An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (23 page)

Upon Cohen’s chest a heavy weight suddenly fell and pressed. He lost his breath momentarily, gasping enough to make the madame worry a customer was about to drop dead in her place, but he waved away her sudden maternal instincts as she tried patting him on the back, as if he was choking on a piece of food. He took a deep breath, then exhaled in a shallow, painful sigh.

“You know him?” Sonia asked. “You know Zagorksy?” she asked again.

But what could Cohen say then, what could he tell her—or himself—that the man whose scarred face was turning from grimace into the repose of climax could not be a Russian Mafia boss of bosses, that it was improbable, impossible, inconceivable. For one thing, Cohen thought, the man on the television screen so enthusiastically enjoying Sonia’s skills was not named Zagorksy.

In the Russian Compound attic, among files that looked faint in daylight but clear under a little halogen light that he brought when he worked at night, Cohen had found a case file that at the time, while searching for his relocated witnesses, he had barely glanced at with interest. He remembered the case well. It was in the seventies, when for a few brief years, in exchange for wheat from America, the Kremlin had allowed a few thousand Jews a month out of the Soviet Union. And it was the first time that as head of CID in Jerusalem he had directly felt the heavy foot of interference from one of the big brothers—Shabak, Aman, or Mossad—suddenly trodding on his own as he tried to solve a murder.

The murdered woman had been a cardiologist in the Soviet space program who had become slightly famous in her struggle to win permission from the Soviet authorities to leave Leningrad for Israel. Her name was Masha Karlin sky, and she had been found, her throat sliced from ear to ear, on the sitting room floor of the two-room flat she and her husband had been assigned in what was considered the best new immigrants’ hostel in Jerusalem.

Masha Karlinksy, the Russian-Jewish scientist who bravely, famously, survived the gauntlet of Soviet repression of her ambition to move to Israel was also, well, somewhat promiscuous.

There weren’t many secrets in the hostel, with six stories of one-and two-room flats suitable for single people and small families, built on stilts on the steep slope looking west to the Valley of the Cross. “Passionate,” said her supporters.

“Greedy,” said her detractors. The husband, Yevet, had put up with it stoically in Leningrad, said the gossips, because her position as cardiologist to the cosmonauts— and his, as a gynecologist who treated some of Leningrad’s most powerful women—had provided them with privileges unavailable to more ordinary citizens of the Communist state. All those privileges were lost, of course, once they begun their campaign for emigrant visas, but they were lucky, nonetheless.

Both were handsome people who spoke English.

Whether it was their striking good looks combined with obvious professional capabilities, or simply good luck, their cause quickly became internationally known, their faces appearing on posters at demonstrations from Jerusalem to Paris to London and Washington. In short, they managed to get out, landing in the Jerusalem hostel for new immigrants, and already before they learned Hebrew they were both granted jobs at Hadassah Hospital.

Their first year in Israel, they had managed at least to maintain the facade. But he was no research scientist—he needed patients, and he hadn’t moved to the West to work shifts in a hospital. He wanted a private clinic of his own and hated Jerusalem’s cloistered feel, traveling by bus to other towns in the country, looking for an opportunity to restart his career. She, on the other hand, was a researcher who had worked in a rarefied atmosphere and while she was having a harder time with Hebrew than he, her real problem was that while Hadassah had a good R&D budget, the nearly three years she had lost in her profession while campaigning for their freedom had had their effect.

No longer a star in her profession, she had become bitter, unable to appreciate Yevet’s own efforts to find them an apartment they could afford outside of Jerusalem. In Leningrad, at least, her job had granted her a status that gave them a large apartment by Soviet standards of the time—four rooms for the childless couple—so each could have an office at home, as well as at their respective laboratories.

In the hostel, they had barely thirty square meters.

Shouting had often been heard from behind their door. On at least one occasion, she had stormed out of the hostel late one night. He had chased her down the hall shouting “Whore!” all the way to the lobby. Only there had he realized he was only wearing his underwear. He’d returned to his room, glaring at anyone who dared catch his eye. She had been back in the hostel two days later, apologetic and demure, but the quarreling had resumed after a week. The murder had taken place six months later.

