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The Cutting Room

By Robert Rosenberg

Chapter One

uring his long reign as the top detective in Jerusalem, Avram Cohen sometimes joked he'd rather have been chief of investigations for King Solomon. But he lived the nightmare of the twentieth century, and had been in the holy city from the birth of his country to the end of the millennium. He believed he had seen everything.

Tourists and true believers could drink up the rhetoric of the politicians and religious leaders, saying they saw God's golden sunlight reflected in Jerusalem's limestone ramparts. But Cohen had no illusions about what could be hidden behind those walls. As head of the Jerusalem District Criminal Investigations Department he knew that there were crimes that could only happen in Jerusalem.

He had pursued corrupt holymen and politicians, terrorists of every religious faith or political inclination, and all the extremists preying on everyone's fears of the future. He had chased on foot after suspects down the darkest alleyways of the Old City, raced against ticking bombs on crowded Ben Yehuda mall, and quietly cornered the corrupt in the carpeted offices of the Knesset. He was never the highest ranking policeman in Jerusalem. But after nearly a generation as chief of investigations, he was the most informed.

As the years passed, the risks grew greater. Loyalists feared for him, enemies waited in ambush. Caring more for the city than for himself was his mistake. It finally caught up with him in the bright sweaty lights of the television cameras aimed at him and the politicians at the end of his last case. Suddenly he was off the force.

But never able to plan ahead further than the cases took him, he had never planned for his own future. Set adrift, he was purposeless. For the first time he could remember since choosing survival instead of surrender in Dachau concentration camp, he felt helpless.

More than anything else, that was the reason he was in the VIP lounge at Ben-Gurion Airport, nursing his second cognac while waiting for the boarding call for the flight halfway around the world to Los Angeles, trying to force himself to call Ahuva.

Their last conversation had been a disaster, and he knew he had only himself to blame. She was a magistrate judge, known for strict judgments, especially when the victim's tale was told. Her fairness was as famous in Jerusalem as their affair was secret. She dealt in opinions, handing down thoughtful judgments that were garlands made of the soft grays hidden between black and white. He dealt in facts, hard and tough.

But in their haven at Cohen's apartment in the German Colony, over candlelit Friday night dinners and afterwards in bed, they shared the feelings that their vocations had deemed too dangerous to display on the job. For ten years, she was the pragmatically wise one, counseling caution and realism. Twenty years older than her, Cohen used their secret oasis as the one place he could reveal his buried idealism, his belief in the Sisyphean purpose that every devoted cop feels.

But once off the job, the sanctuary became a prison. Purposeless, he felt old. Alone, he spent his time looking back over incomplete cases, digging in the unwritten archives in his memories. He thought of convicts who might have been innocent, deaths that could have been avoided. He drew maps in his mind of intersections of past choices, becoming lost in questions about himself he had never needed to ask before. Self-pity and impotence, bitterness and despair crept into his life as quietly as Suspect, his cat. But unlike the old Tom, these new visitors to his life disrupted all the routines he had so carefully nurtured. Especially his relationship with Ahuva.

It didn't help that her career was spiralling upward. Not that he would have denied her success. But when he heard the rumor about her name going onto the short list for the next year's nominees to the District Bench, he was shocked to feel anger, instead of pride, rising instinctively inside him. He had clenched his hand tightly around the thick, cheap water glass of cognac that was his regular drink at Atara Cafe, until even the self-absorbed gossip noticed the tension, and asked sympathetically about Cohen's health.

For nearly six months, Cohen had kept stoically silent while the cafe jackals had snacked on what they thought they knew. He had refused to testify in the cafe court debates over whether he was a martyr or a scapegoat. But after hearing the rumor about Ahuva, he stopped going to the cafe, spreading his own gossip. Cohen was at work on a memoir, the rumor went out, and didn't want to be disturbed.

