House of Guilt
Chapter One
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Cohen sighed. The smell of death never lasted long in the desert, but meanwhile it was somewhere in the garden.
He hissed, hoping it would bring out Suspect the cat, a tom he had adopted years before. In his old age, Suspect still caught prey that crossed the jasmine and vine borders of the yard. But the cat had ceased making its tours of the neighborhood, choosing graceful retirement over the need to hunt down its opponents.
The old long-hair crept into view at the east end of the garden, a bundle of gray against the glistening green and deep brown of the freshly watered garden that Cohen had nurtured over the years.
A swallow jumped down from a tree branch to the clothesline and from there to the little asphalt patio beneath three of Cohen's white shirts billowing like sails in the soft breeze.
Snake or rat, Cohen figured about the hidden corpse. Suspect dropped into his jungle cat pose, a hunting crouch that turned into three quick paces toward the bird. It had been years since Suspect could catch a bird, unless it had strayed by accident into Cohen's apartment, and Suspect got its claws into it before it found the window. But still the cat tried, making Cohen envious of the cat's eternal optimism.
Like the cat, Cohen picked his way softly and slowly along the flagstone paths he had made around the beds of geranium, chrysanthemum and tall Madonna lilies, up to the think tangle of jasmine creating the natural wall between Cohen's garden and his neighbors.
The cat was in front of him and downwind, concentrated on the prey. Cohen took three steps forward. Neither the bird, pecking at the berry seeds fallen from the tree shading that part of the garden, nor the cat, noticed him. He crouched like an Arab, forearms on his knees, the hunting scene framed in his view. He wondered if he'd let the cat catch the bird.
But it wasn't Cohen's choice to make. "Mister Cohen," came a voice behind him. "Are you all right?"
The bird took off. Stunned, the cat furiously washed.
Cohen rose wearily. Yitzhaki the grocer was standing beside the wooden stairs that led up a closed pergola of wood, iron and glass to Cohen's apartment on the second floor. He had lived there for almost twenty years on a side street off Emek Refa'im, the Valley of Ghosts in Jerusalem's German Colony.
"Something wrong, Yitzhaki?" Cohen asked, not rudely, but with a measure of annoyance at being disturbed.
"No, no, problem," the grocer said. "Where do you want me to put this?" He shifted the cardboard box on his shoulder.
Usually Yusuf, the grocer's helper from Dahaishe refugee camp outside Hebron, made the weekly delivery of Cohen's standard order -- the fresh fruits and vegetables for the Shabbat dinner he prepared every Friday evening for Ahuva, his lover. On the first of the month, Cohen would go to Yitzhaki's fruit and vegetable shop around the corner to pay his bill.
Now, in the garden, Cohen assumed Yitzhaki had made the delivery because he was pressed for cash. His patted his hip pocket, and realized his wallet was upstairs. "You shouldn't be embarrassed to ask me to pay my bill before the end of the month," he said, starting for the stairs.
It was an apology, not a reprimand, but it made Yitzhaki sigh. "It's not that," the grocer said.
Cohen paused, guessing the problem. "Yusuf's under curfew?"
Yitzhaki sighed. "His sister has cancer. He went to visit her, got caught in the curfew right after the massacre. I wanted to go down there, talk to someone in the army, something, to get him out of there. For his sake. Not just mine."
The burly Iraqi had deep-set eyes that couldn't hide embarrassment, with a shadow of sadness beneath them. He lowered the crate to the first step. "But Shula wouldn't let me go," he said, adding his confession. "And she wants me to fire him when he comes back." He was blaming his wife for the fear as much as he blamed the Arabs.
Cohen blamed the government. He had followed his instincts to their logical conclusion and brought in proof of the danger, evidence that pointed ahead. All his warnings were in vain.
Now, a judicial commission of inquiry into the causes of a massacre in Hebron was trying to decide whether to blame the guards who overslept, or the generals and politicians blind to what they had wrought during years of letting mystics monopolize the standards of nationalism on the agenda of the public debate.
Cohen had struggled not to blame himself for giving up the fight. Now it was too late. The commission had taken its testimony and gone behind closed doors, working out its decisions. Cohen was alone with his guilt.
