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Chapter Two

Two men move swiftly through a dark house. They wear black masks and signal silently with pointing guns. Slowly they edge around the curve of a flight of stairs, steeling themselves for their burst through the open doorway at the top where a couple makes love. The is woman riding the man. Her back twists. The gunmen enter. The man springs as the first bullet rips her off him. The second strikes his forehead.

ohen cringed in his seat. He hated violence as entertainment. When the woman's blood-soaked hand started crawling across the screen to the fallen telephone on the carpet in the bullet-riddled bedroom, Cohen yanked off the earphones. Dropping them on the empty seat beside him, he scowled at the suddenly silent movie. In real life, he thought, blood spills black, not red.

He slouched uncomfortably for what seemed the hundredth time, finding a spot from which to peer through the half-open plastic curtain over the window to an unmade bed of clouds. The sun was somewhere ahead of the plane. He stared into the bright center of the purpling sky ahead, trying to imagine how Der Bruder would look fifty kilos lighter than what he had been only four years before, when they had last met.

Maximilian Broder, the man Cohen called the brother, was born to make movies. His father had worked with Fritz Lang, and his mother had danced for Ziegfield. Unlike those bigger names, Broder's parents - like Cohen's - didn't get out of Germany in time. Cohen's friendship with Max Broder had nothing to do with show business.

It was the three days on the run together, years together in Dachau, and finally, one more year as nokmim, avengers hunting down Nazis in the ashes of Germany, that Broder and Cohen shared. It had been forty years since Cohen quit Europe and the assassination team, choosing the Jewish war of independence in Palestine, wanting to realize a future, instead of chase after the past.

Half a decade passed before they met again, as accidentally as the first time, when both were youngsters trying to make it across the Swiss border.

An American film crew was doing a movie about the war of independence. Cohen was a young patrolman in the Jerusalem police, on crowd control duty while the Hollywood people shut down a neighborhood for three days of shooting. The American movie star, playing an Israeli war hero, gave the crowd their thrill and some autographs. But Cohen stared only at the tall heavy man sweating profusely as he relayed the director's commands to the local extras.

Memories stung Cohen's face like the sharav dust in the air. Der Bruder had made it to America. But at that tearful reunion on the street-corner half a block from the old Jordanian border in the middle of the city, neither Cohen nor Broder mentioned the last time they had been together, when Cohen had finally disobeyed Der Bruder, choosing life over death.

The Jerusalem reunion ended with promises to stay in touch. Broder wrote three letters. Cohen responded with two postcards, at first telling himself that he let his last answer lapse because he was busy.

But the truth ran deeper. More than anything else, he had wanted to forget. He had already decided he would never speak German again, and using the same willpower Der Bruder had helped him learn, he sealed his past away, determined to forget. For awhile, he even took to wearing his shirtsleeves rolled up only to below his elbow, to hide the number tattooed on his arm. He reinvented himself, becoming an Israeli without a past and only a future to create. Indeed, he was always secretly pleased when a new acquaintance, accidentally spotting the number, would be unable to hide surprise that Cohen was not a sabra, native-born to the land.

But Broder wouldn't let him forget. It took four years, but Broder made it back to Israel, by then a director of his own movies. He, too, had remade himself into someone else. An American, wealthy enough to be courted by the new Jewish state seeking donations, a rising star in Hollywood. "Come back with me," Broder had said, visiting Cohen's one-room flat in the Germany Colony apartment. "You'll live a lot better than this," the Broder had said scornfully about the sparse room. "We'll make our movie. Our story," he had added, in the familiar whisper that took pleasure in its own sound of conspiracy. But Cohen said no then, looking forward to an investigators' course, hopeful about a future of his own. He was done with his past.

Since then, Broder had come to Israel after every war, each time making sure to spend at least an hour with Cohen. Broder would do most of the talking, but Cohen had no interest in Hollywood, and the past was a subject he never discussed. Not with Der Bruder. So the visits would descend into strange silences between Max' speeches, in which the offer to join him in Hollywood was never specifically repeated, but always remained hanging, like all the other unresolved dilemmas between them.

