An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (19 page)

He showered and changed into a clean white shirt and gray twill trousers. He made a cup of black mud coffee and tried calling Shvilli again. It worried him that there was no answer so he tried Jacki again at her office, asking her why Shvilli’s phone wasn’t on. She blamed batteries and holes in the cellular net down south.

“As soon as you hear from him, tell him to call,” he said.

“I made those photocopies,” she added.

“Fax them to me,” he ordered, giving her the number.

“How’s Hagit?” “Last I spoke with her,” Jacki said, “she was demanding that they let her and the child go home already.”

“What do the doctors say?”

“They want her in a couple of more days. For observation.”

“Send me the fax,” he ordered, and hung up.

A few minutes later, he heard the computer answer the phone, open the fax reception program, and command the printer to make hard copies.

Comparing the license registration numbers on the speeding tickets to the notes he had made when he went to Witkoff’s place in Ramat Aviv Gimel, he identified the red BMW 328 convertible parked beside the Mercedes and the Land Rover.

Nissim’s logs named Yuhewitz and Witkoff, among several other names that Shvilli had mentioned. The dates were as recent as the three days before the murder.

He called Abu Kabir to ask for Raoul. But the forensics expert wasn’t going to be back in his office that day, said the secretary. Cohen left his cellular phone number in case the pathologist called and then tried Bensione again. But the photographer, too, was unavailable. Frustrated, he reached for the phone on his desk a third time.

But his cellular phone rang.

“Yes?” he answered.

“Boss, it’s me,” Shvilli said.

“Where are you?”

“Eilat.”

“And?” “Nissim was here.” “Yes, Jacki told me. The watchman saw him at the marina.”

“Yes, but there’s more. I know for sure he was at The Crown on Saturday night.” It was one of the resort town’s luxury hotels.

“He stayed overnight?” Cohen asked, surprised. Nissim would have called Hagit if he had been going to stay overnight at the hotel. Of that, Cohen was certain. There was crackling on the line, and then a shallow silence, and then Shvilli’s voice.

“It’s my fault,” the undercover cop was saying, “it’s my fault … ” Then the connection fell into silence again.

“Hello? Hello? Shvilli?” Cohen tried. “I can’t hear you.”

“… I didn’t. And I don’t know how he found out, but … “

Again the line dropped.

“Shvilli!” Cohen yelled. “The line’s breaking up. Call me on a regular phone. Take my number. Can you hear me?”

He dictated his Jerusalem number into the phone, not at all certain that Shvilli could hear, and closed the cellular phone, waiting for the phone to ring. When it didn’t after ten minutes, he used the asterisk code on his phone to redial the last number that had called him. It was busy. He tried again.

“Shvilli? Can you hear me?” he tried when the ringing stopped.

“Yes.”

“All right. Maybe the line’s okay now,” Cohen hoped aloud. “You said something was your fault. What was your fault?”

“There was a meeting. All the bosses. From all over the country. I should have known about it. I didn’t. But Nissim obviously did.”

“Russian bosses?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Maybe they spotted him. I don’t know. But I do know that he was here. Remember Pinny Shimoni from mounted patrol? He left the force a couple of years ago and moved down here. Got a job in security for the hotel.”

“Hesawnissim?”

“On Saturday night. Definitely on Saturday night.”

“About what?”

“He was with a woman,” said Shvilli. “That’s what Pinny told me. In the lobby.” Cohen said nothing, thinking. He wasn’t surprised by the report. Disappointed, yes. And more. Confused.

“Pinny knows her?”

“He wished.”

“Description?”

“Young, short black hair. Long legs. ‘ pussy’ Pinny told me.”

“So was he down there for the woman or the bosses?” Cohen asked Shvilli. At first he thought Shvilli’s silence was a sign of deliberation, but it went on too long.

“Shvilli?” he tried. “Was Witkoff there?” But the cellular phone connection had fallen again.

Cohen sighed and hung up, then used his regular telephone.

Opening the very first of the little yellow notebooks he had been filling since the morning he began the search through his memory in the attic of the Russian Compound, looking for the Frankfurt bomber among the informants he had sent to Germany, he went over his notes.

