Frederick Forsyth: The Odessa File

“Excellent. By the way, that thing you were on. Nazi-hunting. Did you get the man? Is there a story at all?”

“No, Herr Hoffmann,” said Miller slowly. “No story.”

“Didn’t think so. Hurry up and get well. See you in Hamburg.”

Josef’s plane from Frankfurt via London came into Lod Airport, Tel Aviv, as dusk was setting on Tuesday evening. He was met by two men in a car and taken to headquarters for debriefing by the colonel who had signed the cable from Cormorant. They talked until almost two in the morning, a stenographer noting it all down. When it was over, the colonel leaned back, smiled, and offered his agent a cigarette.

“Well done,” he said simply. “We’ve checked on the factory and tipped off the authorities-anonymously, of course. The research section will be dismantled. We’ll see to that, even if the German authorities don’t.

But they will. The scientists apparently didn’t know whom they were working for. We’ll approach them all privately, and most will agree to destroy their records. They know, if the story broke, the weight of opinion in Germany today is pro-Israeli. They’ll get other jobs in industry and keep their mouths shut. So will Bonn, and so will we. What about Miller?”

“He’ll do the same. What about those rockets?” The colonel blew a column of smoke and gazed at the stars in the night sky outside. “I have a feeling they’ll never fly now. Nasser has to be ready by the summer of sixty-seven at the latest, and if the research work in that Vulkan factory is destroyed, they’ll never mount another operation in time to fit the guidance systems to the rockets before the summer of ‘sixty-seven.”

“Then the danger’s over,” said the agent.

The colonel smiled. “The danger’s never over. It just changes shape. This particular danger may be over. The big one goes on. We’re going to have to fight again, and maybe after that, before it’s over. Anyway, you must be tired. You can go home now.” He reached into a drawer and produced a polyethylene bag of personal effects, while the agent deposited on the desk his false German passport, money, wallet, and keys. In a side room he changed clothes, leaving the German clothes with his superior.

At the door the colonel looked the figure up and down with approval and shook hands. “Welcome home, Major Uri Ben-Shaul.” The agent felt better back in his own identity, the one he had taken in 1947 when he first came to Israel and enlisted in the Palmach. He took a taxi back home to his flat in the suburbs and let himself in with the key that had just been returned to him with his other effects.

In the darkened bedroom he could make out the sleeping form of Rivka, his wife, the light blanket rising and falling with her breathing. He peeked into the children’s room and looked down at their two boys: Shlomo, who was six, and the two-year-old baby, Dov.

He wanted badly to climb into bed beside his wife and sleep for several days, but there was one more job to be done. He set down his case and quietly undressed, taking off even the underclothes and socks.

He dressed in fresh ones taken from the clothes chest, and Rivka slept on, undisturbed.

From the closet he took his uniform trousers, cleaned and pressed as they always were when he came home, and laced up the gleaming black calf-boots over them. His khaki shirts and ties were where they always were, with razor-sharp creases down the shirt where the hot iron had pressed. Over them he slipped his battle jacket, adorned only with the glinting steel wings of a paratroop officer and the five campaign ribbons he bad earned in Sinai and in raids across the borders.

The final article was his red beret. When he bad dressed he took several articles and stuffed them into a small bag. There was already a dim glint in the east when he got back outside and found his small car still parked where he had left it a month before in front of the apartment house.

Although it was only February 26, three days before the end of the last month of winter, the air was mild again and gave promise of a brilliant spring.

He drove eastward out of Tel Aviv and took the road to Jerusalem. There was a stillness about the dawn that he loved, a peace and a cleanness that never ceased to cause him wonder. He had seen it a thousand times on patrol in the desert, the phenomenon of a sunrise, cool and beautiful, before the onset of a day of blistering heat and sometimes of combat and death. It was the best time of the day.

The road led across the flat, fertile countryside of the littoral plain toward the ocher hills of Judea, through the waking village of Ramleh.

After Ramleh there was in those days a detour around the Latroun Salient, five miles to skirt the front positions of the Jordanian forces. To his left he could see the morning breakfast fires of the Arab Legion sending up thin plumes of blue smoke.

There were a few Arabs awake in the village of Abu Gosh, and when he had climbed up the last hills to Jerusalem the sun had cleared the eastern horizon and glinted off the Dome of the Rock in the Arab section of the divided city.

He parked his car a quarter of a mile from his destination, the mausoleum of Yad Vashem, and walked the rest, down the avenue flanked by trees planted in memory of the gentiles who had tried to help, and to the great bronze doors that guard the shrine to six million of his fellow Jews who had died in the holocaust.

The old gatekeeper told him it was not open so early in the morning, but he explained what he wanted, and the man let him in. He passed through into the Hall of Remembrance and glanced about him. He had been there before to pray for his own family, and still the massive gray granite blocks of which the hall was built overawed him.

He walked forward to the rail and gazed at the names written in black on the gray stone floor, in Hebrew and Roman letters. There was no light in the sepulcher but that from the Eternal Flame, flickering above the shallow black bowl from which it sprang.

By its light he could see the names across the floor, score upon score: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, Ravensbruck, Buchenwald…. There were too many to count, but he found the one he sought. Riga.

He did not need a yarmulka to cover himself, for he still wore his red beret, which would suffice. From his bag he took a fringed silk shawl, the tallith, the same kind of shawl Miller had found among the effects of the old man in Altona and had not understood. This he draped around his shoulders.

He took a prayer book from his bag and opened it at the right page. He advanced to the brass rail that separates the hall into two parts, gripped it with one hand, and gazed across it at the flame in front of him.

Because he was not a religious man, he had to consult his prayer book frequently, as he recited the prayer already five thousand years old.

“Yitgaddal,

Veyitkaddash,

Shemay rabbah…”

And so it was that, twenty-one years after it had died in Riga, a major of paratroops of the Army of Israel, standing on a hill in the Promised Land, finally said Kaddish for the soul of Salomon Tauber.

It would be agreeable if things in this world always finished with all the ends neatly tied up. That is very seldom the case. People go on, to live and die in their own appointed time and place. So far as it has been possible to establish, this is what happened to the main characters.

Peter Miller went home, married, and stuck to reporting the sort of things that people want to read over breakfast and in the hairdresser’s.

By the summer of 1970 Sigi was carrying their third child.

The men of the Odessa scattered. Eduard Roschmann’s wife returned home and later received a cable from her husband telling her he was in Argentina. She refused to follow him. In the summer of 1965 she wrote to him at their old address, the Villa Jerbal, to ask him for a divorce before the Argentinian courts.