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Chapter One
It was winter's end in the holy city, cold enough to turn the shouts into steam. Demonstrators chanted demands for the prime minister's resignation as they marched through a gauntlet of government loyalists. Policemen struggled in the breach.
"Traitors!" screamed an unshaven man, clutching a fistsized chip of limestone from which almost all Jerusalem is built. A mounted policeman grimaced. His horse snorted and knocked the man backwards. The stone fell from the man's hands, and his curses turned on the cops.
"Fascists!" sneered a teenaged girl, her arms linked with friends and strangers marching on the prime minister's office. A parade marshal hushed her, repeating the instructions laid down from the start of the rally--"No provocation, no incitement."
It was a season of hatred and fear in Jerusalem, a worrisome, tiring season for Avram Cohen. Old enough to remember goosestep marches outside his bedroom window in Berlin and yet young enough to be commander of the Criminal Investigations Department for the Jerusalem police, Cohen was wise enough to know that ideals can be rusted by the humid passions of politics.
So he watched the demonstration from the passenger seat of the white police Ford Escort, seeing his own tensions reflected in the face of his lieutenant, Chief Inspector Nissim Levy, at the wheel. Slowly they rolled up and down the hilly streets behind the moving crowd, listening to the droning voices of sector commanders reporting to a mobile temporary headquarters parked outside the prime minister's office, already under siege by the front ranks of the protesters. They followed the marchers out of the downtown triangle, across King George Street and down Bezalel Street on the eastern slope of the Valley of the Cross. The street was lit by the last of the marchers' torches and the blue revolving lights of police cars. Photographers' flashes caught faces twisted in anger. The limestone-block walls of the four- and five-story stone buildings refracted the lights into crazy colors.
Straight across, on the hilltop across the dale, they could see the lights of the Knesset's security perimeter and a chopper's beam grazing the park. Cohen's weary eyes stared out the window, squinting against the flaring light. Levy's impatient fingers tapped on the steering wheel, setting a deliberate counterpoint to the chants.
Cohen had read both secret and published reports leading up to the demonstration. Although he had confidence in Operations Commander Yosef Schwartz, calm on horseback at the front of the police troops struggling to keep the march and gauntlet from turning into a riot, Cohen that night feared more than mere fisticuffs and tear gas in the holy city.
"It looks like the sound and light show at the Old City walls," he muttered, "showing the tourists how the city fell to the Romans." The chanting outside the car changed from " Two state for two peoples " to " Stop killing, Start talking ," and Cohen's voice, raspy from too many cigarettes, fit with its own rhythm into the phrasing of the slogans.
"I wonder which version the tourists get," he added, thinking about history, half aware that with his comment, the tapping stopped and that the junior officer, ever ambitious, was straining silently to decipher his meaning. "Do they get Josephus Flavius' version or do they get the rabbinical version?" Cohen continued, wondering aloud, thinking of the Judean general who first fought the Romans and was celebrated by them for writing the history of how the Jews turned their fight against the empire into a civil war of atrocity and inevitable defeat.
Levy's knuckles relaxed as he turned to Cohen with the answer Cohen already knew. "The rabbis say that Josephus was a traitor," Levy said matter-of-factly, his reedy voice tinged with cynicism about the rabbis.
Cohen rubbed at his arm. The eczema rash, just above the pale purple tattoo of his Dachau number, was both annoying and familiar. It sometimes seemed to him as permanent in his life as the city's pull at pilgrims and their passions. "Josephus was a pragmatist," he answered Levy. "He made sure he was on the winning side. And he knew that once the Jews started killing each other, they were bound to lose."
Levy turned off the four-lane boulevard from the valley and onto the five lanes that pass the Knesset. The chopper beam's erratic sweep caught them for a moment, long enough for Cohen to remember the searchlights of the camp. The prime minister's office, five hundred meters ahead, was the last of the Kirya government-complex office buildings. Demonstrators packed the entire width of the avenue all the way to the ivy-covered building where the cabinet was in emergency session, debating the latest peace proposal. Cohen could hear the unintelligible echoes of a speech blaring from a loudspeaker.
"You make it sound like a Likud-Labor debate," Levy finally said in response to Cohen's sarcasm. The chief inspector grinned in expectation of a crack from Cohen about "bloody politicians."
But before Cohen could answer, there was a sound that momentarily silenced the monotonous staccato of the police radio and turned the booming echoes into the squeal of feedback. It was a noise Cohen had long expected with dread. But despite his expectations, he was surprised when it finally came.
