An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery

by Robert Rosenberg

He went to the panel of intercom buttons, standing so the camera would only get a shot of his back, and pressed Witkoff’s once, a full beat long. Nothing happened. He tried again, shorter. Still nothing. A third tap at the button.

  “Da, da,” a female voice answered, then asked in a tone that Cohen understood, even if he didn’t know Russian, “Who is it?” “From the electric company,” Cohen said in Hebrew.

  “I no know electricity,” the woman stammered in pidgin Hebrew. “Video, video,” she instructed.

  “Electricity,” Cohen said. “I’m not the cable man. Electricity.”

  “Televizia. Look televizia,” the woman’s voice said.

  He turned to face the camera, smiled at her, and then pulled out his wallet and showed her a business card. It was the photographer’s. But he doubted she could make out the writing, let alone read the Hebrew. “Electric company,” he tried again, giving a quick grin to the camera then turning to face the door.

  The buzzer went off. Cohen pushed through the glass door into the lobby. Enough sun had poured into it to make the central heating redundant. He wiped slight beads of sweat that gathered on his forehead.

  When the elevator opened he found himself in a small corridor with only one door. A young platinum blonde woman in jeans and a blue shirt tied into a halter was peering through the crack in the open apartment door as he came out of the elevator.

  “We had a report about a problem here,” he said, opening the fuse box cabinet set into the wall opposite the elevator doors.

  “No. No problem here,” the woman said in Hebrew with a whiny Russian accent. But she opened the door a little more.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Hot.” He smiled at her. “Water?” he asked, with an exaggerated pantomime of a man drinking, smiling at her with all the charm he could muster.

  She smiled, and leaving the door open, left the entrance and disappeared into the apartment. He followed the clicking of her heels on the marble floor.

  Through a short lobby, he came into a broad expanse of living room with a sixteen-person dining table and two distinct sitting areas, including one for a wide-screen television screen and a baby grand piano. A broad wooden desk stood in the near corner, holding an elegant pen set and a switchblade for a letter opener. No papers or ashtrays, no coffee cups or opened books littered its surface.

  Cohen was looking for anything that would give him a sense of Witkoff the person. So far, all he had was a neatness that was almost unnatural. There were photographs, all including a man with short cropped gray hair. He assumed that was Witkoff.

  In the kitchen, immediately to his right, he heard a cupboard close, then the clink of a glass on a counter.

  Just then, his eyes fell on the last thing he expected to see: on a side table next to a rocking chair, he saw something that truly shocked him: a copy of the German edition of his book.

  In the kitchen, water was running in the sink. He strode across the room, his sneakers silent on the stone floor.

  The clicking of her heels on the stone floor suddenly resumed. He put down the book, but remained standing in the middle of the room.

  “Hey!” she cried.

  He flung up his hands, showing he had not touched anything, surrendering to her. It made her pause and look at him thoughtfully for a second, and then she found the word. “Out, out. Now.” She said it like she was shooing a stray animal.

  He smiled again and took a step forward, telling her in Hebrew and gesturing that he was sorry, but asking to use the bathroom, as well.

  Again that made her pause, considering her alternatives.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead. She nodded.

  “Thanks,” Cohen said. “Which way?” he signed, pointing at two doors and a corridor entrance that exited from the main room, itself easily bigger than his entire apartment at home in Jerusalem.

  She sighed and pointed at a door to his right. He patted his belly softly, as if to say it was very weak, and closed the door behind him. His stomach was fine. He dropped the toilet seat so she could hear, if she was waiting beyond the door. Then he waited. Thirty seconds went by. He grunted slightly, then sighed, wanting to make her think he’d be a while.

  Sure enough, after another few seconds, he heard her mutter something to herself, and then her footsteps tapped their rhythm away from the door. He waited another few seconds, then opened the door a crack. It gave him a view of most of the big room. He peeked around the corner. She wasn’t in the room.

  He strode to the book, picked it up, and thumbed through it quickly. It had been read. Maybe twice, or more.

