The Odessa File

by Frederick Forsyth

  ‘What the shit …?’ he growled thickly, shaking his head to clear the muzziness. His own tie came off and secured his left ankle to the foot of the chair, and the telephone flex secured the right one.

  He looked up owlishly at Miller as comprehension began to dawn in his button eyes. Like all of his kind, Bayer had one nightmare that never quite left him.

  ‘You can’t get me away from here,’ he said. ‘You’ll never get me to Tel Aviv. You can’t prove anything. I never touched you people …’

  The words were cut off as a rolled-up pair of socks were stuffed in his mouth and a woollen scarf, a present to Miller from his ever-solicitous mother, was wound round his face. From above the patterned knitting his eyes glared balefully out.

  Miller drew up the other chair in the room, reversed it and sat astride, his face two feet away from that of his prisoner.

  ‘Listen, you fat slug. For one thing I’m not an Israeli agent. For another, you’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here, and you’re going to talk, right here. Understand?’

  For answer Ludwig Bayer stared back above the scarf. The eyes no longer twinkled with merriment. They were red-tinged, like an angry boar in a thicket.

  ‘What I want, and what I’m going to have before this night is through, is the name and address of the man who makes the passports for the Odessa.’

  He looked round, spotted the lamp-stand on the bedside table, unhooked the wall socket and brought it over.

  ‘Now, Bayer, or whatever your name is, I’m going to take the gag off. You are going to talk. If you attempt to yell, you get this right across the head. I don’t really care if I crack your head or not. Got it?’

  Miller was not telling the truth. He had never killed a man before and had no desire to start now.

  Slowly he eased off the scarf and pulled the rolled socks out of Bayer’s mouth, keeping the lamp poised in his right hand, high over the fat man’s head.

  ‘You bastard,’ hissed Bayer. ‘You’re a spy. You’ll get nothing out of me.’

  He hardly got the words out before the socks went back into his bulging cheeks. The scarf was replaced.

  ‘No?’ said Miller. ‘We’ll see. I’ll start on your fingers and see how you like it.’

  He took the little finger and ring finger of Bayer’s right hand and bent them backwards until they were almost vertical. Bayer threw himself about in the chair so that it almost fell over. Miller steadied it, and eased the pressure on the fingers.

  He took off the gag again.

  ‘I can break every finger on both your hands, Bayer,’ he whispered. ‘After that I’ll take the bulb out of the table lamp, switch it on and stuff your prick down the socket.’

  Bayer closed his eyes and sweat rolled in torrents off his face.

  ‘No, not the electrodes. No, not the electrodes. Not there,’ he mumbled.

  ‘You know what it’s like, don’t you?’ said Miller, his mouth a few inches from Bayer’s ear.

  Bayer closed his eyes and moaned softly. He knew what it was like. Twenty years before he had been one of the men who had pounded the ‘White Rabbit’, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, to a maimed pulp in the cellars beneath Fresnes jail in Paris. He knew too well what it was like, but not on the receiving end.

  ‘Talk,’ hissed Miller. ‘The forger, his name and address.’

  Bayer slowly shook his head.

  ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘They’ll kill me.’

  Miller replaced the gag. He took Bayer’s little finger, closed his eyes and jerked once. The bone snapped at the knuckle. Bayer heaved in his chair and vomited into the gag.

  Miller whipped it off before he could drown. The fat man’s head jerked forward and the evening’s highly expensive meal, accompanied by two bottles of wine and several double Scotches, poured down his chest into his lap.

  ‘Talk,’ said Miller. ‘You’ve got seven more fingers to go.’

  Bayer swallowed, eyes closed.

  ‘Winzer,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Winzer. Klaus Winzer. He makes the passports.’

  ‘He’s a professional forger?’

  ‘He’s a printer.’

  ‘Where? Which town?’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me. Which town?’

  ‘Osnabrück,’ whispered Bayer.