"She can't take it anymore," Yitzhak was saying. "The worrying. Every day, someone else gets it. From an Arab they know, someone who worked with them, someone they trusted. And now this business in Hebron. They'll take revenge. Everyone is waiting for it. I trusted him. But Mr. Cohen, maybe she's right. Today he's my loyal worker. Tomorrow he could stick a knife in my back. Or a customer."
"He's been with you since he was a boy," Cohen said softly. "You know him well. Do you really think..." There was no judgment in his voice, but Yitzhaki could hear the reproach. Cohen knew that in most cases of an Arab worker from the territories killing his employer, it was either a relatively new laborer, or someone with a grudge that began with motives far more personal than national.
But while he couldn't blame the Arabs for their frustrations, nor could he give into their desire to see Israel disappear. Cohen lived in the quandary of a moral dilemma that required hope as well as pessimism, idealism as well as pragmatism. It was clearer for him than for most, as a survivor. But that didn't make it any easier.
"Shula says..."
"Are you afraid?" Cohen asked, emphasizing it was Yitzhaki's decision.
Yitzhaki shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know anymore. It's so complicated. A Jew doing that. Killing praying people."
"Yusuf's a good man," Cohen tried. "He needs the job. And you need his help." He knew Yusuf and he knew Yitzhaki. They had been together too long for Yitzhaki to be so worried.
"It's Shula you should talk to," Yitzhaki said. "I tried to be logical. But her third cousin on her mother's side, she goes to that grocer, the one in Netanya. You probably saw his picture in the paper. Knife in the back. The shirt all red." Yitzhaki shivered. "His worker did that to him."
"I saw the picture," Cohen said.
"He never stole from me," Yitzhaki went on, the confession pouring from him. "Fifteen years, he never stole. At the beginning, I tested him. Left a tenner on the counter. When a tenner was really worth something. He brought it to me, asked what to do with it. But now? People are afraid."
"You haven't told him yet," Cohen realized.
Yitzhaki smiled weakly.
"If I can help..." Cohen suggested again. Suspect crept a few steps away from the grocer, then crouched in a wait for Yitzhaki to leave so that he could investigate the cardboard box on the stair.
"Maybe," the grocer said, taking a step away. The cat took its own two strides. "I'll think about it," he added almost hopefully, and then squinted toward the sun falling westward behind the weeping willow on the western edge of Cohen's garden. "I've got to get going. You want me to take this upstairs? It's heavy."
Cohen said no, then watched the grocer leave the same way he came in, behind the tin-walled, one-car garage shaded by the willow. The shortcut behind Cohen's garden led to an alley where Yitzhaki had a storage shed for his Emek Refa'im shop. But instead of taking the groceries up the stairs himself, he sat down in the bamboo and wicker chair in the shade of a wild vine that had long ago stopped producing grapes, but all summer guaranteed him a shady corner of the garden.
Two summers ago, Cohen had painted the chair. Now, it felt better than ever under him. Just last week he had mentioned to Ahuva that he was planning to paint it again.
She had mocked him, saying, "You have more than enough money to buy a whole set of garden furniture, let alone a whole house. You aren't a civil servant anymore," she had declared, "And you certainly are no pensioner." It was true. He was a wealthyman now, wealthier than he felt he had any right to be.
It was just after he finally told her, a month after they had returned to Jerusalem from Los Angeles, exactly how much money Cohen had inherited from his old friend Herman Broder.
"You could finally buy a proper apartment," she had said. "A villa, perhaps. On Caspi Street," she had said, "with one of those beautiful views down to the Dead Sea."
Cohen wasn't interested in moving, though he did have an idea about a change in his living conditions. He had been paying key-money rent for more than twenty years rent through an estate lawyer for the extended family that owned the two-story German Colony house built in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Lately he had been discussing with the lawyer the possibility of buying the entire property. The problem wasn't Cohen's ability to pay. . The problem was getting a vote of all the shares of the twenty-nine heirs. Two of them owned ten percent apiece. The rest had various size shares depending on the distance between them and the original patriarch, who had made the family fortune from his plan, conceived already in his native Russia, to build an industrial bakery in Jerusalem. Ottoman troops in Jerusalem were among his first institutional customers. Then came the British. The visionary founder of the bakery didn't live long enough to see the Israeli Army became the family's single largest customer. The first floor apartment had been empty for years, for within the context of the family fortune, the property on the little side street off Emek Refa'im, the Valley of the Ghosts in the German Colony, was inconsequential, almost forgotten amidst their myriad holdings.
