The Odessa File

‘Not a film-star, by any chance?’ asked Miller.

‘Yeah. Sure. They always live in places like this. No, it was an old man. Looked as if he had been dead for years anyway. Someone does it every night.’

‘Well, wherever he’s gone now it can’t be worse than this.’

The inspector gave a fleeting smile and turned as the two ambulance men negotiated the last seven steps of the creaking stairs and came down the hallway with their burden. Brandt turned round.

‘Make a bit of room. Let them through.’

The sergeant promptly took up the cry and pushed the crowd back even further. The two ambulance men walked out on to the pavement and round to the open doors of the Mercedes. Brandt followed them, with Miller at his heels. Not that Miller wanted to look at the dead man, or even intended to. He was just following Brandt. As the ambulance men reached the door of the vehicle the first one hitched his end of the stretcher into the runners and the second prepared to shove it inside.

‘Hold it,’ said Brandt, and flicked back the corner of the blanket above the dead man’s face. He remarked over his shoulder, ‘Just a formality. My report has to say I accompanied the body to the ambulance and back to the morgue.’

The interior lights of the Mercedes ambulance were bright, and Miller caught a single two-second look at the face of the suicide. His first and only impression was that he had never seen anything so old and ugly. Even given the effects of gassing, the dull mottling of the skin, the bluish tinge at the lips, the man in life could have been no beauty. A few strands of lank hair were plastered over the otherwise naked scalp. The eyes were closed. The face was hollowed out to the point of emaciation and, with the man’s false teeth missing, each cheek seemed to be sucked inwards till they almost touched inside the mouth, giving the effect of a ghoul in a horror film. The lips hardly existed and both upper and lower were lined with vertical creases, reminding Miller of the shrunken skull from the Amazon basin he had once seen, whose lips had been sewn together by the natives. To cap the effect the man seemed to have two pale and jagged scars running down his face, each from the temple or upper ear to the corner of the mouth.

After a quick glance, Brandt pulled the blanket back and nodded to the ambulance attendant behind him. He stepped back as the man rammed the stretcher into its berth, locked the doors and went round to the cab to join his mate. The ambulance surged away, the crowd started to disperse accompanied by the sergeant’s muted growls, ‘Come on, it’s all over. There’s nothing more to see. Haven’t you got homes to go to?’

Miller looked at Brandt and raised his eyebrows.

‘Charming.’

‘Yes. Poor old sod. Nothing in it for you, though?’

Miller looked pained.

‘Not a chance. Like you say, there’s one a night. People are dying all over the world tonight and nobody’s taking a bit of notice. Not with Kennedy dead.’

Inspector Brandt laughed mockingly.

‘You bloody journalists.’

‘Let’s face it. Kennedy’s what people want to read about. They buy the newspapers.’

‘Yeah. Well, I must get back to the station. See you, Peter.’

They shook hands again and parted. Miller drove back towards Altona station, picked up the main road back into the city centre and twenty minutes later swung the Jaguar into the underground car park off the Hansa Square, 200 yards from the house where he had his roof-top flat.

Keeping the car in an underground car park all winter was costly, but it was one of the extravagances he permitted himself. He liked his fairly expensive flat because it was high and he could look down on the bustling boulevard of the Steindamm. Of his clothes and food he thought nothing, and at twenty-nine, just under six feet, with the rumpled brown hair and brown eyes that women go for, he didn’t need expensive clothes. An envious friend had once told him, ‘You could pull birds in a monastery,’ and he had laughed, but been pleased at the same time because he knew it was true.

The real passion of his life was sports cars, reporting and Sigrid, though he sometimes shamefacedly admitted that if it came to a choice between Sigi and the Jaguar, Sigi would have to find her loving somewhere else.

He stood and looked at the Jaguar in the lights of the garage after he had parked it. He could seldom get enough of looking at that car. Even approaching it in the street he would stop and admire it, occasionally joined by a passer-by who, not realising it was Miller’s, would stop also and remark, ‘Some motor, that.’

Normally a young freelance reporter does not drive a Jaguar XK 150 S. Spare parts were almost impossible to come by in Hamburg, the more so as the XK series, of which the S model was the last ever made, had gone out of production in 1960. He maintained it himself, spending hours on Sunday in overalls beneath the chassis or half buried in the engine. The petrol it used with its three SU carburetters was a major strain on his pocket, the more so with the price of petrol in Germany, but he paid it willingly. The reward was to hear the berserk snarl of the exhausts when he hit the accelerator on the open autobahn, to feel the surge of thrust as it rocketed out of a turn on a mountain road. He had even hardened up the independent suspension on the two front wheels and as the car had stiff suspension at the back it took corners steady as a rock, leaving other drivers rolling wildly on their cushion springs if they tried to keep up with him. Just after buying it he had had it re-sprayed black with a long wasp-yellow streak down each side. As it had been made in Coventry, England, and not as an export car, the driver’s wheel was on the right, which caused the occasional problem for overtaking but allowed him to change gear with the left hand and hold the shuddering steering wheel in the right hand, which he had come to prefer.

Even thinking back how he had been able to buy it caused him to wonder at his luck. Earlier that summer he had idly opened a pop magazine while waiting in a barber’s shop to have his hair cut. Normally he never read the gossip about pop-stars, but there was nothing else to read. The centre-page spread had been about the meteoric rise to fame and international stardom of four tousle-headed English youths. The face on the extreme right of the picture, the one with the big nose, meant nothing to him, but the other three faces rang a bell in his filing-cabinet of a memory.

The names of the two discs that had brought the quartet to stardom, ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘Love Me Do’, meant nothing either, but three of the faces puzzled him for two days. Then he remembered them, two years e

arlier in 1961, singing way down the bill at a small cabaret off the Reeperbahn. It took him another day to recall the name, for he had only once popped in for a drink to chat up an underworld figure from whom he needed information about the Sankt Pauli gang. The Star Club. He went down there and checked through the billings for 1961 and found them. They had been five then, the three he recognised and two others, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe.

From there he went to the photographer who had done the publicity photographs for the impresario Bert Kaempfert, and had bought right and title to every one he had. His story ‘How Hamburg Discovered the Beatles’ had made almost every pop-music and picture magazine in Germany and a lot abroad. On the proceeds he had bought the Jaguar which he had been eyeing in a car showroom where it had been sold by a British Army officer whose wife had grown too pregnant to fit into it. He even bought some Beatle records out of gratitude, but Sigi was the only one who ever played them.

He left the car and walked up the ramp to the street and back to his flat. It was nearly midnight and although his mother had fed him at six that evening with the usual enormous meal she provided when he called, he was hungry again. He made a plate of scrambled eggs and listened to the late night news. It was all about Kennedy and heavily accented on the German angles, since there was little more news coming through from Dallas. The police were still searching for the killer. The announcer went into great lengths about Kennedy’s love of Germany, his visit to Berlin the previous summer, and his statement in German: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’

There was then a recorded tribute from the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, his voice choked with emotion, and other tributes were read from Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had retired the previous October 15th.

Peter Miller switched off and went to bed. He wished Sigi was home because he always wanted to snuggle up to her when he felt depressed, and then he got hard and then they made love, after which he fell into a dreamless sleep, much to her annoyance because it was after love-making that she always wanted to talk about marriage and children. But the cabaret at which she danced did not close till nearly four in the morning, often later on Friday nights when the provincials and tourists were thick down the Reeperbahn, prepared to buy champagne at ten times its restaurant price for a girl with big tits and a low frock, and Sigi had the biggest and the lowest.