The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  A man in civilian clothes came down the stairs and emerged on to the pavement. The turning light on top of the Volkswagen patrol car swung across his face and Miller recognised him. They had been at school together at Hamburg Central High. The man was now a junior detective inspector in the Hamburg police, stationed at Altona Central.

  ‘Hey, Karl.’

  The young inspector turned at the call of his name and scanned the crowd behind the sergeant. In the next swirl of the police-car light he caught sight of Miller and his raised right hand. His face broke into a grin, part of pleasure, part exasperation. He nodded to the sergeant.

  ‘It’s all right, Sergeant. He’s more or less harmless.’

  The sergeant lowered his arm and Miller darted past. He shook hands with Karl Brandt.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Followed the ambulance.’

  ‘Bloody vulture. What are you up to these days?’

  ‘Same as usual. Freelancing.’

  ‘Making quite a packet out of it, by the look of it. I keep seeing your name in the picture magazines.’

  ‘It’s a living. Hear about Kennedy?’

  ‘Yes. Hell of a thing. They must be turning Dallas inside out tonight. Glad it wasn’t on my patch.’

  Miller nodded towards the dimly lit hallway of the rooming-house where a low-watt naked bulb cast a yellow glare over peeling wallpaper.

  ‘A suicide. Gas. Neighbours smelt it coming under the door and called us. Just as well no one struck a match, the place was reeking with it.’

  ‘Not a film-star, by any chance?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Yeah. Sure. They always live in places like this. No, it was an old man. Looked as if he had been dead for years anyway. Someone does it every night.’

  ‘Well, wherever he’s gone now it can’t be worse than this.’

  The inspector gave a fleeting smile and turned as the two ambulance men negotiated the last seven steps of the creaking stairs and came down the hallway with their burden. Brandt turned round.

  ‘Make a bit of room. Let them through.’

  The sergeant promptly took up the cry and pushed the crowd back even further. The two ambulance men walked out on to the pavement and round to the open doors of the Mercedes. Brandt followed them, with Miller at his heels. Not that Miller wanted to look at the dead man, or even intended to. He was just following Brandt. As the ambulance men reached the door of the vehicle the first one hitched his end of the stretcher into the runners and the second prepared to shove it inside.

  ‘Hold it,’ said Brandt, and flicked back the corner of the blanket above the dead man’s face. He remarked over his shoulder, ‘Just a formality. My report has to say I accompanied the body to the ambulance and back to the morgue.’

  The interior lights of the Mercedes ambulance were bright, and Miller caught a single two-second look at the face of the suicide. His first and only impression was that he had never seen anything so old and ugly. Even given the effects of gassing, the dull mottling of the skin, the bluish tinge at the lips, the man in life could have been no beauty. A few strands of lank hair were plastered over the otherwise naked scalp. The eyes were closed. The face was hollowed out to the point of emaciation and, with the man’s false teeth missing, each cheek seemed to be sucked inwards till they almost touched inside the mouth, giving the effect of a ghoul in a horror film. The lips hardly existed and both upper and lower were lined with vertical creases, reminding Miller of the shrunken skull from the Amazon basin he had once seen, whose lips had been sewn together by the natives. To cap the effect the man seemed to have two pale and jagged scars running down his face, each from the temple or upper ear to the corner of the mouth.

  After a quick glance, Brandt pulled the blanket back and nodded to the ambulance attendant behind him. He stepped back as the man rammed the stretcher into its berth, locked the doors and went round to the cab to join his mate. The ambulance surged away, the crowd started to disperse accompanied by the sergeant’s muted growls, ‘Come on, it’s all over. There’s nothing more to see. Haven’t you got homes to go to?’

  Miller looked at Brandt and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘Yes. Poor old sod. Nothing in it for you, though?’

  Miller looked pained.

  ‘Not a chance. Like you say, there’s one a night. People are dying all over the world tonight and nobody’s taking a bit of notice. Not with Kennedy dead.’

  Inspector Brandt laughed mockingly.

  ‘You bloody journalists.’

