The Odessa File

‘Do you know where he has gone?’

‘No, Father.’

‘Are you sure? Think, my child. He has been forced to run away. Where would he go?’

The emaciated head shook slowly against the pillow.

‘I don’t know, Father. If they threaten him, he will use the file. He told me he would.’

Miller started. He looked down at the woman, her eyes now closed as if in sleep.

‘What file, my child?’

They talked for another five minutes, then there was a soft tap on the door. Miller eased the woman’s hand off his wrist and rose to go.

‘Father …’

The voice was plaintive, pleading. He turned. She was staring at him, her eyes wide open.

‘Bless me, Father.’

The tone was imploring. Miller sighed. It was a mortal sin. He hoped somebody somewhere would understand. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross.

‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.’

The woman sighed deeply, closed her eyes and passed into unconsciousness.

Outside in the passage the doctor was waiting.

‘I really think that is long enough,’ he said.

Miller nodded.

‘Yes, she is sleeping,’ he said, and after a glance round the door, the doctor escorted him back to the entrance hall.

‘How long do you think she has?’ asked Miller.

‘Very difficult to say. Two days, maybe three. Not more. I’m very sorry.’

‘Yes, well, thank you for letting me see her,’ said Miller. The doctor held open the front door for him. ‘Oh, there is one last thing, Doctor. We are all Catholics in our family. She asked me for a priest. The Last Rites, you understand?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Will you see to it?’

‘Certainly,’ said the doctor. ‘I didn’t know. I’ll see to it this afternoon. Thank you for telling me. Goodbye.’

It was late afternoon and dusk was turning into night when Miller drove back into the Theodor Heuss Platz and parked the Jaguar twenty yards from the hotel. He crossed the road and went up to his room. Two floors above, Mackensen had watched his arrival. Taking his bomb in his handgrip he descended to the foyer, paid his bill for the coming night, explaining that he would be leaving very early in the morning, and went out to his car. He manoeuvred it into a place where he could watch the hotel entrance and the Jaguar, and settled down to another wait.

There were still too many people in the area for him to go to work on the Jaguar, and Miller might come out of the hotel any second. If he drove off before the bomb could be planted, Mackensen would take him on the open highway several miles from Osnabrück, and steal the document case. If Miller slept in the hotel, Mackensen would plant the bomb in the small hours when no one was about.

In his room Miller was racking his brains for a name. He could see the man’s face, but the name still escaped him.

It had been just before Christmas 1961. He had been in the press box in the Hamburg Provincial Court, waiting for a case to start in which he was interested. He had caught the tail end of the preceding case. There was a little ferret of a man standing in the dock, and defending counsel was asking for leniency, pointing out that it was just before the Christmas period, and his client had a wife and five children.

Miller remembered glancing at the well of the court, and noting the tired, harassed face of the convicted man’s wife. She had covered her face with her hands in utter despair when the judge, explaining the sentence would have been longer but for the defending counsel’s plea for leniency, sentenced the man to eighteen months in jail. The prosection had described the prisoner as one of the most skilful safe-breakers in Hamburg.

A fortnight later Miller had been in a bar not 200 yards from the Reeperbahn, having a Christmas drink with some of his underworld contacts. He was flush with money, having been paid for a big picture feature that day. There was a woman scrubbing the floor at the far end. He had recognised the worried face of the wife of the cracksman who had been sentenced two weeks earlier. In a fit of generosity which he later regretted he had pushed a 100-mark note into her apron pocket and left.