Cohen fidgeted in his seat, as he thought about why he was flying to Los Angeles. On Broder's last visit to Israel, four years ago, the director had proudly announced he was finally going to make the movie about their years together. It was during a season that Cohen, by then chief of investigations for the Jerusalem police, remembered as the first long hot summer of intifada, and Cohen had little time to spare his old friend.

"I'm calling it The Survivor's Secrets ," Broder had said. They were standing in the lane outside Cohen's apartment house on a late Friday afternoon. Starlings out of Africa were heading north for the summer in Europe, flocking in the branches of the aged cypress shading the taxi waiting for Broder. "You'll come. All you have to do is be there. Tell me who to trust and who to believe." The starlings flocked louder than the cars rushing home for Shabbat on Emek Refaim, making Broder slightly raise his voice to add, "And who to question closely."

Cohen had looked up to the treetop. In the fast growing darkness, it took a moment to spot the birds amidst the dark thick leaves of the tall broad tree. He knew that a sudden noise could break the singing and the leaves would shake as the flock leapt as one into the sky. But they'd only fly once around the tree and take roost again until it was truly time to leave Jerusalem. "The movies are your business," Cohen said simply, "not mine." There was no way a movie could claim priority over the flesh and blood of Jerusalem. "I'm not interested," Cohen had added, pulling open the back door to the taxi. Broder frowned, shrugged, and sighed, getting in. Cohen closed it on him with a strong slap that seemed to make the flock take a deep breath before leaping into the air as the taxi turned right on Emek Refaim and headed back to the King David. Cohen had stayed in the lane, watching the birds sweep upward into a helix that finally collapsed in a great swoop back into the treetop, before he went back inside.

But still Broder wouldn't let go. He made phone calls to report the process. Not many, and they came sporadically, but over the years Cohen heard that Epica studios had signed on. Casting had begun. Shooting was scheduled. Each time Broder would hint, but never say outright that Cohen was wanted. He always had a question that he wanted to ask. "Just one thing," he'd say, "a small detail" he needed to remember. Was the bullet in Bernard Levine's left leg or right? The shade of blue of Manheim's eyes. The kapo they called the beast? What was his real name?

Cohen had always said he couldn't remember, Broder would laughingly call him a terrible liar.

But when Broder's phone call came a few days after Ahuva walked out, the first call since Cohen's departure from the force, it was a much weaker Avram Cohen who answered. A Los Angeles Times report had mentioned Cohen's case in a story about political interference in Jerusalem police investigations.

Cohen had been less shocked by the ringing phone than by the letter from manpower division asking to which bank account he wanted his pension payments deposited automatically.

"You're out of excuses, my brother," Max had shouted down the line at three in the morning. "It's time for you to come," he had ordered. "I finished the movie. I'm at the final cut." His throaty rumble had been made hoarser by the slight echo of the long distance line. "But you don't even have to see it if you don't want," he said, surprising the Jerusalemite. "Just come. We'll have fun. Twenty years you haven't taken a vacation. It's time for you to get some enjoyment out of life. Come on. Get your tuchus over here."

or the first time in years, Cohen couldn't answer truthfully, "I am enjoying my life." And Broder knew it.

Cohen gripped the phone tightly, listening to his breathing. If he went, he thought, he wouldn't have to commit himself to anything, feel guilty about his pain or be reminded of his uselessness. As if all the years had never passed, Der Bruder once again was offering Cohen an escape.

Broder had said the same thing Ahuva had accused him of only a few days before. "You're out of excuses, Avram," she had said. But unlike Ahuva, Der Bruder won.

ohen's stomach was rumbling. He clenched the fleshy fold over his belly as if trying to draw the fat over the muscle to cover the hunger. Like all survivors of starvation, Cohen could be compulsive about food. For most it was a matter of stockpiling, always making sure there was more than enough food. Two or three refrigerators full were not uncommon in survivors' households.