  ‘Let’s face it. Kennedy’s what people want to read about. They buy the newspapers.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I must get back to the station. See you, Peter.’

  They shook hands again and parted. Miller drove back towards Altona station, picked up the main road back into the city centre and twenty minutes later swung the Jaguar into the underground car park off the Hansa Square, 200 yards from the house where he had his roof-top flat.

  Keeping the car in an underground car park all winter was costly, but it was one of the extravagances he permitted himself. He liked his fairly expensive flat because it was high and he could look down on the bustling boulevard of the Steindamm. Of his clothes and food he thought nothing, and at twenty-nine, just under six feet, with the rumpled brown hair and brown eyes that women go for, he didn’t need expensive clothes. An envious friend had once told him, ‘You could pull birds in a monastery,’ and he had laughed, but been pleased at the same time because he knew it was true.

  The real passion of his life was sports cars, reporting and Sigrid, though he sometimes shamefacedly admitted that if it came to a choice between Sigi and the Jaguar, Sigi would have to find her loving somewhere else.

  He stood and looked at the Jaguar in the lights of the garage after he had parked it. He could seldom get enough of looking at that car. Even approaching it in the street he would stop and admire it, occasionally joined by a passer-by who, not realising it was Miller’s, would stop also and remark, ‘Some motor, that.’

  Normally a young freelance reporter does not drive a Jaguar XK 150 S. Spare parts were almost impossible to come by in Hamburg, the more so as the XK series, of which the S model was the last ever made, had gone out of production in 1960. He maintained it himself, spending hours on Sunday in overalls beneath the chassis or half buried in the engine. The petrol it used with its three SU carburetters was a major strain on his pocket, the more so with the price of petrol in Germany, but he paid it willingly. The reward was to hear the berserk snarl of the exhausts when he hit the accelerator on the open autobahn, to feel the surge of thrust as it rocketed out of a turn on a mountain road. He had even hardened up the independent suspension on the two front wheels and as the car had stiff suspension at the back it took corners steady as a rock, leaving other drivers rolling wildly on their cushion springs if they tried to keep up with him. Just after buying it he had had it re-sprayed black with a long wasp-yellow streak down each side. As it had been made in Coventry, England, and not as an export car, the driver’s wheel was on the right, which caused the occasional problem for overtaking but allowed him to change gear with the left hand and hold the shuddering steering wheel in the right hand, which he had come to prefer.

  Even thinking back how he had been able to buy it caused him to wonder at his luck. Earlier that summer he had idly opened a pop magazine while waiting in a barber’s shop to have his hair cut. Normally he never read the gossip about pop-stars, but there was nothing else to read. The centre-page spread had been about the meteoric rise to fame and international stardom of four tousle-headed English youths. The face on the extreme right of the picture, the one with the big nose, meant nothing to him, but the other three faces rang a bell in his filing-cabinet of a memory.

  The names of the two discs that had brought the quartet to stardom, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘Love Me Do’, meant nothing either, but three of the faces puzzled him for two days. Then he remembered them, two years e
arlier in 1961, singing way down the bill at a small cabaret off the Reeperbahn. It took him another day to recall the name, for he had only once popped in for a drink to chat up an underworld figure from whom he needed information about the Sankt Pauli gang. The Star Club. He went down there and checked through the billings for 1961 and found them. They had been five then, the three he recognised and two others, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe.

  From there he went to the photographer who had done the publicity photographs for the impresario Bert Kaempfert, and had bought right and title to every one he had. His story ‘How Hamburg Discovered the Beatles’ had made almost every pop-music and picture magazine in Germany and a lot abroad. On the proceeds he had bought the Jaguar which he had been eyeing in a car showroom where it had been sold by a British Army officer whose wife had grown too pregnant to fit into it. He even bought some Beatle records out of gratitude, but Sigi was the only one who ever played them.