  Axoffee stain marred one page, another was dog-eared. It was the chapter that explained the witness relocation program to Germany.

  A phone rang through the apartment. He froze for an instant, and then the ringing stopped. He heard her voice, speaking in Russian. It gave him more time. He thumbed through the pages again, looking for notes, anything to indicate why Witkoff would have the book. This time he found something that he missed the first time. It made his hand shake slightly.

  The book was inscribed “With gratitude.” No date was added to Benny Lassman’s autograph. Nor did the handwriting say to whom the gratitude was addressed.

  The clicking of the woman’s heels on the stone floor suddenly began approaching from somewhere behind him in the depth of the apartment’s other rooms.

  For a second he was tempted to take the book. But its absence would draw attention to his presence. He didn’t think the woman was reading the book, but he had the feeling that as long as he left it in its place she wouldn’t make the connection between the grim face on the cover and the electrician with the smiling pantomime of drinking water.

  So he put down the book exactly where it had been and went back to the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

  “Finish?” she asked through the door.

  He flushed the toilet, running water in the sink for a second before he opened the door, drying his hands on a small guest towel. “Thank you,” he told her, relief on his face, walking past her with a smile that turned grim as soon as she closed the door behind him.

  21.

  “No interviews about me,” Cohen had said that night in Frankfurt, when, on Cohen’s heels right up to the boarding gate for the flight to Rome, Benny had kept insisting that they had another best-seller to write. “No,” said Cohen. He didn’t want to deny Lassman the chance to make a living. He just didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself. “There’s nothing I can do to stop you. But I don’t have to cooperate,” he had explained to the writer.

  “I’ve got a good relationship with Leterhaus,” Lassman had said, referring to the German cop running the case. “I can do it from his point of view. Hell, I can do it from my point of view.” “In fiction,” Cohen warned.

  “I can’t let this get by me, Avram,” Lassman had tried, appealing to Cohen’s loyalty. “You’ve got to understand that. You can afford to let the ihoment pass. I can’t.”

  That was when they were still in Frankfurt. Cohen sighed then, as he did now, speeding on the highway to Jerusalem, using one hand on the wheel, the other on the cellular phone, trying to get through to the reporter. The number had been busy since he left Tel Aviv. It was still busy as Cohen crawled through the constantly clogged entrance to town, past the foreign ministry and through the Valley of the Cross until he was at the Gaza Road.

  There he took a left, and three streets into Rehavia, he took a right, then another, finding a parking spot half up a sidewalk at the end of the cul-de-sac.

  Lassman lived on the ground floor in the back of a six flat apartment building in the neighborhood. The weight of the wet snow from the storm had broken tree branches that Cohen had to skirt as he strode down the slate path around the building into the back garden. The sun had been almost warm in Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem, the mountain altitude cut the heat, and even in the ostensible shelter of the buildings around him there was a strong breeze. In the shade of the old Rehavia
trees that enveloped Lassman’s unkempt garden and patio, very little sunlight gleamed through the leaves. It was cold.

  “Benny?” Cohen shouted, banging on the peeling white door.

  “Who is it?” Benny called out from inside.

  “Cohen.”

  “Avram?”

  “Open up, it’s cold out here.”

  Instinctively, by habit, Cohen slipped a foot into the door as Benny, unshaven and red-eyed, wearing a bathrobe over a T-shirt, trousers, and two pairs of thick mismatched army socks, opened a crack to the cold.

  “What the hell is your connection to Alex Witkoff?” Cohen demanded, pushing past Benny into an overheated low-ceiling living room and study.

  Lassman’s computer screen glowed in the semidarkness of the room, along with a table lamp on the desk and another bulb burning over a small kitchenette.

  “Who?”

  “Witkoff, Witkoff,” Cohen said impatiently, unzipping his jacket. “Owns a chemicals and trading company. Lives in Tel Aviv. Russian millionaire, possibly dirty. Probably,” he added.

  “Believe me, Avram, I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “You autographed the book for him. ‘ for all your help,’ you wrote, ‘ gratitude,’ ” he added, quoting directly.