"Grenade!" Cohen shouted, and a split second later, he was out the door, running toward the sullen silence already turning into screams.
* * *
The bomb squad worked all through the night, taking advantage of the light of the TV crews beaming their pictures of Jerusalem's strife around the world. Every scrap of metal found in a hundred-meter radius from the explosion was collected.
One piece starred the back window of a minister's car, parked in the lot outside the cabinet office. Another flew all the way to the outdoor windowsill of the cabinet room itself. But it was a sliver, barely half a centimeter wide and twice as long, that made the headlines. It was found embedded in the brain of a paratrooper reserve captain.
One dead, 12 wounded in grenade attack on Jerusalem peace rally , the world press announced. The prime minister's office issued a statement saying that until it was proven otherwise, any implication that a Jew might be responsible for the attack was a blood libel. The statement raised cynical smiles amongst those who remembered the prime minister's youth. An extreme nationalist, he had never hesitated to assassinate those he regarded as traitors to his underground movement's fight against the British mandate and Arab nationalist claims to The Land. And one of his aides told a curious reporter that the ministers' meeting had not been affected by the explosion. "The cabinet room is soundproofed, of course," was Cabinet Secretary Ya'acov Nussbaum's straightfaced explanation.
Cohen took it more personally. He kept the reconstructed grenade in his own office safe rather than consigning it to the clutter of the national police headquarters' evidence stockroom. It was the murder weapon, and the dead man was a martyr to half the country, a traitor to the other half, and in Cohen's mind, a victim of that division.
Civil war was on everyone's lips. But Cohen could not use the term officially, although it was his greatest fear. As a policeman he was supposed to be impartial in the partisan debate that pervaded everything. In that season, even the mention of the possibility of civil war was a violation of the professional neutrality he had sworn to uphold.
So, he began with the weapon. Within forty-eight hours, it was identified by the experts in the police bomb squad labs. From the Sidra 13 series, it was developed by Israel Military Industries for hostage situations. The army wanted a grenade that would knock out a terrorist but release little shrapnel in a contained area. Sidra 13 was experimental and a failure; it released too much shrapnel. But the bureaucracy processed a production run of 12,000 before the series was halted.
Major Ehud Gozani, who was Cohen's liaison at military intelligence in the Central District Command, reported that grenades had been distributed throughout more than a hundred army units ranging over six divisions during the past five years. As many as 120,000 people had access to the weapons during those years. They were packed in styrofoam cases of ten grenades each, and the army began the painstaking accounting of each of those cases. Army computers, the computers from the Sherut Bitahon Klali, the secret counterintelligence and counterespionage police known as the Shabak, and the police force's more primitive system of human record keepers all poured out lists of potential suspects. Soldiers with relatives in the underworld, soldiers with records of losing equipment, soldiers suspected by the military police of stealing for profit or fun were on these lists. Convicted felons were not allowed in the army, but soldiers known to associate with criminals were to be questioned, as were the criminals. Known political extremists from the right wing were also on the list of potential suspects that grew from day to day.
But Cohen and his people had to be careful. Sources in the prime minister's office told the press that investigators could not rule out the possibility that Arabs were responsible. "Provocateurs," the sources said, "trying to turn Jew against Jew," was their explanation for the attack.
"The prime minister should know," wrote one partisan columnist. "His followers often used the exact same methods when he was fighting British occupiers and Arab nationalists." Cohen put down the newspaper when he read that, as uninterested in opposition politics as he was in coalition crises. He found no thrill in partisan debate and regarded the prime minister's political opponents with the same disdain he had for all the politicians who turned ideology into idolatry.
Officially, Cohen had two hundred men and women working in uniform and plainclothes for CID in Jerusalem. But the Palestinian intifada surged and ebbed in rhythm with international terrorism and diplomacy, army crackdowns and rumors of atrocities, drawing resources from the underbudgeted police force. Arab East Jerusalem, in Cohen's purview, was an almost daily set piece of rock-throwing, strikes, and tear gas. Of late, someone was torching Israeli cars, distinguished by their black-on-yellow license plates, and Cohen already had a dozen men on that case alone. Another two dozen were on assignment as temporary commanders of police units brought in from other parts of the country for riot control duty. And the usual crimes of any capital city, from pickpocketing to drugs, from burglary to underworld murder, went unabated.
