An Accidental Murder: An Avram Cohen Mystery by Robert Rosenberg

to logically lead to an assassination attempt twenty years after the informant or witness was relocated to Germany.
    By the middle of December, he had almost finished a full second read of every file he found. Dozens of files were missing, of course. Some were lost, as sometimes happens to files. Some had become of interest to the Shabak. A few to the Mossad. And they could always step in to ask for what they wanted from the police.
    He looked for anyone he ever sent to Germany. Informants and state witnesses, petty crooks and ranking underworld figures; during the seventies he sent many— on his first round through the files he found thirty-seven he remembered because he personally handed over the envelope of cash and the new passport.
    And there was the rub. It was a secret operation: the German authorities knew nothing about it, and for it to work the secrecy had to extend all the way to the underworld itself. Sure, the informants and bosses both knew that state witnesses could get relocation, if the evidence was good enough against a good enough target. But only when the process was complete, when the target was behind bars—or otherwise incapacitated—and the witness ready to be moved, did they find out where they’d be going.
    Leon Hadani testified, for example, about how Avi Hakatan used a razor blade hidden between his fingers as an ultimate weapon of fear to collect his weekly payments from the stall-owners of the shuk> It took Cohen a month to convince Hadani to talk. The promise of a new name and start in hutz la’aretz—“out of the country”—finally turned him over.
    Shimmy Rozen’s wife, Vered, turned her husband in for selling a crate of grenades to an Old City hood. She walked in off the street, and because of her information, the grenades were found in the basement of a Ramallah villa, where they were being fitted to timing devices. All Vered wanted in exchange for the information was a new name on a passport and a new life in bu’l—the slangy acronym for overseas. Israel was too small to hide someone, the Israelis didn’t have a continent in which to hide anyone.
    But they also did not have the clout to guarantee a relocated witness a first job, nor the money for a well-padded landing. Germany was an easy country to pick for the purpose, and not only because of the past. Foreign guest workers were flooding the big cities of what was then West Germany. The working-class Israelis who needed the refuge could easily fit in.
    It took two and a half years for the Israeli underworld to figure out what was happening, and another year before the Germans noticed shadows of a growing Israeli criminal community in their cities. In a four-eyed meeting with his German counterpart, the Israel interior minister rued that yes, “part of the normalcy of the Jewish state is that now we have criminals,” but he denied any knowledge of a “systematic transfer” of Israeli criminals to Frankfurt and Hamburg. The minister wasn’t lying.
    There was nothing systematic about it, which is why it managed to be one of the better-kept secrets in a country full of secrets. But as such, it made Cohen’s work that winter in the attic of the Russian Compound, looking at twenty-year-old pieces of flimsy, faded paper, much more difficult than simply collecting names from old folders and passing them on to Helmut Leterhaus.
    Some had insisted on passports for their wife and children.
    He tried not to promise them more than he could guarantee, or knew they could achieve.
    The names, the faces he had tried so hard to forget now came back to him. Vered Rozen’s cheerless hope that things would be better for her in Frankfurt; Hadani’s fear of what his life would become. The horror in the Bernstein girl’s eyes.
    If half the reason he had put their names and faces out of his mind at the time was to help preserve the very secrecy required for the success of their relocation, the other half was his feeling of doubt about exile