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for a menu beneath a tea cup and saucer. “He’s sold millions of books, literally millions … God, the service here is bad,” he added, almost knocking over a half-drunk bottle of beer left in the remains of the last party that had used the table. “Anyway, Kaplan is … ” But Carey wasn’t interested in Kaplan. “Benny,” he said in a casual tone, “Avram says he’s ready to drop the whole thing. Pay TMC back, and, and, and, I don’t know what.
    What, Avram?”
    “Oh, no, please, no,” Lassman moaned, slumping back in the sofa as if suddenly defeated. “Not after everything we’ve been through. Not now.”
    Tina, too, was shocked, but with Carey’s tone of voice.
    Her mouth seemed to drop open, but she, too, turned to Cohen, wondering the same thing as the editor.
    Carey ignored Lassman’s moaning and Tina’s gaping, facing Cohen. “What do you want, Avram? To pull the book off the market? Buy back all the copies? Make it go away? It’s too late for all that, Avram. It’s out there,” Carey pointed out, and then his sarcasm gave way to frustration.
    “Jesus, Avram, what is your problem?”
    Maybe my problem is that from the start I let you all call me Avram, he thought, almost saying it aloud. It wasn’t that he felt superior. It was that he felt threatened by the intimacy it included in its use. He learned that while he was writing the book. But that didn’t make it any easier for him. For years, people called him Deputy Commander Cohen, and or just plain Cohen. Behind his back, he was sometimes known as Hacohen Hagadol, the High Priest, but that was only used by his loyalists, and never to his face. Avram was for very few. And now, even Lassman was calling him Avram.
    But that wasn’t really the problem, he knew, once again realizing that as much as writing the book had liberated him from his past, its physical existence as an object, printed in tens of thousands of copies, had taken over his life in ways he never expected, never wanted, never needed.
    The book was supposed to answer questions—about the Holocaust, about Israel, about Jerusalem. He didn’t want to have to explain it—or himself. And as far as he was concerned, that was the publisher’s problem, not his.
    “Avram,” Carey suddenly said, thinking he might have understood. “Are you afraid? Is that it?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lassman jumped in to defend Cohen. “Cohen? Afraid?”
    Cohen snapped his fingers at his translator, silencing him. “Of what?” he asked Carey, challenging the editor.
    Carey shrugged. “I don’t know. Cameras? Microphones?
    Fame? I mean, are you the same Avram Cohen who wrote Tear can be, must be conquered by willpower’?”
    “Carey!” Tina exclaimed, offended for Cohen’s sake.
    “It’s all right, Tina,” Cohen said softly, keeping his eyes on the editor.
    Carey had learned a lot about Cohen during the months they worked on the manuscript. They had never met face-to face, but as Cohen thought back on the time since they had first met on the phone, him stumbling over the name Mccloskey, and Carey laughing and saying “just call me Carey, and I’ll call you Avram,” Cohen realized that Carey knew a lot more about him than he did about the young American. Maybe Carey’s right, he thought. Maybe. He might have admitted it, if Frank Kaplan had not at that moment been pushed into the alcove by the same little fat man Carey had gone off with while they waited for Lassman.
    Kaplan loudly gave an order to park him facing Cohen.
    The little fat man quickly abandoned the wheelchair and stood beside Carey, who could do nothing to hide the expression of amazement on his face as the old author growled at Cohen, “I owe you an apology. Let me buy you a drink.”
    Before he could answer, a photographer following Kaplan into the alcove flashed a snap in his eyes, unexpectedly blinding Cohen for a second. He naturally shaded his eyes with his hand. “Of course, you owe me one, too,”