The Odessa File

  ‘That is all, Father.’

  Miller drew a deep breath.

  ‘And what about the forged passports? The ones he made for the SS men on the run.’

  She was silent for a while, and he feared she had passed into unconsciousness.

  ‘You know about that, Father?’

  ‘I know about it.’

  ‘I did not make them,’ she said.

  ‘But you knew about them, about the work Klaus Winzer did.’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was a low whisper.

  ‘He has gone now. He has gone away,’ said Miller.

  ‘No. Not gone. Not Klaus. He would not leave me. He will come back.’

  ‘Do you know where he has gone?’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘Are you sure? Think, my child. He has been forced to run away. Where would he go?’

  The emaciated head shook slowly against the pillow.

  ‘I don’t know, Father. If they threaten him, he will use the file. He told me he would.’

  Miller started. He looked down at the woman, her eyes now closed as if in sleep.

  ‘What file, my child?’

  They talked for another five minutes, then there was a soft tap on the door. Miller eased the woman’s hand off his wrist and rose to go.

  ‘Father …’

  The voice was plaintive, pleading. He turned. She was staring at him, her eyes wide open.

  ‘Bless me, Father.’

  The tone was imploring. Miller sighed. It was a mortal sin. He hoped somebody somewhere would understand. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross.

  ‘In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.’

  The woman sighed deeply, closed her eyes and passed into unconsciousness.

  Outside in the passage the doctor was waiting.

  ‘I really think that is long enough,’ he said.

  Miller nodded.

  ‘Yes, she is sleeping,’ he said, and after a glance round the door, the doctor escorted him back to the entrance hall.

  ‘How long do you think she has?’ asked Miller.

  ‘Very difficult to say. Two days, maybe three. Not more. I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you for letting me see her,’ said Miller. The doctor held open the front door for him. ‘Oh, there is one last thing, Doctor. We are all Catholics in our family. She asked me for a priest. The Last Rites, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Will you see to it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the doctor. ‘I didn’t know. I’ll see to it this afternoon. Thank you for telling me. Goodbye.’

  It was late afternoon and dusk was turning into night when Miller drove back into the Theodor Heuss Platz and parked the Jaguar twenty yards from the hotel. He crossed the road and went up to his room. Two floors above, Mackensen had watched his arrival. Taking his bomb in his handgrip he descended to the foyer, paid his bill for the coming night, explaining that he would be leaving very early in the morning, and went out to his car. He manoeuvred it into a place where he could watch the hotel entrance and the Jaguar, and settled down to another wait.

  There were still too many people in the area for him to go to work on the Jaguar, and Miller might come out of the hotel any second. If he drove off before the bomb could be planted, Mackensen would take him on the open highway several miles from Osnabrück, and steal the document case. If Miller slept in the hotel, Mackensen would plant the bomb in the small hours when no one was about.

  In his room Miller was racking his brains for a name. He could see the man’s face, but the name still escaped him.

  It had been just before Christmas 1961. He had been in the press box in the Hamburg Provincial Court, waiting for a case to start in which he was interested. He had caught the tail end of the preceding case. There was a little ferret of a man standing in the dock, and defending counsel was asking for leniency, pointing out that it was just before the Christmas period, and his client had a wife and five children.

  Miller remembered glancing at the well of the court, and noting the tired, harassed face of the convicted man’s wife. She had covered her face with her hands in utter despair when the judge, explaining the sentence would have been longer but for the defending counsel’s plea for leniency, sentenced the man to eighteen months in jail. The prosection had described the prisoner as one of the most skilful safe-breakers in Hamburg.

  A fortnight later Miller had been in a bar not 200 yards from the Reeperbahn, having a Christmas drink with some of his underworld contacts. He was flush with money, having been paid for a big picture feature that day. There was a woman scrubbing the floor at the far end. He had recognised the worried face of the wife of the cracksman who had been sentenced two weeks earlier. In a fit of generosity which he later regretted he had pushed a 100-mark note into her apron pocket and left.

