The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  Sigi, still fast asleep after only four hours in bed, grunted in annoyance and shifted away towards the edge of the bed.

  ‘Go away,’ she muttered without waking up.

  Miller sighed, turned on to his back and held up his watch, squinting at the face of it in the half-light. Then he slipped out of bed on the other side, pulled a towelling bathrobe round him and padded through into the sitting room to pull back the curtains. The steely November light washed across the room, making him blink. He focussed his eyes and looked down into the Steindamm. It was a Saturday morning and traffic was light down the wet black tarmac. He yawned and went into the kitchen to brew the first of his innumerable cups of coffee. Both his mother and Sigi reproached him with living almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes.

  Drinking his coffee and smoking the first cigarette of the day in the kitchen he considered if there was anything particular he ought to do that day and decided there was not. For one thing all the newspapers and the next issues of the magazines would be about President Kennedy, probably for days or weeks to come. And for another there was no particular story he was chasing up at the time. Besides which, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to get hold of people in their offices, and they seldom like being disturbed at home. He had recently finished a well-received series on the steady infiltration of Austrian, Parisian and Italian gangsters into the gold-mine of the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s half-mile of night-clubs, brothels and vice, and had not yet been paid for it. He thought he might chase up the magazine to which he had sold the series, then decided against it. They would pay in time, and he was not short of money for the moment. Indeed his bank statement, which had arrived three days earlier, showed he had over 5000 marks (£500) to his credit, which he reckoned would keep him going for a while.

  ‘The trouble with you, mate,’ he told his reflection in one of Sigi’s brilliantly polished saucepans as he rinsed out the cup with his forefinger, ‘is that you are lazy.’

  He had once been asked by a civilian careers officer at the end of his military service ten years earlier what he wanted to be in life. He had replied, ‘A rich layabout,’ and at twenty-nine, although he had not achieved it and probably never would, he still thought it a perfectly reasonable ambition.

  He carried the portable transistor radio into the bathroom, closed the door so Sigi would not hear it and listened to the news while he showered and shaved. The main item was that a man had been arrested for the murder of President Kennedy. As he supposed, there were no other items of news on the entire programme but those connected with the Kennedy assassination.

  After drying off he went back to the kitchen and made more coffee, this time two cups. He took them into the bedroom, placed them on the bedside table, slipped off his robe and clambered back under the cushion beside Sigi, whose fluffy blonde head was protruding on to the pillow.

  She was twenty-two and at school had been a champion gymnast who, so she said, could have gone on to Olympic standard if her bust had not developed to the point where it got in the way and no leotard could safely contain it. On leaving school she became a teacher of physical training at a girls’ school. The change to striptease dancer in Hamburg came a year later and for the very best and most simple of economic reasons. It earned her five times more than a teacher’s salary.

  Despite her willingness to take her clothes off to the buff in a night-club, she was remarkably embarrassed by any lewd remarks made about her body by anyone whom she could see when the remarks were made.

  ‘The point is,’ she once told an amused Peter Miller with great seriousness, ‘when I’m on the stage I can’t see anything behind the lights, so I don’t get embarrassed. If I could see them I think I’d run off stage.’

  This did not stop her later taking her place at one of the tables in the auditorium when she was dressed again, and waiting to be invited to a drink by one of the customers. The only drink allowed was champagne, in half-bottles or preferably whole bottles. On these she collected a fifteen per cent commission. Although almost without exception the customers who invited her to drink champagne with them hoped to get much more than an hour gazing in stunned admiration at the canyon between her breasts, they never did. She was a kindly and understanding girl and her attitude to the pawing attentions of the customers was one of gentle regret rather than the contemptuous loathing that the other girls hid behind their neon smiles.

  ‘Poor little men,’ she once said to Miller, ‘they ought to have a nice woman to go home to.’

  ‘What do you mean – poor little men?’ protested Miller. ‘They’re dirty old sods with a pocketful of cash to spend.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t be if they had someone to take care of them,’ retorted Sigi, and on this her feminine logic was unshakable.

  Miller had seen her by chance on a visit to Madam Kokett’s bar just below the Café Keese on the Reeperbahn when he had gone to have a chat and a drink with the owner, an old friend and contact. She was a big girl, five feet nine inches tall and with a figure to match, which on a shorter girl would have been out of proportion. She stripped to the music with the habitual supposedly sensual gestures, her face set in the usual bedroom pout of strippers. Miller had seen it all before and sipped his drink without batting an eyelid.

  But when her brassie`re came off even he had to stop and stare, glass half-raised to his mouth. His host eyed him sardonically.

  ‘She’s built, eh?’ he said.

  Miller had to admit she made Playboy’s playmates of the month look like severe cases of undernourishment. But she was so firmly muscled that her bosom stood outwards and upwards without a vestige of support.

  At the end of her turn, when the applause started, the girl dropped the bored poise of the professional dancer, bobbed a shy, half-embarrassed little bow to the audience and gave a big sloppy grin like a half-trained bird-dog which, against all the betting, has just brought back a downed partridge. It was the grin which got Miller, not the dance routine or the figure. He asked if she would like a drink, and she was sent for.

