Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

IT WAS already dark when the Jaguar slid into the small spa town in the eastern foothills of the mountain range. A glance at his map told Miller he was less than twenty miles from the private estate he sought. He decided to go no farther that night, but to seek a hotel and wait till morning.

To the north lay the mountains, straddled by the road to Limburg, lying quiet and white under the thick carpet of snow that muffled the rocks and shrouded the miles and miles of pine forest. There were lights twinkling down the main street of the small town, and the glow of them picked out the skeletal frame of the ruined castle brooding on its hill, once the fortress home of the Lords of Falkenstein. The sky was clear, but an icy wind gave promise of more snow to come during the night.

At the corner of Hauptstrasse and Frankfurtstrasse he found a hotel, the Park, and asked for a room. In a spa town in February the cold-water cure has hardly the same charm as in the summer months. There was plenty of room.

The porter directed him to put his car in the small lot at the back of the hotel, fringed by trees and bushes.

He had a bath and went out for supper, picking the Grilne Baum hostelry in the Hauptstrasse, one of the dozen old, beamed eating houses the town bad to offer.

It was over his meal that the nervousness set in. He noticed his hands were shaking as he raised his wineglass. Part of the condition was exhaustion, the lack of sleep in the past four days, the catnapping for one and two hours at a time.

Part was delayed reaction from the tension of the breakin with Koppel, and part the sense of astonishment at the luck that had rewarded his instinct to go back to Winzer’s house after the first visit and ask the maid who had looked after the bachelor forger all these years.

But most, he knew, was the sense of the impending end of the chase, the confrontation with the man he hated and had sought through so many unknown byways of inquiry, coupled with the fear that something might still go wrong.

He thought back to the anonymous doctor in the hotel in Bad Godesberg who had warned him to stay away from the men of the Comradeship; and the Jewish Nazi-hunter of Vienna who had told him, “Be careful; these men can be dangerous.” Thinking back, he wondered why they had not struck at him yet.

They knew his name as Miller-the Dreesen Hotel visit proved that; and as Kolb-the beating of Bayer in Stuttgart would have blown that cover. Yet he had seen no one. One thing they could not know, he was sure, was that he had got as far as he had. Perhaps they had lost him, or decided to leave him alone, convinced, with the forger in hiding, he would end up by going in circles.

And yet he had the file, Winzer’s secret and explosive evidence, and with it the greatest news story of the decade in West Germany. He grinned to himself, and the passing waitress thought it was for her. She swung her bottom as she passed his table next time, and he thought of Sigi. He had not called her since Vienna, and the letter he wrote in early January was the last she had had, six weeks back. He felt now that he needed her as he never had before.

Funny, he thought, how men always need women more when they are afraid.

He had to admit he was frightened, partly of what he had done, partly of the mass-murderer who waited, unknowing, for him in the mountains.

He shook his head to shake off the mood and ordered another half-bottle of wine. This was no time for melancholy; he had pulled off the greatest journalistic coup he had ever heard of and was about to settle a score as well.

He ran over his plan as he drank the second portion of wine. A simple confrontation, a telephone call to the lawyer at Ludwigsburg, the arrival thirty minutes later of a police van to take the man away for imprisonment, trial, and a life sentence. If Miller had been a harder man, he would have wanted to kill the SS captain himself.

He thought it over and realized he was unarmed. Supposing Roschmann bad a bodyguard? Would he really be alone, confident his new name would protect him from discovery? Or would there be a strong-arm retainer in case of trouble?

During Miller’s military service, one of his friends, spending a night in the guardroom for being late back into camp, had stolen a pair of handcuffs from the Military Police. Later be had become worried by the thought they might be found in his kitbag and had given them to Miller.

The reporter bad kept them, simply as a trophy of a wild night in the Army. They were at the bottom of a trunk in his Hamburg flat.

He also had a gun, a small Sauer automatic, bought quite legally when he had been covering an expose of Hamburg’s vice rackets in 1960 and had been threatened by Little Pauli’s mobsters. That was locked in a desk drawer, also in Hamburg.

Feeling slightly dizzy from the effects of his wine, a double brandy, and tiredness, he rose, paid his bill, and went back to the hotel. He was just about to enter to make his phone call, when he saw two public booths almost at the hotel door. Safer to use these.

It was nearly ten o’clock, and he found Sigi at the club where she worked. Above the clamor of the band in the background, be had to shout to make her bear him.

Miller cut short her stream of questions about where he had been, why be had not got in touch, where he was now, and told her what he wanted. She protested she couldn’t get away, but something in his voice stopped her.

“Are you all right?” she shouted over the line.

“Yes, I’m fine. But I need your help. Please, darling, don’t let me down.

Not now, not tonight.” There was a pause; then she said simply, “I’ll come. I’ll tell them it’s an emergency.

Close family or something.

“Do you have enough to rent a car?”

“I think so. I can borrow something off one of the girls.” He told her the address of an all-night car-rental firm he had used before, and stressed she should mention his name, as he knew the proprietor.

“How far is it?” she asked.

“From Hamburg, five hundred kilometers. You can make it in five hours.

Say six hours from now. You’ll arrive about five in the morning. And don’t forget to bring the things.”

“All right, you can expect me then.” There was a pause, then: “Peter darling “What?”

“Are you afraid of something?” The time signal started, and he had no more one-mark pieces.

“Yes,” he said and put down the receiver as they were cut off.

In the foyer of the hotel he asked the night porter if he could have a large envelope, and after some hunting beneath the counter the man obligingly produced a stiff brown one large enough to take a quarto-sized sheet of paper. Miller also bought enough stamps to cover the cost of sending the envelopes by first-class mail with a lot of contents, emptying the porter’s stock of stamps, which were usually needed only when a guest wished to send a postcard.

Back in his room he took his document case, which he had carried throughout the evening, laid it on the bed, and took out Salomon Tauber’s diary, the sheaf of papers from Winzer’s safe, and two photographs. He read again the two pages in the diary that bad originally sent him on this hunt for a man he had never heard of, and studied the two photographs side by side.

Finally be took a sheet of plain paper from his case and wrote on it a brief but clear message, explaining to any reader what the sheaf of documents enclosed really was. The note, along with the file from Winzer’s safe and one of the photographs, he placed inside the envelope, addressed it, and stuck on all the stamps he had bought.

The other photograph he put into the breast pocket of his jacket. The sealed envelope and the diary went back into his attache case, which he slid under the bed.