But while he did buy the pads and sharpened the pencils, the words had refused to come. The gossip about the nomination simmered in him like a potion. Instead of reporting it to her right away, he made up excuses for his silence. She was always strict about not lobbying for her own cause, so he decided telling her would be a violation of that ethical self-discipline. It should be her proud privilege to tell him the news, he told himself. But he knew that it was his envy of her youth, with its hope for the future, that bothered him. And that only made him feel older.

For a few weeks, he tried hiding it from her. But it was a lost cause. Like any jail full of echoing self-recrimination, their haven had turned into hell. She wanted to talk about the future. All he wanted to think about was the past. Finally, in that last conversation, she raised the issue of a child. The doctors had told her it might be difficult, but still possible for her. In his painful paranoia, he saw it as a test of his commitment. He half-joked selfishly that he'd never live long enough to see the child become an adult. More seriously he claimed he wouldn't want her to be burdened by the lonely responsibility when he was gone. She called him selfish and stubborn and foolish. He didn't put up an argument.

Thus, for the first time in ten years she finally turned the sanctuary into a courtroom, passing judgment on him with the angry disappointment of a former believer. "When you know what you want," she said, "let me know." It was a stiff sentence, but from Magistrate Judge Ahuva Meyerson he expected no less.

Suspect had jumped onto his lap, surprised by the midnight click of the door and complaining in a soft wail about the woman's angry departure. "Don't you know?" Cohen asked the cat, "She always warns the losers about what will happen the next time they show up in her courtroom."

ohen scowled at a rustle of activity in the carpeted and tapestried lounge behind him. He looked up from the phone to the mirror behind the bottles. It was the American woman with the taut orange skin of expensive sun and surgery.

Earlier she had complained that first-class passengers also had to abide by security regulations requiring their presence in the airport two hours before take-off. He had not been impressed by her loud references to friendships with generals and prime ministers past and present. Her voice reminded Cohen of the Moroccan newspaper hawker on Ben Yehuda mall sawing through the Friday morning shopping crowd. But he had also noticed how she enjoyed the spectacle she made of herself, full of the self-confidence of a stage performer at work. The old Yemenite on Ben Yehuda was sarcastic about the headlines he mongered. She seemed to create scandals for her own pleasure, convinced she was entertaining her audience.

Now she was complaining about the price and strength of her vodka martini, calling for the manager as she strode to the bar. "Nun's piss," she called out, holding up the glass as if it were a laboratory specimen. "You think I don't know what a real one is supposed to taste like?" she groused, handing it over to the chagrined bartender.

Cohen checked his watch. Fifteen minutes to boarding. He eyed the phone beside his elbow on the oak bar. He still had time to call Ahuva. What could he say? That he knew he was missing his chance with her? He knew that. He'd said it so many times in the past - to himself, and to her. But saying it didn't make it any easier for him to go to her, to stay with her like a young man with no past to remember, and only a future to behold. Disgusted with himself, he drained the cognac. As he put it down, his eye was caught in the mirror by the American woman. She was smiling at him while she lit a cigarette. Her gestures, betraying everything else about her, were tiny and ultra-feminine.

He reached for the phone, punching in Ahuva's home number. Three, four times he let it ring. Halfway through the fifth, he hung up. Realizing he was relieved, he signalled for the bartender to fill his glass. But before the bartender could reach for the bottle on the shelf below the mirror, the American woman was sliding onto the tall stool beside Cohen, introducing herself. He looked her over from the corner of his eye. She was dressed for the west, from her rhinestone-studded jeans jacket to the silver-toed cowboy boots.

"Goldie, Goldie Stein," she announced. "I definitely don't recommend the martinis," she grumbled, and then winked at him in the mirror, making him turn to face her.

n the dim light of the lounge, he had guessed her to be Ahuva's age. Now, up close, he adjusted his guess drastically upwards, realizing that her tight-fitting costume was advertising either a health club or a surgeon, but not authentic youth. Her eyes revealed her age as they worked to conceal her feelings. He had seen their almond shape turn quickly into narrow suspicion when the waitress presented the bill for the drink. Now they were squinting at him with a politician's effort to remember his face for the future.

