The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

The upper shelf in the safe contained only one object, a buff manila folder. Miller pulled it out, flicked it open and riffled through the sheets inside. There were about forty of them. Each contained a photograph and several lines of type. At the eighteenth he paused and said out loud, ‘Good God.’

  ‘Quiet,’ muttered Koppel with urgency.

  Miller closed the file, handed the torch back to Koppel and said, ‘Close it.’

  Koppel slid the door back into place and twirled the dial not merely until the door was locked but until the figures were in the same order in which he had found them. When he was done he eased the brickwork across the area and pressed it firmly home. It gave another click and locked into place.

  He had stuffed the bank notes in his pocket, the cash proceeds of Winzer’s last four passports, and he remained only to lay the candlesticks and snuff-box gently into his black leather holdall.

  Switching off his light, he led Miller by the arm to the window, slipped the curtains back to right and left, and took a good look out through the glass. The lawn was deserted, and the moon had gone behind cloud. Koppel eased up the window, hopped over the sill, bag and all, and waited for Miller to join him. He pulled the window down and headed for the shrubbery, followed by the reporter, who had stuffed the file inside his polo-necked sweater.

  They kept to the bushes until close to the gate, then emerged on to the road. Miller had an urge to run.

  ‘Walk slowly,’ said Koppel in his normal talking voice. ‘Just walk and talk like we was coming home from a party.’

  It was three miles back to the railway station and already it was close to five o’clock. The streets were not wholly deserted, although it was Saturday, for the German working man rises early to go about his business. They made it to the station without being stopped and questioned.

  There was no train to Hamburg before seven, but Koppel said he would be glad to wait in the buffet and warm himself with a coffee and a double corn liqueur.

  ‘A very nice little tickle, Herr Miller,’ he said. ‘I hope you got what you wanted.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I got it all right,’ said Miller.

  The little burglar nodded and strolled towards the station buffet. Miller turned back and crossed the square to the hotel, unaware of the red-rimmed eyes that watched him from the back of a parked Mercedes.

  It was too early to make the inquiries Miller needed to make, so he allowed himself three hours of sleep and asked to be woken at nine-thirty.

  The phone shrilled at the exact hour, and he ordered coffee and rolls, which arrived just as he had finished a piping hot shower. Over coffee he sat and studied the file of papers, recognising about half a dozen of the faces but none of the names. The names, he had to tell himself, were meaningless.

  Sheet eighteen was the one he came back to. The man was older, the hair longer, a sporting moustache covered the upper lip. But the ears were the same, the part of a face that is more individual to each owner than any other feature, yet which are always overlooked. The narrow nostrils were the same, the tilt of the head, the pale eyes.

  The name was a common one, what fixed his attention was the address. From the postal district it had to be the centre of the city, and that would probably mean an apartment block.

  Just on ten o’clock he rang the telephone directory inquiries department of the city named on the sheet of paper. He asked for the number of the block manager for the apartment block at that address. It was a gamble, and it came off. It was a block of flats, and an expensive one.

  He rang the block manager, really a glorified front hall porter, upgraded to manager by the German adoration of titles, and explained that he had repeatedly rung one of the tenants but could get no reply, which was odd because he had specifically been asked to ring the man at that hour. Could the block manager help him? Was the phone out of order?

  The man at the other end was most helpful. The Herr Direktor would probably be at the factory, or perhaps at his weekend house in the country.

  What factory was that? Why, his own, of course. The radio factory. Oh, yes, of course, how stupid of me, said Miller, and rang off. The directory inquiries gave him the number of the factory. The girl who answered passed him the boss’s secretary, who told the caller the Herr Direktor was spending the weekend at his country house and would be back on Monday morning. The private house number was not to be divulged from the factory. A question of privacy. Miller thanked her and hung up.

  The man who finally gave him the private number and address of the owner of the radio factory was an old contact, industrial and business affairs correspondent of a large newspaper in Hamburg. He had the man’s address in his private address book.