For Cohen, it was suddenly an easy acquisition begging to be made -- if the lawyer could arrange it. He had not yet mentioned the idea to Ahuva. Until the lawyer had everything set, he didn't want her to know what he was planning. He wasn't even sure about what he would do with such a large house. But he knew he should buy it.
Meanwhile, he preferred talking about anything other than the money Broder left him. "I like my chair," he had protested, just he had protested that he liked the flat in the German Colony and saw no need to move, even if it was to a penthouse with a magnificent view of the Judean desert, the Old City, and the northern tip of the Dead Sea far below in the Jordan Valley.
"That's not the point," Ahuva had said. "I'm not telling you to go out and spend it all. I'm not telling you to give it all away. And I'm not saying you should go cut fire lanes in the forests with work crews. But you have to be active. Involved with something."
"When the time comes," Cohen interrupted the judge, "I'll know what I'm going to do."
Meanwhile, he was learning how to use a personal computer. It was Cohen's way of giving his last respects to Broder, the man he had once called his brother. Cohen spent hours in front of the machine, manuals on his lap as his fingers learned to go from hunt and peck to finding the letters as he thought them.
He was amused by the random coincidence of phonetics and etymology that made the acronym for Disk Operating System into a bilingual pun, dos being Hebrew street slang for the ultra-religious, and more specifically the haredim, ultra-orthodox Jews who dressed in the style of sixteenth century Polish aristocrats, and tried to live according to the laws of Torah as the rabbis over the millenia had interpreted them.
There had been no computer terminals on any of the desks when Cohen worked for the police, and when he had gone to visit Herman Broder in Hollywood, the only envy Cohen had felt was for his friend's access to the technology. Cohen had hopes of one day knowing enough about the machine to connect to Internet, which he had read about in the newspapers. Meanwhile, he struggled with the logic of the machine's simplest language, the hand-eye coordination of using the mouse, and learning how to type.
Ahuva knew about the computer, of course. Just like the computer at Broder's mansion, Cohen's had its own desk-trolley, but lacking a separate room for a study, he kept it in the large living room. Sometimes he rolled it into the bedroom where he'd sit in bed with the keyboard on his lap, the manuals scattered around him on the bed, straining his neck as he looked at the large color screen he had bought.
Ahuva didn't know it was for something more than the catalogue of Cohen's music collection. When he had showed off its ability to play compact disks, she was impressed with his new found hobby for a few minutes. But then she curled up to him and whispered that he knew damn well she preferred her music live, and missed the old vinyl records. "I can't explain why, but they had more feeling to the way they played back the sound," she said.
Not that Cohen was absolutely sure what he was going to do with the computer, now that he had the catalogue almost done. He was thinking of writing something. He had even spoken with David Hefetz, commander of the police academy at Shfaram, about the need for a history of the force.
Hefetz was enthusiastic about the idea, but cautious when Cohen suggested that he could undertake the job. "Don't misunderstand me, Avram," Hefetz had said, trying not to identify himself with Cohen's enemies on the fifth floor of national police headquarters. Cohen didn't misunderstand. They finished their lunch at the little restaurant around the corner from Cohen's apartment exchanging gossip that interested neither of them.
Ahuva suggested teaching. "Moshe would love to have you lecture in his department," she had been telling him for months.
"I am not a scientist," Cohen would growl back. He had guest lectured at the criminology department at the university in the past, but found the atmosphere stifling. His own formal schooling had come to an abrupt end after six years. Yet learning had always been the key to his survival.
The last thing he wanted was to be like the academics he met -- barely able to talk about anything except their field, or so certain of their own brilliance that they couldn't notice anyone else's ideas. "I am not a lawyer," he pointed out to her. "And I am not a forensic scientist. What am I going to do? Tell those kids stories about the old days? And," he summed up bitterly, "How long do you think they'd let me teach if I talked about the syndrome."