So, in the choice between a quiet East Jerusalem and an all-out investigation for the person responsible for the grenade attack, the fifth floor of national police headquarters knew how to please the prime minister. The top priority was an end to the rumble of intifada , especially in the capital called eternal by the prime minister.
Hobbled by politics, Cohen began the race to find the killer or killers. He was determined to win even if it took him a year. But he didn't have a year.
A week after the grenade attack, in a cloudy dark dawn of a Friday morning a few hours before the Moslem prayers, a Wakf gardener mulching a flower bed just behind the Dome of the Rock on what the Jews call the Temple Mount and the Arabs call Haram al-Sharif, found an IDF-issue knapsack buried in the dirt. Inside were a dozen more of the Sidra 13 grenades, prepared as a time bomb set to explode at noon.
If not for a drowsy policeman pouring his tenth cup of overnight-duty coffee in the tiny police station on the Mount, the grenades might have ended up in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists with whom the gardener was acquainted. But glancing out the window, the cop thought it strange that an Arab was running across the empty plaza from pillar to fountain wall, clutching something heavy to his belly as if to hide it. The policeman pulled at the handle of the window, shoving it open to the cold morning air and shouted "Stop!" at the frightened man. When the Arab continued running, the cop gave chase. Though tired, the policeman was much younger and faster, and he caught up with the Moslem at the steps that lead into the tunnel to the Street of the Chain. The Arab was out of breath from too many cigarettes. The policeman was grateful for his Saturday afternoon football games.
And half an hour later, bomb squad experts, along with a team of detectives under Cohen's command, were combing the area, looking for other hidden explosive devices. There was only the one bag. But the grenades had been wired together for a single blast, with a simple timer set for noon, just when Friday prayers would have peaked and tens of thousands of devout Moslems would have been bowing southeast toward Mecca. On their knees, foreheads to the ground, dozens, if not hundreds of people could have been killed. Irreparable damage might have been done to the gilt-domed mosque covering the rock from which the Moslems believe their prophet Mohammed rose heavenward.
The bombing would have been like pouring gasoline onto the already hot coals of the intifada . As it was, the news of the discovery turned that day's prayers into seventy-two hours of rioting throughout the territories. Rumor and counterrumor were like wind to a flame. Seventeen stone-throwers and Molotov-cocktail ambushers were shot dead by soldiers along the roads between Arab and Jewish villages in the territories. An express bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was forced off the mountain highway by a Gazan who grabbed the steering wheel away from the driver, plunging the bus into a ravine. Fourteen Israelis and a tourist were killed, and another twenty-five were crippled for life. The Gazan fundamentalist miraculously survived the crash. From his hospital bed he told interrogators that he had expected to reach heaven when the bus finally reached its resting place at the bottom of the hill.
As far as the Moslems were concerned, the hidden grenades could mean only one thing: another Zionist plot to drive them out of their holy place. The mayor worked around the clock to calm the Wakf council of kadis , themselves under pressure from extremists to turn the next week's prayers into a call for jihad, an all-out holy war. The mayor promised that the police would do their utmost to capture the saboteurs--"whoever they may be"--insistent on that wording in his statement to the press. It angered the right wing that the mayor was ready to imply that Jews might have been involved in the attempted sabotage. From the prime minister's office again came leaks to the press explaining how Arab provocateurs could easily have been responsible for both the attack on the rally and the attempted sabotage on the Mount.
"Bloody politicians," Cohen found himself mumbling more often than ever before as he worked over the files. The men and women brought him their handwritten notes of interviews with AWOL soldiers and weepy mothers' explanations that their boys were really good. Shmulik, his liaison in the Shabak, sent over his own daily sketches from shtinkers , the informants from the muddy alleyways of Palestinian refugee camps; and Ehud's computer lists piled high on Cohen's desk.
Sometimes during that chilly season, after sending Levy home late at night, Cohen found himself staring at one too many pieces that fit nowhere into the puzzle. He'd open the bottom right hand drawer of his desk, stained with cigarette burns, to pull out a bottle of cheap brandy and a small Pyrex glass more usually used in the police station for muddy Turkish coffee. It would take a half-glass, sometimes two, before he could tilt back in his high-backed chair and remember that he had once believed that he could help the city to fulfill its name by being one of the watchmen at the gates, preventing criminals and the insane from infiltrating the city of peace.
Excerpted from Crimes of the City by Robert Rosenberg. Copyright © 1991 by Robert Rosenberg. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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