  Miller sat and stared at the face of Roschmann, the new name and the private address scribbled in his notebook. Now he remembered hearing of the man before, an industrialist from the Ruhr; he had even seen the radios in the shops. He took out his map of Germany and located the country villa on its private estate, or at least the area of villages where it was situated.

  It was past twelve o’clock when he packed his bags, descended to the hall and settled his bill. He was famished, so he went into the hotel dining room, taking only his document case, and treated himself to a large steak.

  Over his meal he decided to drive the last section of the chase that afternoon and confront his target the next morning. He still had the slip of paper with the private telephone number of the lawyer with the Z-Commission in Ludwigsburg. He could have rung him then, but he wanted, was determined, to face Roschmann first. He feared if he tried that evening the lawyer might not be at home when he called him to ask for a squad of policeman within thirty minutes. Sunday morning would be fine, just fine.

  It was nearly two when he finally emerged, stowed his suitcase in the boot of the Jaguar, tossed the document case on to the passenger seat and climbed behind the wheel.

  He failed to notice the Mercedes that tailed him to the edge of Osnabrück. The car behind him came on to the main autobahn after him, paused for a few seconds as the Jaguar accelerated fast down the south-bound lane, then left the main road twenty yards further and drove back into town.

  From a telephone booth by the roadside Mackensen phoned the Werwolf in Nuremberg.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ he told his superior. ‘I just left him going down the south-bound lane like a bat out of hell.’

  ‘Is your device accompanying him?’

  Mackensen grinned.

  ‘Too right. Fixed to the front nearside suspension. Within fifty miles he’ll be in pieces you couldn’t identify.’

  ‘Excellent,’ purred the man in Nuremberg. ‘You must be tired, my dear Kamerad. Go back into town and get some sleep.’

  Mackensen needed no second bidding. He had not slept a full night since Wednesday.

  Miller made those fifty miles, and another hundred. For Mackensen had overlooked one thing. His trigger device would certainly have detonated quickly if it had been jammed into the cushion suspension system of a continental saloon car. But the Jaguar was a British sports car, with a far harder suspension system. As it tore down the autobahn towards Frankfurt the bumping caused the heavy springs above the front wheels to retract slightly, crushing the small bulb between the jaws of the bomb-trigger to fragments of glass. But the electrically charged lengths of steel failed to touch each other. On the hard bumps they flickered to within a millimetre of each other before springing apart.

  Unaware of how close to death he was, Miller made the trip past Munster, Dortmund, Wetzlar and Bad Homburg to Frankfurt in just under three hours, then turned off the ring road towards Königstein and the wild, snow-thick forests of the Taunus mountains.

  Chapter Sixteen

  IT WAS ALREADY dark when the Jaguar slid into the small spa town in the eastern foothills of the mountain range. A glance at his map told Miller he was less than twenty miles from the private estate he sought. He decided to go no further that night, but to seek a hotel and wait till morning.

&nbs
p; To the north lay the mountains, straddled by the road to Limburg, lying quiet and white under the thick carpet of snow that muffled the rocks and shrouded the miles and miles of pine forest. There were lights twinkling down the main street of the small town and the glow of them picked out the skeletal frame of the ruined castle brooding on its hill, once the fortress home of the Lord of Falkenstein. The sky was clear, but an icy wind gave promise of more snow to come during the night.

  At the corner of Haupt Strasse and Frankfurt Strasse he found a hotel, the Park, and asked for a room. In a spa town in February the cold-water cure has hardly the same charm as in the summer months. There was plenty of room.

  The porter directed him to put his car in the small lot at the back of the hotel, fringed by trees and bushes. He had a bath and went out for supper, picking the Grüne Baum hostelry in the Haupt Strasse, one of the dozen old, beamed eating-houses the town had to offer.

  It was over his meal that the nervousness set in. He noticed his hands were shaking as he raised his wineglass. Part of the condition was exhaustion, the lack of sleep in the past four days, the cat-napping for one and two hours at a time.