For Cohen, it was the quality of food that mattered. He could cope easier with hunger than unidentifiable food. The camp had taught him hatred for the inedible. Years of bachelorhood had refined the compulsion into a passion for fine cooking. So, he had turned down the stewardess' offers of the airplane's microwaved food, thinking of Broder's promises about the best restaurants in Los Angeles. Cohen had protested he couldn't afford such luxuries. It's all expenses paid, Broder had insisted. But Cohen thought about the letter from personnel and the pension payment to his bank, one more bit of evidence about how old he was. Old men, he thought bitterly, always had to worry about their money. Then he laughed cynically to himself, thinking of Der Bruder, who had barely weighed thirty kilo on the day the Americans arrived at the camp, ballooning to more than a hundred and fifty during the years in Hollywood. But soon after Broder began work on The Survivor's Secrets , in one of his calls to Cohen, he reported that he was planning to lose fifty kilo from his huge frame.

Cohen shifted uncomfortably again in the seat, feeling his stomach rumble. He hated flying. He wished the engines behind and below him could lull him into a dreamless sleep instead of nag him into searching the even tone for a hint that something was wrong and the plane was about to start falling from the sky. It badgered him like the question whether he should be grateful to Der Bruder for giving him the opportunity to flee Jerusalem, or curse his old friend's penetration of his defenses. A braver man would have said yes to Ahuva, he thought. A stronger man would have said no to Broder. He remembered when he was strong enough to do just that, and wondered if he would ever be so strong again. He was weighing the predicament when he sensed someone taking the empty seat beside him. He opened his eyes.

"There's a really good scene coming up," Goldie said eagerly, picking up the earphones Cohen had dropped and making herself comfortable in the empty aisle seat beside him. "Here," she ordered, holding out the earphones for him.

He shook his head.

"Doesn't matter. I know the words," she said, grinning to herself. Indeed, with the gossip beside him, Cohen didn't need the earphones, nor have to read the lips of the actors. Goldie recited by heart as the figures moved on the screen. "Ralston, you bastard," Goldie hissed while a brunette in tall spiked heels glared at a shark-like businessman behind a desk. "You think getting rid of me is gonna get me off your back? Well, you're wrong. I know who you really are. And I'm gonna expose you. D'you know why?" The leering man on the screen leaned back in his chair, oozing crass sexual innuendo. "No, why?" Goldie whispered in a falsetto basso as the Ralston character spoke. There was a pause, and then she turned on the steam for the brunette's next line. "Because you're slime, Ralston. Slime."

Cohen couldn't prevent a short laugh at the gossip's enthusiasm, and she took it like bait, chortling, "I love it. Slime!" she howled. "God, I love the movies. I mean, I know it's crap," she added, lowering her tone with mock apology. "But don't you love it? Great concept. Make the PI a dame. Great concept. They took in more than thirteen million the first weekend it opened." She leaned toward Cohen and changing her tone completely, whispered in a seductive rasp, "So?"

"So what?" he asked.

"So, are you going to tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"How does an Israeli cop pay for a first class ticket to LA?"

"I was invited by an old friend. For a vacation."

"Really? Who's the Daddy Greenbucks?"

"Pardon me?" he said, not knowing the expression.

"Whoever it is, they must be rich," she said. "And value your company," she added with even more curiosity.

He shrugged slightly.

"Let me guess," she offered. She tapped one of her fingernails at her pouting lips, and before Cohen could protest, her eyes widened with excitement. "I've got it. Many years ago you fell in love with a suspect in a big heist, a beautiful woman, and you're on your way to see her because she was so beautiful and smart. She wasn't some over-the-hill bitch like me. Am I right?" She leaned closer to him, trying to use her half-open blouse like an interrogator offering a suspect a cigarette.

