The Odessa File

‘Well, it’s Friday now,’ said the attaché. ‘He’ll probably be at his favourite place by the bar in the Cercle Français later on. Do you know it?’

‘No, I’ve never been here before.’

‘Ah, yes, well, it’s a restaurant, run by the French, you know. Jolly good food too. It’s very popular. It’s in Bad Godesberg, just down the road.’

Miller found it, a hundred yards from the bank of the Rhine on a road called Am Schwimmbad. The barman knew Cadbury well, but had not seen him that evening. He told Miller if the doyen of the British foreign correspondents’ corps in Bonn was not in that evening he would almost certainly be there for pre-lunch drinks the following day.

Miller checked into the Dreesen Hotel down the road, a great turn-of-the-century edifice that had formerly been Adolf Hitler’s favourite hotel in Germany, the place he had picked to meet Neville Chamberlain of Britain for their first meeting in 1938. He dined at the Cercle Français and dawdled over his coffee, hoping Cadbury would turn up. But by eleven the elderly Englishman had not put in an appearance, so he went back to the hotel to sleep.

Cadbury walked into the bar of the Cercle Français a few minutes before twelve the following morning, greeted a few acquaintances and seated himself at his favourite corner stool at the bar. When he had taken his first sip of his Ricard, Miller rose from his table by the window and came over.

‘Mr Cadbury?’

The Englishman turned and surveyed him. He had smooth-brushed white hair coming back from what had evidently once been a very handsome face. The skin was still healthy, with a fine tracery of tiny veins on the surface of each cheek. The eyes were bright blue under shaggy grey eyebrows. He surveyed Miller warily.

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Miller. Peter Miller. I am a reporter from Hamburg. May I talk with you a moment, please?’

Anthony Cadbury gestured to the stool beside him.

‘I think we had better talk in German, don’t you?’ he said, dropping into the language. Miller was relieved he could go back to his own language, and it must have showed. Cadbury grinned.

‘What can I do for you?’

Miller glanced at the shrewd eyes and backed a hunch. Starting at the beginning he told Cadbury the story from the moment of Tauber’s death. The London man was a good listener. He did not interrupt once. When Miller had finished he gestured to the barman to fill his own Ricard and another beer for Miller.

‘Spatenbräu, wasn’t it?’ he asked.

Miller nodded and poured the fresh beer to a foaming head on top of the glass.

‘Cheers,’ said Cadbury. ‘Well now you’ve got quite a problem. I must say I admire your nerve.’

‘Nerve?’ said Miller.

‘It’s not quite the most popular story to investigate among your countrymen in their present state of mind,’ said Cadbury, ‘as you will doubtless find out in course of time.’

‘I already have,’ said Miller.

‘Mmm. I thought so,’ said the Englishman, and grinned suddenly. ‘A spot of lunch? The wife’s away for the day.’

Over lunch Miller asked Cadbury if he had been in Germany at the end of the war.

‘Yes, I was a war correspondent. Much younger then, of course. About your age. I came in with Montgomery’s army. Not to Bonn, of course. No one had heard of it then. The headquarters was at Luneberg. Then I just sort of stayed on. Covered the end of the war, signature of the surrender and all that, then the paper asked me to remain.’

‘Did you cover the Zonal War Crimes Trials?’ asked Miller.

Cadbury transferred a mouthful of fillet steak and nodded while he chewed.

‘Yes. All the ones held in the British Zone. We had a specialist come over for the Nuremberg Trials. That was the American Zone, of course. The star criminals in our zone were Josef Kramer and Irma Grese. Heard of them?’

‘No, never.’

‘Well, they were called the Beast and Beastess of Belsen. I invented the titles, actually. They caught on. Did you hear about Belsen?’

‘Only vaguely,’ said Miller. ‘My generation wasn’t told much about all that. Nobody wanted to tell us anything.’

Cad