The Odessa File

11

PETER MILLER wrote his letters to his mother and Sigi under the watchful eye of Motti, and finished by midmorning. His luggage had arrived from his hotel, the bill had been paid, and shortly before noon the two of them, accompanied by the driver of the previous night, set off for Bayreuth.

With a reporter’s instinct he flashed a glance at the number plates of the blue Opel which had taken the place of the Mercedes that had been used the night before. Motti, at his side, noticed the glance and smiled.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s a hired car, taken out in a false name.”

“Well, it’s nice to know one is among professionals,” said Miller.

Motti shrugged. “We have to be. It’s one way of staying alive when you’re up against the Odessa.” The garage had two berths, and Miller noticed his own Jaguar in the second slot. Half-melted snow from the previous night had formed puddles beneath the wheels, and the sleek black bodywork gleamed in the electric light.

Once he was in the back of the Opel, the black sock was again pulled over his head, and he was pushed down to the floor as the car eased out of the garage, through the gates of the courtyard, and into the street. Motti kept the blindfold on him until they were well clear of Munich and heading north up autobahn E 6 toward Nuremberg and Bayreuth.

When Miller finally lost the blindfold he could see there had been another heavy snowfall overnight. The rolling forested countryside where Bavaria ran into Franconia was clothed in a coat of unmarked white, giving a chunky roundness to the leafless trees of the I beech forests along the road. The driver was slow and careful, the windshield wipers working constantly to clear the glass of the fluttering flakes and the mush thrown up by the trucks they passed.

They lunched at a wayside inn at Ingolstadt, pressed on to skirt Nuremberg to the east, and were at Bayreuth an hour later.

Set in the heart of one of the most beautiful areas of Germany, nicknamed the Bavarian Switzerland, the small country town of Bayreuth has only one claim to fame, its annual festival of Wagner music. In earlier years the town had been proud to play host to almost the whole Nazi hierarchy as it descended in the wake of that keen Wagnerite, Adolf Hitler.

In January it is a quiet little town, blanketed by snow, the holly wreaths only a few days since removed from the door knockers of its neat and well-kept houses. They found the cottage of Alfred Oster on a quiet byroad a mile beyond the town, and there was not another car on the road as the small party went to the front door.

The former SS officer was expecting them-a big bluff man with blue eyes and a fuzz of ginger hair spreading over the top of his cranium. Despite the season, he had the healthy tan of men who spend their time in the mountains among wind and sun and unpolluted air.

Motti made the introductions and handed Oster a letter from Leon. The Bavarian read it and nodded, glancing sharply at Miller.

“Well, we can always try,” he said. “How long can I have him?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Motti.

“Obviously, until he’s ready. Also, it will be necessary to devise a new identity for him. We will let you know.” A few minutes later he was gone. - Oster led Miller into the living room and drew the curtains against the descending dusk before be put on the light. “So, you want to be able to pass as a former SS man, do you?” he asked.

Miller nodded. “That’s right,” he said.

Oster turned on him. “Well, we’ll start by getting a few basic facts rights. I don’t know where you did your military service, but I suspect it was in that ill-disciplined, democratic, wet-nursing shambles that calls itself the new German Army. Here’s the first fact. The new German Army would have lasted exactly ten seconds against any crack regiment of the British, Americans, or Russians during the last war.

Whereas the Waffen SS, man for man, could beat the shit out of five times their own number of Allies of the last war.

“Here’s the second fact. The Waffen SS were the toughest, best-trained, best-disciplined, smartest, fittest bunch of soldiers who ever went into battle in the history of this planet. Whatever they did can’t change that. SO SMARTEN UP, MILLER. So long as you are in this house, this is the procedure.

“When I walk into a room, you leap to attention. And I mean LEAP. When I walk past, you smack those heels together and remain at attention until I am five paces beyond you. When I say something to you that needs an answer, you reply, ‘JAWOHL, Herr Haupsturmfuhrer.’ And when I give an order or an instruction, you reply, ‘Zu BEFFEL, Herr Haupsturmffihrer.’ Is that clearly understood?” Miller nodded in amazement.

“Heels together,” roared Oster. “I want to hear the leather smack. All right, since we may not have much time, we’ll press on, starting from tonight. Before supper we’ll tackle the ranks, from private up to full general. You’ll learn the titles, mode of address, and collar insignia of every SS rank that ever existed.

