Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

Peter Miller was driving back into the town center after visiting his mother at her home in Osdorf, one of the outer suburbs of the city. He always visited her on Friday evenings, partly to see if she had everything she needed for the weekend and partly because he felt he had to visit her once a week. He would have telephoned her if she had a telephone, but as she had none, he drove out to see her. That was why she refused to have a telephone.

As usual, he had the radio on, and was listening to a music show being broadcast by Northwest German Radio. At half past eight he was in the Osdorf Way, ten minutes from his mother’s flat, when the music stopped in the middle of a bar and the voice of the announcer came through, taut with tension.

“Achtung, Achtung. Here is an announcement. President Kennedy is dead. I repeat, President Kennedy is dead.” Miller took his eyes off the road and stared at the dimly illuminated band of frequencies along the upper edge of the radio, as if his eyes would be able to deny what his ears had heard, assure him he was tuned in to the wrong radio station, the one that broadcast nonsense.

“Jesus,” he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal, and swung to the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona toward the center of Hamburg, other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.

Along his own side he could see the brake lights glowing on as the drivers ahead swung to the right to park at the curb and listen to the supplementary information pouring from their radios. On the left the headlights of the cars heading out of town wavered wildly as they too swung away toward the pavement.

Two cars overtook him, the first hooting angrily, and he caught a glimpse of the driver tapping his forehead in Miller’s direction in the usual rude sign, indicating lunacy, that one German driver makes to another who has annoyed him.

He’ll learn soon enough, thought Miller.

The light music on the radio had stopped, replaced by the “Funeral March,” which was evidently all the disk jockey had on hand. At intervals he read snippets of further information straight off the teleprinter, as they were brought in from the newsroom. The details began to fill in: the open-car ride into Dallas, the rifleman in the window of the School Book Depository. No mention of an arrest.

The driver of the car ahead of Miller climbed out and walked back towards him. He approached the lefthand window, then realized that the driver’s seat was inexplicably on the right and came round the car.

He wore a nylon-fur-collared jacket. Miller wound down his window.

“You heard it?” asked the man, bending down to the window.

“Yeah,” said Miller.

“Absolutely fantastic,” said the man. All over Hamburg, Europe, the world, people were walking up to complete strangers to discuss the event.

“You reckon it was the Communists?” asked the man.

“I don’t know.”

“It could mean war, you know, if it was them,” said the man.

“Maybe,” said Miller. He wished the man would go away. As a reporter he could imagine the chaos sweeping across the newspaper offices of the country as every staff man was called back to help put out a crash edition for the morning breakfast tables. There would be obituaries to prepare, the thousands of instant tributes to correlate and typeset, the telephone lines jammed with yelling men seeking more and ever more details because a man with his head shattered lay dead in a city in Texas.

He wished in a way he were back on the staff of a daily newspaper, but since he had become a freelance three years earlier he bad specialized in news features inside Germany, mainly connected with crime, the police, the underworld. His mother hated the job, accusing him of mixing with “nasty people,” and his arguments that he was becoming one of the most sought-after reporter-investigators in the country availed nothing in persuading her that a reporter’s job was worthy of her only son.

As the reports from the radio came through, his mind was racing, trying to think of another “angle” that could be chased up inside Germany and might make a sidebar story to the main event. The reaction of the Bonn government would be covered out of Bonn by the staff men; the memories of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin the previous June would be covered from there. There didn’t seem to be a good pictorial feature he could ferret out to sell to any of the score of German picture magazines that were the best customers of his kind of journalism.

The man leaning on the window sensed that Miller’s attention was elsewhere and assumed it was out of grief for the dead President. Quickly he dropped his talk of world war and adopted the same grave demeanor.

“Ja, ja, ja,” he murmured with sagacity, as if he had seen it coming all along. “Violent people, these Americans, mark my words, violent people. There’s a streak of violence in them that we over here will never understand.”

“Sure,” said Miller, his mind still miles away.

The man took the hint at last. “Well, I must be getting home,” he said, straightening up. “Gruss Gott.” He started to walk back to his own car.

Miller became aware he was going. "Ja, gute Nacht,” he called out of the open window, then wound it up against the sleet whipping in off the Elbe River. The music on the radio continued in funereal vein, and the announcer said there would be no more light music that night, just news bulletins interspersed with suitable music.

Miller leaned back on the comfortable leather upholstery of his Jaguar and lit up a Roth-Handl, a filterless black-tobacco cigarette with a foul smell, another thing that his mother complained about in her disappointing son.

It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if… or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries. But it is probably accurate to say that if Miller had not had his radio on that night he would not have pulled in to the side of the road for half an hour. He would not have seen the ambulance, or heard of Salomon Tauber or Eduard Roschmann, and forty months later the republic of Israel would probably have ceased to exist.

He finished his cigarette, still listening to the radio, wound down the window, and threw the stub away.

At a touch of the button the 3.8-liter engine beneath the long sloping bonnet of the Jaguar XK 150 S thundered once and settled down to its habitual and comforting rumble, like an angry animal trying to get out of a cage. Miller flicked on the two headlights, checked behind, and swung out into the growing traffic stream along Osdorf Way.

He had got as far as the traffic lights on Stresemannstrasse, and they were standing at red, when he heard the clamor of the ambulance behind him. It came past him on the left, the wail of the siren rising and falling, slowed slightly before heading into the road junction against the red light, then swung across Miller’s nose and down to the right into Daimlerstrasse. Miller reacted on reflexes alone. He let in the clutch. and the Jaguar surged after the ambulance, twenty meters behind it.

As soon as he had done it he wished he had gone straight home. It was probably nothing, but one never knew. Ambulances meant trouble, and trouble could mean a story, particularly if one were first on the scene and the whole thing had been cleared up before the staff reporters arrived. It could be a major crash on the road, or a big wharf fire, a tenement building ablaze, with children trapped inside. It could be anything. Miller always carried a small Yashica with flash attachment in the glove compartment of his car because one never knew what was going to happen right in front of one’s eyes.