The Odessa File

by Forsyth, Frederick

  Miller was awoken by a knock at the bedroom door. He blinked, realising the light was still on, and opened. The night porter stood there, Sigi behind him.

  Miller quieted his fears by explaining the lady was his wife who had brought him some important papers from home for a business meeting the following morning. The porter, a simple country lad with an indecipherable Hessian accent, took his tip and left.

  Sigi threw her arms round him as he kicked the door shut.

  ‘Where have you been? What are you doing here?’

  He shut off the questions in the simplest way and by the time they parted Sigi’s cold cheeks were flushed and burning and Miller was feeling like a fighting rooster.

  He took her coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. She started to ask more questions.

  ‘First things first,’ he said, and pulled her down on to the bed, still warm under the thick feather cushion from where he had lain dozing. She giggled.

  ‘You haven’t changed.’

  She was still wearing her hostess dress from the cabaret, low-cut at the front, with a skimpy sling-bra beneath it. He unzipped the dress down the back and eased the thin shoulder-straps off.

  ‘Have you?’ he asked quietly.

  She took a deep breath and lay back as he bent over her, pushing herself towards his face. She smiled.

  ‘No,’ she murmured, ‘not at all. You know what I like.’

  ‘And you know what I like,’ muttered Miller indistinctly.

  She squealed.

  ‘Me first. I’ve missed you more than you’ve missed me.’

  There was no reply, only silence disturbed by Sigi’s rising sighs and groans.

  It was an hour before they paused, panting and happy, and Miller filled the tooth-glass with brandy and water. Sigi sipped a little, for she was not a heavy drinker despite her job, and Miller took the rest.

  ‘So,’ said Sigi teasingly, ‘first things having been dealt with …’

  ‘For a while,’ interjected Miller. She giggled.

  ‘For a while, would you mind telling me why the mysterious letter, why the six week absence, why that awful skinhead haircut and why a small room in an obscure hotel in Hesse?’

  Miller grew serious. At length he rose, still naked, crossed the room and came back with his document case. He seated himself on the edge of the bed.

  ‘You’re going to learn pretty soon what I’ve been up to,’ he said, ‘so I may as well tell you now.’

  He talked for nearly an hour, starting with the discovery of the diary, which he showed her, and ending with the break-in to the forger’s house. As he talked she grew more and more horrified.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she said when he had finished. ‘You’re stark, staring, raving mad. You could have got yourself killed, or imprisoned or a hundred things.’

  ‘I had to do it,’ he said, bereft of an explanation for things that now seemed to him to have been crazy.

  ‘All this for a rotten old Nazi? You’re barmy. It’s over, Peter, all that is over. What do you want to waste your time on them for?’

  She was staring at him in bewilderment.

  ‘Well, I have,’ he said defiantly.

  She sighed heavily and shook her head to indicate her failure to understand.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘so now it’s done. You know who he is and where he is. You must come back to Hamburg, pick up the phone and ring the police. They’ll do the rest. That’s what they’re paid for.’

  Miller did not know how to answer her.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ he said at last. ‘I’m going up there later this morning.’

  ‘Going up where?’

  He jerked his thumb towards the window and the still-dark range of mountains beyond it.

  ‘To his house.’

  ‘To his house? What for?’ Her eyes widened in horror. ‘You’re not going in to see him?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t ask me why, because I can’t tell you. It’s just something I have to do.’

  Her reaction startled him. She sat up with a jerk, turned on to her knees and glared down at where he lay smoking, his head propped up by a pillow.

  ‘That’s what you wanted the gun for,’ she threw at him, her breasts rising and falling in her growing anger. ‘You’re going to kill him …’

  ‘I’m not going to kill him …’

  ‘Well then, he’ll kill you. And you’re going up there alone with a gun against him and his mob. You bastard, you rotten stinking horrible …’

  Miller was staring at her in amazement.

  ‘What have you got so het up for? Over Roschmann?’

  ‘I’m not het up about that horrid old Nazi. I’m talking about me. About me and you, you stupid dumb oaf. You’re going to risk getting yourself killed up there, all to prove some silly point and make a story for your idiotic magazine readers. You don’t even think for a minute about me …’

  She had started crying as she talked, the tears making tracks of mascara down each cheek like black railway lines.

  ‘Look at me, well bloody well look at me. What do you think I am, just another good screw? You really think I want to give myself every night to some randy reporter so he can feel pleased with himself when he goes off to chase some idiot story that could get him killed? You really think that? Listen, you great moron, I want to get married. I want to be Frau Miller. I want to have babies. And you’re going to get yourself killed … Oh God …’

  She jumped off the bed and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it.

  Miller lay on the bed open-mouthed, the cigarette burning down to his fingers. He had never seen her so angry, and it had shocked him. He thought over what she had said as he listened to the tap running in the bathroom.

  Stubbing out the cigarette he crossed the room to the bathroom door.

  ‘Sigi.’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Sigi.’

  The taps were turned off.

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Sigi, please open the door. I want to talk to you.’

  There was a pause, then the door was unlocked. She stood there, naked and looking sulky. She had washed the mascara streaks off her face.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  ‘Come over to the bed, I want to talk to you. We’ll freeze standing here.’