  In January he had got a letter from Hamburg jail. It was hardly literate. The woman must have asked the barman for his name and told her husband. The letter had been sent to a magazine for which he sometimes worked. They had passed it on to him.

  ‘Dear Herr Miller, my wife wrote me what you done just before Christmas. I never met you, and I don’t know why you done it, but I want to thank you very much. You are a real gent. The money helped Doris and the kids have a real good time over Christmas and the New Year. If ever I can do you a good turn back, just you let me know. Yours with respects …’

  But what was the name on the bottom of that letter? Koppel. That was it. Viktor Koppel. Praying that he had not got himself back inside prison again, Miller took out his little book of contacts’ names and telephone numbers, dragged the hotel telephone on to his knees and started ringing friends in the underworld of Hamburg.

  He found Koppel at half past seven. Being a Friday evening he was in a bar with a crowd of friends, and down the line Miller could hear the juke-box in the background. It was playing the Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, which had almost driven him mad that winter, so frequently had it been played.

  With a bit of prompting Koppel remembered him, and the present he had given to Doris two years earlier. Koppel had evidently had a few drinks.

  ‘Very nice of you, that was, Herr Miller, very nice thing to do.’

  ‘Look, you wrote me from prison saying if there was ever anything you could do for me, you’d do it. Remember?’

  Koppel’s voice was wary.

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’

  ‘Well, I need a spot of help. Not much. Can you help me out?’ said Miller.

  The man in Hamburg was still wary.

  ‘I ain’t got much on me, Herr Miller.’

  ‘I don’t want a loan,’ said Miller. ‘I want to pay you for a job. Just a small one.’

  Koppel’s voice was full of relief.

  ‘Oh, I see, yes, sure. Where are you?’

  Miller gave him his instructions.

  ‘Just get down to Hamburg station and grab the first train to Osnabrück. I’ll meet you on the station. One last thing, bring your working tools with you.’

  ‘Now look, Herr Miller, I don’t ever work outside my patch. I don’t know about Osnabrück.’

  Miller dropped into the Hamburg slang.

  ‘It’s a walkover, Koppel. Empty, owner gone away and a load of gear inside. I’ve cased it, and there’s no problem. You can be back in Hamburg for breakfast, with a bagful of boodle and no questions asked. The man will be away for a week, you can unload the stuff before he’s back, and the cops down here will think it was a local job.’

  ‘What about my train fare?’ asked Koppel.

  ‘I’ll give it you when you get here. There’s a train at nine out of Hamburg. You’ve got an hour. So get moving.’

  Koppel sighed deeply.

  ‘All right, I’ll be on the train.’

  Miller hung up, asked the hotel switchboard operator to call him at eleven and dozed off.

  Outside, Mackensen continued his
lonely vigil. He decided to start on the Jaguar at midnight if Miller had not emerged.

  But Miller walked out of the hotel at quarter past eleven, crossed the square and entered the station. Mackensen was surprised. He climbed out of the Mercedes and went to look through the entrance hall. Miller was on the platform, standing waiting for a train.

  ‘What’s the next train from this platform?’ Mackensen asked a porter.

  ‘Eleven-thirty-three to Munster,’ said the porter.

  Mackensen wondered idly why Miller should want to take a train when he had a car. Still puzzled, he returned to his Mercedes and resumed his wait.

  At eleven-thirty-five his problem was solved. Miller came back out of the station accompanied by a small, shabby man carrying a black leather grip. They were in deep conversation. Mackensen swore. The last thing he wanted was for Miller to drive off in the Jaguar with company. That would complicate the killing to come. To his relief the pair approached a waiting taxi, climbed in and drove off. He decided to give them twenty minutes and then start on the Jaguar, still parked twenty yards away from him.

  At midnight the square was almost empty. Mackensen slipped out of his car, carrying a pencil-torch and three small tools, crossed to the Jaguar, cast a glance around and slid underneath it.

