An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (8 page)

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.

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 the 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.

Box after box, folder after folder, he searched for cases he remembered that involved relocation to what was then West Germany. He cross-referenced to the stories he told in his book about the years the Israelis dumped criminals who turned state evidence and needed relocation to a safer place than tiny Israel.

Sometimes he found himself daydreaming, remembering too well. Sometimes he studied the flimsy pages with amazement at how much he had forgotten. Most of it was detail, tiny, though telling; he had refrained from digging like this into his past while writing his book, not needing the paper to remember what he wanted to say. Now, he realized it was part of his hubris, for as he went through the folders that he gradually built into a pile for yet a second read in case he missed something the first time, he realized that no matter how proud of his memory, no matter how trusting of his intuition, even his version of the events was far from objective, no matter how hard he tried to stick to the truth as he could prove it.

So reading over the sad case of the green-eyed Bernstein brothers, for example, in which an identical twin murdered his brother in a jealous rage over their sharing of their little sister, he could see now that he should have spotted the insanity that lay behind the crime far sooner than he eventually did.

The sister was the key, of course. She became a state witness —while the district psychiatrist said she had suffered severe trauma, there was nothing to prevent her from testifying in the case. The Jerusalem branch of the family was ruined by the scandal, and Cohen, as happened so often— too often, he sometimes thought—took responsibility for the victim, making the arrangements for the girl to be sent, yes, to Cohen’s hated Germany, to a maiden aunt on the girl’s father’s side, who promised to look after her. There, far from the scandal of tiny Jerusalem, she could get a fresh start. He put her on the plane promising her that things would work out for the best. He hoped he wasn’t lying, but knew that for the pretty teenager with the cold green eyes, life had already chosen its tragic course.

He had doubts in many cases. There had been Abu-Hassan, an Old City dealer looking for a heroin route to Europe.

Cohen should have never allowed the student from the Bezalel School of Fine Arts to carry that second shipment of the drug into the trap Cohen was laying for the dealer.

They were typical of the things he found in the search.

There were dozens of cases, and each contained its small success and failures that added up to its closure. None seemed to logically lead to an assassination attempt twenty years after the informant or witness was relocated to Germany.

By the middle of December, he had almost finished a full second read of every file he found. Dozens of files were missing, of course. Some were lost, as sometimes happens to files. Some had become of interest to the Shabak. A few to the Mossad. And they could always step in to ask for what they wanted from the police.

He looked for anyone he ever sent to Germany. Informants and state witnesses, petty crooks and ranking underworld figures; during the seventies he sent many— on his first round through the files he found thirty-seven he remembered because he personally handed over the envelope of cash and the new passport.

And there was the rub. It was a secret operation: the German authorities knew nothing about it, and for it to work the secrecy had to extend all the way to the underworld itself. Sure, the informants and bosses both knew that state witnesses could get relocation, if the evidence was good enough against a good enough target. But only when the process was complete, when the target was behind bars—or otherwise incapacitated—and the witness ready to be moved, did they find out where they’d be going.

Leon Hadani testified, for example, about how Avi Hakatan used a razor blade hidden between his fingers as an ultimate weapon of fear to collect his weekly payments from the stall-owners of the shuk> It took Cohen a month to convince Hadani to talk. The promise of a new name and start in hutz la’aretz—“out of the country”—finally turned him over.

Shimmy Rozen’s wife, Vered, turned her husband in for selling a crate of grenades to an Old City hood. She walked in off the street, and because of her information, the grenades were found in the basement of a Ramallah villa, where they were being fitted to timing devices. All Vered wanted in exchange for the information was a new name on a passport and a new life in bu’l—the slangy acronym for overseas. Israel was too small to hide someone, the Israelis didn’t have a continent in which to hide anyone.

But they also did not have the clout to guarantee a relocated witness a first job, nor the money for a well-padded landing. Germany was an easy country to pick for the purpose, and not only because of the past. Foreign guest workers were flooding the big cities of what was then West Germany. The working-class Israelis who needed the refuge could easily fit in.

It took two and a half years for the Israeli underworld to figure out what was happening, and another year before the Germans noticed shadows of a growing Israeli criminal community in their cities. In a four-eyed meeting with his German counterpart, the Israel interior minister rued that yes, “part of the normalcy of the Jewish state is that now we have criminals,” but he denied any knowledge of a “systematic transfer” of Israeli criminals to Frankfurt and Hamburg. The minister wasn’t lying.

There was nothing systematic about it, which is why it managed to be one of the better-kept secrets in a country full of secrets. But as such, it made Cohen’s work that winter in the attic of the Russian Compound, looking at twenty-year-old pieces of flimsy, faded paper, much more difficult than simply collecting names from old folders and passing them on to Helmut Leterhaus.

Some had insisted on passports for their wife and children.

He tried not to promise them more than he could guarantee, or knew they could achieve.

The names, the faces he had tried so hard to forget now came back to him. Vered Rozen’s cheerless hope that things would be better for her in Frankfurt; Hadani’s fear of what his life would become. The horror in the Bernstein girl’s eyes.