The Odessa File

The call he had taken disturbed him. He had told the caller there had been no one spotted near his house, no one hanging around his factory, no one asking questions about him. But he was worried. Miller? Who the hell was Miller? The assurances down the phone that the reporter would be taken care of only partly assuaged his anxiety. The seriousness with which the caller and his colleagues took the threat posed by Miller was indicated by the decision to send him a personal bodyguard the next day, to act as his chauffeur and stay with him until further notice.

He drew the curtains of the study, shutting out the winter landscape. The thickly padded door cut out all sounds from the rest of the house. The only sound in the room was the crackle of fresh pine logs in the hearth, the cheerful glow framed by the great cast-iron fireplace with its wrought vine-leaves and curlicues, one of the fitments he had kept when he bought and modernised the house.

The door opened and his wife put her head round.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ she called.

‘Coming dear,’ said Eduard Roschmann.

The next morning, Saturday, Oster and Miller were disturbed by the arrival of a party from Munich. The car contained Leon and Motti, the driver and another man who carried a black bag.

When they reached the sitting room Leon said to the man with the bag, ‘You’d better get up to the bathroom and set out your gear.’

The man nodded and went upstairs. The driver had remained in the car.

Leon sat at the table and bade Oster and Miller take their places. Motti remained by the door, a camera with flash attachment in his hand.

Leon passed a driving licence over to Miller. Where the photograph had been was blank.

‘That’s who you are going to become,’ said Leon. ‘Rolf Gunther Kolb, born June 18th, 1925. That would make you nineteen at the end of the war, almost twenty. And thirty-eight years old now. You were born and brought up in Bremen. You joined the Hitler Youth at the age of ten in 1935, and the SS in January 1944 at the age of eighteen. Both your parents are dead. They were killed in an air raid on Bremen docks in 1944.’

Miller stared down at the driving licence in his hand.

‘What about his career in the SS?’ asked Oster. ‘At the moment we have reached something of a dead end.’

‘How is he so far?’ asked Leon. Miller might as well not have existed.

‘Pretty good,’ said Oster. ‘I gave him a two-hour interrogation yesterday and he could pass. Until someone starts asking for specific details of his career. Then he knows nothing.’

Leon nodded for a while, examining some papers he had taken from his attaché case.

‘We don’t know Kolb’s career with the SS,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t have been very much, for he’s not on any wanted list and nobody has ever heard of him. In a way that’s just as well, for the chances are the Odessa have never heard of him either. But the disadvantage is, he has no reason to seek refuge and help from the Odessa unless he was being pursued. So we have invented a career for him. Here it is.’

He passed the sheets over to Oster who began to read them. When he had finished he nodded.

‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘It all fits with the known facts. And it would be enough to get him arrested if he were exposed.’

Leon grunted with satisfaction.

‘That’s what you have to teach him. Incidentally, we have found a guarantor for him. A man in Bremerhaven, a former SS colonel, is going on a sea cruise, starting February 16th. The man is now a bakery owner. When Miller presents himself, which must be after February 16th, he will have a letter from this man assuring the Odessa that Kolb, his employee, is genuinely a former SS man and genuinely in trouble. By that time the bakery owner will be on the high seas and uncontactable. By the way,’ he turned to Miller and passed a book across to him, ‘you can learn bakery as well. That’s what you have been since 1945, an employee in a bakery.’

He did not mention that the bakery owner would be away only for four weeks, and that after that period Miller’s life would hang by a thread.

‘Now my friend the barber is going to change your appearance somewhat,’ Leon told Miller. ‘After that we’ll take a new photograph for the driving licence.’

In the upstairs bathroom the barber gave Miller one of the shortest haircuts he had ever had. The white scalp gleamed through the stubble almost up to the crown of the head by the time he had finished. The rumpled look was gone, but he also looked older. A ruler-straight parting was scraped in the short hair on the left side of his head. His eyebrows were plucked until they almost ceased to exist.

‘Bare eyebrows don’t make a man look older,’ said the barber chattily, ‘but they make the age almost unguessable within six or seven years. There’s one last thing. You’re to grow a moustache. Just a thin one, the same width as your mouth. It adds years, you know. Can you do that in three weeks?’

Miller knew the way the hair on his upper lip grew.

‘Sure,’ he said. He gazed back at his reflection. He looked in his mid-thirties. The moustache would add another four years.

When they got downstairs Miller was stood up against a white sheet, held in place by Oster and Leon, and Motti took several full-face portraits of him.

‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the driving licence ready within three days.’

The party left and Oster turned to Miller.