It was true that Der Bruder had seduced him. And saved him. Maybe they had even loved each other, he thought. But brothers sometimes fight, too. He winced slightly.

But before he could answer, she added with no little insinuation, "or may-be your friend is an old customer. Israeli Mafia," she whispered with mock conspiracy, either ignoring or not noticing his recoil. "You were on the take and now you're on the run."

Six months earlier he would have exploded. Now, exhausted from the sleepless flight, drained by weeks of self-pity, he could only scowl at her, and look back to the movie screen, shaking his head with dismay.

"Kidding, I'm only kidding," she protested. "Come on," she pleaded. "What's the big secret? Remember what I said? We're both too old to play hard to get," she said coyly.

Cohen sighed. From the moment she had identified herself as a Hollywood gossip, he knew she would recognize Max Broder's name. The last thing he wanted was her kibitzing about Der Bruder. But she had given him no choice.

"Max Broder," he confessed, finally breaking down and feeling foolish for all his delaying tactics. From the start, he thought, he should have followed his own advice to every suspect he ever had questioned. Tell the truth.

"Max Broder? The director?" she asked. " The Max Broder?" she demanded excitedly when his silence confirmed her question. " That Max Broder? He's friends with a cop?"

"A retired cop," Cohen protested. He pronounced the word like the Yiddish word for head, kop , as he deliberately turned away from her excitement over the discovery of a mutual acquaintance.

There was a car chase in the movie. Cohen opened the biography on his lap, hoping it would make her go away. But though she remained silent at his side, out of the corner of his eye he could see her right hand clicking two long red fingernails nervously against each other. The hum and rumble of the jets camouflaged the sound, but the insistent rhythm soon had him imagining the beat of her annoying tick. He looked up when he realized he was concentrating more on her thumb and forefinger than on Dayan's archaeology. But before he could ask her to stop, she finally finished her private deliberations.

"Alright, a retired cop," she said. "What's Max Broder doing with a cop for a friend?" she demanded suspiciously, grabbing hold of his left forearm to get his attention.

he gesture made him turn slowly to look at her hand on his arm. Her eyes fell in embarrassment to her fingernails on his thick wrist. They were like drops of blood alongside the sans-serif digits of the purple number tattooed onto his broad left forearm halfway between his elbow and his hand.

"Oh, God, I'm so sorry," she gushed, staring at his arm, "I didn't know. I mean, I knew that he was, I mean everyone knew he was a ... Oh, God. I'm sorry. I didn't realize, I didn't notice..."

"It's alright," Cohen said in a comforting, almost paternal tone. Her stare made him self-conscious and again he brushed a stray lock from his forehead, wondering if he had deliberately waited for her to notice the camp identification number. "There's no need to apologize," he said, adding in an almost officious tone, "I am on a long overdue vacation. He has been inviting me for many years but I never went. Now, I am retired. So, I am going." It spilled out of him like groceries from a torn bag, surprising him.

"Just in time, if you ask me," Goldie said eagerly. "What with all the trouble he's been having."

"Trouble?"

"You know, the studio pulling out of the project," she said.

"We never discuss his business," Cohen said bluntly.

"Right. Gimme a break. What do you talk about? The Lakers? Don't give me that bullshit," she complained.

His eyes fell reflexively to his forearm for a second and looked back up at her.

"Alright, sorry. I guess you do have other things to discuss. But still, you must know what's been going on with him. With the movie, I mean," she insisted.

He shook his head.

She studied his face. "This your first trip to Hollywood?"

He nodded.

"You don't know anything about it?" she asked.

"I don't go to the movies very often," he said. "And I don't believe everything I read in the newspapers," he added.

"Good thinking," she said seriously, surprising him with her sincerity.

They both fell into silence. She tapped at her cheek with a finger, her eyes on the screen but her mind elsewhere. He waited patiently. She had much more to tell him, and he already knew he could count on her to show off what she knew, or at least thought she knew.

