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

search of the hotel for another device. The hotel management didn’t want that, of course. For a few minutes there was a standoff in the corridor far down the hall from the open door to Cohen’s room.
    The sappers noted that if the bomb went off, it would destroy the bed, but the meter-thick cement floors of the old building that had survived Allied bombing would barely be damaged.
    “Maybe there will be a twenty-centimeter hole in the floor. You can fix that,” the sapper told the worried hotel manager, who begged the police not to evacuate the hotel.
    “There must at least be a search for other bombs,” Cohen pointed out.
    “Please, Mr. Cohen,” said the senior officer on the scene, Helmut Leterhaus, a local State Police Criminal Investigations department commander. “Allow us to handle this.”
    The corridor quickly filled with plainclothesmen and uniforms. Officials—from the local branch headquarters commander of the BKA; and from the END, the agency for the protection of the Constitution, which in the old days of the Berlin Wall conducted counterespionage against East Germany, but now focused on countering industrial espionage as well as terrorism. An officer from GSG9, the German counterterrorist unit, attending the fair on a private visit, was also alerted to the attempted bombing. And a young Israeli diplomat, assigned to the Israeli pavilion at the fair by the foreign ministry, also wanted to know if Cohen needed any help.
    All he wanted was to leave. To go home. Leterhaus was right. He had no position in an investigation of the murder or the bombing attempt. Yes, it appeared aimed at him— though he was still not certain. But he had convinced himself that he was done with investigations.
    Certain that whoever had planted the bomb had planned it well in advance—“The chambermaid,” he told anyone who asked, “must have surprised the assassin. The murder was clearly an accident on the job.”—Cohen doubted whether there would be another attempt on him in the coming days. But he was certain that he would be safer at home, where he had control over his environment.
    The sappers worked on the bomb in the room and others searched the rest of the hotel. From the walkie-talkies, Cohen heard that there was a mild panic in the lobby at first, as word spread through the hotel. But the police had it under control. Within twenty minutes, the police announced no other bombs were found in the hotel.
    The management heaved a sigh of relief and as a goodwill gesture, offered Cohen the presidential suite a floor above, to use as his room for the duration of his stay.
    “I won’t be staying,” he told the hotel manager.
    “Excuse me?” Lassman asked.
    “I’ll be leaving tonight.” “I understand,” said the manager. “I, too, would be afraid.” “I don’t understand,” said Lassman. “Don’t you want to stay, find out who did it?”
    But before Cohen could answer, Helmut Leterhaus was back, wanting to go over the same questions again.
    “A young woman,” Cohen said. “Early twenties, perhaps. Very tall. Maybe a meter seventy, black hair, dark eyes, a large mole on her cheek, here,” Cohen said touching his own face just above the jawbone. “Maybe a broken nose. And black boots,” he added. “And maybe a man in disguise. Maybe … “
    But Leterhaus and the others were more interested in Cohen having enemies in Germany.
    “How long have you been a homicide detective?” Cohen finally asked back.
    “Fourteen years,” Leterhaus said.
    “And how many enemies have you made?”
    Leterhaus fell silent for a moment. “Some,” the German officer confessed.
    “Multiply by two—that’s how long I was on my force, and that’s how many enemies I made.”
    “Here, in Germany?”
    “Now, that’s a good question,” Cohen admitted. But he didn’t have an answer that made sense.
    In the late seventies and early eighties, the Israeli police had sent many an informant from the underworld into exile