The forensics from the Frankfurt hotel had yielded very little. There had been the bomb, of course, but nothing in its design and construction had contained a tell-tale signature in any of the counter terror or police archives in either Germany or Israel.

Cohen’s fingerprints, and the dead chambermaid’s, had been all over the room. Cohen had no memory of gloves on the hands of the chambermaid he had nearly stumbled over in the corridor on his way to his room that night in Frankfurt. And the artist’s sketch he had had drawn up and sent to Germany had proved useless.

As long as the Germans believed the case of the murdered chambermaid and the bomb might have roots in some form of Nazism—whether the old-fashioned kind or one of the neo versions, punk or not—they felt driven to solve the case.

In his book, Cohen had admitted to killing “more than fifty” Nazis in more than a year of vengeance after liberation.

But he had detailed only two specific executions—his first (and the satisfaction it gave him) and the last (and the self-disgust he felt).

The rest, he said, didn’t matter, though he had catalogued the many ways he, as one of the nokmim—the avengers—operated: “We hanged and shot and strangled.

Knives, clubs, whatever was appropriate for the execution’s circumstances. Sometimes we hunted, sometimes by accident we came across a target. One simply died of a heart attack as soon as he realized what the three strangers on his doorstep wanted,” he had written.

So in Germany, archives had been opened, historians questioned, old newspapers scanned. There had been hundreds of such murders in the wilderness of Europe’s collapse and into the beginning of its reconstruction. Nobody suggested prosecuting Cohen. But the German enthusiasm for focusing on the bombing and murder had declined as the days went by and the press had caught another story and the experts had said it could take years to track down the children and grandchildren of Nazis killed by avengers after the war. Nonetheless, a few were found in those first few days after Frankfurt. One had actually heard of Cohen and his book. After the news story about the bomb at the book fair, she had bought the book. She loved it, she said.

Her father had been a colonel in the SS. She had no memory of him. Much younger neo-Nazis, punk or not, were also questioned. They laughed about the bomb and the dead chambermaid. But none of the known activists could be placed anywhere near the hotel in Frankfurt, and none knew any woman—or transsexual—with a mole on her jawline. Even the relatively educated leadership knew only what they had read in the newspapers and seen on television.

Nobody among them, of course, felt bad either for Cohen or the dead chambermaid. She was, after all, a foreigner.

They all recommended the German authorities ask the Jew if he planted the bomb.

Cohen’s apparent conviction that his potential assassin might have come from inside the Israeli criminal community in Germany had also been a distraction to the Germans.

His contact for all his efforts was Helmut Leterhaus, the German officer whom he had met that night at the hotel. Cohen had sent him faxes with vaguely remembered new names given to the informants relocated to Germany.

Indeed, the apparent ambiguity of Cohen’s memory made it even more difficult for the German officer to take his suggestions to seek out criminals from the past.

By Christmas, the Germans were rapidly losing interest in the case. In mid-January, the pretty high school daughter of a prominent banker was kidnapped. At first it looked like a clumsy terrorist group, then a purely criminal gang, but by the end of the month the police were guessing that it was psychosexual. Cohen even caught a glimpse of Leterhaus standing in the second row of officers at a Frankfurt press conference about the case, picked up by CNN.

Leterhaus didn’t need to spell it out for Cohen. The official policy was becoming that the Israeli author’s case was just that, an Israeli case, and if someone had tried to kill him, the Israelis should figure it out. There was a conspiracy minded reporter from a small left-wing paper who wondered occasionally in print why Cohen had been allowed out of the country that night. He should have been the suspect.

The reporter’s stories asked why nobody that first night thought to wonder if Cohen planted the bomb as a publicity ploy for his book. Indeed, the question had arisen that night, but had been quickly knocked down by all the witnesses to Cohen’s clear dislike for publicity of any sort.

Leterhaus had said not to worry about it. The newspaper’s anti-Zionism made it anti-Semitic. That didn’t convince Cohen, who sympathized with the reporter’s real complaint —that the police seemed more interested in the bomb than in the murder of the chambermaid, the native-born German child of an immigrant family imported to the country.

That was something that Cohen had noticed right from the start with the policeman. The bomb was much more interesting than the murder. “Yes, yes,” Cohen would try to explain to the Frankfurt cop, “the bomber is the killer, but the murder is the more serious crime committed.