Then we’ll go on to the various types of uniform used, the differing branches of the SS and their different insignia, the occasions when gala uniform, full-dress uniform, walking out uniform, combat uniform, and fatigue dress would be worn.

“After that I’ll put you through the full political ideological course that you would have undergone at Dachau SS training camp, had you been there. Then you’ll learn the marching songs, the drinking songs, and the various unit songs.

“I can get you as far as your departure from training camp for your first posting. After that Leon has to tell me what unit you were supposed to have joined, where you worked, under which commanding officer, what happened to you at the end of the war, how you have passed your time since nineteen forty-five. However, the first part of the training will take from two to three weeks, and that’s a crash course.

“By the way, don’t think this is a joke. If you are once inside the Odessa, knowing who the top men are, and you make one slip in procedure, you’ll end up in a canal. Believe me, I’m no milksop, and after betraying the Odessa, even I’m running scared of them. That’s why I live here under a new name.” For the first time since he had set off on his one-man hunt for Eduard Roschmann, Miller wondered if he had not already gone too far.

Mackensen reported to the Werwolf on the dot of ten. When the door to the room where Hilda worked was safely shut, the Werwolf seated the executioner in the client’s chair opposite the desk and lit a cigar.

“There is a certain person, a newspaper reporter, inquiring about the whereabouts and the new identity of one of our comrades,” he began. The liquidator nodded with understanding. Several times before, he had heard one of his briefings begin in the same way.

“In the normal course of events,” resumed the Werwolf, “we would be prepared to let the matter rest, either convinced that the reporter would eventually give up for lack of progress, or because the man being sought was not worth our while making an expensive and hazardous effort to save.”

“But this time—it’s different?” asked Mackensen softly.

The Werwolf nodded with what might have been genuine regret. “Yes. Through bad luck, ours on the grounds of the inconvenience involved, his on the grounds it will cost him his life, the reporter has unwittingly touched a nerve. For one thing, the man he is seeking is a man of vital, absolutely vital, importance to us and to our long-term planning. For another, the reporter himself seems to be an odd character-intelligent, tenacious, ingenious, and, I regret, wholly committed to extracting a sort of personal vengeance from the Kamerad.”

“Any motive?” asked Mackensen.

The Werwolf’s puzzlement showed in his frown. He tapped ash from his cigar before replying. “We cannot understand why there should be, but evidently there is,” he murmured. “The man he is looking for undoubtedly has a background which might excite certain dislike among such as the Jews and their friends. He commanded a ghetto in Ostland. Some, mainly foreigners, refuse to acknowledge our justification for what was done there. The odd thing about this reporter is that he is neither foreign, nor Jewish, nor a noted Left-Winger, nor one of the well-known type of conscience-cowboy who, in any case, seldom get beyond giving vent to a lot of piss and wind, but nothing else.

“But this man seems different. He’s a young German, Aryan, son of a war hero, nothing in his background to suggest such a depth of hatred toward us, nor such an obsession with tracing one of our Kameraden, despite a firm and clear warning to stay off the matter. It gives me some regret to order his death. Yet he leaves me no alternative. That is what I must do!”

“Kill him?” asked Mack the Knife.

“Kill him,” confirmed the Werwolf.

“Whereabouts?”

“Not known.” The Werwolf flicked two sheets of foolscap paper covered with typed words across the desk. “That’s the man. Peter Miller, reporter and investigator. He was last seen at the Dreesen Hotel in Bad Godesberg. He’s certainly gone from there by now, but it’s a good enough place to start.

The other place would be his own flat, where his girl friend lives with him. You should represent yourself as a man sent by one of the major magazines for which he normally works. That way, the girl will probably talk to you, if she knows his whereabouts. He drives a noticeable car. You’ll find all the details of it there.”

“I’ll need money,” said Mackensen. The Werwolf had foreseen the request. He pushed a wad of 10,000 marks across the desk.

“And the orders?” asked the killer.

“Locate and liquidate,” said the Werwolf.

It was January 13 before the news of the death in Bremen five days earlier of Rolf Gunther Kolb reached Leon in Munich. The letter from his North German representative enclosed the dead man’s driving license.

Leon checked the man’s rank and number on his list of former SS men, checked the West German wanted list and saw that Kolb was not on it, spent some time gazing at the face on the driving license, and made his decision.

