, his mail client software was opening his mailbox.

  “Downloading 1 of 173,” the message bar said.

  Ordinarily, he received an average of five mail messages a day, all lists to which he subscribed, but only rarely participated.

  Two were about food and recipes, one a historical discussion of the era of the Romans and the Jewish Wars; there were occasional digests that announced new recordings, and one in which Jews and Arabs tried at civility in a discussion of the future of Jerusalem.

  He had early on signed up for several law enforcement discussion groups, but too much conspiracy theory and not enough intelligence showed up in them. He had retreated from them all.

  But he had conducted brief exchanges with individuals on some of the lists, a question here, an answer there. And TMC had a Web site, where for a few weeks during the site’s construction—without his knowledge—Cohen’s email address had appeared. As soon as he found out about the TMC site, he asked that his e-mail address be removed, and he changed his username at his Internet service provider.

  Once let loose, information is free, he knew. He clicked at the cancel button, but the program wanted to go on, so he flicked off the machine, cursing Lassman, and everybody else involved with the damn book, including the two reporters and three photographers who showed up outside his house that afternoon, woke him with knocking on his door—which he didn’t answer—and then camped out in the street until he turned off the lights to go to sleep that night.

  He cursed them all, but mostly himself: his vanity, his folly, his mistake.

  9.

  “You are apotz,” Ahuva said softly. Cohen snorted a laugh.

  Her opinions from the bench were always praised by the professionals for their clarity. In Hebrew, after all, the word mishpat means both law and sentence. She was known for writing a judgment that both the lawyers and clients could understand. Her precedents had yet to be overruled by the Supreme Court, and she made her first new point of law as a magistrate in her first year.

  Only with Cohen could she use a word ikepotz—about him or a colleague. It meant someone flaccid and pathetic.

  Only with her could he tell the whole truth. That was the magic of their relationship. “You are behaving like an idiot,” she said. “You have money. You have freedom. You have me,” she added with a slight coyness that nobody in her courtroom ever saw. “But you force yourself to be unhappy.”

  They were in her apartment in Tel Aviv. Just before dawn the day after he arrived home from Frankfurt, the last of the photographers gave up and left the street outside his house. A few minutes later, he slipped into his car and drove down to her place in Tel Aviv, quietly opening the door to her flat with his key.

  He sat in her living room, reading the weekend press coverage of the bomb attempt and his departure from Frankfurt.

  The speculation in the press ranged from Nazis and neo Nazis to terrorism. Two papers pointed out that he had made sworn enemies of several of the most extreme of the nationalist rabbis, those who were known to have found halachic rationale for the death of the prime minister. One was quoted as saying that he wouldn’t mourn if Cohen had been killed, but of course he didn’t recommend it. At least one Islamic fundamentalist group issued a statement denying they had anything to do with the bombing attempt.

  In the most serious of the Israeli press, that morning’s Ha’aretz, he found two stories. One was about the bombing attempt, the other about his book. The item about his book mostly complained that the book came out in English and German, but had not yet appeared in Hebrew. One publisher was quoted as saying he wanted to publish it in Hebrew, but that Cohen was “hesitating.” Cohen snorted.

  The most important sentence in the report was the last one: “Sources at the book fair told Ha’aretz that Cohen was in a dispute with his American publisher about the proper way to publicize the book. Now, with the attempt on his life, there should be no problem in
making the book well-known around the world.”

  Cohen dropped the paper to the floor and pulled off his reading glasses, rubbing his eyes. When he finished, Ahuva was standing at the entrance to the living room. She was wearing a bathrobe and her hair was wet.

  “Where have you been? The whole world’s been searching for you. People are even calling me.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He shrugged. “I needed someplace to stay. To think.”

  She sat down on the sofa beside him and put an arm over his shoulder and her head on his chest. “Of course,” she said.

  He stayed indoors all day. She had to go out for a meeting, but came home by two and found him in the kitchen, preparing dinner that night. It was as if nothing had happened to change their routine.

