The Odessa File

‘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.