He called Motti, who was on duty at the telephone exchange where he worked, and the assistant reported to Leon when he had finished his shift.

Leon laid Kolb’s driving license in front of him. “That’s the man we need,” he said. “He was a staff sergeant at the age of nineteen, promoted just before the war ended. They must have been very short of material. Kolb’s face and Miller’s don’t match, even if Miller were made up, which is a procedure I don’t like anyway. It’s too easy to see through at close range.

But the height and build fit with Miller. So we’ll need a new photograph.

That can wait. To cover the photograph we’ll need a replica of the stamp of the Bremen Police Traffic Department. See to it.” When Motti had gone, Leon dialed a number in Bremen and gave further orders.

“All right,” said Alfred Oster to his pupil. “Now we’ll start on the songs.

You’ve heard of the ‘Horst Wessel Song’?”

“Of course,” said Miller. “It was the Nazi marching song.” Oster hummed the first few bars.

“Oh, yes, I remember hearing it now. But I can’t remember the words.”

“Okay,” said Oster. “I’ll have to teach you about a dozen songs. Just in case you are asked. But this is the most important. You may even have to join in a singsong, when you’re among the Kameraden. Not to know it would be a death sentence. Now, after me:

It was January 18.

Mackensen sat and sipped a cocktail in the bar of the Schweizerhof Hotel in Munich and considered the source of his puzzlement: Miller, the reporter whose personal details and face were etched in his mind. A thorough man, Mackensen had even contacted the main Jaguar agents for West Germany and obtained from them a series of publicity photographs of the Jaguar XK 150 sports car, so he knew what he was looking for. His trouble was he could not find it.

The trail at Bad Godesberg had quickly led to Cologne Airport and the answer that Miller had flown to Undon and back within thirty-six hours over the New Year. Then he and his car had vanished.

Inquiries at his flat led to a conversation with his handsome and cheerful girl friend, but she had only been able to produce a letter postmarked from Munich, saying Miller would be staying there for a while.

For a week Munich had proved a dead lead. Mackensen had checked every hotel, public and private parking space, servicing garage, and gas station.

There was nothing. The man he sought had disappeared as if from the face of the earth.

Finishing his drink, Mackensen eased himself off his bar stool and went to the telephone to report to the Werwolf. Although he did not know it, he stood just twelve hundred meters from the black Jaguar with the yellow stripe, which was parked inside the walled courtyard of the antique shop and private house where Leon lived and ran his small and fanatic organization.

In Bremen General Hospital a man in a white coat strolled into the registrar’s office. He had a stethoscope around his neck, almost the badge of office of a new intern.

“I need a look at the medical file on one of our patients, Rolf Gunther Kolb,” he told the receptionist and filing clerk.

The woman did not recognize the intern, but that meant nothing. There were scores of them working in the hospital. She ran through the names in the filing cabinet, spotted the name of Kolb on the edge of a dossier, and handed it to the intern. The phone rang, and she went to answer it.

The intern sat on one of the chairs and flicked through the dossier. It revealed simply that Kolb had collapsed in the street and been brought in by ambulance. An examination had diagnosed cancer of the intestine in a virulent and terminal form. A decision had later been made not to operate. The patient had been put on a series of drugs, without any hope, and later on painkillers. The last sheet in the file stated simply: “Patient deceased on the night of January 8/9. Cause of death: carcinoma of the main intestine.

No next of kin. Corpus delicti delivered to the municipal mortuary January 10.” It was signed by the doctor in charge of the case.

The new intern eased the last sheet out of the file and inserted in its place one of his own. The new sheet read: “Despite serious condition of patient on admission, the carcinoma responded to a treatment of drugs and went into recession. Patient was adjudged fit to be transferred on January 16. At his own request he was transferred by ambulance for convalescence at the Arcadia Clinic, Delmenhorst.” The signature was an illegible scrawl.

The intern gave the file back to the filing clerk, thanked her with a smile, and left. It was January 22.

Three days later Leon received a piece of information that filled in the last section of his private jigsaw puzzle. A clerk in a ticket agency in North Germany sent a message to say a certain bakery proprietor in Bremerhaven had just confirmed bookings on a winter cruise for himself and his wife. The pair would be touring the Caribbean for four weeks, leaving from Bremerhaven on Sunday, February 16. Leon knew the man to have been a colonel of the SS during the war, and a member of Odessa after it. He ordered Motti to go out and buy a book of instructions on the art of making bread.