Remember, the bomb didn’t go off.”

But just as the Israeli cops investigating Nissim’s murder were focused on Big Kobi Alper—or for that matter, Cohen was focused on Witkoff—the Germans were more interested in the bomb. And after months ofgomisht, nothing, even Leterhaus didn’t seem to care much more. Yet when Leterhaus had called to say he was ordered to suspend his activity on the case in favor of the missing teenager, he had reassured Cohen that if the Jerusalemite came up with any leads, “I will do my best.” Now a stranger answered the phone at Leterhaus’s direct line. Cohen asked for his contact man.

“He is gone,” said the officer at the other end of the line.

He spoke German.

“Gone?” Cohen answered in English. Before he could ask where Leterhaus went, the officer asked who was calling.

“Cohen. Avram Cohen,” he answered obediently.

There was a pause, but not long enough for Cohen to add anything.

“The book fair bomb?” asked the German officer.

“Yes.”

“You’re the policeman. The one who wrote the book.” “Yes,” Cohen admitted.

“Didn’t like it,” said the man, adding, “hold on. Transferring.”

The book critic in the policeman made Cohen smile, but the long wait for the call’s transfer made him uneasy. He held the phone between a cocked shoulder and his ear, leafing through his notes, looking for Leterhaus’s home number.

“Oberpolizeirag Maerker,” a woman identified herself.

“My name is Avram Cohen,” he began in English, “I am trying to reach Polizeirag Helmut Leterhaus. I have some new information—”

“You haven’t heard?”

“What?”

“Leterhaus is dead.”

His heart missed a beat, a bead of sweat grew in his palm clenching the phone. Suspect the cat, sitting at the half open windowsill, deliberating whether to go out or remain sitting in the warm sun, must have sensed the sudden tension.

As if escaping, the cat suddenly leapt out the window.

It was as short a jump from Cohen’s bed to the floor as it was from the window to the roof of the wooden-and-glass pergola over the outdoor stairway from the garden to Cohen’s second-floor flat.

“Hel-lo?” the woman modulated the syllables into two tones, to catch his attention.

“How?”

“An automobile accident.” “A car accident?” Cohen asked.

“Yes. Two weeks ago. A drunk.”

There was something in her curt tone that for a second made him think that she meant Helmut was at fault. For all his flaws, as far as Cohen could tell, Leterhaus was not a drinker. Cohen was the one with the reputation as an alcoholic, but at least had the sense to use a driver when he did drink, even if the driver couldn’t tell from anything except Cohen’s breath that his boss had been drinking. Leterhaus, on the other hand, looked like he never drank.

Cohen hesitated, but then asked the obvious question.

“No,” she replied. “The other driver was drunk. Ran a red light. Both were killed.” “Oh” said Cohen, relieved. “I’m sorry to hear about it.” “Yes, a tragedy,” said the woman, almost bitterly, as if Leterhaus nonetheless was at least partly to blame. “How can I help you?”

“You have an open murder case. The chambermaid.

Marina Berendisi.”

“And the bomb under your bed,” she added.

“Yes, of course.”

“We continue to investigate, of course,” the woman said.

“Of course,” he said, disbelieving. “I have a name for you to check.”

“Excuse me?”

“I gave Helmut names. Leads.”

“Yes, but they were not as helpful as you seemed to believe,” she said.

He bit his jaw, clamping down anger, trying to ignore the tone in her voice.

“I have another one. Helmut ran the other names through the databases.”

“And spent many days and weeks searching for these people and interviewing them.” “Yes,” Cohen admitted. He had to be careful. The call was made on a far-fetched hunch. He had no way of knowing for certain that it was Witkoff to whom Lassman had sent the book. And he certainly had no other reason than the fact he found the book in Witkoff’s penthouse to see a connection between the Russian Mafioso and the incident in Frankfurt. He could not tell her the reasons for his request, lest she dismiss it as either a simple waste of time, or worse, meddling. He did not want to beg. “All I ask is you run it through your database. On the basis of what turns up you can decide whether to investigate further.”

It was her turn to fall silent a moment. “What is the name?” she finally asked.