An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (7 page)

The sappers worked on the bomb in the room and others searched the rest of the hotel. From the walkie-talkies, Cohen heard that there was a mild panic in the lobby at first, as word spread through the hotel. But the police had it under control. Within twenty minutes, the police announced no other bombs were found in the hotel.

The management heaved a sigh of relief and as a goodwill gesture, offered Cohen the presidential suite a floor above, to use as his room for the duration of his stay.

“I won’t be staying,” he told the hotel manager.

“Excuse me?” Lassman asked.

“I’ll be leaving tonight.” “I understand,” said the manager. “I, too, would be afraid.” “I don’t understand,” said Lassman. “Don’t you want to stay, find out who did it?”

But before Cohen could answer, Helmut Leterhaus was back, wanting to go over the same questions again.

“A young woman,” Cohen said. “Early twenties, perhaps. Very tall. Maybe a meter seventy, black hair, dark eyes, a large mole on her cheek, here,” Cohen said touching his own face just above the jawbone. “Maybe a broken nose. And black boots,” he added. “And maybe a man in disguise. Maybe … “

But Leterhaus and the others were more interested in Cohen having enemies in Germany.

“How long have you been a homicide detective?” Cohen finally asked back.

“Fourteen years,” Leterhaus said.

“And how many enemies have you made?”

Leterhaus fell silent for a moment. “Some,” the German officer confessed.

“Multiply by two—that’s how long I was on my force, and that’s how many enemies I made.”

“Here, in Germany?”

“Now, that’s a good question,” Cohen admitted. But he didn’t have an answer that made sense.

In the late seventies and early eighties, the Israeli police had sent many an informant from the underworld into exile in Europe—often to Germany—in exchange for information that resulted in convictions. It worked as an option into the mid-eighties, but by then enough of the Israeli “exports,” as they were known to the few who knew of the practice, had grown into gangs struggling for turf, and the German police caught on to the ploy. Since then, coordination, not concealment, became the byword on relations between the two forces.

Cohen ran through the names and faces in his memory.

Off the top of his head he could think of at least twenty— but none of them, at least as far as he knew them in their day as state witnesses and squealers from the street, were capable let alone had reason to want to try to kill him. He could find out, perhaps, he told Leterhaus, “but only at home.” “Terrorists, perhaps,” Leterhaus suggested. “An Israeli policeman. A famous Israeli policeman,” he repeated.

“Famous now, because of your book. You write about hunting Nazis. Perhaps someone seeks revenge for the revenge you wanted.”

Cohen snorted with disbelief.

“Perhaps Arabs?” Leterhaus tried. “Maybe even fanatic Jews?”

“I am not Salman Rushdie,” Cohen grumbled.

“No, you are not,” said Leterhaus. “I liked yours much better. Very inspirational.”

“Thank you.”

A junior detective arrived, to whisper something in Leterhaus’s ear.

“The dead woman is Marina Berendisi. From a Turkish family. And we found the chambermaid’s cleaning cart. In a storeroom in the basement. I must ask you again, why a bomb? Why you?”

“I don’t know,” Cohen could only say. “But I’m sure that you and your people will find out. No?”

Cohen didn’t mean it as an insult, but Leterhaus took it as such. He didn’t say so, but Cohen could see it clearly in the German’s eyes. Cohen had a hundred ideas in his head about who might want to kill him, but when he asked himself who would have gone to all the trouble to do it here, in Frankfurt, a city he had never visited, in a country he had left almost fifty years earlier, he had no answer.

He racked his brains for names of Israeli criminals he had sent to Germany, and Leterhaus took down the names.

It was probably useless. “I have no idea what name they might be using here,” he admitted.

“This is great, Avram,” Tina said behind him. Somehow she managed to get past the guard at the elevators and came up behind Cohen in the corridor where he was talking with Leterhaus. She was thrilled. “A murder, a bomb. Think of the press we can get from this. Carey’s in seventh heaven.”

“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.

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.

“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.