The Odessa File

There was no answer.

‘Sigi.’

The taps were turned off.

‘Go away.’

‘Sigi, please open the door. I want to talk to you.’

There was a pause, then the door was unlocked. She stood there, naked and looking sulky. She had washed the mascara streaks off her face.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Come over to the bed, I want to talk to you. We’ll freeze standing here.’

‘No, you just want to start making love again.’

‘I won’t. Honestly. I promise you I won’t. I just want to talk.’

He took her hand and led her back to the bed and the warmth it offered. Her face looked up warily from the pillow.

‘What do you want to talk about?’ she asked suspiciously.

He climbed in beside her and put his face close to her ear.

‘Sigrid Rahn, will you marry me?’

She turned to face him.

‘Do you mean it?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I do. I never really thought of it before. But then you never got angry before.’

‘Gosh.’ She sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘I’ll have to get angry more often.’

‘Do I get an answer?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes, Peter, I will. We’ll be so good together.’

He began caressing her again, becoming aroused as he did so.

‘You said you weren’t going to start that again,’ she accused him.

‘Well, just this once. After that I promise I’ll leave you strictly alone for the rest of time.’

She swung her thighs across him and slid her hips on top of his lower belly. Looking down at him she said, ‘Peter Miller, don’t you dare.’

Miller reached up and pulled the toggle that extinguished the light as she started to make love to him.

Outside in the snow there was a dim light breaking over the eastern horizon. Had Miller glanced at his watch it would have told him the time was ten minutes before seven on the morning of Sunday, February 23rd. But he was already asleep.

Half an hour later Klaus Winzer

rolled up the drive of his house, stopped before the closed garage door and climbed out. He was stiff and tired, but glad to be home.

Barbara was not yet up, taking advantage of her employer’s absence to lie in longer than usual. When she did appear, after Winzer had let himself in and called from the hallway, it was in a nightie that would have set another man’s pulses bounding. Instead, Winzer required fried eggs, toast and jam, a pot of coffee and a bath. He got none of them.

She told him instead of her discovery on the Saturday morning on entering the study to dust, of the broken window and the missing silverware. She had called the police, and they had been positive the neat, circular hole was the work of a professional burglar. She had had to tell them the house-owner was away, and they said they wanted to know when he returned, just for routine questions about the missing items.