‘Revenge,’ he said simply. ‘Like you, we want Roschmann. But we want more. The worst of the SS killers are living under false names. We want those names. That’s what’s in it for us. There’s one other thing. We need to know who is the new recruiting officer of the Odessa for German scientists now being sent to Egypt to develop Nasser’s rockets for him. The former one, Brandner, resigned and disappeared last year after we coped with his assistant Heinz Krug. Now they have a new one.’
‘That sounds more like information of use to Israeli intelligence,’ said Miller. Leon glanced at him shrewdly.
‘It is,’ he said shortly. ‘We occasionally co-operate with them, though they do not own us.’
‘Have you ever tried to get your own men inside the Odessa?’ asked Miller.
Leon nodded.
‘Twice,’ he said.
‘What happened?’
‘The first was found floating in a canal without his fingernails. The second disappeared without trace. Do you still want to go ahead?’
Miller ignored the question.
‘If your methods are so efficient, why were they caught?’
‘They were both Jewish,’ said Leon shortly. ‘We tried to get the tattoos from the concentration camps off their arms, but they left scars. Besides, they were both circumcised. That was why, when Motti reported to me on a genuine Aryan German with a grudge against the SS, I was interested. By the way, are you circumcised?’
‘Does it matter?’ inquired Miller.
‘Of course. If a man is circumci
sed it does not prove he’s a Jew. Many Germans are circumcised as well. But if he is not, it more or less proves he is not a Jew.’
‘I’m not,’ said Miller shortly.
Leon breathed a long sigh.
‘This time I think we may be able to get away with it,’ he said.
It was long past midnight. Leon looked at his watch.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked Miller. The reporter shook his head.
‘Motti, I think a little food for our guest.’
Motti grinned and nodded. He disappeared through the door of the cellar room and went up into the house.
‘You’ll have to spend the night here,’ said Leon to Miller. ‘We’ll bring a bedroll down to you. Don’t try to leave, please. The door has three locks, and all will be shut on the far side. Give me your car keys and I’ll have your car brought round here. It will be better out of sight for the next few weeks. Your hotel bill will be paid and your luggage brought round here too. In the morning you will write letters to your mother and girlfriend, explaining that you will be out of contact for several weeks, maybe months. Understood?’
Miller nodded and handed over his car keys. Leon gave them to one of the other two men, who quietly left.
‘In the morning we will drive you to Bayreuth and you will meet our SS officer. His name is Alfred Oster. He’s the man you will live with. I will arrange it. Meanwhile, excuse me. I have to start looking for a new name and identity for you.’
He rose and left. Motti soon returned with a plate of food and half a dozen blankets. As he ate the cold chicken and potato salad, Miller wondered what he had let himself in for.
Far away to the north, in the General Hospital of Bremen, a ward orderly was patrolling his ward in the small hours of the morning. Round a bed at the end of the room was a tall screen that shut off the occupant from the rest of the ward.
The orderly, a middle-aged man called Hartstein, peered round the screen at the man in the bed. He lay very still. Above his head a dim light was burning through the night. The orderly entered the screened-off area and checked the patient’s pulse. There was none.
He looked down at the ravaged face of the cancer victim, and something the man had said in delirium three days earlier caused the orderly to lift the left arm of the dead man out of the blankets. Inside the man’s armpit was tattooed a number. It was the dead man’s blood group, a sure sign that the patient had once been in the SS. The reason for the tattoo was that SS men were regarded in the Reich as more valuable than ordinary soldiers, so when wounded they always had first share of any available plasma. Hence the tattooed blood group.
Orderly Hartstein covered the dead man’s face and glanced into the drawer of the bedside table. He drew out the driving licence that had been placed there along with the other personal possessions when the man had been brought in after collapsing in the street. It showed a man of about thirty-nine, date of birth June 18th, 1925, and the name of Rolf Gunther Kolb.
The orderly slipped the driving licence into the pocket of his white coat and went off to report the decease to the night physician.