  Miller replaced the gag across Bayer’s mouth and thought. Klauz Winzer, a printer in Osnabrück. He went to his attaché case, containing the diary of Salomon Tauber and various maps, and took out a road map of Germany.

  The autobahn to Osnabrück, far away to the north in Nord Rhine/Westphalia, led through Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dortmund and Munster. It was a four- to five-hour drive, depending on road conditions. It was already nearly three in the morning of February 21st.

  Across the road Mackensen shivered in his niche on the second floor of the half-completed building. The light still shone in the room over the road, the first-floor front. He flicked his eyes constantly from the illuminated window to the front door. If only Bayer would come out, he thought, he could take Miller alone. Or if Miller came out he could take him further down the street. Or if someone opened the window for a breath of fresh air. He shivered again and clasped the heavy Remington .300 rifle. At a range of thirty yards there would be no problems with such a gun. Mackensen could wait, he was a patient man.

  In his room Miller quietly packed his things. He needed Bayer to remain quiescent for at least six hours. Perhaps the man would be too terrified to warn his chiefs that he had given away the secret of the forger. But he couldn’t count on it.

  Miller spent a last few minutes tightening the bonds and the gag that held Bayer immobile and silent, then eased the chair on to its side so the fat man could not raise attention by rolling the chair over with a crash. The telephone cord was already ripped out. He took a last look round the room and left, locking the door behind him.

  He was almost at the top of the stairs when a thought came to him. The night porter might have seen them both mount the stairs. What would he think if only one came down, paid his bill and left? Miller retreated and headed towards the back of the hotel. At the end of the corridor was a window looking out on to the fire-escape. He slipped the catch and stepped out on to the escape ladder. A few seconds later he was in the rear courtyard where the garage was situated. A back entrance led to a small alley behind the hotel.

  Two minutes later he was striding the three miles to where he had parked his Jaguar, half a mile from Bayer’s house. The effect of the drink and the night’s activities combined to make him feel desperately tired. He needed sleep badly, but realised he had to reach Winzer before the alarm was raised.

  It was almost four in the morning when he climbed into the Jaguar, and half past the hour before he had made his way back to the autobahn leading north for Heilbronn and Mannheim.

  Almost as soon as he had gone Bayer, by now completely sober, began to struggle to get free. He tried to lean his head forward far enough to use his teeth, through the socks and the scarf, on the knots of the ties that bound his wrists to the chair. But his fatness prevented his head getting low enough, and the socks in his mouth forced his teeth apart. Every few minutes he had to pause to take deep breaths through his nose.

  He tugged and pulled at his ankle-bonds, but they held. Finally, despite the pain from his broken and swelling little finger, he decided to wriggle his wrists free.

  When this did not work, he spotted the table lamp lying on the floor. The bulb was still in it, but a crushed light bulb leaves enough slivers of glass to cut a single necktie.

  It took him an hour to inch the overturned chair across the floor and crush the light bulb.

  It may sound easy, but it isn’t, to use a piece of broken glass to cut wrist-bonds. It takes hours to get through a single strand of cloth. Bayer’s wrists poured sweat, damping the cloth of the neckties and making them even tighter round his fat wrists. It was seven in t
he morning, and light was beginning to filter over the roofs of the town, before the first strands binding his left wrist parted from the effects of being rubbed on a piece of broken glass. It was nearly eight when his left wrist came free.

  By that time Miller’s Jaguar was boring round the Cologne Ring to the east of the city with another hundred miles before Osnabrück. It had started to rain, an evil sleet running in curtains across the slippery autobahn, and the mesmeric effect of the windscreen wipers almost sent him to sleep.

  He slowed down to a steady cruise at 80 mph rather than risk running off the road into the muddy fields on either side.

  With his left hand free, Bayer took only a few minutes to rip off his gag, then lay for several minutes whooping in great gulps of air. The smell in the room was appalling, a mixture of sweat, fear, vomit and whisky. He unpicked the knots on his right wrist, wincing as the pain from the snapped finger shot up his arm, then released his feet.

