An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (29 page)

“They’re about to find out,” Cohen said.

Everyone in the room froze at the sight of Cohen and Shvilli’s entrance, the two guards with their hands held high pushed forward weaponless in front of the invaders.

Cohen scanned the room. Witkoff was in the rocking chair, at the head of the meeting; Zagorksy to the host’s right, Yuhewitz to his left. The girl was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Witkoff’s blonde. Cohen stole a glance into the kitchen. It was empty.

Three other men were in the room. Two were probably bookkeepers or lawyers, thought Cohen. The third was the tourist Cohen had seen with the camera outside the King David. His eyes narrowed on seeing Cohen, but he said nothing.

Cohen motioned with his head for the two guards they had taken captive to move across the room. They obeyed, hands high in the air. Witkoff started to rise from his chair.

Shvilli waved the mini-Uzi to indicate the host should sit down.

Yuhewitz snarled something in Russian at Shvilli.

Cohen let off a shot into the ceiling, surprising even Shvilli. Witkoff threw his hands over his head, Yuhewitz fell to the ground. “Silence,” Cohen added softly. “Get up,” he said to the Eilat boss. Zagorksy only smiled slightly. It was the same smile that made the scar across the Russian’s face grow, which Cohen had recognized from twenty years before when watching the video in the brothel.

“Misha?” Witkoff asked, indicating he meant Shvilli, the tone of the question neither rhetorical nor curious. His eyes went to Yuhewitz, who was trying not to shake in his seat. Witkoff said something in Russian.

Cohen swung his gun to aim at Witkoff. “Silence, I said.”

Witkoff fell silent.

“What did he say?” Cohen asked Shvilli.

“That Yuhewitz is an idiot.”

“Mr. Cohen,” Witkoff suddenly said in a friendly tone.

“I am so glad to meet you. Your book was wonderful.” He spoke a simple Hebrew with a strained attempt not to let the Russian accent through, which of course only made it stronger.

“This is Cohen?” Yuhewitz asked, his voice trembling.

Everyone ignored him. In the distance, beyond the open window to the sea, the sound of a propeller plane taking off from Sde Dov Airport was the only sound in the room—except for Cohen’s heart, pounding away inside his chest, the pulse beating under his skull.

“The girl,” Cohen finally said, breaking the silence, then snapped, “Higher!” at one of the bodyguards, whose arms appeared to be slowly lowering. There was the sound of cloth tearing as the guard’s jacket tore at the armpit.

Nobody smiled.

“The girl,” said Witkoff, calmly. He looked at Zagorsky.

So did Cohen.

“She had nothing to do with it,” said Zagorksy, but the conviction in his tone was hollow.

“Enough of that,” Witkoff reprimanded Zagorksy, and his eyes went back to Cohen. “Yes, the girl. How stupid, no? Love is stupid, no?” “Stop it,” Zagorksy demanded.

“I know what happened,” Cohen said.

“So you know I had nothing to do with it,” Yuhewitz piped up. “It was all her fault.” “No,” said Witkoff, nodding toward Zagorksy. “It was actually his.”

“Where is she?” Cohen demanded. “Here? In the apartment?

Where?” His cellular phone suddenly rang from inside his jacket pocket. He ignored it.

The sudden trill of a woman’s laugh answered Cohen’s question.

Strange, he thought, as she came into the room from a side door to Cohen’s left, followed by the buxom blonde who had opened the door for him only a few days earlier.

The mole was smaller than he remembered. All those artist sketches were misleading. He wondered how he could have made such a mistake.

But there was no time for wondering now. The girl, tall, tightly wrapped in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, paused as she came into the living room, and scanned all the faces until she settled on Cohen. Her green eyes were as cold as her father’s, as cold as her uncle’s.

They seemed almost amused, those eyes, with none of the fear—nor surprise—that he could see in the expressions of all the other people in the room. If anything, there was a slight measure of disappointment, as if she were hoping for a more worthy adversary.

There was no doubt now, as far as he was concerned. Her hands were casually jammed into her rear pockets, and if not for the circumstances she could have been a model posing for a provocative advertisement for the T-shirt, or perhaps the jeans, or even a perfume. Behind her was Witkoff’s desk, a gleaming wooden surface unmarred by papers. They were all staring at her now, except the blonde, whose eyes worriedly shifted between Cohen and her boss Witkoff.

“The Jerusalem policeman,” the girl finally said, in German.

