Crimes of the City
Chapter One
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In the Poisoned Press (Missing Mystery) Edition
It was winter's end in the holy city, cold enough
to turn the shouts into steam. Demonstrators chanted demands
for the prime minister's resignation as they marched through a
gauntlet of government loyalists. Policemen struggled in the
breach.
"Traitors!" screamed an unshaven man, clutching
a fist-sized chip of limestone from which almost all Jerusalem
is built. A mounted policeman grimaced. His horse snorted and
knocked the man backwards. The stone fell from the man's hands,
and his curses turned on the cops.
"Fascists!" sneered a teenaged girl, her
arms linked with friends and strangers marching on the prime minister's
office. A parade marshal hushed her, repeating the instructions
laid down from the start of the rally -- "no provocation,
no incitement."
It was a season of hatred and fear in Jerusalem and
therefore it was a worrisome, tiring season for Avram Cohen.
Old enough to remember goose-step marches outside his bedroom
window in Berlin and yet young enough to be commander of the Criminal
Investigations Department for the Jerusalem police, Cohen was
wise enough to know that ideals can be rusted by the humid passions
of politics.
So he watched the demonstration from the passenger
seat of the white police Ford Escort, seeing his own tired tensions
reflected in the face of his lieutenant, Chief Inspector Nissim
Levy, at the wheel. Slowly, they rolled up and down the hilly
streets behind the moving crowd, listening to the droning voices
of sector commanders reporting to a mobile temporary headquarters
parked outside the prime minister's office, already under siege
by the front ranks of the protesters. They followed the marchers
out of the downtown triangle, across King George Street and down
Bezalel Street on the eastern slope of the Valley of the Cross.
The street was lit by the last of the marchers torches and the
blue revolving lights of police cars. Photographers' flashes
caught faces twisted in anger. The limestone block walls of the
four and five-story stone buildings refracted the lights into
crazy colors.
Straight across, on the hilltop across the dale,
they could see the lights of the Knesset's security perimeter
and a chopper's beam grazing the park. Cohen's weary eyes stared
out the window, squinting against the flaring light. Levy's impatient
fingers tapped on the steering wheel, setting a deliberate counterpoint
to the chants.
Cohen had read both secret and published reports
leading up to the demonstration. Although he had confidence in
Operations Commander Yosef Schwartz, on calm horseback at the
front of the police troops struggling to keep the march and gauntlet
from turning into a riot, Cohen that night feared more than mere
fisticuffs and tear gas in the holy city.
"It looks like the sound and light show at the
Old City walls," he muttered, "showing the tourists
how the city fell to the Romans." The chanting outside the
car changed from Two state for two peoples to Stop killing, Start
talking , and Cohen's voice, raspy from too many cigarettes, fit
with its own rhythm into the phrasing of the slogans.
"I wonder which version the tourists get,"
he added, thinking about history, half aware that with his comment,
the tapping stopped and that the junior officer, ever ambitious,
was straining silently to decipher his meaning. "Do they
get Josephus Flavius' version or they get the rabbinical version?"
Cohen continued wondering aloud, thinking of the Judean general
who first fought the Romans and was celebrated by them for writing
the history of how the Jews turned their fight against the empire
into a civil war of atrocity and inevitable defeat.
Levy's knuckles relaxed, as he turned to Cohen with
the answer Cohen already knew. "The rabbis say that Josephus
was a traitor," Levy said matter of factly, his reedy voice
reedy tinged with cynicism about the rabbis.
Cohen rubbed at his arm. The eczema rash just above
the pale purple tattoo of his Dachau number, was both annoying
and familiar. It sometimes seemed to him as permanent in his life
as the city's pull at pilgrims and their passions. "Josephus
was a pragmatist," he answered Levy. "He made sure he
was on the winning side. And he knew that once the Jews started
killing each other, they were bound to lose."
Levy turned off the four-lane boulevard from the
valley and onto the five lanes that pass the Knesset. The chopper
beam's erratic sweep caught them for a moment, long enough for
Cohen to remember the searchlights of the camp. The prime minister's
office, five hundred meters ahead, was the last of the Kirya government
complex office buildings. Demonstrators packed the entire width
of the avenue all the way to the ivy-covered building where the
cabinet was in emergency session, debating the latest peace proposal.
Cohen could hear the unintelligible echoes of a speech blaring
from a loudspeaker.
"You make it sound like a Likud-Labor debate,"
Levy finally said in response to Cohen's sarcasm. The chief inspector
grinned in expectation of a crack from Cohen about "bloody
politicians."
But before Cohen could answer, there was a sound
that momentarily silenced the monotonous staccato of the police
radio and turned the booming echoes into the squeal of feedback.
It was a noise Cohen had long expected with dread. But despite
his expectations, he was surprised when it finally came.
"Grenade!" Cohen shouted, and a split-second
later, he was out the door, running toward the sullen silence
already turning into screams.
Next:
The bomb squad worked all through the night, taking advantage of the light of the TV crews beaming their pictures of Jerusalem's strife around the world.
All the Avram Cohen Mysteries at Amazon
Get one or all of the books in the
Avram Cohen Mystery Quartet
"Having created a highly intelligent detective to handle the brainwork in this series, Mr. Rosenberg does not waste that shrewd and subtle mind." -- --New York Times Book Review
Crimes of the City The first book in the Avram Cohen Quartet, in which the veteran Jerusalem detective investigates the murder of two Rusian nuns and uncovers the Jerusalem Syndrome, a mysterious psychosis affecting the susceptible in that holy city.
The New York Times Notable thriller of 1991 Originally published by Simon&Schuster, and Penguin paperback, and translated into German, Dutch, Romanian, and Japanese,
Shown is the Poisoned Pen Press 2nd edition cover More about Crimes of the City, including the first chapter.
The Cutting Room Out of print in both hardcover and paperback (But possibly available in a used edition from
Amazon
the second book in the quartet finds Cohen unhappily retired, on his way to Hollywood to visit his boyhood friend, like Cohen, a Dachau survivor. But when he arrives, he discovers a suicide that is really a murder, and to find the killer, he must delve into his darkest memories of the concentration camp -- and understand the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Download it as an e-book for
free in html
here.
After unzipping it to its own directory, start with the index.htm file. More about The Cutting Room, including the first chaper.
House of Guilt Between the Hebron Massacre and Rabin's assassination, Avram Cohen is emotionally extorted into a hunt for the missing heir to a fortune. Now a wealthy man from an unexpected inheritance, Cohen follows the case from the anarchy of Tel Aviv's night life to the zealotry of the settlements, and on the way is forced to look at his own failures -- and Israel's -- in a new light.
More about House of Guilt, including the first chapter.
An Accidental Murder What appears to be an accident in the desert turns out to be the murder of Cohen's surrogate son, and by ignoring police pressure to stay away from the case, Cohen's investigation leads him to the Russian Mafia's innermost circles in Israel, and to a suprising conclusion about his own place in Israel, and the world. So far, the last of the Cohen books, An Accidental Murder is a profile of a man -- and a country -- trying to be normal in abnormal circumstances.
More about An Accidental Murder, including the first chapter.
PLUS
Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando is the autobiography of IDF Col. (ret) Muki Betser, the hero of the Entebbe rescue raid, a pioneering veteran of Israel's air marshall defense forces, the Sayeret Matkal officer thrice assigned the job of getting Yasser Arafat -- yet a proponent of the peace process with the Palestinians -- and a warrior who went into battle knowing how to control his fear. His story is an epic, behind the senes account of Israel's war against terrorism, a dramatic story about life at the tip of the IDF's spear.
More about Secret Soldier, including excerpts, and the author's introduction.