  As Miller was in the company of the boss, she avoided a bottle of champagne and asked for a gin-fizz. To his surprise Miller found she was a very nice person to be around, and asked if he might take her home after the show. With obvious reservations she agreed. Playing his cards coolly, Miller made no pass at her that night. It was early spring, and she emerged from the cabaret when it closed clad in a most unglamorous duffel coat, which he presumed was intentional.

  They just had a coffee together and talked, during which she unwound from her previous tension and chatted gaily. He learned she liked pop music, art, walking along the banks of the Alster, keeping house and children. After that they started going out on her one free night a week, taking in a dinner or a show, but not sleeping together.

  After three months Miller took her to his bed and later suggested she might like to move in. With her single-minded attitude to the important things of life, Sigi had already decided she wanted to marry Peter Miller and the only problem was whether she should try to get him by not sleeping in his bed or the other way round. Noticing his ability to fill the other half of his mattress with other girls if the need arose, she decided to move in and make his life so comfortable that he would want to marry her. They had been together for six months by the end of November.

  Even Miller, who was hardly house-trained, had to admit she kept a beautiful home, and she made love with a healthy and bouncing enjoyment. She never mentioned marriage directly but tried to get the message across in other ways. Miller feigned not to notice. Strolling in the sun by the Alster lake she would sometimes make friends with a toddler, under the benevolent eyes of its parent.

  ‘Oh, Peter, isn’t he an angel?’

  Miller would grunt: ‘Yeah. Marvellous.’

  After that she would freeze him for an hour for having failed to take the hint. But they were happy together, especially Peter Miller, whom the arrangement of all the comforts of marriage, the delights of regular lovin
g, without the ties of marriage, suited down to the ground.

  Drinking half his coffee, Miller slithered down into the bed and put his arms round her from behind, gently caressing her crotch, which he knew would wake her up. After a few minutes she muttered with pleasure and rolled over on to her back. Still massaging, he leant over and started to kiss her breasts. Still half asleep, she gave vent to a series of long mmmms and her hands started to move drowsily over his back and buttocks. Ten minutes later they made love, squealing and shuddering with pleasure.

  ‘That’s a hell of a way to wake me up,’ she grumbled afterwards.

  ‘There are worse ways,’ said Miller.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Nearly twelve,’ Miller lied, knowing she would throw something at him if she learned it was half past ten and she had only had five hours’ sleep. ‘Never mind, you go back to sleep if you feel like it.’

  ‘Mmmm. Thank you, darling, you are good to me,’ said Sigi, and fell asleep again.

  Miller was halfway to the bathroom after drinking the rest of his coffee and Sigi’s as well when the phone rang. He diverted into the sitting room and answered it.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Yes, who’s that?’

  ‘Karl.’

  His mind was still fuzzed and he did not recognise the voice.

  ‘Karl?’

  The voice was impatient.

  ‘Karl Brandt. What’s the matter? Are you still asleep?’

  Miller recovered.

  ‘Oh yes. Sure, Karl. Sorry, I just got up. What’s the matter?’

  ‘Look, it’s about this dead Jew. I want to talk to you.’

  Miller was baffled.

  ‘What dead Jew?’

  ‘The one who gassed himself last night in Altona. Can you remember that far back?’

  ‘Yes, of course I remember last night,’ said Miller. ‘I didn’t know he was Jewish. What about him?’

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said the police inspector. ‘But not on the phone. Can we meet?’

  Miller’s reporter’s mind clicked into gear immediately. Anyone who has got something to say but does not wish to say it over the phone must think it important. In the case of Brandt, Miller could hardly suspect a police detective would be so cagey about something ridiculous.

  ‘Sure,’ he said down the phone. ‘Are you free for lunch?’

  ‘I can be,’ said Brandt.

  ‘Good. I’ll stand you some if you think it’s something worthwhile.’ He named a small restaurant on the Goose Market for one o’clock and replaced the receiver. He was still puzzled, for he couldn’t see a story in the suicide of an old man, Jewish or not, in a slum tenement in Altona.

  Throughout the lunch the young detective seemed to wish to avoid the subject over which he had asked for the meeting, but when the coffee came he said simply, ‘The man last night.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miller. ‘What about him?’

  ‘You must have heard, like we all have, about what the Nazis did to the Jews during the war and even before it?’

  ‘Of course. They rammed it down our throats at school, didn’t they?’

  Miller was puzzled and embarrassed. Like most young Germans he had been told at school when he was nine or ten that he and the rest of his countrymen had been guilty of massive war crimes. At the time he had accepted it without even knowing what was being talked about.

  Later it had been difficult to find out what the teachers had meant in the immediate post-war period. There was nobody to ask, nobody who wanted to talk, not the teachers, not the parents. Only with coming manhood had he been able to read a little about it, and although what he read disgusted him, he could not feel it concerned him. It was another time, another place, a long way away. He had not been there when it happened, his father had not been there, his mother had not been there. Something inside him had persuaded him it was nothing to do with Peter Miller, so he had asked for no names, dates, details. He wondered why Brandt should be bringing the subject up.