  They made love while the sun set into the sea behind a stretch of cirrus clouds, the changing colors faintly reflected on the white walls, sharply bouncing off a full length mirror beside the bed. Then they went out to the patio in bathrobes to let the cool breeze from the north dry their sweat.

  “A realpotz,” she emphasized. “You think the book was your mistake? You’re wrong. The book wasn’t the mistake.

  That wasn’t your vanity. Your vanity is your attitude. All high and mighty. You’re a martyr looking for a cause.”

  He knew she was right. But he didn’t know what to do about it. He hoped she would hand down a sentence. Not a punishment or fine, but a discipline of some sort that would define his direction, free him from the ambivalence that so plagued him.

  All his life, things had been clear to him. In childhood, as in all happy childhoods, everything was clear. On the run, in the camp, survival was clear. Afterward, hunting the killers was clear until it disgusted him. And even in the midst of a case, even when the only clarity was the faint sparkle of light reflecting through the fog, his questions never brought him up against the sense of paralysis that he felt crawling into his soul with the money he had inherited.

  Writing the book liberated him. But the attention that came with the book’s publication brought back the paralysis, the fear—yes, he admitted to her, he wasn’t afraid of the bomb or the bomber. He was afraid of the way he had become part of a spectacle. So much of his survival depended on his privacy, and more, on his ability to be anonymous. Even in the streets of Jerusalem, where he knew many faces and many more knew him, he could make himself almost invisible in a crowd.

  Yes, he was barrel-chested, but if he was ever seen in shorts in public it would reveal somewhat spindly legs. Of average height, his black hair had gone white over a very long period, with the last dark strands disappearing only in the last year. His skin was only dark on his face, forearm and hands, as well as a small triangle of chest where his top shirt button was usually unbuttoned. Over the years the hair in that triangle had thickened against the sun, turning into a little white forest where Ahuva’s fingers now played, teasing him.

  “You know what you ought to do?” she said to him suddenly, turning in her seat, holding his face with two hands, looking into his eyes.

  “Please, tell me,” he said. In the fading light, her red hair seemed to darken to a deeper shade, framing an oval face that was beginning to wrinkle. The difference in age had never been an issue between them their first ten years, in which secrecy ruled the relationship. The last seven, it was only a matter for gossips. But lately, she was drawing his attention to the years, the wrinkles, even asking if he thought a face-lift might one day be in order for her. The question had made him laugh. He had only discovered during that island vacation that she had been using coloring to control the whitening of her hair and keep it honey red.

  “Please, tell me, what should I do?” he asked again in exasperation.

  “No,” she decided sadly, “you’ll laugh.”

  “No, I promise I won’t.”

  “Get a new wardrobe. Indulge yourself.” He did have to stifle a laugh.

  She hit him on the chest. “I’m serious. Get a new wardrobe and a new car, pay the extra money, whatever it takes to fix up that house—if that’s what you really want to do. Build the computer system you want. Open a school or a restaurant, or any of those other ideas that you know you’ll never do. Or move in with me.”

  He grinned again.

  “No, you’re right, maybe that’s not such a good idea. I understand, you want to keep your privacy. Keep it. Spend what it takes and keep it. But stop blaming yourself. Start enjoying yourself.” “I am enjoying myself,” he said truthfully, “with you.

  And right now I’m going to enjoy myself even more by basting that roast in the oven,” he added, standing up.

  “The mushrooms this year are fantastic.”

  “You’re not taking me seriously,” she protested, reaching for him.

  But he stepped out of reach and curled a finger at her, humming tunelessly the Aranjuez, trying to be romantic.

  “Oh, but I am,” he said. “Come, I’ll show you.” And for the rest of the Shabbat weekend, they both, indeed, did enjoy.

  10.

  For almost two months he spoke once a week with Helmut Leterhaus in Frankfurt, asking about progress in the investigation. Leterhaus was looking for Cohen’s mystery chambermaid with the mole, but also collecting data on Israeli underworld figures in Germany.