"God knows somebody's got to tell him there are limits," she finally said to herself. Then she turned angrily on Cohen, stabbing at his broad chest with a long red fingernail "I'll tell you something. I haven't reported half the things I've heard about him lately. You know why?"

Cohen listened to her with all the skepticism he knew how to muster. Gossips sold rumors, the cheapest bargains in the bazaar. Anyone could invent one, if only they told it with enough conviction.

"Because I understand ," she said in a stage whisper, nodding with the confidence of conviction. "He couldn't help being obsessed with this flick. His masterpiece, they say. But I know it goes even deeper than that. Back to, to," she tried to finish the sentence, but instead of the words, she glanced again at his tattoo.

"His past," Cohen filled in for her.

"Exactly," she said, relieved. "But now that he's supposedly finished it, it's like he's doing everything to keep it from coming out. Not that I can blame the studio for canning it. Who cares about the Shoah nowadays?" she asked rhetorically, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, "I mean, except us Jews?"

From the start, when Broder announced that the film was going to be made, Cohen had made clear his disinterest in it. Now, the gossip's talk was making him feel guilty about his deliberate refusal to discuss the movie. The guilt primed, he defended Broder. "He won't do anything to jeopardize the movie," he said.

"Yeah?" she said doubtfully. "What about last week? He tried to kill Andy. And don't give me that look, there were witnesses."

His impulse to laugh drained away. She was serious.

"Andy?" he asked.

"Andy Blakely. He's studio chief at Epica."

"This Blakely. He is dead?" he asked.

"Of course not," she said, astounded by the question

"So," Cohen said without trying to hide a patronizing smile, "Max has been arrested for attempted murder."

"Don't be silly," she blurted.

"You see?" he said sternly.

"Listen to me," she said, sitting upright, trying to be even more serious than him. "Your friend Max Broder made quite a scene. At Ma Maison no less, which quite frankly is not the place to attack a studio chief. He tried to kill Andy. With a steak knife . That's right," she said to his disbelieving eyes. "He was out of control. From what I hear, it was eleven points on the Richter scale of breakdowns." Satisfied with her testimony, she adjusted herself comfortably in her seat and smiled triumphantly at Cohen.

He didn't even blink. "When?" he asked.

"Tuesday night."

Broder had called Cohen in Jerusalem the following night, wanting to know which Hollywood actress Cohen wanted to meet. Cohen had demurred, but Broder insisted until finally Cohen threw out a name. Broder chortled, telling Cohen he was completely out of date. The actress had been dead for a decade. If anything, Cohen remembered, Broder sounded euphoric describing his plans for dinner at the best restaurants in the city, and to arrange at least one good party. No parties, Cohen had protested, but Broder had insisted. "What's the good of coming to Hollywood if I can't throw you a party?" the director had asked. Cohen clenched at this memory like it was a lonely fingerprint on a murder weapon, and reprimanded Goldie.

"You don't know what really happened," he said to the gossip. "You weren't there."

But the authority in his tone made her misunderstand. "Of course not. I was too young," she said, confounded.

"No," he corrected her. "I mean last week. You were in Jerusalem. You don't know what really happened."

"Listen buster," she charged, "I'm paid a lot of money to know exactly what happens at Ma Maison, every night of the week."

"Hearsay," Cohen scoffed.

"I don't usually do this," she shot back. "But in this case, and only because of the circumstances," she said, her eyes flickering to the tattoo again, "and you being Max's old friend and all, I'll tell you who told me." She pursed her lips as if priming the muscles to make the effort to give away her source's name. "Leo Hirsh," she finally said, as if it were a trump card in a game.

"Who?" Cohen asked.

She rolled her eyes at his ignorance. "Leo Hirsh. Epica board member and Max's executive producer on this project. Hell, Leo goes back to Two to Tango with Max. That's almost thirty years. In fact, until I met you, I thought Leo was Max's oldest friend."