  Part was delayed reaction from the tension of the break-in with Koppel, and part the sense of astonishment at the luck that had rewarded his instinct to go back to Winzer’s house after the first visit and ask the maid who had looked after the bachelor forger all these years.

  But most, he knew, was the sense of the impending end of the chase, the confrontation with the man he hated and had sought through so many unknown byways of inquiry, coupled with the fear that something might still go wrong.

  He thought back to the anonymous doctor in the hotel in Bad Godesberg who had warned him to stay away from the men of the Comradeship; and the Jewish Nazi-hunter of Vienna who had told him, ‘Be careful; these men can be dangerous.’ Thinking back he wondered why they had not struck at him yet. They knew his name was Miller, the Dreesen Hotel visit proved that; and as Kolb, the beating of Bayer in Stuttgart would have blown that cover. Yet he had seen no one. One thing they could not know, he was sure, was that he had got as far as he had. Perhaps they had lost him, or decided to leave him alone, convinced, with the forger in hiding, he would end up by going in circles.

  And yet he had the file, Winzer’s secret and explosive evidence, and with it the greatest news story of the decade in West Germany. He grinned to himself, and the passing waitress thought it was for her. She swung her bottom as she passed his table next time, and he thought of Sigi. He had not called her since Vienna, and the letter he wrote in early January was the last she had had, six weeks back. He felt now he needed her like he never had before.

  Funny, he thought, how men always need women more when they are frightened. He had to admit he was frightened, partly of what he had done, partly of the mass-murderer who waited unknowingly for him in the mountains.

  He shook his head to shake off the mood, and ordered another half-bottle of wine. This was no time for melancholy. He had pulled off the greatest journalistic coup he had ever heard of, and was about to settle a score as well.

  He ran over his plan as he drank the second portion of wine. A simple confrontation, a telephone call to the lawyer at Ludwigsburg, the arrival thirty minutes later of a police van to take the man away for imprisonment, trial and a life sentence. If he had been a harder man, he would have wanted to kill the SS-captain himself.

  He thought it over, and realised he was unarmed. Supposing Roschmann had a bodyguard? Would he really be alone, confident his new name would protect him from discovery? Or would there be a strong-arm retainer in case of trouble?

  During his military service one of Miller’s friends, spending a night in the guardroom for being late back into camp, had stolen a pair of handcuffs from the military police. Later he had become worried by the thought they might be found in his kitbag, and had given them to Miller. The reporter had kept them, simply as a trophy of a wild night in the Army. They were at the bottom of a trunk in his Hamburg flat.

  He also had a gun, a small Sauer automatic, bought quite legally when he had been covering an exposé of Hamburg’s vice rackets in 1960, and had been threatened by Little Pauli’s mobsters. That was locked in a desk drawer, also in Hamburg.

  Feeling slightly dizzy from the effects of his wine, a double brandy and tiredness, he rose, paid his bill and went back to the hotel. He was just about to enter to make his phone call when he saw two public booths almost at the hotel door. Safer to use these.

  It was nearly ten o’clock, and he found Sigi at the club where she worked. Above the clamour of the band in the background he had to shout to make her hear him.

  Miller cut short her stream of questions about where he had been, why he had not got in touch, where he was now, and told her what he wanted. She protested she couldn’t get away, but something in his voice stopped her.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she shouted down the line.

  ‘Yes. I’m fine. But I need your help. Please, darling, don’t let me down. Not now, not tonight.’

  There was a pause, then she said simply, ‘I’ll come. I’ll tell them it’s an emergency. Close family or something.’

  ‘Do you have enough to hire a car?’

  ‘I think so. I can borrow something off one of the girls.’

  He told her the address of an all-night car-hire firm he had used before, and stressed she should mention his name as he knew the proprietor.

  ‘How far is it?’

  ‘From Hamburg, 500 kilometres. You can make it in five hours. Say six hours from now. You’ll arrive about five in the morning. And don’t forget to bring the things.’

