Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

“I want to talk to you,” said the police inspector. “But not on the phone. Can we meet?” Miller’s reporter’s mind clicked into gear immediately. Anyone who has got something to say but does not wish to say it over the phone must think it important. In the case of Brandt, Miller could hardly suspect a police detective would be so cagy about something ridiculous.

“Sure,” he said. “Are you free for lunch?”

“I can be,” said Brandt.

“Good. I’ll buy it if you think it’s something worthwhile.” He named a small restaurant on the Goose Market for one o’clock and replaced the receiver. He was still puzzled, for he couldn’t see a story in the suicide of an old man, Jewish or not, in a slum tenement m Altona.

Throughout the lunch the young detective seemed to wish to avoid the subject about which he had asked for the meeting, but when the coffee came he said simply, “The man last night.”

“Yes,” said Miller. “What about him?”

“You must have heard, as we all have, about what the Nazis did to the Jews during the war and even before it?”

“Of course. They rammed it down our throats at school, didn’t they?” Miller was puzzled and embarrassed. Like most young Germans, he had been told at school when he was twelve or so that he and the rest of his countrymen had been guilty of massive war crimes.

At the time he had accepted it without even knowing what was being talked about.

Later it had been difficult to find out what the teachers had meant in the immediate postwar period. There was nobody to ask, nobody who wanted to talk-not the teachers, not the parents. Only with coming manhood had he been able to read a little about it, and although what he read disgusted him, he could not feel it concerned him. It was another time, another place, a long way away. He had not been there when it happened, his father had not been there, his mother had not been there. Something inside him had persuaded him it was nothing to do with Peter Miller, so he had asked for no names, dates, details. He wondered why Brandt should be bringing the subject up.

Brandt stirred his coffee, himself embarrassed, not knowing how to go on.

“That old man last night,” he said at length. “He was a German Jew, He was in a concentration camp.”

Miller thought back to the death’s head on the stretcher the previous evening. Was that what they ended up like? It was ridiculous. The man must have been liberated by the Allies eighteen years earlier and had lived on to die of old age. But the face kept coming back. He had never seen anyone who had been in a camp before-at least, not knowingly. For that matter he had never met one of the SS mass-killers, he was sure of that. One would notice, after all.

His mind strayed back to the publicity surrounding the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem two years earlier. The papers had been full of it for weeks on end. He thought of the face in the glass booth and remembered that his impression at the time had been how ordinary that face was, so depressingly ordinary. It was in reading the press coverage of the trial that for the first time he had gained an inkling of how the SS had done it, how they had got away with it.

But these had all been about things in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, far away and a long time back. He could not make them personal.

He brought his thoughts back to the present and the sense of unease Brandt’s line of talk aroused in him.

“What about it?” be asked the detective.

For answer Brandt took a brown-paper-wrapped parcel out of his attache case and pushed it across the table. “The old man left a diary. Actually, be wasn’t so old. Fifty-six. It seems he wrote notes at the time and stored them in his foot-wrappings. After the war he transcribed them all. They make up the diary.”

Miller looked at the parcel with scant interest. “Where did you find it?”

“It was lying next to the body. I picked it up and took it home. I read it last night.”

Miller looked at his former friend quizzically. “It was bad?”

“Horrible. I had no idea it was that bad-the things they did to them.”

“Why bring it to me?” Now Brandt was embarrassed.

He shrugged. “I thought it might make a story for you.”

“Who does it belong to now?”

“Technically, Tauber’s heirs. But we’ll never find them. So I suppose it belongs to the Police Department. But they’d just file it. You can have it, if you want it. Just don’t let on that I gave it to you. I don’t need any trouble in the department.”

Miller paid the bill, and the pair walked outside.

“All right, I’ll read it. But I don’t promise to get steamed up about it.

It might make an article for a magazine.” Brandt turned to him with a half-smile. “You’re a cynical bastard,” he said.

“No,” said Miller, “it’s just that, like most people, I’m concerned with the here and now. What about you?

After ten years in the police I’d have thought you’d be a tough cop. This thing really upset you, didn’t it?”

Brandt was serious again. He looked at the parcel under Miller’s arm and nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, it did. I just never thought it was that bad. And by the way, it’s not all past history. ‘That story ended here in Hamburg last night. Good-by, Peter.”

The detective turned and walked away, not knowing how wrong he was.

PETER MILLER took the brown paper parcel home and arrived there just after three. He threw the package onto the living-room table and went to make a large pot of coffee before sitting down to read it.

Settled in his favorite armchair with a cup of coffee at his elbow and a cigarette going, be opened it. The diary was in the form of a looseleaf folder with stiff covers of cardboard bound in a dull black vinyl, and a series of clips down the spine so that the leaves of the book could be extracted, or further leaves inserted, if necessary.

The contents consisted of a hundred and fifty pages of typewritten script, apparently banged out on an old machine, for some of the letters were above the line, others below it, and some either distorted or faint.

The bulk of the pages seemed to have been written years before, or over a period of years, for most of them, although neat and clean, bore the unmistakable tint of white paper several years old. But at the front and back were a number of fresh sheets, evidently written barely a few days previously. There was a preface of some new pages at the front of the typescript, and there was a sort of epilogue at the back.

A check of the dates on the preface and the epilogue showed both to have been written on November 21, two days previously. Miller supposed the dead man had written them after he had made the decision to end his life.

A quick glance at some of the paragraphs on the first page surprised him, for the language was clear and precise German, the writing of a well-educated and cultured man. On the outside of the front cover a square of white paper had been pasted, and over it a larger square of cellophane to keep it clean. On the square of paper had been written in large block capitals in black ink: THE DIARY OF SALOMON TAUBER.

Miller settled himself deeper in his chair, turned to the first page, and began to read.

My name is Salomon Tauber, I am a Jew and about to die. I have decided to end my own life because it has no more value, nor is there anything left for me to do. Those things that I have tried to do with my life have come to nothing, and my efforts have been unavailing. For the evil that I have seen has survived and flourished, and only the good has departed in dust and mockery. The friends that I have known, the sufferers and the victims, are all dead, and only the persecutors are all around me. I see their faces on the streets in the daytime, and in the night I see the face of my wife, Esther, who died long ago. I have stayed alive this long only because there was one more thing I wished to do, one thing I wanted to see, and now I know I never shall.