Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

The ticket collector nodded up the line, where the track disappeared into close folds of hills and valleys heavy-hung with fresh snow. “There’s been a large snowfall down the track. Now we’ve just heard the snow plow’s gone on the blink. The engineers are working on it.” Years in journalism bad given Miller a deep loathing of waiting rooms.

He had spent too long in them, cold, tired, and uncomfortable. In the small station cafe be sipped a cup of coffee and looked at his ticket. It had already been clipped. His mind went back to his car parked up the hill.

Surely, if he parked it on the other side of Nuremberg, several miles from the address he had been given… ? If, after the interview, they sent him on somewhere else by another means of transport, he would leave the Jaguar in Munich. He could even park it in a garage, out of sight.

No one would ever find it. Not before the job was done. Besides, he reasoned, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to have another way of getting out fast if the occasion required. There was no reason for him to think anyone in Bavaria had ever heard of him or his car.

He thought of Motti’s warning about its being too noticeable, but then he recalled Oster’s tip an hour earlier about getting out in a hurry. To use it was a risk, of course, but then so was to be stranded on foot. He gave the prospect another five minutes, then left his coffee, walked out of the station and back up the hill. Within ten minutes he was behind the wheel of the Jaguar and heading out of town.

It was a short trip to Nuremberg. When he arrived, Miller checked into a small hotel near the main station, parked his car in a side street two blocks away, and walked through the King’s Gate into the old walled medieval city of Albrecht Durer.

It was already dark, but the lights from the streets and windows lit up the quaint pointed roofs and decorated gables of the walled town. It was almost possible to think oneself back in the Middle Ages, when the Kings of Franconia had ruled over Nuremberg, one of the richest merchant cities of the Germanic states. It was hard to recall that almost every brick and stone of what he saw around him had been built since 1945, meticulously reconstructed from the actual architects’ plans of the original town, which had been reduced with its cobbled streets and timbered houses to ashes and rubble by the Allied bombs of 1943.

He found the house he was looking for two streets from the square of the main market, almost under the twin spires of Saint Sebald’s Church. The name on the doorplate checked with the one typed on the letter he carried, the forged introduction supposedly from former SS Colonel Joachim Eberhardt of Bremen. As he had never met Eberhardt, he could only hope the man in the house in Nuremberg bad not met him either.

He walked back to the market square, looking for a place to have supper.

After strolling past two or three traditional Franconian eating houses, he noticed smoke curling up into the frosty night sky from the red-tiled roof of the small sausage house in the comer of the square, in front of the doors of Saint Sebald’s. It was a pretty little place, fronted by a terrace fringed with boxes of purple heather, from which a careful owner had brushed the morning’s snow.

Inside, the warmth and good cheer hit him like a wave. The wooden tables were almost all occupied, but a couple from a comer table were leaving, so he took it, bobbing and smiling back as the couple, on their way out, wished him a good appetite. He ordered the specialty of the house, the small spiced Nuremberg sausages, a dozen on one plate, and treated himself to a bottle of the local wine to wash them down.

After his meal he sat back and dawdled over his coffee and chased the black liquid home with two Asbachs. He didn’t feel like bed, and it was pleasant to sit and gaze at the logs flickering in the open fire, to listen to the crowd in the comer roaring out a Franconian drinking song, locking arms and swinging from side to side to the music, voices and wine tumblers raised high each time they reached the end of a stanza.

For a long time he wondered why he should bother to risk his life in the quest for a man who had committed crimes twenty years before. He almost decided to let the matter drop, to shave off his mustache, grow his hair again, go back to Hamburg and the bed warmed by Sigi.

The waiter came over, bowed, deposited the bill on the table with a cheerful “Bitte schön.” He reached into his pocket for his wallet, and his fingers touched a photograph. He pulled it out and gazed at it for a while. The pale red-rimmed eyes and the rattrap mouth stared back at him above the collar with the black tabs and the silver lightning symbols. After a while he muttered, “You shit,” and held the comer of the photograph above the candle on his table. When the picture had been reduced to ashes he crumpled them in the copper tray. He would not need it again. He could recognize the face when he saw it.

Peter Miller paid for his meal, buttoned his coat about him, and walked back to his hotel.

Mackensen was confronting an angry and baffled Werwolf at about the same time.

“How the hell can he be missing?” snapped the Odessa chief. “He can’t vanish off the face of the earth, he can’t disappear into thin air. His car must be one of the most distinctive in Germany, visible half a mile off.

Six weeks of searching, and all you can tell me is that he hasn’t been seen….

Mackensen waited until the outburst of frustration had spent itself.

“Nevertheless, it’s true,” be pointed out at length. “I’ve had his apartment in Hamburg checked out, his girl friend and mother interviewed by supposed friends of Miller, his colleagues contacted. They all know nothing. His car must have been in a garage somewhere all this time. He must have gone to ground. Since he was traced leaving the airport parking lot in Cologne, after returning from London, and driving south, he has gone.”

“We have to find him,” repeated the Werwolf. “He must not get near this Kamerad. It would be a disaster.”

“He’ll show up,” said Mackensen with conviction. “Sooner or later he has to break cover. Then we’ll have him.” The Werwolf considered the patience and logic of the professional hunter.

He nodded slowly. “Very well. Then I want you to stay close to me. Check into a hotel here in town, and we’ll wait it out. If you’re nearby, I can get you easily.”

“Right, sir. I’ll get into a hotel downtown and call you to let you know. You can get me there any time.” He bade his superior good night and left.

It was just before nine the following morning that Miller presented himself at the house and rang the brilliantly polished bell. He wanted to get the man before he left for work. The door was opened by a maid, who showed him into the living room and went to fetch her employer.

The man who entered the room ten minutes later was in his mid-fifties with medium-brown hair and silver tufts at each temple, self-possessed and elegant. The furniture and decor of his room also spelled elegance and a substantial income.

He gazed at his unexpected visitor without curiosity assessing at a glance the inexpensive trousers and jacket of a working-class man. “And what can I do for you?” he inquired calmly.

The visitor was plainly embarrassed and ill at ease among the opulent surroundings of the room. “Well, Herr Doktor, I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

“Come now,” said the Odessa man, “I’m sure you know my office is not far from here. Perhaps you should go there and ask my secretary for an appointment.”

“Well, it’s not actually professional help I need,” said Miller. He had dropped into the vernacular of the Hamburg and Bremen area, the language of working people. He was obviously embarrassed. At a loss for words, he produced a letter from his inside pocket and held it out. “I brought a letter of introduction from the man who suggested I come to you, Sir.”