The Odessa File

14

TO LOOK at him, there was nothing about Klaus Winzer to suggest he had ever been in the SS. For one thing, he was weft below the required height of six feet; for another, he was nearsighted. At the age of forty, he was plump and pale, with fuzzy blond hair and a diffident manner.

In fact he had had one of the strangest careers of any man to have worn the uniform of the SS. Born in 1924, he was the son of a certain Johann Winzer, a pork butcher of Wiesbaden, a large, boisterous man who from the early twenties onward was a trusting follower of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. From his earliest days Klaus could remember his father coming home from street battles with the Communists and Socialists.

Klaus took after his mother, and to his father’s disgust grew up small, weak, shortsighted, and peaceful.

He hated violence, sports, and belonging to the Hitler Youth. At only one thing did he excel: from his early teens he fell completely in love with the art of handwriting and the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, an activity his disgusted father regarded as an occupation for sissies.

With the coming of the Nazis, the pork butcher flourished, obtaining as a reward for his earlier services to the Party the exclusive contract to supply meat to the local SS barracks. He mightily admired the strutting SS youths and devoutly hoped he might one day see his own son wearing the black and silver of the Schutzstaffel.

Klaus showed no such inclination, preferring to spend his time poring over his manuscripts, experimenting with colored inks and beautiful lettering.

The war came, and in the spring of 1942 Klaus turned eighteen, the draft age. In contrast to his hamfisted, brawling, Jew-hating father, he was small, pallid, and shy. Failing even to pass the medical then required for a desk job with the Army, Klaus was sent home from the draft board. For his father it was the last straw.

Johann Winzer took the train to Berlin to see an old friend from his street-fighting days who had since risen high in the ranks of the SS, in the hopes the man might intercede for his son and obtain an entry into some branch of service to the Reich. The man was as helpful as he could be, which was not much, and asked if there was anything the young Klaus could do well. Shamefacedly his father admitted he could write illuminated manuscripts.

The man promised he would do what he could, but meanwhile he asked if Klaus would prepare an illuminated address on parchment in honor of a certain SS Major Fritz Suhren.

Back in Wiesbaden, the young Klaus did as he was asked, and at a ceremony in Berlin a week later this manuscript was presented to Suhren by his colleagues. Suhren, then the commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was being sent to take over command of the even more notorious Ravensbruck.

Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.

At the handing-over ceremony in the RSHA headquarters in Berlin, everyone admired the beautifully prepared manuscript, and not least a certain SS Lieutenant Alfred Naujocks. This was the man who had carried out the mock attack on Gleiwitz radio station on the German-Polish border in August 1939, leaving the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in German Army uniforms as “proof” of the Polish attack on Germany, Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland the following week.

Naujocks asked who had done the manuscript, and, on being told, he requested the young Klaus Winzer be brought to Berlin.

Before he knew what was happening, Klaus Winzer was inducted into the SS, without any formal training period, made to swear the oath of loyalty and another oath of secrecy, and told he would be transferred to a top-secret Reich project. The butcher of Wiesbaden bewildered, was in seventh heaven.

The project involved was then being carried out under the auspices of the RSHA, Amt Six, Section F, in a workshop in Delbruckstrasse, Berlin.

Basically it was quite simple. The SS was trying to forge hundreds of thousands of British P-5 notes and American $100 bills. The paper was being made in the Reich banknote paper factory at Spechthausen, outside Berlin, and the job of the workshop in Delbruckstrasse was to try and get the right watermarks for British and American currency. It was for his knowledge of papers and inks that they wanted Klaus Winzer.

The idea was to flood Britain and America with phony money, thus ruining the economies of both countries. In early 1943, when the watermark for the British fivers had been achieved, the project of making the printing plates was transferred to Block 19, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Jewish and nonJewish graphologists and graphic artists worked under the direction of the SS. The job of Winzer was quality control, for the SS did not trust its prisoners not to make a deliberate error in their work.

Within two years Klaus Winzer had been taught by his charges everything they knew, and that was enough to make him a forger extraordinary. Toward the end of 1944 the project in Block 19 was also being used to prepare forged identity cards for the SS officers to use after the collapse of Germany.

In the early spring of 1945 the private little world, happy in its way when contrasted with the devastation then overtaking Germany, was brought to an end.

The whole operation, commanded by a certain SS Captain Bernhard Krilger, was ordered to leave Sachsenhausen and transfer itself into the remote mountains of Austria and continue the good work. The group drove south and set up the forgery again in the deserted brewery of Redl-Zipf in Upper Austria. A few days before the end of the war, a brokenhearted Klaus

Winzer stood weeping on the edge of a lake as millions of pounds and billions of dollars in his beautiful forged currency were dumped into the lake.

He went back to Wiesbaden and home. To his astonishment, having never lacked for a meal in the SS, he found the German civilians almost starving in that summer of 1945. The Americans now occupied Wiesbaden, and although they had plenty to eat, the Germans were nibbling at crusts. His father, by now a lifelong anti-Nazi, had come down in the world. Where once his shop had been stocked with hams, only a single string of sausages hung from the rows of gleaming hooks.

Klaus’s mother explained to him that all food had to be bought on ration cards issued by the Americans.

In amazement Klaus looked at the ration cards, noted they were locally printed on fairly cheap paper, took a handful, and retired to his room for a few days. When he emerged, it was to hand over to his astonished mother sheets of American ration cards, enough to feed them all for six months.

“But they’re forged,” gasped his mother.

Klaus explained patiently what by then he sincerely believed: they were not forged, just printed on a different machine.

His father backed Klaus. “Are you saying, foolish woman, that our son’s ration cards are inferior to the Yankee ration cards?” The argument was unanswerable, the more so when they sat down to a four-course meal that night.

