The Odessa File

‘He’s a printer.’

‘Where? Which town?’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me. Which town?’

‘Osnabrück,’ whispered Bayer.

Miller replaced the gag across Bayer’s mouth and thought. Klauz Winzer, a printer in Osnabrück. He went to his attaché case, containing the diary of Salomon Tauber and various maps, and took out a road map of Germany.

The autobahn to Osnabrück, far away to the north in Nord Rhine/Westphalia, led through Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dortmund and Munster. It was a four- to five-hour drive, depending on road conditions. It was already nearly three in the morning of February 21st.

Across the road Mackensen shivered in his niche on the second floor of the half-completed building. The light still shone in the room over the road, the first-floor front. He flicked his eyes constantly from the illuminated window to the front door. If only Bayer would come out, he thought, he could take Miller alone. Or if Miller came out he could take him further down the street. Or if someone opened the window for a breath of fresh air. He shivered again and clasped the heavy Remington .300 rifle. At a range of thirty yards there would be no problems with such a gun. Mackensen could wait, he was a patient man.

In his room Miller quietly packed his things. He needed Bayer to remain quiescent for at least six hours. Perhaps the man would be too terrified to warn his chiefs that he had given away the secret of the forger. But he couldn’t count on it.

Miller spent a last few minutes tightening the bonds and the gag that held Bayer immobile and silent, then eased the chair on to its side so the fat man could not raise attention by rolling the chair over with a crash. The telephone cord was already ripped out. He took a last look round the room and left, locking the door behind him.

He was almost at the top of the stairs when a thought came to him. The night porter might have seen them both mount the stairs. What would he think if only one came down, paid his bill and left? Miller retreated and headed towards the back of the hotel. At the end of the corridor was a window looking out on to the fire-escape. He slipped the catch and stepped out on to the escape ladder. A few seconds later he was in the rear courtyard where the garage was situated. A back entrance led to a small alley behind the hotel.

Two minutes later he was striding the three miles to where he had parked his Jaguar, half a mile from Bayer’s house. The effect of the drink and the night’s activities combined to make him feel desperately tired. He needed sleep badly, but realised he had to reach Winzer before the alarm was raised.

It was almost four in the morning when he climbed into the Jaguar, and half past the hour before he had made his way back to the autobahn leading north for Heilbronn and Mannheim.

Almost as soon as he had gone Bayer, by now completely sober, began to struggle to get free. He tried to lean his head forward far enough to use his teeth, through the socks and the scarf, on the knots of the ties that bound his wrists to the chair. But his fatness prevented his head getting low enough, and the socks in his mouth forced his teeth apart. Every few minutes he had to pause to take deep breaths through his nose.

He tugged and pulled at his ankle-bonds, but they held. Finally, despite the pain from his broken and swelling little finger, he decided to wriggle his wrists free.

When this did not work, he spotted the table lamp lying on the floor. The bulb was still in it, but a crushed light bulb leaves enough slivers of glass to cut a single necktie.

It took him an hour to inch the overturned chair across the floor and crush the light bulb.

It may sound easy, but it isn’t, to use a piece of broken glass to cut wrist-bonds. It takes hours to get through a single strand of cloth. Bayer’s wrists poured sweat, damping the cloth of the neckties and making them even tighter round his fat wrists. It was seven in t

he morning, and light was beginning to filter over the roofs of the town, before the first strands binding his left wrist parted from the effects of being rubbed on a piece of broken glass. It was nearly eight when his left wrist came free.

By that time Miller’s Jaguar was boring round the Cologne Ring to the east of the city with another hundred miles before Osnabrück. It had started to rain, an evil sleet running in curtains across the slippery autobahn, and the mesmeric effect of the windscreen wipers almost sent him to sleep.

He slowed down to a steady cruise at 80 mph rather than risk running off the road into the muddy fields on either side.

With his left hand free, Bayer took only a few minutes to rip off his gag, then lay for several minutes whooping in great gulps of air. The smell in the room was appalling, a mixture of sweat, fear, vomit and whisky. He unpicked the knots on his right wrist, wincing as the pain from the snapped finger shot up his arm, then released his feet.

His first thought was the door, but it was locked. He tried the telephone, lumbering about on feet long since devoid of feeling from the tightness of the bindings. Finally he staggered to the window, ripped back the curtains and jerked the windows inwards and open.

In his shooting niche across the road Mackensen was almost dozing, despite the cold, when he saw the curtains of Miller’s room pulled back. Snapping the Remington up into the aiming position, he waited until the figure behind the net curtains jerked the windows inwards, then fired straight into the face of the figure.

The bullet hit Bayer in the base of the throat and he was dead before his reeling bulk tumbled backwards to the floor. The crash of the rifle might be put down to a car backfiring for a minute, but not longer. Within less than a minute, even that hour of the morning, Mackensen knew someone would investigate.

Without waiting to cast a second look into the room across the road, he was out of the second floor and running down the concrete steps of the building towards the ground. He left by the back, dodging two cement mixers and a pile of gravel in the rear yard. He regained his car within sixty seconds of firing, stowed the gun in the boot and drove off.

He knew as he sat at the wheel and inserted the ignition key that all was not right. He suspected he had made a mistake. The man the Werwolf had briefed him to kill was tall and lean. The mind’s eye impression of the figure at the window was of a fat man. From what he had seen the previous evening, he was sure it was Bayer he had hit.

Not that it was too serious a problem. Seeing Bayer dead on his carpet, Miller would be bound to flee as fast as his legs would carry him. Therefore he would return to his Jaguar, parked three miles away. Mackensen headed the Mercedes back to where he had last seen the Jaguar. He only began to worry badly when he saw the space between the Opel and the Benz truck where the Jaguar had stood the previous evening in the quiet residential street.

Mackensen would not have been the chief executioner for the Odessa if he had been the sort who panics easily. He had been in too many tight spots before. He sat at the wheel of his car for several minutes before he reacted to the prospect of Miller now being hundreds of miles away.

If Miller had left Bayer alive, he reasoned, it could only be because he had got nothing from him, or he had got something. In the first case there was no harm done; he could take Miller later. There was no hurry. If Miller had got something from Bayer it could only be information. The Werwolf alone would know what kind of information Miller had been seeking, that Bayer had to give. Therefore, despite his fear of the Werwolf’s rage, he would ring him.