The Werwolf was puzzled. For nearly three weeks he had had his representatives in the major cities of Germany on the lookout for a man called Miller and a black Jaguar sports car. The apartment and the garage in Hamburg had been watched, a visit bad been made to a middle-aged woman in Osdorf, who had said only that she did not know where her son was.

Several telephone calls had been made to a girl called Sigi, purporting to come from the editor of a major picture magazine with an urgent offer of very lucrative employment for Miller, but the girl bad also said she did not know where her boy friend was.

Inquiries bad been made at his bank in Hamburg, but he had not cashed any checks since November. In short, he bad disappeared. It was already January 30, and against his wishes the Werwolf felt obliged to make a phone call. With regret, he lifted his receiver and made it.

Far away, high in the mountains, a man put down his telephone half an hour later and swore softly and violently for several minutes. It was a Friday evening, and he had barely returned to his weekend manor for two days of rest when the call had come through.

He walked to the window of his elegantly appointed study and looked out.

The light from the window spread out across the thick carpet of snow on the lawn, the glow reaching away toward the pine trees that covered most of the estate.

He had always wanted to live like this, in a fine house on a private estate in the mountains, since, as a boy, he had seen during the Christmas vacation the houses of the rich in the mountains around Graz.

Now he had it, and he liked it.

It was better than the house of a brewery worker, where he had been brought up; better than the house in Riga where he had lived for four years; better than a furnished room in Buenos Aires or a hotel room in Cairo. It was what he had always wanted.

The call he had taken disturbed him. He had told the caller there had been no one spotted near his house, no one hanging around his factory, no one asking questions about him. But he was worried. Miller? Who the hell was Miller? The assurances on the phone that the reporter would be taken care of only partly assuaged his anxiety. The seriousness with which the caller and his colleagues took the threat posed by Miller was indicated by the decision to send him a personal bodyguard the next day to act as his chauffeur and stay with him until further notice.

He drew the curtains of the study, shutting out the winter landscape. The thickly padded door cut out all sounds from the rest of the house. The only sound in the room was the crackle of fresh pine logs on the hearth; the cheerful glow was framed by the great cast-iron fireplace with its wrought vine leaves and curlicues, one of the fittings he had kept when he bought and modernized the house.

The door opened, and his wife put her head around it. “Dinner’s ready,” she said.

“Coming, dear,” said Eduard Roschmann.

The next morning, Saturday, Oster and Miller were disturbed by the arrival of a party from Munich. The car contained Leon and Motti, the driver, and another man, who carried a black bag.

When they reached the living room, Leon said to the man with the bag, “You’d better get up to the bathroom and set out your gear.” The man nodded and went upstairs. The driver had remained in the car.

Leon sat at the table and bade Oster and Miller take their places. Motti remained by the door, a camera with Bash attachment in his hand.

Leon passed a driving license over to Miller. Where the photograph had been was a blank.

“That’s who you are going to become,” said Leon. “Rolf Gunther Kolb, born June eighteenth, nineteen twenty-five. That would make you nineteen at the end of the war, almost twenty. And thirty-eight years old now. You were born and brought up in Bremen. You joined the Hitler Youth at the age of ten in nineteen thirtyfive, and the SS in January nineteen forty-four, at the age of eighteen. Both your parents are dead. They were killed in an air raid on Bremen docks in nineteen forty-four.” Miller stared down at the driving license in his band.

“What about his career in the SST’ asked Oster. “At the moment we have reached something of a dead end.”

“How is he so far?” asked Leon. Miller might as well not have been there.

“Pretty good,” said Oster. “I gave him a two-hour interrogation yesterday, and he could pass. Until someone starts asking for specific details of his career. Then he knows nothing.” Leon nodded for a while, examining some papers he had taken from his attaché case. “We don’t know Kolb’s career with the SS,” he said. “It couldn’t have been very much, for he’s not on any wanted list and nobody has ever heard of him. In a way that’s just as well, for the chances are the Odessa has never heard of him either.

But the disadvantage is, he has no reason to seek refuge and help from the Odessa unless he is being pursued. So we have invented a career for him. Here it is.” He passed the sheets over to Oster, who began to read them. When he had finished he nodded. “It’s good,” he said. “It all fits with ‘ the known facts. And it would be enough to get him arrested if he were exposed.” Leon grunted with satisfaction.