  Among the mud and snow-slush of the square his suit, he knew, would be wet and filthy within seconds. That was the least of his worries. Using the pencil-torch beneath the front end of the Jaguar he located the locking switch for the bonnet. It took him twenty minutes to ease it free. The bonnet jumped upward an inch when the catch was released. Simple pressure from on top would re-lock it when he had finished. At least he had no need to break into the car to release the bonnet catch from inside.

  He went back to the Mercedes and brought the bomb over to the sports car. A man working under the bonnet of a car attracts little or no attention. Passers-by assume he is tinkering with his own car.

  Using the binding wire and the pliers, he lashed the explosive charge to the inside of the engine bay, fixing it to the wall directly in front of the driving position. It would be barely three feet from Miller’s chest when it went off. The trigger mechanism, connected to the main charge by two wires eight feet long, he lowered through the engine area to the ground beneath.

  Sliding back under the car he examined the front suspension by the light of his torch. He found the place he needed within five minutes, and tightly wired the rear end of the trigger to a handy bracing-bar. The open jaws of the trigger, sheathed in rubber and held apart by the glass bulb, he jammed between two of the coils of the stout spring that formed the front nearside suspension.

  When it was firmly in place, unable to be shaken free by normal jolting, he came back out from under. He estimated the first time the car hit a hump or a normal pot-hole at speed the retracting suspension on the front nearside wheel would force the open jaws of the trigger together, crushing the frail glass bulb that separated them, and make contact between the two lengths of electrically charged hacksaw blade. When that happened Miller and his incriminating documents would be blown to pieces.

  Finally Mackensen gathered up the slack in the wires connecting the charge and the trigger, made a neat loop of them and taped them out of the way at the side of the engine bay, so they would not trail on the ground and be rubbed through by abrasion against the road surface. This done, he closed the bonnet and snapped it shut. Returning to the back seat of the Mercedes he curled up and dozed. He had done, he reckoned, a good night’s work.

  Miller ordered the taxi-driver to take them to the Saar Platz, paid him and dismissed him. Koppel had had the good sense to keep his mouth shut during the ride, and it was only when the taxi was disappearing back into town that he opened it again.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing. Herr Miller. I mean, it’s odd you being on a caper like this, you being a reporter and that.’

  ‘Koppel, there’s no need to worry. What I’m after is a bunch of documents, kept in a safe inside the house. I’ll take them, you get anything else there is to hand. OK?’

  ‘Well, seeing it’s you, all right. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘There’s one last thing. The place has a living-in maid,’ said Miller.

  ‘You said it was empty,’ protested Koppel. ‘If she comes down, I’ll scarper. I don’t want no part of violence.’

  ‘We’ll wait until two in the morning. She’ll be fast asleep.’

  They walked the mile to Winzer’s house, cast a quick look up and down the road and darted through the gate. To avoid the gravel both men walked up the grass edge along the driveway, then crossed the lawn to hide in the rhododendron bushes facing the windows of what looked like the study.

  Koppel, moving like a furtive little animal through the undergrowth, made a tour of the house, leaving Miller to watch the bag of tools. When he came back he whispered, ‘The maid’s still got her light on. Window at the back under the eaves.’

  Not daring to smoke, they sat for an hour, shivering beneath the fat, evergreen leaves of the bushes. At one in the morning Koppel made another tour, and reported the girl’s bedroom light was out.

  They sat for another ninety minutes before Koppel squeezed Miller’s wrist, took his bag and padded across the stretch of moonlight on the lawn towards the study windows. Somewhere down the road a dog barked, and further away a car tyre squealed as a motorist headed home.

  Fortunately for them the area beneath the study windows was in shadow, the moon not having come round the side of the house. Koppel flicked on a pencil-torch and ran it round the window frame, then along the bar dividing the upper and lower sections. There was a good burglar-proof window catch but no alarm system. He opened his bag and bent over it for a second, straightening up with a roll of sticky tape, a suction pad on a stick, a diamond-tipped glass cutter like a fountain pen and a rubber hammer.

