An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery

by Robert Rosenberg

  “With an earring.” Cohen laughed then. Now, he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Shvilli wasn’t calling to invite him at dawn to invite him to a brit.

  “I’ve got bad news.” “Obviously,” said Cohen. “Just tell me, Misha,” he ordered, using Shvilli’s first name deliberately.

  “Nissim is dead.”

  Pain propelled by memories shot through Cohen’s mind like rain driven before the wind. He closed his eyes and for a moment thought he might be dreaming, that everything he expected in the nightmares he knew so well had suddenly given way to a new dream from which he’d yet awake sweaty, afraid.

  Memories flooded him. Levy asking a question, Levy answering a question; from Levy’s first days in Cohen’s office, to the last—and beyond, when Levy’s natural loyalties to Cohen made the junior officer suspect to the fifth floor of national headquarters. It would take nearly two years before Cohen could repair the damage his reputation did to Levy’s career.

  “Boss, you all right?” Shvilli finally asked.

  Then, as suddenly as the phone call woke him, indeed as the too-familiar gunshot in his nightmare always inevitably arrived, he was alert and focused like so many times in the past when survival required it.

  “Hold on,” Cohen said, seeking light, and a way to squelch the sour taste of alcohol-induced sleep that made his mouth feel glued shut. He pulled the little chain on the heavy brass night lamp on the table beside the bed. It illuminated a pale puddle at the bottom of the water glass he used for the cognac and water he drank before going to sleep. He downed those last few drops to get some moisture back into his dry mouth, smacking his lips with the sudden burn.

  “How?” he asked.

  “Looks like an accident,” Shvilli said.

  “Car?” Cohen guessed sadly.

  “Yes,” Shvilli admitted tersely.

  “Where?”

  “Down near Eilat.”

  “In this weather?” Cohen asked, with as much curiosity as anger.

  Flooding wadis could sweep across a dip in the road and take a car dozens of kilometers away. What looked like a puddle as a car started into a dip on the road could suddenly be window high, smashing into the car, carrying it kilometers off the road. Buses, even loaded trucks, were known to be shoved aside by the rage of one of those flash rivers. Cars sometimes ended up in the deep ravines, dropping from the Negev plateau down to the Jordan Rift, the lowest place on earth. “He was out on the road in this weather?” Cohen repeated.

  “Yes,” said Shvilli.

  Nissim took all the driving courses, coming out at the top of his group in every driving course offered by Israeli security.

  But he was always too quick on the gas pedal for no reason, to Cohen’s mind, and used the siren a bit too much.

  He wasn’t reckless. But as always, self-confidence—and readiness to take risks that Cohen, older, and yes, wiser, knew were unnecessary—sometimes went a step too far.

  He wasn’t fearless, but Cohen sometimes worried Nissim was too brave for his own good. So in that moment, Cohen realized that it wasn’t inevitable that Nissim might die in a car accident. But it wasn’t surprising.

  “Was he alone?” Cohen asked. “What about Hagit?” “The report says that as far as they can tell there was only one body.”

  “What was he working on?” Cohen asked.

  “I don’t know. He had a lot going.”

  “Maybe something you were working on with him?”

  Cohen wondered. Soon after his appointment as Intelligence branch commander for the Negev subdistrict of the Southern District, Levy brought Shvilli south from Jerusalem to map the Russian underworld operating in Beersheba and Eilat.

  Shvilli paused before he spoke. “Could be. But he didn’t tell me he was going down south this weekend. You taught him, after all.”

  Like Cohen, Nissim compartmentalized, keeping secrets from subordinates until they needed to know. Your methods, Shvilli was saying, without any mean intention, just pointing out the fact that explained Levy’s behavior. It was a cop’s approach and it was true and Cohen knew it, even if it only added to his pain the feeling that he was responsible for Levy’s death. He went back to business, trying to keep focused, working at controlling his emotions.

  Shvilli broke the silence. “He kept a lot going at once,” Cohen’s former undercover man repeated.