It was the sore in his heart that refused to heal, the madness justified by the religions, and encouraged by politicians. None condoned a madman's arson or murder. But they did little to dampen the fervor, and once the fever broke out, it was difficult to cool down.
Cohen's last case had proven -- at least to him -- that the syndrome was spreading and becoming more dangerous as apocalypse and salvation became the chosen terms of reference for the mystics who wanted to be fingers of God.
That's what happened in his last case, and that's what had happened in Hebron, in the the prayer halls of the ancient Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham had bought a burial plot for his wife Sarah and was laid to rest beside her. A doctor, who had seen one-too-many victims of the uncivil war in the territories, had tried to stop the peace process, had tried to hasten the messiah's arrival, had tried to... "Well," Cohen had said to himself, waking to the news that cold and foggy morning, "who knows what a man massacring people at prayer is hoping to accomplish."
The doctor chose Purim as his day of action. It was the holiday of Mordechai and Esther, celebrated with traditions of costumes and drink and noisemakers to drown out the name of the evil Haman, the vizier who had planned to kill all the Jews of Persia until Esther and her uncle Mordechai foiled the plan. The doctor had sprayed machine gun fire through a room full of kneeling Moslems, killing thirty before the rest overcame him, beating him to death.
One thing was certain. Now that it had happened once, it could happen again. in Hebron or Jerusalem, in any of the places around the Holy Land where more than one religion placed its faith in the stones of ancient sites. And meanwhile, Moslems would seek their revenge.Terrorists and freedom fighters and saints and martyrs mixed their messages into prayers in these holy cities.
Private madness easily can become public catastrophe, especially when the madness is seemingly sanctioned by religion. Some called it the syndrome, and exposing its sin had made Cohen into a pariah. The politicians didn't want to hear his warnings, and on the fifth floor of police headquarters, where the inspector general sat at one end of the long corridor and his deputy at the other, they were more interested in their own politics than about something the politicians didn't want to know.
Now with the madness under the bright lights of the inquiry into the massacre Cohen had seen coming and had tried to warn about, he felt more lonely than ever in the city. He had no faith that the inquiry would go to the heart of the matter. They wouldn't call him to testify.
Meanwhile, he still had friends and loyalists inside the system. But they were like Hefetz, the police academy commander, eager to hear Cohen's view, afraid to sanction it.
Ahuva was the only warmth in his life, except for the music, books and cooking. Nissim Levy had been thrown to the dogs, in typical fifth-floor fashion. The ambitious assistant had stuck loyally by Cohen as their last investigation together revealed layer after layer of madness, leading to a confrontation with the prime minister at the time. Levy won a promotion to deputy superintendent right after Cohen left the force, unable to work any longer with the prime minister so openly hostile to him. But with Levy's promotion came a transfer, dropping him from assistant to chief of investigations in the Criminal Investigations Department of the Jerusalem police district, down to the number three job in the ten-man station in Yeroham, in the middle of the Negev desert.
At least with Ahuva, herself a brief eyewitness to the horror, when Nissim had brought it shackled and handcuffed into to her magistrate's courtroom for remand, Cohen could still laugh -- though never about the syndrome. Lately, it was about the money, which he still had difficulty thinking of as his own.
He had never really thought about money before. He never had let his overdraft grow larger than his salary. All his utility payments were made automatically. Even Yossi, the red-headed local branch bank manager, admitted that he envied the stability of Cohen's accounts. Indeed, aside from Yossi, and a few unfortunate bank branch managers who had been the victims of the rare Jerusalem bank robbery, Cohen had never really had a conversation with a banker. But when Broder's estate fell into his hands, Cohen remembered Ephraim Laskoff, and the people Cohen referred to in his mind as "the tremblers."
They were a host of soft-fingered men who had passed through the Russian Compound, where every criminal arrested in Jerusalem eventually must pass from police headquarters through the parking lot to the magistrate's court. That's where a government-appointed judge and two experts from the university questioned the chairmen of the boards and the director generals of the country's biggest banks, wanting to know the details of how they colluded to rig the stock market in the banks' favor. It had cost the taxpayer ten billion dollars when the government stepped in to halt the stock market crash. For Cohen, in the days when he was chief of criminal investigations in Jerusalem, it was a kind of theater to relieve him from the more bloody crimes that came onto his watch over the city.