“That’s what you have to teach him.

Incidentally, we have found a guarantor for him. A man in Bremerhaven, a former SS colonel, is going on a sea cruise, starting February sixteenth.

The man is now a bakery-owner. When Miller presents himself, which must be after February sixteenth, he will have a letter from this man assuring the Odessa that Kolb, his employee, is genuinely a former SS man and genuinely in trouble. By that time the bakery-owner will be on the high seas and uncontactable.

By the way he turned to Miller and passed a book across to him. You can learn baking as well. That’s what you have been since nineteen forty-five, an employee in a bakery.” He did not mention that the bakery-owner would be away for only four weeks, and that after that period Miller’s life would hang by a thread.

“Now my friend the barber is going to change your appearance somewhat,” Leon told Miller. “After that we’ll take a new photograph for the driving license.” In the upstairs bathroom the barber gave Miller one of the shortest haircuts he had ever had. The white scalp gleamed through the stubble almost up to the crown of the head by the time he had finished. The rumpled look was gone, but he also looked older. A ruler-straight parting was scraped in the short hair on the left side of his head. His eyebrows were plucked until they almost ceased to exist.

“Bare eyebrows don’t make a man look older,” said the barber chattily, “but they make the age almost unguessable within six or seven years. There’s one last thing. You’re to grow a mustache. Just a thin one, the same width as your mouth. It adds years, you know. Can you do that in a couple of weeks?”

Miller knew the way the hair on his upper lip grew. “Sure,” he said. He gazed back at his reflection. He looked in his midthirties. The mustache would add another four years.

When they got downstairs, Miller was stood up against a white sheet held in place by Oster and Leon, and Motti took several full-face portraits of him.

“That’ll do,” he said. “I’ll have the driving license ready within three days.” The party left, and Oster turned to Miller. “Right, Kolb,” he said, having ceased to refer to him in any other way, “you were trained at Dachau SS training camp, seconded to Flossenburg concentration camp in July nineteen forty-four, and in April nineteen forty-five you commanded the squad that executed Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr. You also helped kill a number of the other Army officers suspected by the Gestapo of complicity in the July nineteen forty-four assassination attempt on Hitler. No wonder the authorities today would like to arrest you. Admiral Canaris and his men were not Jews. There can be no overlooking that. Okay, let’s get down to work, Staff Sergeant.”

The weekly meeting of the Mossad had reached its end when General Amit raised his hand and said,

“There is just one last matter, though I regard it as of comparatively low importance. Leon has reported from Munich that he has for some time had under training a young German, an Aryan, who for some reason of his own has a grudge against the SS and is being prepared to infiltrate the Odessa.”

“His motive?” asked one of the men suspiciously.

General Amit shrugged. “For reasons of his own, he wants to track down a certain former SS captain called Roschmann.”

The head of the Office for the Countries of Persecution, a former Polish Jew, jerked his head up. “Eduard Roschmann? The Butcher of Riga?”

“That’s the man.”

“Phew. If we could get him, that would be an old score settled.” General Amit shook his head. “I have told you before, Israel is no longer in the retribution business. My orders are absolute. Even if the man finds Roschmann, there is to be no assassination. After the Ben-Gal affair, it would be the last straw on Erhard’s back. The trouble now is that if any ex-Nazi dies in Germany, Israeli agents get the blame.”

“So what about this young German?” asked the Shabak chief.

“I want to try and use him to identify any more Nazi scientists who might be sent out to Cairo this year. For us that is priority number one. I propose to send an agent over to Germany, simply to put the young man under surveillance. Just a watching brief, nothing else.”

“You have such a man in mind?”

“Yes,” said General Amit. “He’s a good man, reliable. He’ll just follow the German and watch him, reporting back to me personally. He can pass for a German. He’s a Yekke. He came from Karlsruhe.”

“What about Leon?” asked someone else. “Will he not try to settle accounts on his own?”

“Leon will do what he’s told,” said General Amit angrily. “There is to be no more settling of accounts.”

In Bayreuth that morning, Miller was being given another grilling by Alfred Oster.

“Okay,” said Oster, “what are the words engraved on the hilt of the SS dagger?”

“Blood and Honor,” replied Miller.

“Right. When is the dagger presented to an SS man?”

“At his passing-out parade from training camp,” replied Miller.