  “Where are you?” Cohen asked.

  “Beersheba station. Just dropped into the office. Saw the bulletin on the desk. Called you first. Thought you’d want to know right away.”

  “What about Hagit?” Cohen snapped, almost bitterly, nearly angry that Shvilli thought of Cohen, not Hagit, first.

  “SOP already kicked in. The social workers are probably already at work.” “So what do we know?” Cohen asked.

  “Trucker caught the car in his headlights. Reported it to Eilat station. It came into District about ten minutes ago.”

  “Where they taking the body?” Cohen asked.

  “You mean the pieces,” Shvilli said bluntly. “It sounds like the body’s a complete mess, smashed up as badly as the car.” “How’d they get an ID?” Cohen asked.

  “From the plates, I guess.”

  “So we don’t know for sure if it’s Nissim’s body?” Shvilli paused for a minute. “We have to assume for now it’s him.”

  “Maybe his assistant will know what he was working on,” Cohen said. “What’s her name? Jacki?”

  “Yeah, I’ll call her as soon as I get off with you,” Shvilli promised.

  “All right, I’ll meet you at their house,” Cohen decided, “if the weather doesn’t hold me up. Meet me there.” He started to hang up but paused, and deliberately using Shvilli’s first name, he added, “Michael, thanks for letting me know.”

  He heaved himself off the bed and went to the thick curtain at his window, yanking it open angrily, starting grimly at the weather for what it did to Levy. The snow was mixed with a falling rain that had washed away the white of the night before. The storm had moved.

  Only the branches of the eucalyptus tree in his garden wore white sleeves of snow, making him sigh. He forced himself back to work building that wall in his mind, shoring up its foundations to make sure it stayed up, preserving Nissim’s memory but allowing Cohen to continue with his work. He picked up the transistor radio on top of his wooden bureau, carrying it around the small apartment as he went through his little routine: he started with the kitchen, where he put on the kettle for hot water, and then to the bathroom where the radio played music while he showered.

  First he stood for a long while under hot water and then cold, until finally he was truly awake, just in time to shave while the six A.M. Army Radio news magazine on the first day of the workweek in Israel began to tell him the news.

  They began with the weather, and its toll. An elderly woman had been found by her son, frozen to death in her unheated Jerusalem flat. A kerosene heater tipped over in an Arab villager’s house, causing a fire that sent four people to the hospital, including a baby. In Tel Aviv, electricity remained out in most of the southern half of the city. In the north, snow kept falling throughout Galilee, with three fatalities. “And in the Negev,” said the broadcaster, “flooding across the road north cut Eilat off from the rest of the country, and so far one fatality is reported.” No names were yet attached to any of the victims of the three incidents. That meant next of kin were not yet told of the disasters that just struck them. Levy’s parents were both dead. Hagit still didn’t know.

  By the time Cohen was dressed, standing in his living room-turned-study, sipping his thick black mud drink made like instant with Turkish ground coffee, the broadcaster finished with the weather story and was talking about Israel’s latest demands in the peace process. Cohen checked his watch and turned on the television to CNN.

  The American weatherman spoke softly as he moved across the screen, blocking Spain and giving Cohen a view of the Eastern Mediterranean. Two low pressure areas had
converged at the intersection of the three continents.

  From Africa, a band of clouds raced across the Sahara from southern Libya up into Egypt, thickening as it stabbed into the Mediterranean where it met the second swirl of clouds that bulged down from Greece and Turkey.

  He glanced at his umbrella in the corner by the front door and again at the TV screen. The fast motion satellite picture’s cloud cover flipped forward, showing the storm’s breakup starting in the south. From Beersheba south, the sun would be shining in the Negev. He didn’t need a raincoat, he decided, despite the rain pattering evenly on the glass canopy above the seventeen steps down to the back of the garden. He trotted past the deep green foliage of his garden, around to the front of the house, almost slipping when he jumped a puddle to avoid getting his sneakers wet.