During one week of the public hearing, Cohen found a few hours to sit in the last row of the wooden benches, making secret bets with himself about the unconscious signals of guilt the bankers gave the panel. Neither the judge nor the academics noticed how the banker with the slight German accent adjusted his tie whenever he said, "I don't remember." They couldn't see the twitching foot of the chief executive officer who began his testimony with a touching tale of rising from poverty to power through the diligence of hard work -- and the loyalty he gave the chairman of the board. These were all from Cohen's professional larder, bread and butter to his perpetually unhappy eyes.
Cohen had never owned stocks, so it took him one session to learn the terminology of the bourse, a second to understand the crime that took place, and only in the third did he begin concentrate fully on the bankers' faces and hands as they took the stand to explain their innocence. After all, they said, the politicians knew what was going on. Everyone was making money, as the stocks rose. Nobody wanted to see them fall.
The fourth session was Laskoff's. He had kept his hands perfectly still on his lap, sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair stage-right of the Supreme Court judge and the two professors.
Cohen had liked the slightly hunchbacked banker's demeanor under questioning, so when many years after the inquiry, when Cohen returned to Jerusalem with Broder's portfolio under his arm, he looked up Laskoff, who, just as Cohen had expected, had not been indicted, though he had left the bank, taking only private investors into a small but highly profitable and very discreet mutual fund.
"You can spend a hundred thousand a year and still have more at the end of the year than the beginning." Laskoff said, after leafing quickly through the stack of documents Cohen brought from California. Instead of watching for Cohen's reaction, Laskoff reached for the ebony cigarette filter leaning against the ashtray on the desk, then added "After taxes."
"Shekels?" Cohen asked, wondering what he would do with so much money.
"Dollars." Laskoff said over the flame lighting the cigarette. Cohen told Laskoff to take care of the accounts.
Once a month they met in Tel Aviv at Laskoff's favorite restaurant. Their conversations about the money were as ritualistic as Cohen's weekly assignations with Ahuva. Laskoff would comment on how little Cohen spent, Cohen would say not to worry. Laskoff would sniff slightly and sigh, wishing he had more clients like Cohen, who didn't care if he had one million more or less.
Then they'd spend the rest of the long lunch at the Golden Apple, sampling the new sauces and deserts Aharoni invented out of French recipes and Israeli agritechnology's best products, drinking at least a bottle apiece, alternating each meal with who chose the wine. Laskoff always insisted on paying, but Cohen knew the money came from his account. He didn't care.
Cohen chose Laskoff because as far as Cohen could tell, except for that one appearance in front of the commission, the banker's name had never appeared in the press. When he returned from Los Angeles, the press became Cohen's nemesis, especially after the Los Angeles correspondent for one of the afternoon dailies dug into the probate court records and came up with the story of Cohen's fantastic inheritance.
Everyone, from Laskoff to Yitzhaki, to Aharoni and the weekend magazine writers who wanted to interview him, said Cohen deserved the money. Yitzhaki said that what happened to Cohen was like winning the lottery, and that he was glad to see it hadn't changed Cohen the way it changed Yitzhaki's cousin on his mother's side when he won the lottery and forgotten his family.
But to the sycophantic journalists who tried phoning, Cohen would growl softly down the line and hand up, while he'd stare silently at those who came knocking on his door, wanting to get the details. He did try to cooperate with one who said he wanted to dig up what had happened when Cohen had gone to the prime minister with the warning about the syndrome. But when Cohen discovered that the reporter was more interested in the late prime minister's rumored depressions, than he was in the spread of the syndrome, Cohen stopped the interview.
Besides, even Cohen understood enough about the media to know that his story was ancient history compared to the events of any weekend's toll of the religious blood feuding over the city. The government had changed. The world was changing. It was said peace was on the way. Cohen hoped so, but wouldn't believe it until he could see it. But he wasn't sure h'd live long enough to see the day when he could drive from Israel, through Syria and Turkey, to Europe, the ultimate proof as far as he was concerned, of the arrival of peace.