  The BKA and END meanwhile looked for references to Cohen by terrorist groups. There were none, of course, as Cohen could have pointed out. Certainly none that had appeared in German. But as Lassman—who stayed in Frankfurt—had already pointed out to Leterhaus while Cohen was in the air going home, there were groups, small perhaps but zealous of their cause, who had targeted Cohen. “I understand there were at least two leaflets that named you among the people they consider—let me get my glasses—yes, ‘ to national Jewish interests,’ ” Leterhaus had said, surprising Cohen as much as Cohen had surprised him the first time Cohen called after returning to Jerusalem.

  Leterhaus, after all, had the distinct impression that Cohen didn’t want to help. Cohen didn’t say it was part of Ahuva’s sentence. And he also had not told Leterhaus about the leaflets. Lassman did.

  The BKA—specializing in counter terror—asked the Mossad for copies and translations of the leaflets found in the most radical of the settlements, as well as the short list of names of Jews around the world known for their support of violent opposition to the peace process, beginning with no regret over the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, whom they regarded as a traitor for conceding to the Palestinians control over parts of the Land of Israel.

  The Mossad complied, getting the documents through the Shabak, which since Cohen’s days as chief of CID in Jerusalem had its informers and agents, unwitting or not, infiltrate the radical Jewish right wing, where vigilantes plotted provocation and retaliations against the Arabs and the terrorism that came from their own fundamentalists and militants.

  For his last ten years on the police force, Cohen had spent at least half his time on the danger of civil wars. After Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre, which Cohen practically predicted long before it happened—while the chief of the general staff called it “a thunderbolt out of clear skies”—he hoped the system would have learned the lesson.

  Many were Americans; there were a few rabbis who said that assassinating Rabin was halachically acceptable, for a Jew was forbidden, under punishment of death, of handing another Jew over to the enemy, and as far as these rabbis were concerned that’s what Yitzhak Rabin had done by agreeing to make peace with the PLO. Six members of the Jewish Defense League and a few Israelis held under house arrest—mostly in the Hebron area—for a year after the Rabin assassination were also on the list. Leterhaus read the list aloud to Cohen, who recognized many of the names.

  “They believe it is in the Jewish interest to remove the mosques on the Temple Mount, in order to rebuild the Temple,” Cohen pointed out. He had wanted to believe that the assassination of the prime minister had entirely quenched th
e flames of violence that threatened civil war.

  He was doubtful, however, knowing how deep revenge could run a motive into darkness.

  With Dachau behind him, he had seen the limitless depths of evil and ever since had that as a measuring stick for the deed itself. But he never ceased to be astonished by the thin line between good and bad, and he knew from his years in Jerusalem that religious orthodoxy was no guarantee of goodness.

  But the idea that he would be targeted by the lunatic fringe, no matter how many of their plots he had foiled or friends put in jail, was absurd. When, fully serious, Leterhaus told Cohen that “Mr. Kaplan was disappointed his name wasn’t on the list,” Cohen lost his temper.

  “Find the woman with the mole,” he ordered. He spent hours working with Israel’s finest portrait painter, paying several thousand dollars for a set of drawings ranging from full-figure to a close-up of the face—all from Cohen’s memory as described to the artist.

  Leterhaus was grateful. The fingerprints collected from the hotel room turned up as Cohen’s and the dead chambermaid’s, and the thorough German police tracked down the three previous guests who had used the room to match against other prints found there. They were left with one half-thumbprint with no matches in their computer records.

  “You can help,” the inspector general had told Cohen, “but you are not to step outside channels.” Cohen on. He had carte blanche in the archives, as long as if and when he found something he reported it to CID, which would then pass it through proper Interpol channels to the Germans.

  So he spent most of November in the back attic of the Russian Compound. He sat by a round window he pushed open at the very end of the long row of shelves stacked with boxes and cartons, going back to the days when the British packed up the building Allenby had captured from the Russians in 1917, the police station that in the days of the British was known as Bevingrad, and the Jews called the Russian Compound, when they turned it into their police headquarters in West Jerusalem.