The Odessa File

‘Well now,’ said Bayer, ‘have you ever been in Württemberg before, my dear Kolb?’

‘No, I confess I haven’t.’

‘Ha, well, we pride ourselves here on being a very hospitable people. No doubt you’d like some food. Have you eaten yet today?’

Miller told him he had had neither breakfast nor lunch, having been on the train all afternoon. Bayer seemed most distressed.

‘Good Lord, how awful. You must eat. Tell you what, we’ll pop into town and have a slap-up dinner. Nonsense, dear boy, the least I can do for you.’

He waddled off into the back of the house to tell his wife he was taking their guest out for a meal in downtown Stuttgart, and ten minutes later they were heading in Bayer’s car towards the city centre.

*

It is at least a two-hour drive from Nuremberg to Stuttgart along the old E 12 high road, even if one pushes the car hard. And Mackensen pushed his car that night. Half an hour after he received the Werwolf’s call, fully briefed and armed with Bayer’s address, he was on the road. He arrived at half past ten and went straight to Bayer’s house.

Frau Bayer, alerted by another call from the Werwolf that the man calling himself Kolb was not what he seemed to be, and might indeed be a police informer, was a trembling and frightened woman when Mackensen arrived. His terse manner was hardly calculated to put her at her ease.

‘When did they leave?’

‘About a quarter past eight,’ she quavered.

‘Did they say where they were going?’

‘No. Franz just said the young man had not eaten all day and he was taking him into town for a meal at a restaurant. I said I could make something here at home, but Franz just loves dining out. Any excuse will do …’

‘This man Kolb. You said you saw him parking his car. Where was this?’

She described the street where the Jaguar was parked, and how to get to it from her house. Mackensen thought deeply for a moment.

‘Have you any idea which restaurant your husband might have taken him to?’ he asked.

She thought for a while.

‘Well, his favourite eating place is the Three Moors restaurant on Friedrich Strasse,’ she said. ‘He usually tries there first.’

Mackensen left the house and drove the half-mile to the parked Jaguar. He examined it closely, certain that he would recognise it again whenever he saw it. He was in two minds whether to stay with it and wait for Miller’s return. But the Werwolf’s orders were to trace Miller and Bayer, warn the Odessa man and send him home, then take care of Miller. For that reason he had not telephoned the Three Moors. To warn Bayer now would be to alert Miller to the fact that he had been uncovered, giving him the chance to disappear again.

Mackensen glanced at his watch. It was ten to eleven. He climbed back into his Mercedes and headed for the centre of town.

In a small and obscure hotel in the back streets of Munich, Josef was lying awake on his bed when a call came from the reception desk to say a cable had arrived for him. He went downstairs and brought it back to his room.

Seated at the rickety table he slit the buff envelope and scanned the lengthy contents. It began:

‘Here are the prices we are able to accept for the commodities about which the customer has inquired:

Celery: 481 marks, 53 pfennigs.

Melons: 362 marks, 17 pfennigs.

Oranges: 627 marks, 24 pfennigs.

Grapefruit: 313 marks, 88 pfennigs …’

The list of fruit and vegetables was long, but all the articles were those habitually exported by Israel, and the cable read like the response to an inquiry by the German-based representative of an export company for price quotations. Using the public international cable network was not secure, but so many commercial cables pass through Western Europe in a day that checking them all would need an army of men.

Ignoring the words, Josef wrote down the figures in a long line. The five-figure groups into which the marks and pfennigs were divided disappeared. When he had them all in a line he split them up into groups of six figures. From each six-figure group he subtracted the date, February 20th, 1964, which he wrote as 20264. In each case the result was another six-figure group.

It was a simple book code, based on the paperback edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary published by the Popular Library of New York. The first three figures in the group represented the page in the dictionary; the fourth figure could be anything from one to nine. An odd number meant column one, an even number column two. The last two figures indicated the number of words down the column from the top. He worked steadily for half an hour, then read the message through and slowly held his head in his hands.