  They were eye to eye. Cohen could smell Lassman’s breath and sweat and realized the writer was sick with the flu. “That’s what you signed in his copy of the book.”

  “I signed a lot of those books,” Benny protested, then coughed so badly he bent over, grasping his lungs, grimacing in pain.

  “You wrote ‘ gratitude,’ ” Cohen pointed out again.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lassman said anxiously, then broke into a cough.

  Cohen took a deep breath, trying to regain control.

  “I was just about to make a cup of tea and cognacxfve got this flu,” said Benny. “You have no idea how sick I am.”

  There was a dry and claustrophobic smell in the room, which was overfurnished with Lassman’s landlady’s old heavy upholstered furniture.

  “Alexander Witkoff,” Cohen repeated.

  “Why don’t you sit down,” Lassman offered. “Calm down, tell me what this is about. I was about to make some tea.” He didn’t wait for Cohen to sit down, and instead shuffled toward the little kitchenette attached to the main room that Lassman had turned into an office.

  Cohen’s glance naturally went to the desk. Lassman was untidy, not sloppy. No overflowing ashtrays or unwashed cups and glasses were to be seen. But on the floor around the desk and on level surfaces in the room, stacks and piles of papers, magazines, and books were probably organized in a way that only Lassman could understand.

  “I heard about Nissim,” Benny said, his back to Cohen, who was glancing over the papers on the desk. “I said to myself,” Lassman continued, “it was bound to happen.

  That guy took chances. Big chances.” “He was murdered,” Cohen said bluntly.

  Lassman turned, the bottle of cognac in his hand. “What are you talking about? The radio said an accident.”

  Cohen shook his head. “There was a shooting.” “Who did it?” “The system says it was Kobi Alper. But I’m looking at Russians. And one of my Russians had the book. Alexander Witkoff.” He repeated the name. “You signed his book.”

  “Could be, I don’t know. I’ll have to check the notes.”

  “Now.” “Why don’t you sit down?” he asked Cohen, pointing at a stack of papers on the seat of an armchair. “Just drop the pile on the floor.” Lassman turned back to the kitchen counter to prime the two cups of tea with shots of Extra Fine, a cheap brown brandy sold only in Jerusalem.

  Cohen reached for the pile of magazines and photocopies sitting on the chair. The top document was a photocopy of a three-inch clipping from a Texas newspaper.

  Headlined “Book Fair Bomb,” it was a wire service version of what happened in Frankfurt.

  Underneath that little clip was a glossy American magazine that compared the Cohen case to the Rushdie case.

  The next was an article that analyzed Cohen’s book and reached the conclusion that the mystery bomber was ideologically motivated by Nazism. Still standing, Cohen leafed through the thick pile. There were photocopies of book reviews and letters to the editor, there were original magazines and ragged tear sheets from newspapers. In one way or another it was about him, his book, and the bomb—and why Nazis did it.

  “What is all this?” he asked, “all these articles?”

  Lassman turned around with the two cups of tea. He passed one to Cohen with a long reach, then put his own cup down on this desk and picking up a blanket crumpled on the floor beside his chair, wrapped himself like a mummy, and sat down at the desk. One hand held the blanket closed, while the other he used for his tea. He smiled at Cohen. “Clips, research. Notes. Books. What it looks like.”

  Cohen knew very well why he didn’t want to give interviews, why he didn’t want to cooperate with the journalists.

  What he didn’t know, until then, was just how much attention his case had received. He had stopped asking Carey to send him reviews even before the Frankfurt Book Fair. Leterhaus only sent news when there was some, which had become less and less frequent.

  Tina, too, had a life that would have to go on after Cohen.

  He only asked that she keep the media away from him. He let her sell translation rights, but nothing else. And yes, he’d let the book be sold to Hollywood, on condition they “don’t use the title, don’t name the character Cohen, and don’t ask for interviews,” and then, just to make sure she understood, he added, “and I don’t have to go there.” He eventually compromised. They could use Benny’s title. But he knew his conditions precluded any sale.