  His first thought was the door, but it was locked. He tried the telephone, lumbering about on feet long since devoid of feeling from the tightness of the bindings. Finally he staggered to the window, ripped back the curtains and jerked the windows inwards and open.

  In his shooting niche across the road Mackensen was almost dozing, despite the cold, when he saw the curtains of Miller’s room pulled back. Snapping the Remington up into the aiming position, he waited until the figure behind the net curtains jerked the windows inwards, then fired straight into the face of the figure.

  The bullet hit Bayer in the base of the throat and he was dead before his reeling bulk tumbled backwards to the floor. The crash of the rifle might be put down to a car backfiring for a minute, but not longer. Within less than a minute, even that hour of the morning, Mackensen knew someone would investigate.

  Without waiting to cast a second look into the room across the road, he was out of the second floor and running down the concrete steps of the building towards the ground. He left by the back, dodging two cement mixers and a pile of gravel in the rear yard. He regained his car within sixty seconds of firing, stowed the gun in the boot and drove off.

  He knew as he sat at the wheel and inserted the ignition key that all was not right. He suspected he had made a mistake. The man the Werwolf had briefed him to kill was tall and lean. The mind’s eye impression of the figure at the window was of a fat man. From what he had seen the previous evening, he was sure it was Bayer he had hit.

  Not that it was too serious a problem. Seeing Bayer dead on his carpet, Miller would be bound to flee as fast as his legs would carry him. Therefore he would return to his Jaguar, parked three miles away. Mackensen headed the Mercedes back to where he had last seen the Jaguar. He only began to worry badly when he saw the space between the Opel and the Benz truck where the Jaguar had stood the previous evening in the quiet residential street.

  Mackensen would not have been the chief executioner for the Odessa if he had been the sort who panics easily. He had been in too many tight spots before. He sat at the wheel of his car for several minutes before he reacted to the prospect of Miller now being hundreds of miles away.

  If Miller had left Bayer alive, he reasoned, it could only be because he had got nothing from him, or he had got something. In the first case there was no harm done; he could take Miller later. There was no hurry. If Miller had got something from Bayer it could only be information. The Werwolf alone would know what kind of information Miller had been seeking, that Bayer had to give. Therefore, despite his fear of the Werwolf’s rage, he would ring him.

  It took him twenty minutes to find a public telephone. He always kept a pocketful of one-mark pieces for long-distance calls.

  When he took the call in Nuremberg and heard the news the Werwolf went into a transport of rage, mouthing abuse down the line at his hired killer. It took several seconds before he could calm down.

  ‘You’d better find him, you oaf, and quickly. God knows where he’s gone now.’

  Mackensen explained to his chief he needed to know what kind of information Bayer could have supplied to Miller before he died.

  At the other end of the line the Werwolf thought for a while.

  ‘Dear God,’ he breathed, ‘the forger. He’s got the name of the forger.’

  ‘What forger, Chief?’ asked Mackensen.

  The Werwolf pulled himself together.

  ‘I’ll get on to the man and warn him,’ he said crisply. ‘This is where Miller has gone.’

  He dictated an address to Mackensen and added, ‘You get the hell up to Osnabrück like you’ve never moved before. You’ll find Miller at that address, or somewhere in the town. If he’s not at the house, keep searching the town for the Jaguar. And this time, don’t leave the Jaguar. It’s the one place he always returns.’

  He slammed down the phone, then picked it up again and asked for directory inquiries. When he had the number he sought he dialled a number in Osnabrück.

  In Stuttgart, Mackensen was left holding a buzzing receiver. With a shrug he replaced it and went back to his car, facing the prospect of a long, wearying drive followed by another ‘job’. He was almost as tired as Miller, by then twenty miles short of Osnabrück. Neither man had slept for twenty-four hours, and Mackensen had not even eaten since the previous lunch.

  Chilled to the marrow from his night’s vigil, longing for a piping hot coffee and a Steinhäger to chase it, he got back into the Mercedes and headed it north on the road to Westphalia.