“Right. Repeat to me the oath of loyalty to the person of Adolf Hitler.” Miller repeated it, word for word.

“Repeat the blood oath of the SS.” Miller complied.

“What is the significance of the emblem of the death’s head?” Miller closed his eyes and repeated what he had been taught. “The sign of the death’s head comes from distant Germanic mythology. It is the emblem of those groups of Teuton warriors who have sworn fealty to their leader and to each other, unto the grave and even beyond, into Valhalla. Hence the skull and the crossbones, signifying the world beyond the grave.”

“Right. Were all SS men automatically members of death’s-head units?”

“No.”

Oster rose and stretched. “Not bad,” he said. “I can’t think of anything else you might be asked in general terms. Now let’s get on to specifics. This is what you would have to know about Flossenburg Concentration Camp, your first and only posting….”

The man who sat in the window seat of the Olympic Airways flight from Athens to Munich seemed quiet and withdrawn.

The German businessman next to him, after several attempts at conversation, took the hint and confined himself to reading Playboy magazine. His next-door neighbor stared out of the window as the Aegean Sea passed beneath them and the airliner left the sunny spring of the eastern Mediterranean for the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites and the Bavarian Alps.

The businessman had at least elicited one thing from his companion. The traveler in the window seat was undoubtedly a German, his grasp of the language fluent and familiar, his knowledge of the country without fault.

The businessman, traveling home after a sales mission to the Greek capital, had not the slightest doubt that he was seated next to a fellow countryman.

He could hardly have been more wrong. The man next to him had been born in Germany thirty-three years earlier, under the name of Josef Kaplan, son of a Jewish tailor, in Karlsruhe. He had been three years old when Hitler came to power, seven when his parents had been taken away in a black van; he had been hidden in an attic for another three years until, at the age of ten in 1940, he too had been discovered and taken away in a van. His early teens had been spent using the resilience and the ingenuity of youth to survive in a series of concentration camps until in 1945, with the suspicion of a wild animal burning in his eyes, he had snatched a thing called a Hershey bar from the outstretched hand of a man who spoke to him in a foreign language through his nose, and had run away to eat the offering in a comer of the camp before it could be taken away from him.

Two years later, weighing a few pounds more, aged seventeen and hungry as a rat, with that creature’s suspicion and mistrust of everyone and everything, he had come on a ship called the President Warfield, alias the Exodus, to a new shore many miles from Karlsruhe and Dachau.

The passing years had mellowed him, matured him, taught him many things, given him a wife and two children, a commission in the army, but never eliminated the hatred he felt for the country to which he was traveling that day. He had agreed to go, to swallow his feelings, to take up again, as he had done twice before in the previous ten years, the façade of amiability and bonhomie that was necessary to effect his transformation back into a German.

The other requirements had been provided by the service: the passport in his breast pocket, the letters, cards, and documentary paraphernalia of a citizen of a West European country, the underclothes, shoes, suits, and luggage of a German commercial traveler in textiles.

As the heavy and freezing clouds of Europe engulfed the plane he reconsidered his mission, fed into him in days and nights of briefing by the quiet-spoken colonel on the kibbutz that produced so little fruit and so many Israeli agents. To follow a man, to keep an eye on him, a young German four years his junior, while that man sought to do what several had tried and failed to do, infiltrate the Odessa.

To observe him and measure his success, to note the persons he contacted and was passed on to, check on his findings, ascertain if the German could trace the recruiter of the new wave of German scientists headed for Egypt to work on the rockets. Never to expose himself, never to take matters into his own hands. Then to report back with the sum total of what the young German had found out before he was “blown” or discovered, one of which was bound to happen. lie would do it; be did not have to enjoy doing it, that was not part of the requirement. Fortunately, no one required that he like becoming a German again. No one asked him to enjoy mixing with Germans, speaking their language, smiling and joking with them. Had this been asked, he would have refused the job. For he hated them all, the young reporter he was ordered to follow included. Nothing, he was certain, would ever change that.

The following day Oster and Miller had their last visit from Leon. Apart from Leon and Motti, there was a new man, sun-tanned and fit-looking, much younger than the others. Miller adjudged the new man to be in his midthirties. He was introduced simply as Josef. He said nothing throughout.