The police reporters faded away, but the society columnists took an interest in him and Ahuva, at forty, now the youngest district court judge in the country. The relationship they had kept secret for almost a decade was inadvertently revealed by the events in Los Angeles. It made Cohen retreat even further into his apartment and garden, neither hermit nor recluse, but solitary and self-contained.
Gradually the interest in him died away, and though he could read in the newspaper every day the proof he needed to know he had been right, he was impotent to act. The inspector general had gone on record as saying that even the doctors weren't completely sure about the syndrome, implying that an old cop like Cohen certainly couldn't know absolutely what caused it, or predict how it would appear.
And then there were elections. Fifteen years of government coalitions between right-wing nationalists and religious orthodox politicians came to an end. People were tired. They wanted peace.
Cohen found his peace in his garden, the quiet that sealed him from the craziness stalking the streets of the city and about which he could do nothing. He was glad when the gossips finally agreed in all three local papers one weekend, that the deputy commander had never been considered a society item before he was rich, so why should he suddenly become so now. But they all said he deserved the money.
Even Ahuva said so. But that wasn't the point, either, Cohen felt. She wanted him to get a new wardrobe. But the strain for him was in the choosing, even before the fashionable cut made him feel uncomfortable. Yet with her, he could laugh about it, and in turn make her laugh, which always gave him pleasure. Not long after they were back from California, he had finally promised her that he would acquire a new wardrobe and would be wearing some new clothes when she next came to visit. That Friday night, when she arrived as usual at nine, he greeted her at the door. She stared for a second and then burst out laughing. He had bought a complete new set of what he had always worn: gray twill-cotton trousers, long-sleeved white shirts rolled up past his elbows, and a new pair of sneakers.
Still, the money had changed him, even if Yitzhaki, as well as the press, couldn't see it. The psoriasis had disappeared for awhile after leaving the force, and was gone by the time he went to California. Now it was back, and Cohen had no doubt it was his effort not to think about the money that brought the anxiety onto the surface.
He rubbed at the dry skin of his forearm under his shirt then cursed himself for his lack of self-discipline as he stopped. The cat, finally realizing that there was no raw flesh amidst the fruits and vegetables, interpreted the gesture as an invitation, and jumped onto Cohen's lap. "Yes, money changes people," he told Suspect.
The phone began ringing in his living room overlooking the garden. He checked his watch, making the cat leap off and away to the wooden stairwell at the rear entrance to the building. Such a back entrance was a rarity in Jerusalem, and one of the reasons Cohen had decided to buy the flat when he first found it so many years ago. Suspect disappeared up the stairs, as if the cat knew who was calling. Ahuva would hang up after four rings. Her rulings were built on the precedents of a decade together, the ritual kept alive every Friday, except when Cohen was called into the streets by his vocation during his years in criminal investigations.
The animal corpse, whatever it was, would have to wait. He hefted the heavy box into his arms and took the stairs two at a time, dropped the carton on the floor and caught the phone in the middle of the fourth ring.
"Mr. Cohen?"
It was a woman, but not Ahuva. "Yes," he said, disappointed. He eyed the box of groceries, planning an onion soup in his mind.
"Commander Avram Cohen?" It was a pleasant voice, but had a slightly desperate ring. Her English was British, and it sounded to Cohen's ear like mashed potatoes, lacking consonants, full of words wrapped around themselves.
"Deputy Commander," Cohen corrected her. He didn't feel like adding retired, but it's what sprang to mind.
"Thank goodness," the woman exhaled. "You sure aren't easy to track down. Did you know that there are nearly thirty A. Cohens in Jerusalem?"
She was calling from a cellular phone, Cohen decided, hearing in the pause before he answered the voice of a man on the same cellular network, saying "Please, Mama, please understand."
"Are you a reporter?" Cohen asked, though he doubted it. There was something too polite in her manner from the start.
"Oh no, dear me, no," she said, almost giggling at the supposition. "My name is Caroline Jones," she said. "I'm calling on behalf of Mr. Raphael Levi-Tsur." Her voice rose as she stated the fact in the tone of a question, seeming to test Cohen's familiarity with the name.