  At first, Tina called almost once a day, each time asking with a nervous giggle, “So when do you think the coast will be clear?” He’d say only when the murderer was caught.

  Gradually, the calls dropped off to once a week and then every other week, until finally, she stopped calling entirely.

  Her office staff was efficient, of course. As the checks came in, she wired the money—less her commission—to the proper accounts. But Laskoff handled that side of the matter for Cohen.

  He was looking around the room at the piles, astonished by the amount of material. “It’s not all about you, of course,” Lassman said. “The Nazi stuff is on the couch.

  Messianicists over there,” he added, pointing to the left of the desk, “and Israeli criminals in Frankfurt over here.” “What’s this?” Cohen asked, pointing to the pile he put down on the floor.

  “Stuff that still needs to be filed.”

  “And where’s Alexander Witkoff in all of this?” “How should I know?” asked Lassman. “I’m not looking at Russians. At least none have turned up in my investigation … “

  “I am not interested in your investigation,” said Cohen angrily. He pushed himself to his feet from the armchair.

  Lassman looked surprised, and was even more surprised when Cohen stepped over a pile of files toward the desk.

  Cohen knew that despite all the semichaos of the room’s surroundings, Lassman was meticulous about saving information in his computer.

  “I’m telling you, Avram,” Lassman said, standing up and away from the chair in front of the computer. “I haven’t come across any Russians on this story.”

  Cohen sat down in front of the computer. He gave the mouse a little shake to clear the screen saver of bouncing quadrangles. An array of icons was laid out on the screen.

  “Top righth and corner,” Lassman said, sighing.

  Cohen clicked on the icon of a telephone named “contacts.”

  A spreadsheet listing names and telephone numbers in columns opened up. He clicked for the find menu and typed Witkoff’s name into the window. “Not found.” said the box that appeared on the screen after a few seconds.

  “See,” Benny said, watching from over Cohen’
s shoulder.

  Cohen typed “Alex” into the box.

  Lassman laughed. “It’s going to find hundreds of names.

  At least two dozen from Alexandria.” “Egypt?” Cohen asked.

  “No, Virginia. You wouldn’t know about it. Did a great cocktail party there. Collected a lot of business cards. And do me a favor, when it gets to Alexandra, remind me of her last name. She picked me up in Chicago. Amazing woman.”

  “Shut up, Benny,” Cohen muttered, slapping the return button with a growing anger as one by one the machine found every instance of “Alex” in the spreadsheet. Lass man did collect a lot of business cards with Alexandria, Virginia, addresses. And Alexandra’s last name was Swartz.

  But no Alexander Witkoff showed up in Lassman’s computerized phone book.

  “Maybe if you gave me a description,” Lassman suggested.

  “I only saw his picture.” “And?” Cohen thought about the pictures he had seen at Witkoff’s penthouse. Could he even be sure the man he had seen in the photos was indeed Witkoff? Most of the pictures had shown the man with famous people—a minister, a singer, a television talk show host. One photo had stood out, because in it the man had been alone, at the hotel. He hadn’t been praying, but rather posing with the big stones against his back. It had been afternoon, Cohen could tell from the picture, both from the squint in the man’s eyes and a hint of shadow on the wall behind the man. He had been wearing a kippa perched with unfamiliarity on his head; a new tallith, edged with gold embroidery, had glistened white in the bright sun. The man had not really been smiling, but there had been an almost smug self-satisfaction in his expression.

  “Short hair. Cropped close. Very short hair. Fifties.

  Maybe forties. Thin eyebrows. Thin lips.” Cohen thought a second longer. The photo had been full-frame, but had cut the man’s legs just below the knees. However, the tallith, conservative-style and embroidered with gold at the neck, had reached only to Witkoff’s waist. “Tall,” Cohen concluded.

  Lassman shook his head. “You have to understand. I spent a month on the road in the States touring for that book. I signed hundreds of those. Mostly to strangers.