But her fragrance surprised him. Again he thought of Ahuva, trying to remember if he had ever asked her for the name of the perfume. He winced with shame and his eyes flickered to the phone. Nine at night on a Saturday. She was practically religious about the nine o'clock television news. He wondered where she was.

"Good thinking," Goldie said, eying the bottle of Martell as the bartender poured Cohen a drink. "You can't fuck up straight liquor, I always say. Let me have one of those, too," she ordered the bartender.

Cohen snarled a short, silent smile, and then drained half the miserly measure the bartender had poured into the short water glass Cohen had requested for his drink.

"But put mine in a real cognac glass," she called to the bartender, shaking her head at Cohen's tumbler, before smiling at him again. "So, as I was saying, I'm Goldie," she repeated her self-introduction. Disappointment fluttered across her face when he didn't recognize her name. "Goldie Stein? The tinsel-town tattletale?" she added with a self-deprecatory grin that included a lilting tone that both asked him again if he had heard of her, and questioned her own statement.

"Cohen, Avram Cohen," he said quietly, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye and then back at his drink, wishing she'd go away.

"And you are a...?" she asked. When he didn't fill in the blank, she tried a different tack. "I'm in the media," she said. "Newspapers, TV," she boasted casually.

He raised his eyes from the polished brass liquid to the mirror, now doubly distrustful of her prying. He believed that silence would finally drive her away.

"It's a living," she defended herself, reading his mind. "But I'm good at it," she added proudly, "and that's what counts. Right?" She peered at him in the mirror, waiting for his response.

Her manner of emphasizing words in her conversation reminded him of an informer who had once worked for him. The memory of the shtinker increased his resistance to her.

But she wasn't deterred by his silence. "Your turn," she said.

He raised an eyebrow at her in the mirror.

"You're dressed too casually for a businessman," she guessed, "and God knows you're not one of those lousy politicians," she added, discreetly leveling one of her long red fingernails to point across the almost empty lounge. The back of her hand was tanned dark, but the skin was like a soft flimsy leather, grained and loose, aged and angrily spotted liverish.

Cohen, of course, recognized the politician, and it was easy to pick out the businessman with his open briefcase. A pair of honeymooners nuzzled on a corner sofa. The ground attendants were gossiping by the door to the tarmac. He wondered why Goldie wasn't bothering the national team basketball player drinking alone in the corner.

"Come on, you don't have to play hard-to-get with me. We're both too old for that," she grinned at him and then leaned closer with her mocking smile. He raked his fingers self-consciously through an unruly lock of hair more white than black, and almost no gray. It had flopped over his forehead and her mouth pursed, as her expression changed to expectation.

But instead of answering, he looked away. Six months ago, he thought, he would have sent her packing with a snarl. But six months ago he wouldn't have been sitting in the airport, waiting for a first class flight halfway around the world.

"You look like you're sitting in jail instead of waiting for a first class flight," she said, her bracelets jangling on the counter. "What's with the attitude ?" Her elbow shoved the phone slightly. He pulled back, as if by touching it she had touched him. "You do have thoughtful eyes," she finally said, not noticing his flinch. "A scientist maybe?" She glanced at the book on the bar in front of him. "Moshe Dayan? Jeez. Light reading or what?"

"A biography," Cohen said, hating himself for falling into the trap as he said it.

"Touchdown!" she exclaimed sarcastically. "I was beginning to think you really are an asshole." She took a sip of her drink, picked up the book and opening it in the middle, frowned sadly. "I should have paid more attention in Hebrew school," she said as much to herself as to him, and then with a surprising seriousness, she asked, "Is it any good?"

"I'll decide when I finish," he said softly.

" I knew him," she bragged.

He remained stone-faced, uninterested in her insinuation.

"I guess you don't jump to conclusions, do you?" she asked. When he said nothing, she made a decision. "A professor of history," she said, "that's what you are."

