Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

“Now my friend the barber is going to change your appearance somewhat,” Leon told Miller. “After that we’ll take a new photograph for the driving license.” In the upstairs bathroom the barber gave Miller one of the shortest haircuts he had ever had. The white scalp gleamed through the stubble almost up to the crown of the head by the time he had finished. The rumpled look was gone, but he also looked older. A ruler-straight parting was scraped in the short hair on the left side of his head. His eyebrows were plucked until they almost ceased to exist.

“Bare eyebrows don’t make a man look older,” said the barber chattily, “but they make the age almost unguessable within six or seven years. There’s one last thing. You’re to grow a mustache. Just a thin one, the same width as your mouth. It adds years, you know. Can you do that in a couple of weeks?”

Miller knew the way the hair on his upper lip grew. “Sure,” he said. He gazed back at his reflection. He looked in his midthirties. The mustache would add another four years.

When they got downstairs, Miller was stood up against a white sheet held in place by Oster and Leon, and Motti took several full-face portraits of him.

“That’ll do,” he said. “I’ll have the driving license ready within three days.” The party left, and Oster turned to Miller. “Right, Kolb,” he said, having ceased to refer to him in any other way, “you were trained at Dachau SS training camp, seconded to Flossenburg concentration camp in July nineteen forty-four, and in April nineteen forty-five you commanded the squad that executed Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr. You also helped kill a number of the other Army officers suspected by the Gestapo of complicity in the July nineteen forty-four assassination attempt on Hitler. No wonder the authorities today would like to arrest you. Admiral Canaris and his men were not Jews. There can be no overlooking that. Okay, let’s get down to work, Staff Sergeant.”

The weekly meeting of the Mossad had reached its end when General Amit raised his hand and said,

“There is just one last matter, though I regard it as of comparatively low importance. Leon has reported from Munich that he has for some time had under training a young German, an Aryan, who for some reason of his own has a grudge against the SS and is being prepared to infiltrate the Odessa.”

“His motive?” asked one of the men suspiciously.

General Amit shrugged. “For reasons of his own, he wants to track down a certain former SS captain called Roschmann.”

The head of the Office for the Countries of Persecution, a former Polish Jew, jerked his head up. “Eduard Roschmann? The Butcher of Riga?”

“That’s the man.”

“Phew. If we could get him, that would be an old score settled.” General Amit shook his head. “I have told you before, Israel is no longer in the retribution business. My orders are absolute. Even if the man finds Roschmann, there is to be no assassination. After the Ben-Gal affair, it would be the last straw on Erhard’s back. The trouble now is that if any ex-Nazi dies in Germany, Israeli agents get the blame.”

“So what about this young German?” asked the Shabak chief.

“I want to try and use him to identify any more Nazi scientists who might be sent out to Cairo this year. For us that is priority number one. I propose to send an agent over to Germany, simply to put the young man under surveillance. Just a watching brief, nothing else.”

“You have such a man in mind?”

“Yes,” said General Amit. “He’s a good man, reliable. He’ll just follow the German and watch him, reporting back to me personally. He can pass for a German. He’s a Yekke. He came from Karlsruhe.”

“What about Leon?” asked someone else. “Will he not try to settle accounts on his own?”

“Leon will do what he’s told,” said General Amit angrily. “There is to be no more settling of accounts.”

In Bayreuth that morning, Miller was being given another grilling by Alfred Oster.

“Okay,” said Oster, “what are the words engraved on the hilt of the SS dagger?”

“Blood and Honor,” replied Miller.

“Right. When is the dagger presented to an SS man?”

“At his passing-out parade from training camp,” replied Miller.

“Right. Repeat to me the oath of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler.” Miller repeated it, word for word.

“Repeat the blood oath of the SS.” Miller complied.

“What is the significance of the emblem of the death’s head?” Miller closed his eyes and repeated what he had been taught. “The sign of the death’s head comes from distant Germanic mythology. It is the emblem of those groups of Teuton warriors who have sworn fealty to their leader and to each other, unto the grave and even beyond, into Valhalla. Hence the skull and the crossbones, signifying the world beyond the grave.”

“Right. Were all SS men automatically members of death’s-head units?”

“No.”

Oster rose and stretched. “Not bad,” he said. “I can’t think of anything else you might be asked in general terms. Now let’s get on to specifics. This is what you would have to know about Flossenburg Concentration Camp, your first and only posting….”

The man who sat in the window seat of the Olympic Airways flight from Athens to Munich seemed quiet and withdrawn.

The German businessman next to him, after several attempts at conversation, took the hint and confined himself to reading Playboy magazine. His next-door neighbor stared out of the window as the Aegean Sea passed beneath them and the airliner left the sunny spring of the eastern Mediterranean for the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites and the Bavarian Alps.

The businessman had at least elicited one thing from his companion. The traveler in the window seat was undoubtedly a German, his grasp of the language fluent and familiar, his knowledge of the country without fault.

The businessman, traveling home after a sales mission to the Greek capital, had not the slightest doubt that he was seated next to a fellow countryman.

He could hardly have been more wrong. The man next to him had been born in Germany thirty-three years earlier, under the name of Josef Kaplan, son of a Jewish tailor, in Karlsruhe. He had been three years old when Hitler came to power, seven when his parents had been taken away in a black van; he had been hidden in an attic for another three years until, at the age of ten in 1940, he too had been discovered and taken away in a van. His early teens had been spent using the resilience and the ingenuity of youth to survive in a series of concentration camps until in 1945, with the suspicion of a wild animal burning in his eyes, he had snatched a thing called a Hershey bar from the outstretched hand of a man who spoke to him in a foreign language through his nose, and had run away to eat the offering in a comer of the camp before it could be taken away from him.

Two years later, weighing a few pounds more, aged seventeen and hungry as a rat, with that creature’s suspicion and mistrust of everyone and everything, he had come on a ship called the President Warfield, alias the Exodus, to a new shore many miles from Karlsruhe and Dachau.

The passing years had mellowed him, matured him, taught him many things, given him a wife and two children, a commission in the army, but never eliminated the hatred he felt for the country to which he was traveling that day. He had agreed to go, to swallow his feelings, to take up again, as he had done twice before in the previous ten years, the façade of amiability and bonhomie that was necessary to effect his transformation back into a German.

The other requirements had been provided by the service: the passport in his breast pocket, the letters, cards, and documentary paraphernalia of a citizen of a West European country, the underclothes, shoes, suits, and luggage of a German commercial traveler in textiles.