Her voice was soft and had a natural hoarseness that made it sound like a whisper. “Avram Cohen.” There was no disguising the hatred.

He nodded. “Raise your hands.”

She held them out to show she held nothing. Her eyes glittered with expectation.

Witkoff asked Zagorksy something in Russian. Again Cohen fired a bullet from the pistol into the ceiling over Witkoff’shead.

Both Russians blanched, the bookkeeper and the tourist— Cohen still wanted to know what he was all about—threw themselves to the floor, hands over their heads.

“Quiet,” Cohen said softly, his voice a deep rumble.

“Hebrew. English. German. No Russian,” he ordered, with a cold half-grin on his face. “But first, quiet.” He turned to the girl. “Why?” he asked her in German.

She only smiled. Her black hair was cut in a bob, her lipstick a bloody red. There was another lipstick smudge on her cheek and Cohen realized it was the same dark orange on the blonde’s lips.

“Why?” Cohen repeated. “The bombs? The murders?

What was it all for?”

Zagorksy answered for her. “She is obsessed,” he said sadly.

“And you knew this?” Witkoff asked. “And let her come here?”

Cohen fired a third time. He could only assume that somewhere in the neighborhood someone would hear the shots and call the police. It was going to be their only way out. But he needed something solid from someone—the girl, Zagorksy, Yuhewitz, someone—if the plan were to work.

He looked at the girl. There was nothing masculine about her. He had no doubt that she was the young woman he had seen in the corridor in the hotel. He had been wrong.

“Do you have a son?” he suddenly asked Zagorksy, surprising them all, except the girl, whose laugh trilled again, softer, slighter, but no less provocatively than her stance.

Zagorsky nodded.

“Is he here?”

Zagorksy shook his head.

The blonde started to whimper in fear. Witkoff told her to be quiet.

The bigger guard, the one who opened the door to them, suddenly took a step forward. Without warning, Cohen fired the Beretta, knowing his aim. The heavy man dropped to the floor, gasping, not screaming, clutching a shattered knee.

Witkoff didn’t move. Yuhewitz moaned. Zagorksy shook his head with dismay. The girl smiled. And still, Cohen’s expression didn’t change.

“There are sixteen more bullets in this,” Cohen said softly. “And plenty more in that,” he pointed to the Uzi in Shvilli’s hands.

“I must get out of here—” one of the bookkeepers spluttered.

“Quiet!” both Witkoff and Zagorsky snapped at him simultaneously.

“Now tell me,” Cohen demanded of the girl, “why. Why do you hate me so much? To kill? Why?”

The girl spat.

“Why?” Cohen asked the girl again with a patience that belied the pounding in his veins, the thudding in his head.

An executive jet at the airport runway far beyond the open sliding window made a distant roar as it took off. The girl turned to look over her shoulder out the window, ignoring Cohen for a second.

Then she turned back. “My mother hated you,” the girl finally said in a simple voice. “She hated you and I hate you. It is simple, no?”

“I helped her,” Cohen protested.

“You sent her to hell,” the girl shot back. “And me with her,” she added bluntly.

“This is hell?” Zagorksy broke in. “You said you loved me.”

“You bought me,” she shot back at him. “I sold you what you wanted.”

“I helped her,” Cohen protested again to the girl.

The girl laughed at that. “Helped her? You sent her to that witch.”

“Her aunt?”

“Ha! “the girl cried.

“You were a baby. How could you know?” “She told me everything. Everything.”

“That your uncle is your father?”

“They’re both dead.” “Yes,” Cohen admitted. The jailed twin had been murdered in his bed in Ramie prison two years after his arrival in the jail. “But I had nothing to do with that.”

“You sent her away. To the witch. So I’d end up like this.

Here.” “Idiot,” Witkoff shouted at Zagorsky, adding something more in Russian.

“Quiet!” Cohen shouted, then asked Shvilli to translate.

“You brought her here,’ ” the Georgian quoted Witkoff.

” ‘ knew this and brought her here.’ “

“She didn’t tell me this. She told me he had arrested her mother. Sent her to the gutter in Germany. That’s what she told me.” “And did you tell him,” Cohen asked Zagorksy, pointing toward Witkoff, “that you knew me, too?” “You know him?” Witkoff asked, astounded.

Zagorksy shook his head with dismay, not denial.

At the far end of the room, the tourist from outside the King David was suddenly leaning forward tensely. But Cohen needed to know more from the girl.

