An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery (3 page)

Not wanting to meet the politician—and wanting to get as far away as he could from another wall-high poster of the cover of his book, his face alone almost as tall as he was— Cohen tried to find an unobtrusive space from which to watch.

He found himself up against a display case of his books, and realized too late his position put him in the background of most of the photographs that would show the Koethe president with the German politician. While the politician and publisher—apparently old friends—chatted in front of the cameras, Cohen stupidly faced a hundred copies of the German edition of his book, beside a woman in her forties, cigarette dangling from her lower lip, her honey blonde hair already half white.

“Shalom,” she said to Cohen.

“Shalom,” said Cohen, slightly surprised.

“That’s all the Hebrew I know,” the woman said in badly accented English, taking the cigarette out of her mouth and dumping it in her empty beer glass.

Cohen, as he had vowed to himself so many years before, chose to answer in English. “That’s all right.”

“My English is bad. Very bad.”

“That’s all right, you can speak German. I understand the language. I just don’t speak it.” “I know,” said the woman. “I brought your book to Smitbauer. I am the editor. Kristina. Kristina Scheller.” She offered her hand.

Embarrassed that he didn’t even know her name, Cohen shook her hand warmly, smiling a half grin and explaining that he had only worked on the American edition, and was surprised when Tina said the book sold in Germany. He made the decision not to interfere with the Koethe edition, not even reading the translation until it was in galleys, and even then, just skimming through it, not enjoying the German, but not finding anything to complain about. “The translator did a good job,” Cohen admitted.

“I wish you had written it in German,” said the woman.

Cohen said nothing to her.

“I understand,” she said. “I think it’s why I decided to publish the book.” She smiled and they stood in silence for a minute. “You don’t want to meet the chancellor?” she asked.

Cohen shook his head.

From a pocket in her skirt, she pulled out a packet of cigarettes, offering him one. He shook his head, but took out one of his own cheap Noblesses from his shirt pocket packet. He was rationing them to himself, and was calculating how many he had left until the evening when she interrupted him. “Well, it looks like you might have to.”

“What?”

“Meet the chancellor. They’re coming this way.”

And so, despite his efforts to keep a low profile, the shot of the smiling chancellor shaking hands with a dour-looking Cohen was taken by at least a dozen cameras both still and video.

“So you are the one who says Israel sent us criminals in the seventies,” the chancellor said softly enough for only Cohen, and Smitbauer, who was looking on proudly, to hear.

“Witnesses,” Cohen corrected the politician. “Informants.”

“Well, you did good work against the fascists,” the chancellor said.

“Nazis,” Cohen corrected him.

Smitbauer’s smile was fading rapidly.

“Yes, yes,” the politician said, still holding Cohen’s hand, not hearing.

His voice suddenly rose, and speaking for the microphones pointing at them, he said, “I will be visiting your country next month. Your city, Jerusalem, is a favorite of mine.” “Good luck,” said Cohen. On his forearm, between his wrist and his elbow, he felt the itch of the eczema above the tattooed number the Nazis had given him when he was fourteen.

Finally, the chancellor dropped his hand, and Cohen fought the impulse to scratch until the big man was gone, and the TV camera crews and still photographers, the aides and the hangers-on and the handlers from the fair and the politician’s office had all moved away.

For the next six hours, Cohen stayed at Koethe’s pavilion, as journalists came by every half hour to interview him. Lassman disappeared from the scene when he sadly realized that none of the journalists were interested in him.

Cohen, surrounded by people, felt alone. He answered the questions succinctly but politely, except when he realized the journalist had not read his book. In those cases, he scolded them and found an ally in Kristina Scheller. She had a beer for every two sips of cognac Cohen pulled from his flask.

By seven, he was exhausted, with a thick headache. But at eight-thirty, he was due at a banquet thrown by Koethe in honor of their authors that year. He wanted a shower and a nap.

Lassman had disappeared hours before. “He said he was going to find the Israeli pavilion,” one of the assistants told Cohen.

“If he looks for me, tell him I went to the hotel,” Cohen said.

“Do you know where to find it?” Kristina asked, coming up behind him.

“The driver pointed it out to us as we went by. It’s almost directly across the street, no?”