  With remarkable skill he cut a perfect circle on the surface of the glass just below the window catch. For double insurance he taped two lengths of sticky tape across the disc with the ends of each tape pressed to the uncut section of window. Between the tapes he pressed the sucker, well licked, so that a small area of glass was visible either side of it.

  Using the rubber hammer, holding the stick from the sucker in his left hand, he gave the exposed area of the cut circle of window-pane a sharp tap.

  At the second tap there was a crack and the disc fell inwards towards the room. They both paused and waited for reaction, but no one had heard the sound. Still gripping the end of the sucker, to which the glass disc was attached inside the window, Koppel ripped away the two pieces of sticky tape. Glancing through the window he spotted a thick rug five feet away, and with a flick of the wrist tossed the disc of glass and the sucker inwards, so it fell soundlessly on the rug.

  Reaching through the hole he unscrewed the burglar catch and eased up the lower window. He was over the sill as nimble as a fly and Miller followed more cautiously. The room was pitch black by contrast with the moonlight on the lawn, but Koppel seemed to be able to see perfectly well.

  He hissed, ‘Keep still,’ to Miller, who froze, while the burglar quietly closed the window and drew the curtains across it. He drifted through the room, avoiding the furniture by instinct, and closed the door that led to the passage, and only then flicked on his pencil-torch.

  It swept round the room, picking out a desk, telephone, a wall of bookshelves, a deep armchair, and finally settled on a handsome fireplace with a large surround of red brick.

  He materialised at Miller’s side.

  ‘This must be the study, guv. There can’t be two rooms like this, with two brick fireplaces, in one house. Where’s the lever that opens the brickwork?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ muttered Miller back, imitating the low murmur of the burglar, who had learned the hard way that a murmur is far more difficult to detect than a whisper. ‘You’ll have to find it.’

  ‘Gor blimey. It could take ages,’ said Koppel.

&nb
sp; He sat Miller in the chair, warning him to keep his string-backed driving gloves on at all times. Taking his bag, Koppel went over to the fireplace, slipped a headband round his head and fixed the pencil-torch into a bracket so that it pointed forward. Inch by inch, he went over the brickwork, feeling with sensitive fingers for bumps or lugs, indentations or hollow areas. Abandoning this when he had covered it all, he started again with a palette knife probing for cracks. He found it at half past three.

  The knife blade slipped into a crack between two bricks and there was a low click. A section of bricks, two feet by two feet in size, swung an inch outwards. So skilfully had the work been done that no naked eye could spot the square area among the rest of the surround.

  Koppel eased the door open, hinged on the left side by silent steel hinges. The four-square-foot area of brickwork was set in a steel tray that formed a door. Behind the door the thin beam of Koppel’s headlamp picked out the front of a small wall-safe.

  He kept the light on, but slipped a stethoscope round his neck and fitted the ear-pieces. After five minutes spent gazing at the four-disc combination lock, he held the listening end where he judged the tumblers would be, and began to ease the first ring through its combinations.

  Miller, from his seat ten feet away, gazed at the work and became increasingly nervous. Koppel by contrast was completely calm, absorbed in his work. Apart from this, he knew that both men were unlikely to cause anyone to investigate the study so long as they remained completely immobile. The entry, the moving about and the exit were the danger period.

  It took him forty minutes until the last tumbler fell over. Gently he eased the safe door back and turned to Miller, the beam from his head darting over a table containing a pair of silver candlesticks and a heavy old snuff-box.

  Without a word Miller rose and went to join Koppel by the safe. He reached up, took the torch from Koppel’s head bracket and used it to probe the interior. There were several bundles of bank notes which he pulled out and passed to the grateful burglar, who uttered a low whistle that carried no more than several feet.