“Who made the bomb?” Cohen tried asking her.

She laughed. “It is so difficult? Only men can do this?”

“Who taught you?” “A man,” she said, in a matter-of-fact manner that made it clear she could get any man to do anything for her, if she decided.

“Yosef,” Yuhewitz said. “She fucked him and he did anything she asked.”

“He did not,” she protested. “The devices were mine.

Mine.”

“Why Nissim? Why have him killed?”

She shrugged. “You sent my mother to die, why shouldn’t I send your loved ones to die?”

“What are they talking about?” Witkoff demanded again from Zagorksy.

But Zagorksy was staring at the girl, ignoring the question.

“You used me,” he finally realized.

She laughed at him. “And you didn’t use me? That’s the way the world works. I use you, you use me. We all use each other, no? And those who don’t know how to do it, well, they lose.” “Please, no … ” Zagorksy said softly, staring at her.

The girl mocked him. “Please … please … you’re surprised?”

she answered him with a question. “Such a big man you are, so important. You have killed, no? Arranged killing, no? And you, too, Alex, you too have done such things,” she added to Witkoff. “But not me? Why not me?

He killed,” she added, pointing at Cohen. “This, this, saint … ” she snarled the word. “He says so in the book.”

“I saved your mother,” Cohen protested. “I didn’t kill her.”

“You sent her to hell. And that’s where I was born,” the girl said in a matter-of-fact voice. The grin, a scowl really, grew slowly across her face. Her eyes narrowed as her hands moved back to her hips. She leaned backward against the broad desk behind her.

The thumping inside his skull had been growing stronger all morning. Maybe that’s why he remembered too late the switchblade letter opener on the desk.

“And that’s where I’m going to send you!” she cried out, reaching behind her and then throwing, with no little expertise, the pointed knife straight at him.

He dodged too late, and the knife struck deep into his lower chest. He gasped, and knew from the pain that the knife had lodged in his lower lung. He fired nonetheless, yet knowing he would miss, watching as the girl acrobatically rolled over the desk to hide.

Shvilli swung to fire. “No,” Cohen gasped, wondering absurdly what other tricks she knew. Shvilli halted.

“Maya!” Zagorksy cried out, as the girl reappeared from behind the desk, a gun held with two hands, aiming at Cohen.

He dropped to the floor as she fired, landing on his side, aware of the knife lodged in his ribs digging deeper into his lung. He didn’t have the breath to shout at Shvilli this time. The Uzi burst and Cohen looked up.

The girl was looking down at her perfect breasts, with disbelief that turned into a strange look of satisfaction as she looked up at Cohen. Her cold green eyes rolled back, and she dropped.

He grunted as he pulled the knife out of his side and again as he rose to his feet, the pounding in his head echoing the submachine gun bullets that had rocked the penthouse living room.

Blood drained from his wound, a growing rivulet that he tried stemming with one hand, the Beretta still aimed with the other.

“Boss,” Shvilli cried out, “I’ve got it, you can rest. Sit down. Lie down, boss … “

“I’ll wait,” he gasped. He looked around the room.

Zagorksy was sitting forward in his chair, a hand over his eyes. Witkoff was watching Cohen carefully. The blonde was in shock, too frightened to speak, let alone whimper.

Yuhewitz was sweating profusely, his teeth chattering. The two bookkeepers were silent. So were the two guards, one wounded, the other tense but frozen. But the mysterious tourist was smiling at Cohen and suddenly he realized that no matter what happened next, there would always remain that man’s presence in the meeting as a mystery for which he doubted he’d ever have an answer. In the distance, he could hear sirens. A neighbor must have called, Cohen thought. He looked down at his shirt. Blood was trickling between his fingers down his shirt.

Suddenly, the roar of beating helicopter blades swerved close to the building and then backed away. The unit, Cohen figured. Gunshots would mean terrorists. They sent the unit. He looked at the blood on his fingers and suddenly thought foolishly, I’m too old for this. A strong wave of exhaustion swept over his body with a thrashing warmth. But still, he remained standing. The phone rang in the apartment. Shvilli looked at him. Cohen shook his head. “I’ll get it. Keep them covered.” His voice came out as a raspy whisper, the breath painful and short.

He went to the desk, each step painful, slowly stepping around the table to the body of the dead girl. He looked down at her lifeless eyes, still open. Only then did he pick up the receiver, the splattered blood sticky on the plastic.