"Never heard of him," Cohen grumbled.
She was not surprised. "Mr. Levi-Tsur is chairman of a private investment bank. He would like to make an appointment to see you," she said, adding, "in Jerusalem and at your earliest possible convenience." There was a pause, and then she emphasized again, "as soon as possible."
"These aren't banker's hours," Cohen snarled at the phone, holding it away from his ear and looking at the mouthpiece as if blaming the machine itself for what he regarded as a folly. "And I have a banker. So, you can tell your..."
"Oh dear, no," she interrupted. He could hear a slight laugh in her voice at the misunderstanding, and then she dropped her voice slightly, a signal of something much more serious than money. "It is not a banking matter. Oh no, of course not. It is a personal matter, in which he believes your expertise would be helpful, indeed indispensable."
"Why me?" he asked, pulling the celery out of the box. He slid a finger down the stalk, breaking one off and putting it under the faucet. The water ran as the woman answered with her own question.
"You are Cohen, no? Avram Cohen? The police commander? The detective?"
The crunch of celery should have told her what he thought of the question. He repeated his correction -- "deputy commander" -- this time adding "retired," still uncomfortable with the way it didn't roll off his tongue with ease. "And I have a banker, thank you. Now, if you please..."
"Mr. Levi-Tsur would greatly appreciate your help."
"Why me?" Cohen demanded again.
"He knows you are honest and discreet." She waited for him to say something in response to the flattery. He didn't. "This is a most delicate matter," she finally added.
"Are you going to tell me what it is?" Cohen asked, "or do you want me to guess?" Friday afternoon was the most sacred part of the week for him, as the Sabbath descended tangibly over the city for a few hours of peace and quiet and he would prepare dinner for Ahuva.
"It involves a missing person," she said gingerly, leaving a pause that gave Cohen the feeling she was waiting for his expletive. He gave her silence instead, and she filled it. "Mr. Levi-Tsur's grandson is missing."
Cohen shook his head, sighing. "I am not a private investigator. If the boy is missing in Israel, he can go to the police here. If they cannot help him, then there are private investigators. That is all I can do for your Mr. Levi-Tsur. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some of my own personal matters to attend." He added "good-bye," without waiting for her response and hung up. A moment later the phone rang again.
"Ahuva?" he assumed.
"Caroline Jones here again," the sprightly voice began, "Please, commander. At least you could meet with ..."
"Not interested," Cohen said, hanging up. The nerve, he thought to himself as he finished washing the celery. The phone rang a third time. He answered angrily. "I am not interested in a private investigation of any sort, and would appreciate it if you told that to your Mr. Levi-Tsur."
"Who's Levi-Tsur?" Ahuva asked calmly in her judge's even tone, seeking clarification of a 's point.
Cohen laughed. It came from his chest and was barely a grunt when it came out, but Ahuva recognized it. "I'm sorry," he said, ending his laugh with a sigh. "I didn't mean to shout."
"So, who's Levi-Tsur?" she asked again.
"I don't know," Cohen said, reporting back to Ahuva the contents of the surprising phone call. "She said he's a banker, that his grandson's missing. I assume she wanted me to find the boy."
"You mean he wanted you to find the boy," Ahuva corrected him. "You've never heard of him?" she asked.
"No," he admitted. "Have you?"
"There's a Levi-Tsur lecture hall at the university," she mused aloud. "Maybe... Why don't you do it?" she asked. "Look into it?"
Her question shocked him. "You heard what I said. I'm not interested in a private investigation of any sort."
"You're scared," she ruled.
He bit at the celery, thinking. There was a slight flicker in the line, the call-waiting signal. Cohen scowled. "I'm not scared," he finally said. "I'm uninterested. And I certainly don't need the work."
"That's what you think," she said. She had always been the only person who could talk to him that way. "But there's no need to discuss it now," she added lightly. "I'll be over at nine," she said. "We can talk about it then." She hung up. The call waiting immediately kicked in. Cohen unplugged the phone from the wall and then began chopping the celery for the strawberry gelatin mold he had planned for desert. It was one of Ahuva's favorites and easier to think about than her judgment.
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"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,
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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.