  He left the car and walked up the ramp to the street and back to his flat. It was nearly midnight and although his mother had fed him at six that evening with the usual enormous meal she provided when he called, he was hungry again. He made a plate of scrambled eggs and listened to the late night news. It was all about Kennedy and heavily accented on the German angles, since there was little more news coming through from Dallas. The police were still searching for the killer. The announcer went into great lengths about Kennedy’s love of Germany, his visit to Berlin the previous summer, and his statement in German: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’

  There was then a recorded tribute from the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, his voice choked with emotion, and other tributes were read from Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had retired the previous October 15th.

  Peter Miller switched off and went to bed. He wished Sigi was home because he always wanted to snuggle up to her when he felt depressed, and then he got hard and then they made love, after which he fell into a dreamless sleep, much to her annoyance because it was after love-making that she always wanted to talk about marriage and children. But the cabaret at which she danced did not close till nearly four in the morning, often later on Friday nights when the provincials and tourists were thick down the Reeperbahn, prepared to buy champagne at ten times its restaurant price for a girl with big tits and a low frock, and Sigi had the biggest and the lowest.

  So he smoked another cigarette and fell asleep alone at quarter to two to dream of the hideous face of the old gassed man in the slums of Altona.

  While Peter Miller was eating his scrambled eggs at midnight in Hamburg five men were sitting drinking in the comfortable lounge of a house attached to a riding school near the pyramids outside Cairo. The time there was one in the morning. The five men had dined well and were in a jovial mood, the cause being the news from Dallas they had heard four hours earlier.

  Three of the men were Germans, the other two Egyptians. The wife of the host and proprietor of the riding school, a favourite meeting place of the cream of Cairo society and the several-thousand-strong German colony, had gone to bed, leaving the five men to talk into the small hours.

  Sitting in the leather-backed easy chair by the shuttered window was Hans Appler, formerly a Jewish expert in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Dr Joseph Goebbels. Having lived in Egypt since shortly after the end of the war, where he had been spirited by the Odessa, Appler had taken the Egyptian name of Salah Chaffar, and worked as an expert on Jews in the Egyptian Ministry of Orientation. He held a glass of whisky. On his left was another former expert from Goebbels’ staff, Ludwig Heiden, also working in the Orientation Ministry. He had in the meantime adopted the Moslem faith, made a trip to Mecca and was called El Hadj. In deference to his new religion he held a glass of orange juice. Both men were fanatical Nazis.

  The two Egyptians were Colonel Chams Edine Badrane, personal aide to Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later to become Egyptian Defence Minister before being sentenced to death for treason after the Six-Day War of 1967. Colonel Badrane was destined to pass into disgrace with him. The other was Colonel Ali Samir, head of the Moukhabarat, the Egyptian secret intelligence service.

  There had been a sixth guest at dinner, the guest of honour, who had rushed back to Cairo when the news came through at nine-thirty, Cairo time, that President Kennedy was dead. He was the Speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, Anwar el Sadat, a close collaborator of President Nasser and later to become his successor.

  Hans Appler raised his glass to the ceiling.

  ‘So Kennedy the Jew-lover is dead. Gentlemen, I give you a toast.’

  ‘But our glasses are empty,’ protested Colonel Samir.

  Their host hastened to remedy the matter, filling the empty glasses with a bottle of scotch from the sideboard.

  The reference to Kennedy as a Jew-lover baffled none of the five men in the room. On the 14th of March 1960, while Dwight Eisenhower was still President of the United States, the Premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had met secretly at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, a meeting that ten years earlier would have been deemed impossible. What was deemed impossible even in 1960 was what happened at that meeting, which was why details of it took years to leak out and why even at the end of 1963 President Nasser refused to take seriously the information that the Odessa and the Moukhabarat of Colonel Samir placed on his desk.

  The two statesmen had signed an agreement whereby West Germany agreed to open a credit account for Israel to the tune of fifty million dollars a year without any strings attached. Ben-Gurion, however, soon discovered that to have money was one thing, to have a secure and certain source of arms was quite another. Six months later the Waldorf agreement was topped off with another, signed between the defence ministers of Germany and Israel, Franz-Josef Strauss and Shimon Peres. Under its terms Israel would be able to use the money from Germany to buy weapons in Germany.