“We have a little bus to take us all at seven-thirty,” she promised Cohen.

“I don’t mind walking.”

“It’s raining out.”

“It hasn’t rained in Israel since March. I miss it. Maybe it will help clear my headache.”

“I have some pills,” she offered.

“Mine are at the hotel,” he said. It was a lie. He had already eaten three aspirins laced with a touch of codeine, sold over the counter in Israel, and had the rest of the packet in his pocket. But he still had a headache. “I haven’t had any real exercise all day.” At home he tried to walk at least a kilometer a day.

“You want to be alone,” Kristina decided. He nodded.

“Well, you’d better take my umbrella,” she suggested, going to the little closet behind the reception desk of the pavilion.

On her face as she handed it over was a look of disappointment.

“I’ll take the van back to the hotel,” she said.

As he expected, the walk in the rain pleased him, making his headache go away. From outside, the hotel was aglow.

Through broad windows that showed off almost the entire first floor, Cohen could see a lobby that seemed to have been taken over by a cocktail party. He again experienced the nervous numbness he had felt earlier that day when he signed what seemed to him the hundredth copy of his book for yet another stranger who had looked at Cohen with an indefinable longing that the old investigator couldn’t interpret.

“What do they want?” Cohen had asked Kristina at the fair, and she had said, “You are now a celebrity, yes?”

making him blurt out, “No, no thank you.”

The doorman shook his head at the white-haired man coming out of the dark park, cutting across traffic where no traffic lights gave pedestrians permission to cross, his trouser shins wet, his shoes soaking. Cohen ignored the uniformed doorman’s looks. At the entrance to the hotel, up six red-carpeted stairs beneath a canopy, he had to tell the concierge that he was a guest at the hotel.

At reception there was a wait of five minutes before he could catch the attention of a clerk behind the counter.

He identified himself. Once the clerk behind the desk realized it was Mr. Cohen from Koethe’s reservations, things moved quickly. He sent a bellboy to get Cohen’s suitcase, which the driver delivered earlier.

“Has Mr. Lassman checked in yet?” Cohen asked. It took the clerk a couple of minutes to find Lassman’s name on the reservation list. He had a room on the floor below Cohen.

“Yes, he has been in since four o’clock,” said the receptionist.

“And Miss. Andrews? Tina Andrews?” “Oh, no, not yet,” said the clerk, not even having to look to see if Tina’s key was in her mailbox, let alone look up the agent’s name. “She will be here at seven forty-five.

Can I take a message for her?” “No, nothing,” said Cohen. What he was thinking of saying would best be said face-to-face. “Please have me woken in an hour,” he requested. That would leave him half an hour to get ready for the Koethe banquet.

“No problem,” the receptionist promised.

The bellboy led him, skirting the crowded lobby, which indeed felt more like a party than a waiting room, to the elevator doors. On the sixth floor, he confused the bellboy by tipping the young man as soon as the suitcase was on the luggage rack at the end of the bed, refusing a tour of the room.

The bed and bathroom both seemed oversized, the furnishings combined both ultramodern fixtures such as the bathroom faucets and the telephone with baroque decorations, like the tapestrylike curtain covering the window view to the street below, the park, and the convention center across the street. As much as the hotel seemed aglow as he approached, the fairgrounds across the street now seemed ablaze with lights. He opened the window.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, kicking off the wet shoes he had bought for the trip, then testing the mattress.

The bed had too much of a bounce, making him scowl. But he lay down and soon was dozing, vaguely aware that by the time he fell asleep, the phone would ring him awake.

That awareness stayed in the back of his mind so that he didn’t actually reach deep sleep, just touching the edges of where he could hear his breathing become rhythmic. Sure enough, just reaching that sweet slide to sleep, the phone rang with his wake-up call and he was back on his feet, in the shower, shaving, and finally dressing for the banquet.

He decided to leave the blue necktie Ahuva packed for another time, and wearing a clean white shirt, gray twill trousers, and the still-damp loafers, he headed down the long corridor from his room overlooking the park and the convention center beyond.

The elevator doors opened to an old man sitting in a wheelchair, while in the corner, her back to the elevator doors, a tall brunette, her hair in a large bun, peered at the mirror, checking her makeup.

