The Odessa File

The man who finally gave him the private number and address of the owner of the radio factory was an old contact, industrial and business affairs correspondent of a large newspaper in Hamburg. He had the man’s address in his private address book.

Miller sat and stared at the face of Roschmann, the new name and the private address scribbled in his notebook. Now he remembered hearing of the man before, an industrialist from the Ruhr; he had even seen the radios in the shops. He took out his map of Germany and located the country villa on its private estate, or at least the area of villages where it was situated.

It was past twelve o’clock when he packed his bags, descended to the hall and settled his bill. He was famished, so he went into the hotel dining room, taking only his document case, and treated himself to a large steak.

Over his meal he decided to drive the last section of the chase that afternoon and confront his target the next morning. He still had the slip of paper with the private telephone number of the lawyer with the Z-Commission in Ludwigsburg. He could have rung him then, but he wanted, was determined, to face Roschmann first. He feared if he tried that evening the lawyer might not be at home when he called him to ask for a squad of policeman within thirty minutes. Sunday morning would be fine, just fine.

It was nearly two when he finally emerged, stowed his suitcase in the boot of the Jaguar, tossed the document case on to the passenger seat and climbed behind the wheel.

He failed to notice the Mercedes that tailed him to the edge of Osnabrück. The car behind him came on to the main autobahn after him, paused for a few seconds as the Jaguar accelerated fast down the south-bound lane, then left the main road twenty yards further and drove back into town.

From a telephone booth by the roadside Mackensen phoned the Werwolf in Nuremberg.

‘He’s on his way,’ he told his superior. ‘I just left him going down the south-bound lane like a bat out of hell.’

‘Is your device accompanying him?’

Mackensen grinned.

‘Too right. Fixed to the front nearside suspension. Within fifty miles he’ll be in pieces you couldn’t identify.’

‘Excellent,’ purred the man in Nuremberg. ‘You must be tired, my dear Kamerad. Go back into town and get some sleep.’

Mackensen needed no second bidding. He had not slept a full night since Wednesday.

Miller made those fifty miles, and another hundred. For Mackensen had overlooked one thing. His trigger device would certainly have detonated quickly if it had been jammed into the cushion suspension system of a continental saloon car. But the Jaguar was a British sports car, with a far harder suspension system. As it tore down the autobahn towards Frankfurt the bumping caused the heavy springs above the front wheels to retract slightly, crushing the small bulb between the jaws of the bomb-trigger to fragments of glass. But the electrically charged lengths of steel failed to touch each other. On the hard bumps they flickered to within a millimetre of each other before springing apart.

Unaware of how close to death he was, Miller made the trip past Munster, Dortmund, Wetzlar and Bad Homburg to Frankfurt in just under three hours, then turned off the ring road towards Königstein and the wild, snow-thick forests of the Taunus mountains.

Chapter Sixteen

IT WAS ALREADY dark when the Jaguar slid into the small spa town in the eastern foothills of the mountain range. A glance at his map told Miller he was less than twenty miles from the private estate he sought. He decided to go no further that night, but to seek a hotel and wait till morning.

&nbs

p; To the north lay the mountains, straddled by the road to Limburg, lying quiet and white under the thick carpet of snow that muffled the rocks and shrouded the miles and miles of pine forest. There were lights twinkling down the main street of the small town and the glow of them picked out the skeletal frame of the ruined castle brooding on its hill, once the fortress home of the Lord of Falkenstein. The sky was clear, but an icy wind gave promise of more snow to come during the night.

At the corner of Haupt Strasse and Frankfurt Strasse he found a hotel, the Park, and asked for a room. In a spa town in February the cold-water cure has hardly the same charm as in the summer months. There was plenty of room.

The porter directed him to put his car in the small lot at the back of the hotel, fringed by trees and bushes. He had a bath and went out for supper, picking the Grüne Baum hostelry in the Haupt Strasse, one of the dozen old, beamed eating-houses the town had to offer.

It was over his meal that the nervousness set in. He noticed his hands were shaking as he raised his wineglass. Part of the condition was exhaustion, the lack of sleep in the past four days, the cat-napping for one and two hours at a time.

Part was delayed reaction from the tension of the break-in with Koppel, and part the sense of astonishment at the luck that had rewarded his instinct to go back to Winzer’s house after the first visit and ask the maid who had looked after the bachelor forger all these years.

But most, he knew, was the sense of the impending end of the chase, the confrontation with the man he hated and had sought through so many unknown byways of inquiry, coupled with the fear that something might still go wrong.

He thought back to the anonymous doctor in the hotel in Bad Godesberg who had warned him to stay away from the men of the Comradeship; and the Jewish Nazi-hunter of Vienna who had told him, ‘Be careful; these men can be dangerous.’ Thinking back he wondered why they had not struck at him yet. They knew his name was Miller, the Dreesen Hotel visit proved that; and as Kolb, the beating of Bayer in Stuttgart would have blown that cover. Yet he had seen no one. One thing they could not know, he was sure, was that he had got as far as he had. Perhaps they had lost him, or decided to leave him alone, convinced, with the forger in hiding, he would end up by going in circles.

And yet he had the file, Winzer’s secret and explosive evidence, and with it the greatest news story of the decade in West Germany. He grinned to himself, and the passing waitress thought it was for her. She swung her bottom as she passed his table next time, and he thought of Sigi. He had not called her since Vienna, and the letter he wrote in early January was the last she had had, six weeks back. He felt now he needed her like he never had before.

Funny, he thought, how men always need women more when they are frightened. He had to admit he was frightened, partly of what he had done, partly of the mass-murderer who waited unknowingly for him in the mountains.

He shook his head to shake off the mood, and ordered another half-bottle of wine. This was no time for melancholy. He had pulled off the greatest journalistic coup he had ever heard of, and was about to settle a score as well.

He ran over his plan as he drank the second portion of wine. A simple confrontation, a telephone call to the lawyer at Ludwigsburg, the arrival thirty minutes later of a police van to take the man away for imprisonment, trial and a life sentence. If he had been a harder man, he would have wanted to kill the SS-captain himself.

He thought it over, and realised he was unarmed. Supposing Roschmann had a bodyguard? Would he really be alone, confident his new name would protect him from discovery? Or would there be a strong-arm retainer in case of trouble?