  Adenauer, aware of the vastly more controversial nature of the second agreement, delayed for months, until in November 1961 he was in New York to meet the new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy put the pressure on. He did not wish to have arms delivered directly from the USA to Israel, but he wanted them to arrive somehow. Israel needed fighters, transport planes, Howitzer 105 mm artillery pieces, armoured cars, armoured personnel carriers and tanks, but above all tanks.

  Germany had all of them, mainly of American make, either bought from America to offset the cost of keeping American troops in Germany under the NATO agreement or made under licence in Germany.

  Under Kennedy’s pressure the Strauss – Peres deal was pushed through.

  The first German tanks started to arrive at Haifa in late June 1963. It was difficult to keep the news secret for long; too many people were involved. The Odessa found out in late 1962 and promptly informed the Egyptians with whom their agents in Cairo had the closest links.

  In late 1963 things started to change. On October 15th Konrad Adenauer, the Fox of Bonn, the Granite Chancellor, also resigned and went into retirement. Adenauer’s place was taken by Ludwig Erhard, a good vote-catcher as the father of the German economic miracle, but in matters of foreign policy weak and vacillating.

  Even when Adenauer was in power there had been a vociferous group inside the West German cabinet in favour of shelving the Israeli arms deal and halting the supplies before they had begun. The old Chancellor had silenced them with a few terse sentences and such was his power they stayed silenced.

  Erhard was quite a different man and already had earned himself the nickname the Rubber Lion. As soon as he took the chair the anti-arms-deal group, based on the Foreign Ministry, ever mindful of its excellent and improving relations with the Arab world, opened up again. Erhard dithered. But behind them all was the determination of John Kennedy that Israel should get her arms via Germany.

  And then he was shot. The big question in the small hours of the morning of November 23rd was simply: would President Lyndon John
son take the American pressure off Germany and let the indecisive Chancellor in Bonn renege on the deal? In fact he did not, but there were high hopes in Cairo that he would.

  The host at the convivial meeting outside Cairo that night, having filled his guests’ glasses, turned back to the sideboard to top up his own. His name was Wolfgang Lutz, born at Mannheim in 1921, a former major in the German Army, a fanatical Jew-hater, who had emigrated to Cairo in 1961 and started his riding academy. Blond, blue-eyed, hawk-faced, he was a top favourite among both the influential political figures of Cairo and the expatriate German and mainly Nazi community along the banks of the Nile.

  He turned to face the room and gave them a broad smile. If there was anything false about that smile no one noticed it. But it was false. He had been born, a Jew, in Mannheim but had emigrated to Palestine in 1933 at the age of twelve. His name was Ze’ev and he held the rank of Rav-Seren (major) in the Israeli Army. He was also the top agent of Israeli Intelligence in Egypt at that time. On February 28th, 1965, after a raid on his home, in which a radio transmitter was discovered in the bathroom scales, he was arrested. Tried on June 26th, 1965, he was sentenced to hard labour in perpetuity. Released after the end of the 1967 war as part of an exchange against thousands of Egyptian prisoners of war, he and his wife stepped back on to the soil of home at Lod Airport on February 4th, 1968.

  But the night Kennedy died this was all in the future, the arrest, the tortures, the multiple rape of his wife. He raised his glass to the four smiling faces in front of him.

  In fact, he could hardly wait for his guests to depart, for something one of them had said over dinner was of vital importance to his country, and he desperately wished to be alone, to go up to his bathroom, get the transmitter out of the bathroom scales and send a message to Tel Aviv. But he forced himself to keep smiling.

  ‘Death to the Jew-lovers,’ he toasted. ‘Sieg Heil.’

  Peter Miller woke the next morning just before nine and shifted luxuriously under the enormous feather cushion that covered the double bed. Even half awake he would feel the warmth of the sleeping figure of Sigi seeping across the bed at him and by reflex he snuggled closer so that her buttocks pushed into the base of his stomach. Automatically he began to erect.