All this Cohen had discovered relatively quickly in the investigation that had begun early one rainy Sunday morning in the early spring of 1974, when the blood pooling out of Masha Karlinksy’s body lying on the floor of the small apartment had begun seeping out into the hallway outside the front door. A child riding his tricycle in the corridor had rolled home to the last door on the left, tracing a pattern of blood on the beige stone floor. The child’s mother’s screams as she traced the blood stains back to the source brought up the hostel manager, who had opened the locked door to the Karlinsky apartment and found the body. He had called the police.

Cohen had arrived on the scene with a troop of investigators and a pair of translators who had sat in on almost all the interviews. Within an hour of his arrival at the hostel, Cohen had learned of the routine shouting and screaming that had gone on behind the closed doors of the famed activist-doctors’ room. And when his crews, sent to find the husband at Hadassah Hospital, had called in to report that Yevet was nowhere to be found, the suspicion had fallen heavily on the missing husband.

However, as so often happens in an investigation, as the evidence—witness testimony, forensics, and motive— poured in during the day, the weather vane of suspicion had begun to shift.

That very first day, with Yevet still missing, the two man crew that couldn’t find him at Hadassah did find a second-year medical student whose aghast reaction on the spot when learning of the murder had led to a quick confession of having been one of Masha’s sex partners—and of knowing that there was at least one other. But the student had had a strong alibi—he had been in attendance at an all night surgery on a man mangled in a car accident the previous night. And Masha had definitely last been seen alive at nine-thirty, at the end of the TV news playing in the lobby.

So the student’s alibi held—on the spot they confirmed it— but it took a while for the pair of investigators to believe that the student really didn’t know the name of another sex partner Masha had taunted him about. All the student knew was that the second lover was an Englishman.

A second Cohen crew found the English lover in the ulpan Hebrew school run in the basement floor of the hostel.

He was actually a new immigrant from Wales, who hadn’t seemed surprised that Masha had ended the way she did, “considering her behavior,” he had told Cohen when brought to the temporary HQ set up in the hostel manager’s office. “Ask Lerner,” added the Welshman, shifting suspicion once again. “Ask how she betrayed Lev Lerner.”

Mrs. Lerner, who lived with her husband Lev two floors down from the Karlinskys in the hostel, was slightly built, with a firm handshake and a slight limp from a shortened right leg. But despite those apparent weaknesses, she had defended her husband with all her might.

“He is on a photographic expedition,” the woman had told Cohen. Their tiny apartment’s walls were a small gallery of desert scenes in black and white. Their bathroom doubled as a darkroom. To make money, she told him—just as the hotel manager had said—Lerner sold prints to tourists.

Cohen asked about how they had met. Both orphaned in the Great War against fascism, he learned, they both had been believers in communism until the 1967 Six Day War, when the Soviets backed the Arabs against Israel. Doubts had begun creeping into their pure Communist souls. Lev was a career officer who was sent as a young major to Czechoslovakia. She had been proud of him, but after the invasion, when he had reported back in letters on how the Czechs hated the Soviet presence, she had begun to become outspoken. By 1972 they had both become unemployed, fired, outcast pariahs because they had asked for permission to emigrate. And they arrived in the last week of November 1973, right after the Yom Kippur War.

Her Hebrew was very good, Cohen had complimented her. She had wanted to become a ballerina, she had admitted, but a tractor accident in a kolboz during the great wheat harvest of 1959 had put an end to that ambition. But she had discovered a proclivity for language while learning French for her dance lessons, and after some more studies ended up teaching languages—French and English—in a Moscow high school until she had been spotted attending human rights rallies. Learning Hebrew had become an obsession during those long months of waiting for permission to leave.

When Cohen commented that they had been in the hostel a year and a half, the longest-term residents in the place, she had said they had taken a government mortgage for an apartment, but there had been some delays in the construction.

“We move in two months,” she said. Meanwhile, Lev made a little money from the photography—only enough to pay for itself plus a little left over for groceries—and she was occasionally working as a substitute French-language private tutor. Yes, they owned a car.

