The Odessa File

‘Miller, you are being very foolish. Very foolish indeed. Permit me to give you a word of advice, from an older man to a much, much younger one. Drop this inquiry.’

Miller eyed him.

‘I suppose I ought to thank you,’ he said without gratitude.

‘If you will take my advice, perhaps you ought,’ said the doctor.

‘You misunderstand me again,’ said Miller. ‘Roschmann was also seen alive in mid-October this year in Hamburg. The second sighting was not confirmed. Now it is. You just confirmed it.’

‘I repeat, you are being very foolish if you do not drop this inquiry.’ The doctor’s eyes were as cold as ever, but there was a hint of anxiety in them. There had been a time when people did not reject his orders and he had never quite got used to the change.

Miller began to get angry, a slow glow of anger working up from his collar to his face.

‘You make me sick, Herr Doktor,’ he told the older man. ‘You and your kind, your whole stinking gang. You have a respectable façade, but you are filth on the face of my country. So far as I am concerned I’ll go on asking questions till I find him.’

He turned to go, but the elder man grabbed his arm. They stared at each other from a range of two inches.

‘You’re not Jewish, Miller. You’re Aryan. You’re one of us. What did we ever do to you, for God’s sake, what did we ever do to you?’

Miller jerked his arm free.

‘If you don’t know yet, Herr Doktor, you’ll never understand.’

‘Ach, you people of the younger generation, you’re all the same. Why can you never do what you’re told?’

‘Because that’s the way we are. Or at least it’s the way I am.’

The older man stared at him with narrowed eyes.

‘You’re not stupid, Miller. But you’re behaving like you are. As if you were one of these ridiculous creatures constantly governed by what they call their conscience. But I’m beginning to doubt that. It’s almost as if you had something personal in this matter.’

Miller turned to go.

‘Perhaps I have,’ he said, and walked away across the lobby.

Chapter Eight

MILLER FOUND THE house in a quiet residential street off the main road of the London borough of Wimbledon without difficulty. Lord Russell himself answered the ring at the door, a man in his late sixties wearing a woollen cardigan and a bow tie. Miller introduced himself.

‘I was in Bonn yesterday,’ he told the British peer, ‘lunching wit

h Mr Anthony Cadbury. He gave me your name and a letter of introduction to you. I hoped I might have a talk with you, sir.’

Lord Russell gazed down at him from the step with perplexity.

‘Cadbury? Anthony Cadbury? I can’t seemed to remember …’

‘A British newspaper correspondent,’ said Miller. ‘He was in Germany just after the war. He covered the war-crimes trials at which you were Deputy Judge Advocate. Josef Kramer and the others from Belsen. You recall those trials …’

‘Course I do. Course I do. Yes, Cadbury, yes, newspaper chap. I remember him now. Haven’t seen him in years. Well, don’t just stand there. It’s cold and I’m not as young as I was. Come in, come in.’

Without waiting for an answer he turned and walked back down the hall. Miller followed, closing the door on the chill wind of the first day of 1964. He hung his coat on a hook in the hall at Lord Russell’s bidding and followed him through into the back of the house where a welcoming fire burned in the sitting-room grate.

Miller held out the letter from Cadbury. Lord Russell took it, read it quickly and raised his eyebrows.

‘Humph. Help in tracking down a Nazi? Is that what you came about?’ He regarded Miller from under his eyebrows. Before the German could reply Lord Russell went on: ‘Well, sit down, sit down. No good standing around.’

They sat in flower-print-covered armchairs on either side of the fire.