Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

He knew a man who had been waiting for a plane at Munich airport on February 6, 1958, and the plane carrying the Manchester United football team bad crashed a few hundred meters from where he stood.

The man was not even a professional photographer, but be had unslung the camera he was taking on a skiing holiday and snapped the first exclusive pictures of the burning aircraft. The pictorial magazines had paid more than 50,000 marks for them.

The ambulance twisted into the maze of small and mean streets of Altona, leaving the Altona railway station on the left and heading down toward the river. Whoever was driving the flat-snouted, high-roofed Mercedes ambulance knew his Hamburg and knew how to drive. Even with his greater acceleration and hard suspension, Miller could feel the back wheels of the Jaguar skidding across the cobbles slick with rain.

Miller watched Menck’s auto-parts warehouse rush by, and two streets later his original question was answered. The ambulance drew up in a poor and sleazy street, ill lit and gloomy in the slanting sleet, bordered by crumbling tenements and rooming-houses. It stopped in front of one of these, where a police car already stood, its blue roof light twirling, the beam sending a ghostly glow across the faces of a knot of bystanders grouped round the door.

A burly police sergeant in a rain cape roared at the crowd to stand back and make a gap in front of the door for the ambulance. Into this the Mercedes slid. Its driver and attendant climbed down, ran round to the back, and eased out an empty stretcher. After a brief word with the sergeant, the pair hastened upstairs.

Miller pulled the Jaguar to the opposite curb twenty yards down the road and raised his eyebrows. No crash, no fire, no trapped children. Probably just a heart attack. He climbed out and strolled over to the crowd, which the sergeant was holding back in a semicircle around the door of the rooming-house.

“Mind if I go up?” asked Miller.

“Certainly do. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I’m press,” said Miller, proffering his Hamburg city press card.

“And I’m police,” said the sergeant. “Nobody goes up. Those stairs are narrow enough as it is, and none too safe. The ambulance men will be down right away.” He was a big man, standing six feet three, and in his rain cape, with his arms spread wide to hold back the, crowd, he looked as immovable as a barn door.

“What’s up, then?” asked Miller.

“Can’t make statements. Check at the station later on.

A man in civilian clothes came down the stairs and emerged onto the pavement. The turning light on top of the Volkswagen patrol car swung across his face, and Miller recognized him. They had been at school together at Hamburg Central High. The man was now a junior detective inspector in the Hamburg police, stationed at Altona Central.

“Hey, Karl.” The young inspector turned at the call of his name and scanned the crowd behind the sergeant. In the next swirl of the police-car light he caught sight of Miller and his raised right hand. His face broke into a grin, part of pleasure, part of exasperation. He nodded to the sergeant.

“It’s all right, Sergeant. He’s more or less harmless.” The sergeant lowered his arm, and Miller darted past. He shook hands with Karl Brandt.

“What are you doing here?”

“Followed the ambulance.”

“Damned vulture. What are you up to these days?”

“Same as usual. Freelancing.”

“Making quite a bundle out of it by the look of it. I keep seeing your name in the picture magazines.”

“It’s a living. Hear about Kennedy?”

“Yes. Hell of a thing. They must be turning Dallas inside out tonight. Glad it wasn’t on my turf.”

Miller nodded toward the dimly lit hallway of the rooming-house, where a low-watt naked bulb cast a yellow glare over peeling wallpaper.

“A suicide. Gas. Neighbors smelled it coming under the door and called us.

Just as well no one struck a match; the place was reeking with it.”

“Not a film star by any chance?” asked Miller “Yeah. Sure. They always live in places like us. No, it was an old man.

Looked as if he had been dead for years anyway. Someone does it every night.”

“Well, wherever he’s gone now, it can’t be worse than this.” The inspector gave a fleeting smile and turned as the two ambulance men negotiated the last seven steps of the creaking stairs and came down the hallway with their burden. Brandt turned around. “Make some room. Let them through.” The sergeant promptly took up the cry and pushed the crowd back even farther. The two ambulance men walked out onto the pavement and around to the open doors of the Mercedes. Brandt followed them, with Miller at his heels.

Not that Miller wanted to look at the dead man, or even intended to.

He was just following Brandt. As the ambulance men reached the door of the vehicle, the first one hitched his end of the stretcher into the runners and the second prepared to shove it inside.

“Hold it,” said Brandt and flicked back the comer of the blanket above the dead man’s face. He remarked over his shoulder, “Just a formality. My report has to say I accompanied the body to the ambulance and back to the morgue.” The interior lights of the Mercedes ambulance were bright, and Miller caught a single two-second look at the face of the suicide. His first and only impression was that he had never seen anything so old and ugly. Even given the effects of gassing, the dull mottling of the skin, the bluish tinge at the lips, the man in life could have been no beauty. A few strands of lank hair were plastered over the otherwise naked scalp. The eyes were closed. The face was hollowed out to the point of emaciation, and with the man’s false teeth missing, each cheek seemed to be sucked inward till they almost touched inside the mouth, giving the effect of a ghoul in a horror film. The lips hardly existed, and both upper and lower were lined with vertical creases, reminding Miller of the shrunken skull from the Amazon basin he had once seen, whose lips had been sewn together by the natives.

To cap the effect, the man seemed to have two pale and jagged scars running down his face, each from the temple or upper ear to the corner of the mouth.

After a quick glance, Brandt pulled the blanket back and nodded to the ambulance attendant behind him.

He stepped back as the man rammed the stretcher into its berth, locked the doors, and went around to the cab to join his partner. The ambulance surged away. The crowd started to disperse accompanied by the sergeant’s muted growls: “Come on, it’s all over. There’s nothing more to see. Haven’t you got homes to go to?”

Miller looked at Brandt and raised his eyebrows. “Charming.”

“Yes. Poor old guy. Nothing in it for you, though?” Miller looked pained.

“Not a chance. Like you say, there’s one a night. People are dying all over the world tonight, and nobody’s taking a bit of notice. Not with Kennedy dead.” Inspector Brandt laughed mockingly.

“You lousy journalists.”

“Let’s face it. Kennedy’s what people want to read about. They buy the newspapers.”

“Yeah. Well, I must get back to the station. See you, Peter.” They shook hands again and parted. Miller drove back toward Altona station, picked up the main road back into the city center, and twenty minutes later swung the Jaguar into the underground garage off the Hansa Square, two hundred yards from the house where he had his penthouse apartment.

Keeping the car in an underground garage all winter was costly, but it was one of the extravagances he permitted himself. He liked his fairly expensive apartment because it was high and be could look down on the bustling boulevard of the Steindamm. Of his clothes and food he thought nothing, and at twenty-nine, just under six feet, with the rumpled brown hair and brown eyes that women go for, he didn’t need expensive clothes.