"Was this Hirsh at the restaurant?" Cohen asked.

"He was at the table!" she exclaimed.

"And he called you from Los Angeles to Jerusalem to tell you about this?"

"That's right," she said proudly.

n the movie screen, the woman detective was waiting for someone behind a newspaper in a hotel lobby. Cohen covered his own eyes with the palm of his meaty hand, cursing silently. He had known he wouldn't like Broder's friends. "Children play a game called broken telephone," he finally said. "They sit in a circle. The first one whispers to the second one. The second one to the third. The message becomes distorted." He paused before adding, "Among children it is harmless."

"Listen," she hissed. "Don't be such an asshole. I'm trying to tell you something. It's suicide for Max to attack Andy Blakely like that."

"Why?" Cohen asked.

"Because," she began, sighing with exasperation at his ignorance of what should have been obvious, "Andy's job is to get Epica out of the red and there's no way any Holocaust flick is going to be a summer hit, or take Christmas by storm," she explained as if to a child. "So Andy pulled Epica out of the distribution deal. The last thing he needs now is a flop. The stock market would kill him."

"So?"

She shook her head at his incomprehension. "Epica owns the movie," she said, trying to teach two plus two. "If they don't show it, nobody will see it."

He snorted. Broder would have had at least two fall-back positions for every possible obstacle on the way to his goal. Der Bruder had made an art out of contingency plans. Cohen could already hear Broder's braying laugh when Cohen would tell him what the gossip reported. "Ridiculous," he muttered, shifting in his seat away from her, as he thought of all the ways Der Bruder knew how to kill. None of them included a steak knife across a table in a crowded restaurant. "Ridiculous," he repeated, punching at the hard, uncomfortable pillow propped between the seat and the window.

Goldie looked at him for a long moment, and then tenderly touched his arm. He opened his eyes. "It really happened," she said. he couldn't help but notice the pity in her voice and for a moment wondered if it was for him, Broder or herself.

He shook his head. "I doubt it."

"Maybe," she said. "But you're the one who says you haven't seen him in a long time. Maybe he's changed," she added. "Hollywood does that. Changes people. You don't know Hollywood. But I do." It sounded as if she was trying to break the news gently.

"And you don't know Max Broder," Cohen muttered back, not knowing whether he was defending his old friend or himself. He huffily wrapped his arms around his chest, turning away from her.

"I'm sorry I'm the one to break the news," she said, patting his arm sympathetically. "I was only trying to help."

He grumbled to himself, refusing to acknowledge her attempt at tenderness.

"Maybe that's why he invited you," she said, suddenly thoughtful.

But he only hunkered deeper in the seat, refusing to participate any longer in her gossip.

"Whatever," she surrendered, getting up from the seat. "If you're staying with him," she added from the aisle, "I'm sure we'll run into each other again. He gets around to all the right places."

He waited until her perfume's fragrance faded before he opened his eyes to the dark night sky beyond the oval window. She had made him miss the sunset. He slapped off the reading lamp, and readjusted the pillow, grumbling to himself.

He was suddenly aware that he had clutched Jerusalem around him like a tallit, the fringed prayer shawl of the religious. Each knot on the ceremonial mantle represented one of the Bible's commandments. But for Cohen, the knots of belief had come undone in one terrible blow, and the linen had frayed over the years.

So, he dozed fitfully for the rest of the flight, waking to the shifting tones of the jet engines in descent. For a second he didn't know where he was. The fright passed, and he made his decision. He'd stay a few days. Maybe even see Der Bruder's damn movie. But then he'd go home.

The engines screamed. As his stomach muscles tightened under the seat-belt with the rumble of the wheels touching down, he wondered if Goldie was right and Hollywood had changed Max Broder in ways Cohen had never noticed. But with the same relief he felt when the plane's rush down the runway turned into a slow smooth taxi to the terminal, he realized that at least he knew Der Bruder.

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