The lift was slow enough for Cohen to realize the man in the wheelchair was staring at him.

“You’re that Cohen fellow,” the elderly man said with a voice as hoarse as tearing cloth.

Cohen nodded. The woman turned away from the mirror.

“Frank,” said the man in the wheelchair, ignoring her.

“Frank Kaplan,” the man repeated, watching Cohen’s face for a reaction, curious to see if Cohen recognized the name. When there was no response, the older man looked down at his blanket-covered lap and shook his head, then snorted a laugh. “If I were fifteen years younger,” he finally said, “I’d beat the shit out of you.”

The comment stunned Cohen. “Pardon me?” he said, “I do not know what you are talking about … “

“He thinks you wrote about him in your book,” the woman tried explaining to Cohen, grabbing the handles of the wheelchair as if trying to take control over the elderly man.

“And it’s a good book,” the old man added, suddenly cheerful, almost friendly, instead of resentful. “I’ve got to admit. It’s a very good book.” “Where? When?” Cohen asked, not worried but curious.

He had no memory of writing about anyone named Frank Kaplan.

“You didn’t mention my name. Just called me and some friends of mine, crazy. Fanatics. Terrorists.”

Cohen racked his brain.

“This elevator moves faster than you think,” Kaplan mocked him.

“It wasn’t just you,” Cohen said, finally remembering.

“There were many of you. A fund-raising banquet in New York for people with fantasies about religious war in Jerusalem.” Cohen didn’t know all the names of the contributors at the banquet, but he knew how much money was raised and what bank accounts it went through to reach causes that wanted an ideological offensive up to the destruction of the Moslem mosques on the Temple Mount, to make way for the Third Temple.

“No,” Kaplan protested, “people standing up for the rights of the Jews.”

Cohen shook his head and would have argued that in the sovereign state of Israel, the law, as promulgated by the Knesset, determined the rights of the citizenry. But just then, the elevator came abruptly to a stop at the first floor. The woman turned Kaplan’s chair abruptly to face the doors.

“Jesus, Francine,” Kaplan moaned. “Not so fast.”

As the elevator doors slid open, and Francine moved the chair forward, Cohen added, “And you’re not even religious,” feeling foolish immediately afterward, sounding to himself like a kid calling someone a name, not even sure Kaplan heard. Worse, the remark seemed to cut the commotion in the lobby, which dropped a beat in deference to the man in the wheelchair’s arrival.

A few eyes fell on Cohen, still standing in the elevator as a circle quickly closed around Kaplan in the wheelchair.

Cohen didn’t like the feeling of being watched, and for a moment considered hitting the elevator button again.

Instead, he slipped through a clearing that bypassed Kaplan at the center of attention in the lobby, and went into the banquet hall, where Koethe’s festive dinner for five hundred valued guests was taking shape.

He spotted Lassman leaning close to a brunette at a table at the far end of the hall. Cohen found his name tag at the head of a table at which he was flanked on one side by a man who introduced himself as the owner of the largest bookstore in Switzerland, and on the other by an author who specialized in counterespionage.

Tina came by his table before the speeches that preceded the dinner, to whisper to Cohen that she was making progress with a French publisher and hoped to have good news by the end of the fair. “But I’m still worried about TMC,” she said. “Maybe it will help that you’re on CNN.”

“What?!” Cohen exclaimed.

“Their item on the fair. The chancellor shook your hand.”

“They couldn’t find anything else to use?”

His question and its tone made Tina sigh. “I’ll never understand you,” she said. “I know authors who would cut off their right arms for a chance to be seen on CNN. Your friend Benny would, easy. Anyway, I’m hoping Herb Wang sees that, and realizes that you plan to be cooperative now.

We’re seeing him tomorrow at five o’clock.” She paused, before adding, “You are, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“Going to cooperate?” she asked.

“I’m trying,” he said half-heartedly, giving her a smile that calmed her enough to continue her tablehopping onward.

But very quickly it became apparent that the Swiss bookstore owner wanted to talk about money and the German author wanted to talk about the Mossad. Cohen wanted to sleep, and excused himself after the soup, shocking the Swiss bookstore owner—though making his wife smile— and leaving the espionage expert convinced that Cohen indeed was an agent for the Israeli secret service.