“By the way,” Motti told Miller, “I drove your car up here today. I’ve left it in a public parking lot down in the town, by the market square.” He tossed Miller the keys, adding, “Don’t use it when you go to meet the Odessa. For one thing, it’s too noticeable; for another, you’re supposed to be a bakery worker on the run after being spotted and identified as a former camp guard. Such a man would not have a Jaguar.

When you go, travel by rail.” Miller nodded his agreement, but privately he regretted being separated from his beloved Jaguar.

“Right. Here is your driving license, complete with your photograph as you now look. You can tell anyone who asks that you drive a Volkswagen but you have left it in Bremen, as the number could identify you to the police.” Miller scanned the driving license. It showed himself with his short hair but no mustache. The one he now had could simply be explained as a precaution, grown since he was identified.

“The man who, unknown to him, is your guarantor, left from Bremerhaven on a cruise ship on the morning tide. This is the former SS colonel, now a bakery-owner and your former employer. His name is Joachim Eberhardt.

Here is a letter from him to the man you are going to see. The paper is genuine, taken from his office. The signature is a perfect forgery. The letter tells its recipient that you are a good former SS man, reliable, now fallen on misfortune after being recognized, and it asks the recipient to help you acquire a new set of papers and a new identity.” Leon passed the letter across to Miller. He read it and put it back in its envelope.

“Now seal it,” said Leon.

Miller did so. “Who’s the man I have to present myself to?” he asked.

Leon held out a sheet of paper with a name and address on it. “This is the man,” he said. “He lives in Nuremberg. We’re not certain what he was in the war, for he almost certainly has a new name. However, of one thing we are quite certain. He is very high up in the Odessa. He may have met Eberhardt, who is a big wheel in the Odessa in North Germany. So here is a photograph of Eberhardt the baker. Study it, in case your man asks for a description of him from you. Got that?” Miller looked at Eberhardt’s photograph and nodded.

“When you are ready, I suggest a wait of a few days until Eberhardt’s ship is beyond the reach of ship-to-shore radio-telephone. We don’t want the man you will see to get through a telephone call to Eberhardt while the ship is still off the German coast. Wait till it’s in mid-Atlantic. I think you should probably present yourself on next’ Thursday morning.” Miller nodded.

“All right. Thursday it is.”

“Two last things,” said Leon. “Apart from trying to trace Roschmann, which is your desire, we also would like some information. We want to know who is now recruiting scientists to go to Egypt and develop Nasser’s rockets for him. The recruiting is being done by the Odessa, here in Germany. We need to know specifically who the new chief recruiting officer is.

Secondly, stay in touch. Use public telephones and phone this number.” He passed a piece of paper across to Miller. “The number will always be manned, even if I am not there. Report in whenever you get anything.” Twenty minutes later, the group was gone.

In the back seat of the car on their way back to Munich, Leon and Josef sat side by side, the Israeli agent hunched in his comer and silent. As they left the twinkling lights of Bayreuth behind them Leon nudged Josef with his elbow. “Why so gloomy?” he asked. “Everything is going fine.” Josef glanced at him.

“How reliable do you reckon this man Miller?” he asked.

“Reliable? He’s the best chance we have ever had for penetrating the Odessa. You heard Oster. He can pass for a former SS man in any company, provided he keeps his head.” Josef retained his doubts.

“My brief was to watch him at all times,” he grumbled. “I ought to be sticking to him when he moves, keeping an eye on him, reporting back on the men he is introduced to and their position in the Odessa. I wish I’d never agreed to let him go off alone and check in by phone when he sees fit. Supposing he doesn’t check in?” Leon’s anger was barely controlled. It was evident they had been through this argument before.

“Now, listen one more time. This man is my discovery. His infiltration into the Odessa was my idea. He’s my agent. I’ve waited years to get someone where he is now-a non-Jew. I’m not having him exposed by someone tagging along behind him.”

“He’s an amateur. I’m a pro,” growled the agent.

“He’s also an Aryan,” riposted Leon. “By the time he’s outlived his usefulness, I hope he’ll have given us the names of the top ten Odessa men in Germany. Then we go to work on them one by one. Among them, one must be the recruiter of the rocket scientists. Don’t worry, we’ll find him, and the names of the scientists he intends to send to Cairo.”

Back in Bayreuth, Miller stared out of the window at the falling snow.

Privately he had no intention of checking in by phone, for he had no interest in tracing recruited rocket scientists. He still had only one objective-Eduard Roschmann.