Free An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg Page A

I am,” he said. “Come, I’ll show you.” And for the rest of the Shabbat weekend, they both, indeed, did enjoy.

10.
    For almost two months he spoke once a week with Helmut Leterhaus in Frankfurt, asking about progress in the investigation. Leterhaus was looking for Cohen’s mystery chambermaid with the mole, but also collecting data on Israeli underworld figures in Germany.
    The BKA and END meanwhile looked for references to Cohen by terrorist groups. There were none, of course, as Cohen could have pointed out. Certainly none that had appeared in German. But as Lassman—who stayed in Frankfurt—had already pointed out to Leterhaus while Cohen was in the air going home, there were groups, small perhaps but zealous of their cause, who had targeted Cohen. “I understand there were at least two leaflets that named you among the people they consider—let me get my glasses—yes, ‘ to national Jewish interests,’ ” Leterhaus had said, surprising Cohen as much as Cohen had surprised him the first time Cohen called after returning to Jerusalem.
    Leterhaus, after all, had the distinct impression that Cohen didn’t want to help. Cohen didn’t say it was part of Ahuva’s sentence. And he also had not told Leterhaus about the leaflets. Lassman did.
    The BKA—specializing in counter terror—asked the Mossad for copies and translations of the leaflets found in the most radical of the settlements, as well as the short list of names of Jews around the world known for their support of violent opposition to the peace process, beginning with no regret over the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, whom they regarded as a traitor for conceding to the Palestinians control over parts of the Land of Israel.
    The Mossad complied, getting the documents through the Shabak, which since Cohen’s days as chief of CID in Jerusalem had its informers and agents, unwitting or not, infiltrate the radical Jewish right wing, where vigilantes plotted provocation and retaliations against the Arabs and the terrorism that came from their own fundamentalists and militants.
    For his last ten years on the police force, Cohen had spent at least half his time on the danger of civil wars. After Baruch Goldstein’s Hebron massacre, which Cohen practically predicted long before it happened—while the chief of the general staff called it “a thunderbolt out of clear skies”—he hoped the system would have learned the lesson.
    Many were Americans; there were a few rabbis who said that assassinating Rabin was halachically acceptable, for a Jew was forbidden, under punishment of death, of handing another Jew over to the enemy, and as far as these rabbis were concerned that’s what Yitzhak Rabin had done by agreeing to make peace with the PLO. Six members of the Jewish Defense League and a few Israelis held under house arrest—mostly in the Hebron area—for a year after the Rabin assassination were also on the list. Leterhaus read the list aloud to Cohen, who recognized many of the names.
    “They believe it is in the Jewish interest to remove the mosques on the Temple Mount, in order to rebuild the Temple,” Cohen pointed out. He had wanted to believe that the assassination of the prime minister had entirely quenched the flames of violence that threatened civil war.
    He was doubtful, however, knowing how deep revenge could run a motive into darkness.
    With Dachau behind him, he had seen the limitless depths of evil and ever since had that as a measuring stick for the deed itself. But he never ceased to be astonished by the thin line between good and bad, and he knew from his years in Jerusalem that religious orthodoxy was no guarantee of goodness.
    But the idea that he would be targeted by the lunatic fringe, no matter how many of their plots he had foiled or friends put in jail, was absurd. When, fully serious, Leterhaus told Cohen that “Mr. Kaplan was disappointed his name wasn’t on the list,” Cohen lost his temper.
    “Find the woman with the