Cohen's abrupt laugh was one short harrumph that surprised him as much as it did her. He realized he was uncomfortable with the momentary pleasure he took from what he regarded as flattery.

"So?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter," he said. He sipped his drink to douse the bitter truth, surprised to realize that she was the first genuine stranger he had spoken with in more than a month.

"Tough guy, Eh? I'm going to give it only one more guess," Goldie said. "And then the gloves come off," she threatened with a laugh. She studied his eyes again, and he stared back, daring her to try. He thought she was going to lose. But she surprised him. A smile grew on her face.

"A cop," she suddenly grinned with realization. "You're a cop."

He unwillingly lost his poker face, making her laugh again.

"A cop!" she chortled, "Boy, I got to admit, that's a surprise. Never would have expected a cop."

Cohen reached for the green packet of Noblesse cigarettes on the bar beside the book, wondering what gave it away. Before he could get one of the cigarettes out of the packet, she was holding up a gold lighter. He sucked deeply at the flame and then turned away to exhale the gray smoke. A cough followed. She waited for him to catch his breath. At least she didn't tell him the cigarettes were bad for him, he thought, as she plunged on. "I sure could have used you," she said. "You see, my camera was stolen."

er tale began with a dinner with some movie star she said she was interviewing at a restaurant in the heart of intifada country. For a moment he wondered what fool had recommended it for an evening dinner party, no matter how celebrated the diners. But then, watching her through the mirror behind the bar, he realized she could probably hold her own against both the masked Arabs of East Jerusalem and the crack Border Police troops on patrol against them. He paid less attention to her words than to her face and its changing expressions. Her eyebrows rose and fell with each emphasis, her pink lipsticked mouth wrapped the words like packages for delivery, and occasionally, the bridge of her nose wrinkled revealing tiny pale scar lines that even the most expensive surgeons could not hide. He thought of Ahuva's pale skin and its even paler lines of age, and how she had kept her shape but her skin had turned softer over the years. His eyes flickered to the phone.

"Well, for the insurance, I needed a police report. I got to tell you, that police station," Goldie gasped. "Talk about central casting. They had everything except goats."

Her mention of the Russian Compound pushed open the door to Cohen's memory of his office on the second floor of the ivy-covered building. He thought of the magic of the dawn light pouring in through the tall narrow window directly behind the desk that had served him for more than a decade. He settled into the memories like he used to settle into the old chair behind the desk, closing his ears to her voice the way he used to close the door to the echoing stone floors and arched ceiling of the corridor outside his office. Half a year had passed since he last sat behind that closed door. But then he had been listening intently to a different kind of story.

"The craziness of it all," Goldie shrieked, bursting into his thoughts with a different kind of craziness than he remembered. "I don't need that kind of meshugas ," she said. "They sent me 'round and around. You think I needed that kind of bullshit? The last thing I needed last week was more drama. For godsake, I had Jenny Garson, exclusive, for a week," she summed up, demonstratively admiring her fingernails.

But while he recognized the gesture, he had no idea who Jenny Garson was, and he certainly didn't care. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the ground attendant pushing at the door to the tarmac, and one of the stewardesses picking up a hand microphone from behind the attendant's desk. In one swift movement, Cohen leaned over, reaching for his canvas bag on the floor. Standing straight, he swept the book into the satchel, his only luggage for the trip.

"Hey, what did I say?" Goldie complained. "I didn't mean to rag you," she said, in a tone that implied that she was the one who had been insulted. "Besides, you still haven't told me how a cop can afford first class tickets to LA."

But Cohen already had the canvas bag zipped up and over his shoulder. He made a small gesture with his free hand, pointing a finger upwards as if referring to a higher presence. Goldie frowned with incomprehension. The loudspeaker chimed its bell and the stewardess' accented English came on, informing the passengers that boarding for the Tel Aviv to Montreal to Los Angeles flight had begun. "It's time to go," Cohen said simply, shooting Goldie a short humorless grin before turning to the smiling ground attendants and the open door to the tarmac.

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