Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

An envious friend had once told him, “You could pull broads in a monastery,” and he had laughed but been pleased at the same time because he knew it was true.

The real passions of his life were sports cars, reporting, and Sigrid, though he sometimes shamefacedly admitted that if it came to a choice between Sigi and the Jaguar, Sigi would have to find her loving somewhere else.

He stood and looked at the Jaguar in the lights of the garage after he had parked it. He could seldom get enough of looking at that car. Even approaching it in the street, he would stop and admire it, occasionally joined by a passer-by who, not realizing it was Miller’s, would stop also and remark, “Some motor, that.”

Normally a young freelance reporter does not drive a Jaguar K 150 S. Spare parts were almost impossible to come by in Hamburg, the more so as the XK series, of which the S model was the last ever made, had gone out of production in 1960. He maintained it himself, spending hours on Sunday in overalls beneath the chassis or half buried in the engine. The gas it used, with its three SU carburetors, was a major strain on his pocket, the more so because of the price of gas in Germany, but he paid it willingly. The reward was to hear the berserk snarl of the blown exhausts when he hit the accelerator on the open autobahn, to feel the thrust as it rocketed out of a turn on a mountain road. He had even hardened up the independent suspension on the two front wheels, and as the car had stiff suspension at the back, it took comers steady as a rock, leaving other drivers rolling wildly on their cushion springs if they tried to keep up with him. Just after buying it, he had had it resprayed black with a long wasp-yellow streak down each side. As it had been made in Coventry, England, and not as an export car, the driver’s wheel was on the right, which caused an occasional problem in passing but allowed him to change gear with the left hand and hold the shuddering steering wheel in the right hand, which he had come to prefer.

Even now he wondered at the lucky stroke that had enabled him to buy it.

Earlier that summer he had idly opened a pop magazine while waiting in a barber shop to have his hair cut. Normally he never read the gossip about pop stars, but there was nothing else to read. The center-page spread bad been about the meteoric rise to fame and international stardom of four tousel-headed English youths. The face on the extreme right of the picture, the one with the big nose, meant nothing to him, but the other three faces rang a bell in his filing cabinet of a memory.

The names of the two disks that had brought the quartet to stardom, “Please, Please Me” and “Love Me, Do,” meant nothing either, but three of the faces puzzled him for two days. Then he remembered them, more than a year earlier, in 1962, singing way down on the program at a small cabaret off the Reeperbalm. It took him another day to recall the name, for he had only once popped in for a drink to talk to an underworld figure from whom he needed information about the Sankt Pauli gang. The Star Club. He went down there and checked through the billings for 1962 and found them. They had been five then, the three he recognized and two others, Pete Best and Stuart Sutliffe.

From there he went to the photographer who had done the publicity photographs for the impresario Bert Kumpfert, and had bought right and title to everyone he had. His story “How Hamburg Discovered the Beatles” had made almost every pop-music and picture magazine in Germany and a lot abroad. On the proceeds he had bought the Jaguar, which he bad been eyeing in a car showroom, where it had been sold by a British Army officer whose wife had grown too pregnant to fit into it. He even bought some Beatles records out of gratitude, but Sigi was the only one who ever played them.

He left the car and walked up the ramp to the street and back to his flat. It was nearly midnight, and although his mother had fed him at six that evening with the usual enormous meal, he was hungry again.

He made a plate of scrambled eggs and listened to the late-night news. It was all about Kennedy and heavily accented on the German angles, since there was little more news coming through from Dallas. The police were still searching for the killer. The announcer went to great lengths about Kennedy’s love of Germany, his visit to Berlin the previous summer, and his statement in German, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

There was then a recorded tribute from the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, his voice choked with emotion, and other tributes were read from Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had retired the previous October 15.

Peter Miller switched off and went to bed. He wished Sigi was home because he always wanted to snuggle up to her when he felt depressed, and then he got hard and then they made love, after which he fell into a dream-less steep, much to her annoyance because it was after lovemaking that she always wanted to talk about marriage and children. But the cabaret at which she danced did not close till nearly four in the morning, often later on Friday nights, when the provincials and tourists were thick down the Reeperbalm, prepared to buy champagne at ten times its restaurant price for a girl with big tits and a low-cut dress, and Sigi had the biggest and the lowest.

So he smoked another cigarette and fell asleep alone at quarter to two to dream of the hideous face of the old gassed man in the slums of Altona.

While Peter Miller was eating his scrambled eggs at midnight in Hamburg, five men were sitting drinking in the comfortable lounge of a house attached to a riding school near the pyramids outside Cairo. The time there was one in the morning. The five men had dined well and were in a jovial mood, the cause being the news from Dallas they had heard almost four hours earlier.

Three of the men were Germans, the other two Egyptians. The wife of the host and proprietor of the riding school, a favorite meeting place of the cream of Cairo society and the several-thousand-strong German colony, had gone to bed, leaving the five men to talk into the small hours.

Sitting in the leather-backed easy chair by the shuttered window was Hans Appler, formerly a Jewish expert in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Dr.

Josef Goebbels. Having lived in Egypt since shortly after the end of the war, where he had been spirited by the Odessa, Appler had taken the Egyptian name of Salah Chaff ar and worked as an expert on Jews in the Egyptian Ministry of Orientation. He held a glass of whisky. On his left was another former expert from Goebbels’ staff, Ludwig Heiden, also working in the Orientation Ministry. He had in the meantime adopted the Moslem faith, made a trip to Mecca, and was called El Hadj. In deference to his new religion he held a glass of orange juice. Both men were still fanatical Nazis.

The two Egyptians were Colonel Shamseddin Badran, personal aide to Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later to become Vice-President of Egypt before being accused of treason after the Six-Day War of 1967 and later committing suicide. The other was Colonel Ali Samir, head of the Moukhabarat, the Egyptian Secret Intelligence Service.

There had been a sixth guest at dinner, the guest of honor, who had rushed back to Cairo when the news came through at nine-thirty, Cairo time, that President Kennedy was dead. He was the Speaker of the Egyptian National Asesmbly, Anwar el Sadat, a close collaborator of President Nasser and later to become his successor.

Hans Appler raised his glass toward the ceiling. “So Kennedy the Jew-lover is dead. Gentlemen, I give you a toast.”

“But our glasses are empty,” protested Colonel Samir.

Their host hastened to remedy the matter, filling the empty glasses from a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard.