The Odessa File

During his military service one of Miller’s friends, spending a night in the guardroom for being late back into camp, had stolen a pair of handcuffs from the military police. Later he had become worried by the thought they might be found in his kitbag, and had given them to Miller. The reporter had kept them, simply as a trophy of a wild night in the Army. They were at the bottom of a trunk in his Hamburg flat.

He also had a gun, a small Sauer automatic, bought quite legally when he had been covering an exposé of Hamburg’s vice rackets in 1960, and had been threatened by Little Pauli’s mobsters. That was locked in a desk drawer, also in Hamburg.

Feeling slightly dizzy from the effects of his wine, a double brandy and tiredness, he rose, paid his bill and went back to the hotel. He was just about to enter to make his phone call when he saw two public booths almost at the hotel door. Safer to use these.

It was nearly ten o’clock, and he found Sigi at the club where she worked. Above the clamour of the band in the background he had to shout to make her hear him.

Miller cut short her stream of questions about where he had been, why he had not got in touch, where he was now, and told her what he wanted. She protested she couldn’t get away, but something in his voice stopped her.

‘Are you all right?’ she shouted down the line.

‘Yes. I’m fine. But I need your help. Please, darling, don’t let me down. Not now, not tonight.’

There was a pause, then she said simply, ‘I’ll come. I’ll tell them it’s an emergency. Close family or something.’

‘Do you have enough to hire a car?’

‘I think so. I can borrow something off one of the girls.’

He told her the address of an all-night car-hire firm he had used before, and stressed she should mention his name as he knew the proprietor.

‘How far is it?’

‘From Hamburg, 500 kilometres. You can make it in five hours. Say six hours from now. You’ll arrive about five in the morning. And don’t forget to bring the things.’

‘All right, you can expect me then.’ There was a pause, then, ‘Peter darling …’

‘What?’

‘Are you frightened of something?’

The pips started going and he had no more one-mark pieces.

‘Yes,’ he said, and put down the receiver as they were cut off.

In the foyer of the hotel he asked the night porter if he could have a large envelope, and after some hunting beneath the counter the man obligingly produced a stiff brown one large enough to take a quarto-sized sheet of paper. Miller also bought enough stamps to cover cost of sending the envelope by first-class mail with a lot of contents, emptying the porter’s stock of stamps, usually only needed when a guest wishes to send a postcard.

Back in his room he took his document case, which he had carried throughout the evening, laid it on the bed and took out Salomon Tauber’s diary, the sheaf of papers from Winzer’s safe and two photographs. He read again the two pages in the diary that had originally sent him on this hunt for a man he had never heard of, and studied the two photographs side by side.

Finally he took a sheet of plain paper from his case and wrote on it a brief but clear message, explaining to any reader what the sheaf of documents enclosed really were. The note, along with the file from Winzer’s safe and one of the photographs, he placed inside the envelope, addressed it and stuck on all the stamps he had bought.

The other photograph he put into the breast pocket of his jacket. The sealed envelope and the diary went back into his attaché case, which he slid under the bed.

He carried a small flask of brandy in his suitcase, and he poured a measure into the tooth-glass above the wash basin. He noticed his hands were trembling, but the fiery liquid relaxed him. He lay down on the bed, his head spinning slightly, and dozed off.

In the underground room in Munich, Josef paced the floor, angry and impatient. At the table Leon and Motti gazed at their hands. It was forty-eight hours since the cable had come from Tel Aviv.

Their own attempts to trace Miller had brought no result. At their request by telephone, Alfred Oster had been to the car park in Bayreuth and later called back to tell them the car was gone.

‘If they spot that car, they’ll know he can’t be a bakery worker from Bremen,’ growled Josef when he heard the news, ‘even if they don’t know the car owner is

Peter Miller.’

Later a friend in Stuttgart had informed Leon the local police were looking for a young man in connection with the murder in a hotel room of a citizen called Bayer. The description fitted Miller in his disguise as Kolb too well for it to be any other man, but fortunately the name from the hotel register was neither Kolb nor Miller, and there was no mention of a black sports car.

‘At least he had the sense to register in a false name,’ said Leon.

‘That would be in character with Kolb,’ Motti pointed out. ‘Kolb was supposed to be on the run from the Bremen police for war crimes.’