  Slowly but surely, he drove through the empty streets of the early morning city until down the mountain to the coastal plain, and heading south on the highway to the Negev, he was beyond the ice and able to speed.

  12.

  Sunk in his memories, he drove automatically. By the time he reached the bridge over the wadi north of Beersheba, Army Radio was carrying Nissim’s name as part of their report on the road death toll. To Cohen’s are, they were specifically noting Levy was a senior police officer, so his death in a car accident made a natural peg for their daily traffic death report. “Even trained police officers,” the broadcaster was saying, “have to be careful on the roads. This month’s road accident death rate already set a new record.”

  Leaving the mumble of Beersheba behind, he felt his head clear as the speedometer rose and the clear air left behind by the departed storm rushed in from the open window, chilling his face even while the sun tried to warm it. Like the struggle of sensation on his face, his memories of the dead challenged him not to weep. He didn’t, but his face was grim as two hours and seventeen minutes after leaving Jerusalem, he turned left onto an avenue wider than the two-lane road from Beersheba to Eilat and entered what had once been a gray little town but which was growing some color.

  Nissim had helped in the town’s self-improvement campaign, of that Cohen was sure. But what really made the difference was on his left: a low-slung high-tech park made of one-and two-story light blue buildings sat behind a row of newly planted palm trees that grew a little taller than the dark blue Mercedes gliding out of the park under an electronically operated barrier, which was guarded by a security guard in a simple uniform. Cohen drove another fifty meters past another three palms in the median strip before reaching a billboard promising a country club at Neve Darom, the southern oasis.

  He followed the arrow to the right, and headed toward the new neighborhood of misproportioned two-story apartment blocks with slanting red-tiled roofs where Nissim and Hagit had bought their first home. The houses stood in awkward rows a couple of hundred yards into the desert, on a still-new black asphalt road already scarred, Cohen noticed, by tire rubber laid down by bad drivers or teenage joy riders. The country club would have a swimming pool and health spa, tennis courts, and an auditorium, said the signs hanging on a wire fence concealing the hole in the ground where the foundations would go for the complex. The last time he had been there, for the housewarming, there had only been a sign inviting people to the model home at Neve Darom.

  Just a month ago, Levy had been in Jerusalem for a meeting and had dropped by to see Cohen’s plans for the house. Nissim had been proud that all the homes in the neighborhood had been bought. “People are already coming around asking if we’re selling,” Nissim had announced, pleased with his investment.

  Cohen turned into the street where Nissim and Hagit had planned to have their first baby. It was wide enough to park at an angle in front of the houses. Their house was on the corner, first on the left. About half the houses on the street had a car parked in front. Outside Levy’s house stood half a dozen cars, including an empty blue-and-white, a van, and an upper-range Peugeot, its three-digit license plate identifying it to Cohen as a district commander’s. Cohen scowled, guessing the identity of the owner. A uniformed driver slouched in the front seat, reading the sports pages.

  He walked on to the front gate, a low-slung iron arabesque set into a low stucco wall already traced by ivy.

  “I’m gardening,” Nissim had told Cohen proudly. He paused for a second and looked up at the black bunting of the storm to the north. To the south, the blue was almost white in its clarity, without even a wisp of cloud in the sky.

  He knew that he might never know what really had happened when the flood took Levy to his death, because the storm would have washed away the evidence.

  He looked around. The last time he had been there, half the homes had still stood empty. Now, parked cars, tricycles, and other children’s toys, and a pair of spaniels and a poodle playing in the middle of the street gave life to the short, wide block. The sidewalks, however, were not completely paved. Three stacks of bricks, stacked on wooden palettes and still wrapped in their steel band, stood like sentries to the desert at the end of the street. Almost every front yard had at least one sapling and some shrubs. Levy had planted ficus on one side of the walk and a pair of palms on the other.

  Finally, hesitantly, he looked at the house and found himself in the wide-eyed sights of a uniformed police woman with dyed yellow hair and a nose beaked into a sculpture on her flat face, heading down the walkway toward him, hand outstretched. “Yoheved Ginsburg,” she said, sticking out her hand, “but everyone calls me Jacki.”