“Lev has it. He went to the Dead Sea. Early, to be there for dawn. Masha? We were not close.”

Cohen had put an APB out for their turquoise blue Peugeot 404, especially in the Jordan Rift Valley region, and before he had left Natasha Lerner—and a squad outside keeping an eye on the hostel in case Lev returned—he had apologized first for the question and than asked if she was pregnant. Yes, she had said. Four months to go, she had added.

A few hours later, around the same time Lerner’s blue Peugeot was stopped by a police roadblock at the road up to Jerusalem from the Dead Sea, Yevet Karlinsky had shown up at the hostel, pleading innocence, indeed total ignorance of the murder of his wife until he had awoken that afternoon at a friend’s house and heard the news on the radio. Yes, they had quarreled often, the husband had told Cohen. About her affairs, he had admitted. But if I didn’t kill her in the past, he had said, why would I do so now?

“The pressure?” Cohen had asked. “Life is difficult for you now. Frustration? She at least has her job. You,” he had pointed out to Yevet, “have become a drunk.”

Indeed, that had been Yevet’s alibi. They had quarreled and Yevet had gone to a friend to commiserate with a bottle.

He had provided a name and address.

Just then, there had been a knock on the door. One of the investigators assigned to question Lerner—across the hallway in a second interrogation room—had handed a piece of paper to Cohen. It said, “Please come in here, now,” and was signed by the district commander, Cohen’s boss.

And for the first time, by virtue of his new job as CID chief in Jerusalem, Cohen would be privy to a decision by one of the country’s two senior intelligence agencies to step on the toes of the police.

Lerner, it turned out, had been a colonel in the Red Army, a specialist in logistics, who had seen the anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism of the Soviet bureaucracy in the late 1960s and early 1970s stymie any chance for further promotion in the army. Like thousands of other Jews when detente opened the doors a crack, he had applied for permission to emigrate to Israel. Immediately thrown out of the army, Lerner had lost everything, but he either gambled well or managed to keep some friends in high places, for only a year after his request for emigration was submitted to his commanding general he had arrived in Israel. Like all men arriving from ostensibly enemy countries in those years, new immigrant or not, he had been questioned at the airport about his military background. A Red Army colonel was quite a prize to the Mossad, or at least that’s what they thought, when he freely admitted that had been his last position. They whisked him away to a safe house in Tel Aviv. But his expertise in logistics was long-range delivery via railroad of troops, equipment, and provisions. It was hardly an expertise required in tiny Israel, where at most sometimes the railroad was used to move tanks from the Negev to the Galilee in three hours.

Nor was his encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet rail system of much interest to the Americans, who were emphasizing electronic intelligence, particularly satellite imaging for that kind of information by the seventies. And since he was already in his late forties when he had arrived in Israel, close to the official retirement age for Israeli officers, he wasn’t going to pick up a new army career where he left off. So he spent two weeks in a Mossad safe house, questioned by an Israeli team. The Americans sent over an observer, at the invitation of the Mossad, and because the American raised the possibility that Lerner might be a plant by the Soviets, the Shabak, the counterintelligence agency, had also gotten involved.

But after two more weeks of questioning, even the Shabak had had to admit that the former colonel was just that, a former colonel, and let him into the civilian world with his two suitcases, an absorption ministry stipend worth a few hundred dollars a month, and a then-coveted place in the hostel, considered at the time the best in the country for new immigrants.

“That was eighteen months ago,” said the small baby faced man with the premature bald spot sitting in the district commander’s office, who had been introduced to Cohen only as Moshe from the Mossad. “But things change,” said the Shabak officer. “We need him now.” “His wife said nothing.”

“She doesn’t know.” “He is a suspect in a murder,” Cohen said bluntly.

“He didn’t do it,” said the senior officer. “Trust us, we know. It is a matter of state security.”

Cohen gritted his teeth. By virtue of his job as CID chief, he was, as the British say, seconded to the Shabak as an associate, working often hand in hand with the counterintelligence and counterterrorism secret service. He was part of the system that protected state security, but the Shabak outranked him. But Cohen did not like to leave loose ends. And Lerner was about to become a loose end.