Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

He kissed Sigi before she went off to work at the club, telling her he would be gone for a week, maybe more. Then he took the Jaguar from its underground home and headed south toward the Rhineland.

The first snows had started, whistling in off the North Sea, slicing in flurries across the wide stretches of the autobahn as it swept south of Bremen and into the flat plain of Lower Saxony.

He paused once for coffee after two hours, then pressed on across North Rhine-Westphalia. Despite the wind and the descending darkness, he enjoyed driving down the autobahn in bad weather. Inside the XK 150 S he had the impression of being in the cockpit of a fast plane, the dashboard lights glowing dully under the facia, and outside the descending darkness of a winter’s night, the icy cold, the slanting flurries of snow caught for a moment in the harsh beam of the headlights, whipping past the windshield and back into nothingness again.

He stuck to the fast lane as always, pushing the Jag to close to 100 miles an hour, watching the growling hulks of the heavy trucks swish past to his right as he passed them.

By six in the evening he was beyond the Hamm Junction, and the glowing lights of the Ruhr began to be dimly discernible to his right through the darkness. He never ceased to be amazed by the Ruhr, mile after mile after mile of factories and chimneys, towns and cities so close as to be in effect one gigantic city a hundred miles long and fifty broad. When the autobahn went into an overpass he could look down to the right and see it stretching away into the December night, thousands of hectares of lights and mills, aglow from a thousand furnaces churning out the wealth of the economic miracle. Fourteen years ago, as he traveled through it by train toward his school holiday in Paris, it had been rubble, and the industrial heart of Germany was hardly even beating. Impossible not to feel proud of what his people had done since then.

Just so long as I don’t have to live in it, he thought as the giant signs of the Cologne Ring began to come up in the light of the headlights. From Cologne he ran southeast, past Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, Mannheim and Heilbronn, and it was late that evening when he cruised to a halt in front of a hotel in Stuttgart, the nearest city to Ludwigsburg, where he spent the night.

Ludwigsburg is a quiet and inoffensive little market town set in the rolling pleasant hills of Wirttemberg, fifteen miles north of the state capital of Stuttgart. Set in a quiet road off the High Street, to the extreme embarrassment of the town’s upright inhabitants, is the home of the Z Commission, a small understaffed, underpaid, overworked group of men whose job and dedication in life is to hunt down the Nazis and the SS guilty during the war of the crimes of mass murder. Before the Statute of Limitations eliminated all SS crimes with the exception of murder and mass murder, those being sought might have been guilty only of extortion, robbery, grievous bodily harm including torture, and a variety of other forms of unpleasantness.

Even with murder as the only remaining charge able to be brought, the Z Commission still had 170,000 names in its files. Not unnaturally, the main effort had been and still is to track down the worst few thousand of the mass-murderers, if and where possible.

Deprived of any powers of arrest, able only to request the police of the various states of Germany to make an arrest when positive identification has already been made, unable to squeeze more than a pittance each year out of the federal government in Bonn, the men of Ludwigsburg worked solely because they were dedicated to the task.

There were eighty detectives on the staff, and fifty investigating attorneys. Of the former group, all were young, below the age of thirtyfive, so that none could possibly have had any implication in the matters under examination. The lawyers were mainly older, but vetted to ensure they too were uninvolved with events prior to 1945.

The lawyers were mainly taken from private practice, to which they would one day return. The detectives knew their careers were finished. No police force in Germany wanted to see on its staff a detective who had once served a term at Ludwigsburg. For detectives prepared to hunt the SS in West Germany, promotion was finished in any other police force in the country.

Quite accustomed to seeing their requests for cooperation ignored in over half the states, to seeing their loaned files unaccountably become missing, to see the quarry suddenly disappear after an anonymous tip-off, the Z men worked on as best they might at a task they realized was not in accordance with the wishes of the majority of their fellow countrymen.

Even on the streets of the smiling town of Ludwigsburg, the men on the staff of the Z Commission went ungreeted and unacknowledged by the citizens, to whom their presence brought an undesired notoriety.

Peter Miller found the commission at 58 Schorndorferstrasse, a large former private house set inside an eight-foot-high wall. Two massive steel gates barred the way to the drive. At one side was a bell handle, which he pulled. A steel shutter slid back, and a face appeared. The inevitable gatekeeper.

“Please?”

“I would like to speak to one of your investigating attorneys,” said Miller.

“Which one?” said the face.

“I don’t know any names,” said Miller. “Anyone will do. Here is my card.” He thrust his press card through the aperture, forcing the man to take it. Then at least be knew it would go inside the building. The man shut the hatch and went away. When he came back, it was to open the gate.

Miller was shown up the five stone steps to the front door, which was closed against the clear but icy winter air.

Inside, it was stuffily hot from the central heating. Another porter emerged from a glass-fronted booth to his right and showed him into a small waiting room. “Someone will be with you right away,” he said and shut the door.

The man who came three minutes later was in his early fifties, mild-mannered and courteous. He handed Miller back his press card and asked, “What can I do for you?” Miller started at the beginning, explaining briefly about Tauber, the diary, his inquiries into what had happened to Eduard Roschmann.

The lawyer listened intently. “Fascinating,” he said at last.

“The point is, can you help me?”

“I wish I could,” said the man, and for the first time since he had started asking questions about Roschmann in Hamburg, Miller believed he had met an official who genuinely would like to help him. “But the point is, although I am prepared to accept your inquiries as completely sincere, I am bound hand and foot by the rules that govern our continued existence here. Which are in effect that no information may be given out about any wanted SS criminal to anyone other than a person supported by the official backing of one of a specific number of authorities.”

“In other words, you can tell me nothing?” said Miller.

“Please understand,” said the lawyer, “this office is under constant attack. Not openly-no one would dare. But privately, within the corridors of power, we are incessantly being sniped at-our budget, such powers as we have, our terms of reference. We are allowed no latitude where the rules are concerned.

Personally, I would like to engage the alliance of the press of Germany to help, but it’s forbidden.”

“I see,” said Miller. “Do you then have any newspaper-clippings reference library?”

“No, we don’t.”

“Is there in Germany at all a newspaper-clippings reference library that is open to an inquiry by a member of the public?”

“No. The only newspaper-clippings libraries in the country are compiled and held by the various newspapers and magazines. The most comprehensive is reputed to be that of Der Spiegel magazine. After that, Komet has a very good one.”