  “I know,” he mumbled. Shvilli—unshaven, in sneakers, jeans, and a sweater under a blue police-issued bombardier’s jacket—appeared in the doorway. His face confirmed what Cohen had hoped against hope he would not have to hear. It was indeed Levy who had died in the car.

  “How’s Hagit?” Cohen asked.

  “Her mother wants the funeral in Jerusalem,” said Jacki, “and wants Hagit back in Jerusalem for the shivah.”

  Cohen had met Hagit’s parents twice—first at the wedding, then, two years later, at the housewarming when the young couple had bought the house in the desert town, and made public the announcement Cohen already knew, that Hagit was pregnant. At the wedding her parents had seemed proud of their daughter. At the housewarming, they kept to themselves, unable to hide their disappointment in their daughter’s decision to make a home in the desert town so far from the family, unable to understand why Nissim had been sent so far south, unable to fight the transfer. They ran a small makolet, a mom-and-pop grocery store, on the border between Jerusalem’s upper middle class Rehavia and working-class Nahlaot. “With a university education, she decides to live in this place,” the mother had complained to Cohen at the housewarming. He had used his empty glass as an excuse to get away from the embittered woman and her meek, silent husband.

  “She’d rather stay down here,” Shvilli pointed out.

  “They made a lot of friends here.” Just then, as if to confirm his assessment, a blonde in her early thirties came out of the front door of the next house carrying a platter of food. Because of the waist-high wall separating the gardens, she had to walk down her walkway to the still unpaved sidewalk, onto the asphalt street, around a ten-year-old gray Subaru sedan pulled up onto what would have been the sidewalk, past the parked police cars, and only then enter the path to the house. She sidled past Cohen, Shvilli, and Jacki, mumbling “pardon me” with a Russian accent before disappearing into the house.

  “Do we know why Nissim was out on that road?” Cohen asked in a voice as low as the neighbor bringing food to the house of the mourners.

  “It could be anything,” said Jacki. Shvilli just shook his head sadly. Jacki’s wide mouth squirmed downward into a frown, and she, too, shook her head no.

  “And Hagit doesn’t know, either,” Cohen said in a tone that made the statement into a question to which he already knew the answer. Shvilli and Jacki exchanged glances but their expressions didn’t need words to confirm Cohen’s guess.

  Cohen looked back at the
district commander’s car.

  “Does he know?” Cohen asked, indicating District Commander Ya’acov Bendor’s car.

  “He knows how to jump out of airplanes. He wouldn’t know how to fill out an accident report, let alone read one,” Jacki said.

  Shvilli frowned at her, but, uninhibited by the responsibility of active service, Cohen could smile. Like her, he was not necessarily impressed with army officers’ trading in their greens for blues. It took most of them too long to learn that the police might wear uniforms and have a chain of command, but that civilians were not the enemy. Ya’acov Bendor had come out of the paratroopers’ brigade as a colonel who realized he’d never make general, and parachuted into the police where he was promised a promotion to commander—the equivalent of a general in the army.

  A sudden sob from inside the house broke the quiet.

  “Who else is here?” Cohen asked Shvilli.

  “The social worker, two neighbors, her school principal.” “What else do we know?” “Hagit says he left on Saturday morning,” Shvilli reported. ” ‘,’ he told her.”

  “Early? Late? A sudden decision?” Cohen rattled off the questions. He didn’t want to have to interrogate the widow. He knew he would nonetheless. A sudden gust of wind carried the sound of a motorcycle’s sudden downshift on the highway a kilometer away. Shvilli’s expression changed as he glanced off toward the distant bike, as if the sound were a scent he knew.

  “Jacki?” Cohen called on her, like a teacher calling on a student. He feared the worst, needing preparation for what lay ahead, knowing Nissim learned much from him, but worried he might have learned too much. Secrets are the true trade of the investigator. Sometimes, Cohen taught Levy, to bring one secret into the open, another must be hidden in the dark.