  ‘No, you just want to start making love again.’

  ‘I won’t. Honestly. I promise you I won’t. I just want to talk.’

  He took her hand and led her back to the bed and the warmth it offered. Her face looked up warily from the pillow.

  ‘What do you want to talk about?’ she asked suspiciously.

  He climbed in beside her and put his face close to her ear.

  ‘Sigrid Rahn, will you marry me?’

  She turned to face him.

  ‘Do you mean it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I do. I never really thought of it before. But then you never got angry before.’

  ‘Gosh.’ She sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘I’ll have to get angry more often.’

  ‘Do I get an answer?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, Peter, I will. We’ll be so good together.’

  He began caressing her again, becoming aroused as he did so.

  ‘You said you weren’t going to start that again,’ she accused him.

  ‘Well, just this once. After that I promise I’ll leave you strictly alone for the rest of time.’

  She swung her thighs across him and slid her hips on top of his lower belly. Looking down at him she said, ‘Peter Miller, don’t you dare.’

  Miller reached up and pulled the toggle that extinguished the light as she started to make love to him.

  Outside in the snow there was a dim light breaking over the eastern horizon. Had Miller glanced at his watch it would have told him the time was ten minutes before seven on the morning of Sunday, February 23rd. But he was already asleep.

  Half an hour later Klaus Winzer
rolled up the drive of his house, stopped before the closed garage door and climbed out. He was stiff and tired, but glad to be home.

  Barbara was not yet up, taking advantage of her employer’s absence to lie in longer than usual. When she did appear, after Winzer had let himself in and called from the hallway, it was in a nightie that would have set another man’s pulses bounding. Instead, Winzer required fried eggs, toast and jam, a pot of coffee and a bath. He got none of them.

  She told him instead of her discovery on the Saturday morning on entering the study to dust, of the broken window and the missing silverware. She had called the police, and they had been positive the neat, circular hole was the work of a professional burglar. She had had to tell them the house-owner was away, and they said they wanted to know when he returned, just for routine questions about the missing items.

  Winzer listened in absolute quiet to the girl’s chatter, his face paling, a single vein throbbing steadily in his temple. He dismissed her to the kitchen to prepare coffee, went into his study and locked the door. It took him thirty seconds and frantic scratching inside the empty safe to convince himself that the file of forty Odessa criminals was gone.

  As he turned away from the safe the phone rang. It was the doctor from the clinic to inform him Fraülein Wendel had died during the night.

  For two hours Winzer sat in his chair before the unlit fire, oblivious of the cold seeping in through the newspaper-stuffed hole in the window, aware only of the cold fingers worming round inside himself as he tried to think what to do. Barbara’s repeated calls from outside the locked door that breakfast was ready went unheeded. Through the keyhole she could hear him muttering occasionally, ‘Not my fault, not my fault at all.’

  Miller had forgotten to cancel the morning call he had ordered the previous evening before he rang Sigi in Hamburg. The bedside phone shrilled at nine. Bleary-eyed he answered it, grunted his thanks and climbed out of bed. He knew if he did not he would fall asleep again. Sigi was still fast asleep, exhausted by her drive from Hamburg, their love-making and the contentment of being engaged at last.

  Miller showered, finishing off with several minutes under the ice-cold spray, rubbed himself briskly with the towel he had left over the radiator all night, and felt like a million dollars. The depression and anxiety of the night before had vanished. He felt fit and confident.

  He dressed in ankle-boots and slacks, a thick roll-neck pullover and his double-breasted blue duffel over-jacket, a German winter garment called a Joppe, halfway between a jacket and a coat. It had deep slit pockets at each side, capable of taking the gun and the handcuffs, and an inside breast pocket for the photograph. He took the handcuffs from Sigi’s bag and examined them. There was no key and the manacles were self-locking, which made them useless for anything other than locking a man up until released by the police or a hacksaw blade.

  The gun he opened and examined. He had never fired it, and it still had the maker’s grease on the interior. The magazine was full, he kept it that way. To familiarise himself with it once again he worked the breech several times, made sure he knew which position of the safety-catch was the ‘On’ and ‘Fire’, smacked the magazine into the grip, pushed a round into the chamber and set the safety-catch to ‘On’. He stuffed the telephone number of the lawyer in Ludwigsburg into his trouser pocket.

  He took his attaché case out from under the bed, and taking a plain sheet from it wrote a message for Sigi to read when she awoke. It said: ‘My darling. I am going now to see the man I have been hunting. I have reason for wanting to look into his face, and be present when the police take him away in handcuffs. It is a good one, and by this afternoon I will be able to tell you. But just in case, here is what I want you to do …’

  The instructions were precise and to the point. He wrote down the telephone number in Munich she was to ring, and the message she was to give the man at the other end. He ended: ‘Do not under any circumstances follow me up the mountain. You could only make matters worse, whatever the situation. So if I am not back by noon, or have not rung you in this room by then, call that number, give that message, check out of the hotel, post the envelope at any box in Frankfurt, then drive back to Hamburg. Don’t get engaged to anyone else in the meantime. All my love, Peter.’

