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

mole,” he ordered. He spent hours working with Israel’s finest portrait painter, paying several thousand dollars for a set of drawings ranging from full-figure to a close-up of the face—all from Cohen’s memory as described to the artist.
    Leterhaus was grateful. The fingerprints collected from the hotel room turned up as Cohen’s and the dead chambermaid’s, and the thorough German police tracked down the three previous guests who had used the room to match against other prints found there. They were left with one half-thumbprint with no matches in their computer records.
    “You can help,” the inspector general had told Cohen, “but you are not to step outside channels.” Cohen on. He had carte blanche in the archives, as long as if and when he found something he reported it to CID, which would then pass it through proper Interpol channels to the Germans.
    So he spent most of November in the back attic of the Russian Compound. He sat by a round window he pushed open at the very end of the long row of shelves stacked with boxes and cartons, going back to the days when the British packed up the building Allenby had captured from the Russians in 1917, the police station that in the days of the British was known as Bevingrad, and the Jews called the Russian Compound, when they turned it into their police headquarters in West Jerusalem.
    Box after box, folder after folder, he searched for cases he remembered that involved relocation to what was then West Germany. He cross-referenced to the stories he told in his book about the years the Israelis dumped criminals who turned state evidence and needed relocation to a safer place than tiny Israel.
    Sometimes he found himself daydreaming, remembering too well. Sometimes he studied the flimsy pages with amazement at how much he had forgotten. Most of it was detail, tiny, though telling; he had refrained from digging like this into his past while writing his book, not needing the paper to remember what he wanted to say. Now, he realized it was part of his hubris, for as he went through the folders that he gradually built into a pile for yet a second read in case he missed something the first time, he realized that no matter how proud of his memory, no matter how trusting of his intuition, even his version of the events was far from objective, no matter how hard he tried to stick to the truth as he could prove it.
    So reading over the sad case of the green-eyed Bernstein brothers, for example, in which an identical twin murdered his brother in a jealous rage over their sharing of their little sister, he could see now that he should have spotted the insanity that lay behind the crime far sooner than he eventually did.
    The sister was the key, of course. She became a state witness —while the district psychiatrist said she had suffered severe trauma, there was nothing to prevent her from testifying in the case. The Jerusalem branch of the family was ruined by the scandal, and Cohen, as happened so often— too often, he sometimes thought—took responsibility for the victim, making the arrangements for the girl to be sent, yes, to Cohen’s hated Germany, to a maiden aunt on the girl’s father’s side, who promised to look after her. There, far from the scandal of tiny Jerusalem, she could get a fresh start. He put her on the plane promising her that things would work out for the best. He hoped he wasn’t lying, but knew that for the pretty teenager with the cold green eyes, life had already chosen its tragic course.
    He had doubts in many cases. There had been Abu-Hassan, an Old City dealer looking for a heroin route to Europe.
    Cohen should have never allowed the student from the Bezalel School of Fine Arts to carry that second shipment of the drug into the trap Cohen was laying for the dealer.
    They were typical of the things he found in the search.
    There were dozens of cases, and each contained its small success and failures that added up to its closure. None seemed