  ‘All right, you can expect me then.’ There was a pause, then, ‘Peter darling …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you frightened of something?’

  The pips started going and he had no more one-mark pieces.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and put down the receiver as they were cut off.

  In the foyer of the hotel he asked the night porter if he could have a large envelope, and after some hunting beneath the counter the man obligingly produced a stiff brown one large enough to take a quarto-sized sheet of paper. Miller also bought enough stamps to cover cost of sending the envelope by first-class mail with a lot of contents, emptying the porter’s stock of stamps, usually only needed when a guest wishes to send a postcard.

  Back in his room he took his document case, which he had carried throughout the evening, laid it on the bed and took out Salomon Tauber’s diary, the sheaf of papers from Winzer’s safe and two photographs. He read again the two pages in the diary that had originally sent him on this hunt for a man he had never heard of, and studied the two photographs side by side.

  Finally he took a sheet of plain paper from his case and wrote on it a brief but clear message, explaining to any reader what the sheaf of documents enclosed really were. The note, along with the file from Winzer’s safe and one of the photographs, he placed inside the envelope, addressed it and stuck on all the stamps he had bought.

  The other photograph he put into the breast pocket of his jacket. The sealed envelope and the diary went back into his attaché case, which he slid under the bed.

  He carried a small flask of brandy in his suitcase, and he poured a measure into the tooth-glass above the wash basin. He noticed his hands were trembling, but the fiery liquid relaxed him. He lay down on the bed, his head spinning slightly, and dozed off.

  In the underground room in Munich, Josef paced the floor, angry and impatient. At the table Leon and Motti gazed at their hands. It was forty-eight hours since the cable had come from Tel Aviv.

  Their own attempts to trace Miller had brought no result. At their request by telephone, Alfred Oster had been to the car park in Bayreuth and later called back to tell them the car was gone.

  ‘If they spot that car, they’ll know he can’t be a bakery worker from Bremen,’ growled Josef when he heard the news, ‘even if they don’t know the car owner is
Peter Miller.’

  Later a friend in Stuttgart had informed Leon the local police were looking for a young man in connection with the murder in a hotel room of a citizen called Bayer. The description fitted Miller in his disguise as Kolb too well for it to be any other man, but fortunately the name from the hotel register was neither Kolb nor Miller, and there was no mention of a black sports car.

  ‘At least he had the sense to register in a false name,’ said Leon.

  ‘That would be in character with Kolb,’ Motti pointed out. ‘Kolb was supposed to be on the run from the Bremen police for war crimes.’

  But it was scant comfort. If the Stuttgart police could not find Miller, neither could the Leon group, and the latter could only fear the Odessa would by now be closer than either.

  ‘He must have known after killing Bayer that he had blown his cover, and therefore reverted to the name of Miller,’ reasoned Leon. ‘So he has to abandon the search for Roschmann, unless he got something out of Bayer that took him to Roschmann.’

  ‘Then why the hell doesn’t he check in,’ snapped Josef. ‘Does the fool think he can take Roschmann on his own?’

  Motti coughed quietly.

  ‘He doesn’t know Roschmann has any real importance to the Odessa,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Well, if he gets close enough, he’ll find out,’ said Leon.

  ‘And by then he’ll be a dead man, and we’ll all be back to square one,’ snapped Josef. ‘Why doesn’t the idiot ring in?’

  But the phone lines were busy elsewhere that night, for Klaus Winzer had rung the Werwolf from a small mountain chalet in the Regensburg region. The news he got was reassuring.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s safe for you to return home,’ the Odessa chief had answered in reply to the forger’s question. ‘The man who was trying to interview you has by now certainly been taken care of.’

  The forger had thanked him, settled his overnight bill and set off through the darkness for the north and the familiar comfort of his large bed at home in Westerberg, Osnabrück. He expected to arrive in time for a hearty breakfast, a bath and a long sleep. By Monday morning he would be back in his printing works supervising the handling of the business.