  He propped the note on the bedside table by the telephone, along with the large envelope containing the Odessa file and three fifty-mark bills. Tucking Salomon Tauber’s diary under his arm, he slipped out of the bedroom and headed downstairs. Passing the reception desk he ordered the porter to give his room another morning call at eleven-thirty.

  He came out of the hotel doorway at nine-thirty and was surprised at the amount of snow that had fallen during the night.

  Miller walked round to the back, climbed into the Jaguar, gave full choke and pressed the starter. It took several minutes before the engine caught. While it was warming up he took a hand-brush from the boot and brushed the thick carpet of snow off the bonnet, roof and windscreen.

  Back behind the wheel he slipped into gear and drove out on to the main road. The thick layer of snow over everything acted as a sort of cushion and he could hear it crunching under the wheels. After a glance at the ordnance survey map he had bought the previous evening just before closing time, he set off down the road towards Limburg.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE MORNING HAD turned out grey and overcast after a brief and brilliant dawn which he had not seen. Beneath the clouds the snow glittered under the trees and a wind keened off the mountains.

  The road led upwards, winding out of town and immediately becoming lost in the sea of trees that make up the Romberg Forest. After he had cleared town the carpet of snow along the road was almost virgin, only one set of tracks running parallel through it, where an early morning visitor to Königstein for church service had headed an hour before.

  Miller took the branch-off towards Glashütten, skirted round the flanks of the towering Feldberg mountain and down a road signposted as leading to the village of Schmitten. On the flanks of the mountains the wind howled through the pines, its pitch rising to a near-scream among the snow-clogged boughs.

  Although Miller had never bothered to think about it, it was once out of these and other oceans of pine and beech that the old Germanic tribes had swarmed to be checked by Caesar at the Rhine. Later, converted to Christianity, they had paid lip-service by day to the Prince of Peace, dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power. It was this ancient atavism, the worship in the dark of the private gods of screaming endless trees, that Hitler had ignited with a magic touch.

  In another twenty minutes of careful driving Miller checked his map again and began to look for a gateway off the road on to a private estate. When he found it, it was a barred gate held in place by a steel catch, with a notice board to one side saying ‘Private Property, Keep Out’.

  Leaving the engine running he climbed out and swung the gate inwards.

  Miller entered the estate and headed up the driveway. The snow was untouched and he kept in bottom gear, for there was only frozen sand beneath the snow.

  Two hundred yards up the track a branch from a massive oak tree had come down in the night, overladen with half a ton of snow. The branch had crashed into the under-growth to the right, and some of its twigs lay on the track. It had also brought down a thick black pole that had stood beneath it, and this lay across the drive.

  Rather than get out and move it, he drove carefully forward, feeling the bump as the pole passed under the front and then the rear wheels.

  Clear of the obstruction he moved on towards the house and emerged into a clearing, which contained the villa and its gardens, fronted by a circular area of gravel. He halted the car in front of the main door, climbed out and rang the bell.

  While Miller was climbing out of his car, Klaus Winzer made his decision and rang the Werwolf. The Odessa chief was brusque and irritable, for it was long past the time he should have heard on the news of a
sports car being blown to pieces, apparently by an exploding petrol tank, on the autobahn south of Osnabrück. But as he listened to the man on the other end of the telephone his mouth tightened in a thin, hard line.

  ‘You did what? You fool, you unbelievable, stupid little cretin. Do you know what’s going to happen to you if that file is not recovered? …’

  Alone in his study in Osnabrück Klaus Winzer replaced the receiver after the last sentences from the Werwolf came over the wire, and went back to his desk. He was quite calm. Twice already life had played him the worst of tricks, firstly over the destruction of his war-work in the lakes, then the ruin of his paper fortune in 1948 and now this. Taking an old but serviceable Lüger from the bottom drawer he placed the end in his mouth and shot himself. The lead slug that tore his head apart was not a forgery.

  Werwolf sat and gazed in something close to horror at the silent telephone. He thought of the men for whom it had been necessary to obtain passports through Klaus Winzer and the fact that each of them was a wanted man on the list of those destined for arrest and trial if caught. The exposure of the dossier would lead to a welter of prosecutions that could only jerk the population out of its growing apathy towards the question of continuing pursuit of wanted SS men, re-galvanise the hunting agencies … The prospect was appalling.

  But his first priority was the protection of Roschmann, one of those he knew to be on the list taken from Winzer. Three times he dialled the Frankfurt area number, followed by the private number of the house on the hill, and three times he got the ‘unobtainable’ signal. Finally he tried through the operator, who told him the line must be out of order.

  Instead, he rang the Hohenzollern Hotel in Osnabrück and caught Mackensen about to leave. In a few sentences he told the killer of the latest disaster, and where Roschmann lived.

  ‘It looks as if your bomb hasn’t worked,’ he told him. ‘Get down there faster than you’ve ever driven,’ he said. ‘Hide your car and stick close to Roschmann. There’s a bodyguard called Oskar as well. If Miller goes straight to the police with what he’s got, we’ve all had it. But if he comes to Roschmann, take him alive and make him talk. We must know what he’s done with those papers before he dies.’