The Odessa File

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.’