  Chapter Fourteen

  TO LOOK AT him there was nothing about Klaus Winzer to suggest he had ever been in the SS. For one thing he was well below the required height of six feet, for another he was short-sighted. At the age of forty he was plump and pale, with fuzzy blond hair and a diffident manner.

  In fact he had had one of the strangest careers of any man to have worn the uniform of the SS. Born in 1924, he was the son of a certain Johann Winzer, a pork butcher of Wiesbaden, a large, boisterous man who from the early twenties onwards was a trusting follower of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. From his earliest days Klaus could remember his father coming home from street battles with the Communists and Socialists.

  Klaus took after his mother, and to his father’s disgust grew up small, weak, shortsighted and peaceful. He hated violence, sports and belonging to the Hitler Youth. At only one thing did he excel: from his early teens he fell completely in love with the art of handwriting and the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, an activity his disgusted father regarded as an occupation for cissies.

  With the coming of the Nazis, the pork butcher flourished, obtaining as a reward for his earlier services to the Party the exclusive contract to supply meat to the local SS barracks. He mightily admired the strutting SS youths, and devoutly hoped he might one day see his own son wearing the black and silver of the Schütz Staffel.

  Klaus showed no such inclination, preferring to spend his time poring over his manuscripts, experimenting with coloured inks and beautiful lettering.

  The war came, and in the spring of 1942 Klaus turned eighteen years old, the age of call-up. In contrast to his ham-fisted, brawling, Jew-hating father, he was small, pallid and shy. Failing even to pass the medical then required for a desk job with the Army, Klaus was sent home from the recruiting board. For his father it was the last straw.

  Johann Winzer took the train to Berlin to see an old friend from his street-fighting days, who had since risen high in the ranks of the SS, in the hopes the man might intercede for his son and obtain an entry into some branch of service to the Reich. The man was as helpful as he could be, which was not much, and asked if there was anything the young Klaus could do well. Shamefacedly, his father admitted he could write illuminated manuscripts.

  The man promised he would do what he could, but to be getting on with, he asked if Klaus would prepare an illuminated address on parchment, in honour of a certain SS-Major Fritz Suhren.

  Back in Weisbaden, the young Klaus did as he was asked, and at a ceremony in Berlin a wee
k later this manuscript was presented to Suhren by his colleagues. Suhren, then the Commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was being posted to take over command of the even more notorious Ravensbrück.

  Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.

  At the handing-over ceremony in the RSHA headquarters in Berlin everyone admired the beautifully prepared manuscript, and not least a certain SS-Lieutenant Alfred Naujocks. This was the old man who had carried out the mock attack on Gleiwitz radio station on the German – Polish border in August 1939, leaving the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in German Army uniforms as ‘proof’ of the Polish attack on Germany, Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland the following week.

  Naujocks asked who had done the manuscript, and on being told, he requested the young Klaus Winzer be brought to Berlin.

  Before he knew what was happening, Klaus Winzer was inducted into the SS, without any formal training period, made to swear the oath of loyalty, another oath of secrecy, and told he would be transferred to a top-secret Reich project. The butcher of Weisbaden, bewildered, was in seventh heaven.

  The project involved was then being carried out under the auspices of the RSHA, Amt Six, Section F, in a workshop in Dellbruck Strasse, Berlin. Basically it was quite simple. The SS was trying to forge hundreds of thousands of British five-pound notes and American 100-dollar bills. The paper was being made in the Reich banknote-paper factory at Spechthausen, outside Berlin, and the job of the workshop in Dellbruck Strasse was to try to get the right watermark for British and American currency. It was for his knowledge of papers and inks that they wanted Klaus Winzer.

  The idea was to flood Britain and America with phoney money, thus ruining the economies of both countries. In early 1943, when the watermark for the British fivers had been achieved, the project of making the printing plates was transferred to Block 19, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Jewish and non-Jewish graphologists and graphic artists worked under the direction of the SS. The job of Winzer was quality control, for the SS did not trust their prisoners not to make a deliberate error in their work.