The Odessa File

He passed a piece of paper across to Miller.

‘The number will always be manned, even if I am not there. Report in whenever you get anything.’

Twenty minutes later the group was gone.

In the back seat of the car on their way back to Munich Leon and Josef sat side by side, the Israeli agent hunched in his corner and silent. As they left the twinkling lights of Bayreuth behind them Leon nudged Josef with his elbow.

‘Why so gloomy?’ he asked. ‘Everything is going fine.’

Josef glanced at him.

‘How reliable do you reckon this man Miller?’ he asked.

‘Reliable? He’s the best chance we have ever had for penetrating the Odessa. You heard Oster. He can pass for a former SS man in any company, provided he keeps his head.’

Josef retained his doubts.

‘My brief was to watch him at all times,’ he grumbled. ‘I ought to be sticking to him when he moves, keeping an eye on him, reporting back on the men he is introduced to and their position in the Odessa. I wish I’d never agreed to let him go off alone and check in by phone when he thinks fit. Supposing he doesn’t check in?’

Leon’s anger was barely controlled. It was evident they had been through this argument before.

‘Now listen one more time. This man is my discovery. His infiltration into Odessa was my idea. He’s my agent. I’ve waited years to get someone where he is now – a non-Jew. I’m not having him exposed by someone tagging along behind him.’

‘He’s an amateur. I’m a pro,’ growled the agent.

‘He’s also an Aryan,’ riposted Leon. ‘By the time he’s outlived his usefulness I hope he’ll have given us the names of the top ten Odessa men in Germany. Then we go to work on them one by one. Among them one must be the recruiter of the rocket scientists. Don’t worry, we’ll find him, and the names of the scientists he intends to send to Cairo.’

Back in Bayreuth Miller stared out of the window at the falling snow. Privately he had no intention of checking in by phone, for he had no interest in tracing recruited rocket scientists. He still had only one objective – Eduard Roschmann.

Chapter Twelve

IT WAS ACTUALLY on the evening of Wednesday February 19th that Peter Miller finally bade farewell to Alfred Oster in his cottage in Bayreuth and headed for Nuremberg. The former SS officer shook him by the hand on the doorstep.

‘Best of luck, Kolb. I’ve taught you everything I know. Let me give you a last word of advice. I don’t know how long your cover can hold. Probably not long. If you ever spot anyone whom you think has seen through the cover, don’t argue. Get out and revert to your real name.’

As the young reporter walked down the drive, Oster muttered to himself, ‘Craziest idea I ever heard,’ shut the door and went back to his hearth.

Miller walked the mile to the railway station, going steadily downhill and passing the public car park. At the small station, with its Bavarian eaves and gables, he bought a single ticket to Nuremberg. It was only as he passed through the ticket barrier towards the windswept platform that the collector told him:

‘I’m afraid you’ll have quite a wait, sir. The Nuremberg train will be late tonight.’

Miller was surprised. German railways make a point of honour of running to time.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked. The ticket collector nodded up the line where the track disappeared into close folds of hills and valley heavy-hung with fresh snow.

‘There’s been a large snowfall down the track. Now we’ve just heard the snow plough’s gone on the blink. The engineers are working on it.’

Years in journalism had given Miller a deep loathing of waiting rooms. He had spent too long in them, cold, tired and uncomfortable. In the small station buffet he sipped a cup of coffee and looked at his ticket. It had already been clipped. His mind went back to his car parked up the hill.

Surely, if he parked it on the other side of Nuremberg, several miles from the address he had been given …? If, after the interview, they sent him on somewhere else by another means of transport, he would leave the Jaguar in Munich. He could even park it in a garage, out of sight. No one would ever find it. Not before the job was done. Besides, he reasoned, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have another way of getting out fast if the occasion required. There was no reason for him to think anyone in Bavaria had ever heard of him or his car.

He thought of Motti’s warning about it being too noticeable, but then he recalled Oster’s tip an hour earlier about getting out in a hurry. To use it was a risk, of course, but then so was to be stranded on foot. He gave the prospect another five minutes, then left his coffee, walked out of the station and back up the hill. Within ten minutes he was behind the wheel of the Jaguar and heading out of town.

It was a short trip back to Nuremberg. When he arrived Miller checked into a small hotel near the main station, parked his car in a side street two blocks away and walked through the King’s Gate into the old walled medieval city of Albrecht Dürer.

It was already dark, but the lights from the streets and windows lit up the quaint pointed roofs and decorated gables of the walled town. It was almost possible to think oneself back in the Middle Ages, when the Kings of Franconia had ruled over Nuremberg, one of the richest merchant cities of the Germanic states. It was hard to recall that almost every brick and stone of what he saw around him had been built since 1945, meticulously reconstructed from the actual architects’ plans of the original town, reduced with its cobbled streets and timbered houses to ashes and rubble by the Allied bombs of 1943.

He found the house he was looking for two streets from the square of the Main Market, almost under the twin spires of St Sebald’s Church. The name on the doorplate checked with the one typed on the letter he carried, the forged introduction supposedly from former SS colonel Joachim Eberhardt of Bremen. As he had never met Eberhardt he could only hope the man in the house in Nuremberg had not met him either.