  Brandt stirred his coffee, himself embarrassed, not knowing how to go on.

  ‘That old man last night,’ he said at length. ‘He was a German Jew. He was in a concentration camp.’

  Miller thought back to the death’s head on the stretcher the previous evening. Was that what they ended up like? It was ridiculous. The man must have been liberated by the Allies eighteen years earlier and had lived on to die of old age. But the face kept coming back. He had never seen anyone who had been in a camp before; at least, not knowingly. For that matter he had never met one of the SS mass killers, he was sure of that. One would notice, after all. The man would be different.

  His mind strayed back to the publicity surrounding the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem two years earlier. The papers had been full of it for weeks on end. He thought of the face in the glass booth, and remembered that his impression at the time had been how ordinary that face had been, so depressingly ordinary. It was reading the press coverage of the trial that for the first time he had gained an inkling of how the SS had done it, how they had got away with it. But it had all been about things in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, far away and a long time back. He could not make it personal.

  He brought his thoughts back to the present and the sense of unease Brandt’s line of talk aroused in him.

  ‘What about it?’ he asked the detective.

  For answer Brandt took a brown-paper-wrapped parcel out of his attaché case and pushed it across the table.

  ‘The old man left a diary. Actually, he wasn’t so old. Fifty-six. It seems he wrote notes at the time and stored them in his foot-wrappings. After the war he transcribed them all. They make up the diary.’

  Miller looked at the parcel with scant interest.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘It was lying next to the body. I picked it up and took it home. I read it last night.’

  Miller looked at his former schoolfriend quizzically.

  ‘It was bad?’

  ‘Horrible. I had no idea it was that bad, the things they did to them.’

  ‘Why bring it to me?’

  Now Brandt was embarrassed. He shrugged.

  ‘I thought it might make a story for you.’

  ‘Who does it belong to now?’

  ‘Technically, Tauber’s heirs. But we’ll never find them. So I suppose it belongs to the Police Department. But they’d just file it. You can have it, if you want it. Just don’t let on that I gave it to you. I don’t need any trouble in the Force.’

  Miller paid the bill and the pair walked outside.

  ‘All right, I’ll read it. But I don’t promise to get steamed up about it. It might make an article for a magazine.’

  Brandt turned to him with a half smile.

  ‘You’re a cynical bastard,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Miller. ‘It’s just that like most people I’m concerned with the here and now. What about you? After ten years in the Force I’d have thought you’d be a tough cop. This thing really upset you, didn’t it?’

  Brandt was serious again. He looked at the parcel under Miller’s arm and nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it did. I just never thought it was that bad. And by the way, it’s not all past history. The story ended here in Hamburg last night. Good-bye, Peter.’

  The detective turned and walked away, not knowing how wrong he was.

  Chapter Two

  PETER MILLER TOOK THE brown paper parcel home and arrived there just after three. He threw the package on to the sitting-room table and went to make a large pot of coffee before sitting down to read it.

  Settled in his favourite armchair, with a cup of coffee at his elbow and a cigarette going, he opened it. The diary was in the form of a loose-leaf folder with stiff covers of cardboard bound in dull black vinyl material and a series of clips down the spine so that the leaves of the book could be extracted, or further leaves inserted, if necessary.

  The contents consisted of a hundred and fifty p
ages of typewritten script, apparently banged out on an old machine, for some of the letters were above the line, others below it and some either distorted or faint. The bulk of the pages seemed to have been written years before, or over a period of years, for most of the pages, although neat and clean, bore the unmistakable tinting of white paper several years old. But at the front and back were a number of fresh sheets, evidently written barely a few days previously. There was a preface of some new pages at the front of the typescript and a sort of epilogue at the back. A check of the dates on the preface and the epilogue showed both to have been written on November 21st, two days previously. Miller supposed the dead man had written them after he had made the decision to end his life.

  A quick glance at some of the paragraphs on the first page surprised him, for the language was clear and precise German, the writing of a well-educated and cultured man. On the outside, front cover a square of white paper had been gummed, and over it a large square of cellophane to keep it clean. On the square of paper had been written in large block capitals in black ink THE DIARY OF SALOMON TAUBER.

  Miller settled himself deeper in his chair, turned to the first page and began to read.

  THE DIARY OF SALOMON TAUBER

  PREFACE

  My name is Salomon Tauber, I am a Jew and about to die. I have decided to end my own life because it has no more value, nor is there anything left for me to do. Those things that I have tried to do with my life have come to nothing, and my efforts have been unavailing. For the evil that I have seen has survived and flourished and only the good has departed in dust and mockery. The friends that I have known, the sufferers and the victims, are all dead and only the persecutors are all around me. I see their faces on the streets in the daytime, and in the night I see the face of my wife Esther who died long ago. I have stayed alive this long only because there was one more thing I wished to do, one thing I wanted to see, and now I know I never shall.