A month later Klaus Winzer met Otto Klops, flashy, self-assured, the king of the black market of Wiesbaden, and they were in business. Winzer turned out endless quantities of ration cards, gasoline coupons, zonal border passes, driving licenses, United States military passes, PX cards; Klops used them to buy food, gasoline, truck tires, nylon stockings, soap, cosmetics, and clothing, keeping a part of the booty to enable him and the Winzers to live well, selling the rest at black-market prices. Within thirty months, by the summer of 1948,

Klaus Winzer was a rich man. In his bank account reposed five million Reichsmarks.

To his horrified mother he explained his simple philosophy. “A document is not either genuine or forged; it is either efficient or inefficient. If a pass is supposed to get you past a checkpoint, and it gets you past the checkpoint, it is a good document.” In October 1948 came the second dirty trick played on Klaus Winzer. The authorities reformed the currency, substituting the new Deutschmark for the old Reichsmark.

But instead of giving one for one, they simply abolished the Reichsmark and gave everyone the flat sum of 1000 new marks. He was mined. Once again his fortune was mere useless paper.

The populace, no longer needing the black-marketeers as goods came on the open market, denounced Klops, and Winzer had to flee. Taking one of his own zonal passes, he drove to the headquarters of the British Zone at Hanover and applied for a job in the passport office of the British Military Government.

His references from the United States authorities at Wiesbaden, signed by a full colonel of the USAF, were ‘excellent. They should have been; he had written them himself. The British major who interviewed him for the job put down his cup of tea and told the applicant, “I do hope you realize the importance of people having proper documentation on them at all times.” With complete sincerity Winzer assured the major that he did indeed. Two months later came his lucky break. He was alone in a beer hall, sipping a beer, when a man got into conversation with him. The man’s name was Herbert Molders. He confided to Winzer he was being sought by the British for war crimes and needed to get out of Germany. But only the British could supply passports to Germans, and he dared not apply. Winzer murmured that it might be arranged but would cost money.

To his amazement, Molders produced a genuine diamond necklace. He explained that he had been in a concentration camp, and one of the Jewish inmates bad tried to buy his freedom with the family jewelry.

Molders had taken the jewelry, ensured that the Jew was in the first party to the gas chambers, and against orders had kept the booty.

A week later, armed with a photograph of Molders, Winzer prepared the passport. He did not even forge it. He did not need to.

The system at the passport office was simple. In Section One, applicants turned up with all their documentation and filled out forms. Then they went away, leaving their documents for study. Section Two examined the birth certificates, ID cards, driving licenses, etc., for possible forgery, checked the war criminals wanted list, and, if the application was approved, passed the documents, accompanied by a signed approval from Head of Department, to Section Three. Section Three, on receipt of the note of approval from Section Two, took a blank passport from the safe where it was stored, filled it out, stuck in the applicant’s photograph, and gave the passport to the applicant, who presented himself a week later.

Winzer got himself transferred to Section Three. Quite simply, he filled out an application form for Molders in a new name, wrote out an “Application Approved” slip from the head of Section Two, and forged that British officer’s signature.

He walked through into Section Two and picked up the nineteen application forms and approval slips waiting for collection, slipped the Molders application form and approval slip among them, and took the sheaf to Major Johnstone. Johnstone checked that there were twenty approval slips, went to his safe, took out twenty blank passports, and handed them to Winzer.

Winzer duly filled them out, gave them the official stamp, and handed nineteen to the waiting nineteen happy applicants. The twentieth went into his pocket. Into the filing cabinet went twenty application forms to match the twenty issued passports.

That evening he handed Molders his new passport and took the diamond necklace. He had found his new m6tier.

In May 1949 West Germany was founded, and the passport office was handed over to the state government of Lower Saxony, capital city Hanover.

Winzer stayed on. He did not have any more clients. He did not need them.

Each week, armed with a full-face portrait of some nonentity bought from a studio photographer, Winzer carefully filled out a passport-application form, attached the photograph to the form, forged an approval slip with the signature of the head of Section Two (by now a German), and went to see the head of Section Three with a sheaf of application forms and approval slips. So long as the numbers tallied, he got a bunch of blank passports in return. All but one went to the genuine applicants. The last blank passport went into his pocket. Apart from that, all he needed was the official stamp. To steal it would have aroused suspicion. He took it for one night and by morning had a casting of the stamp of the passport office of the state government of Lower Saxony.

In sixty weeks he had sixty blank passports. He resigned his job, blushingly acknowledged the praise of his superiors for his careful, meticulous work as a clerk in their employ, left Hanover, sold the diamond necklace in Antwerp, and started a nice little printing business in Osnabruck, at a time when gold and dollars could buy anything well below market price.

He would never have got involved with the Odessa if Molders had kept his mouth shut. But once arrived in Madrid and among friends, Molders boasted of his contact who could provide genuine West German passports in a false name to anyone who asked.

In late 1950 a “friend” came to see Winzer, who had just started work as a printer in Osnabruck. There was nothing Winzer could do but agree.

From then on, whenever an Odessa man was in trouble, Winzer supplied the new passport.

The system was perfectly safe. All Winzer needed was a photograph of the man and his age. He had kept a copy of the personal details written into each of the application forms by then reposing in the archive in Hanover. He would take a blank passport and fill in the personal details already written on one of those application forms from 1949. The name was usually a common one, the place of birth usually by then far behind the Iron Curtain, where no one would check, the date of birth would almost correspond to the real age of the SS applicant, and then he would stamp it with the stamp of Lower Saxony. The recipient would sign his new passport in his own handwriting with his new name when he received it.

Renewals were easy. After five years the wanted SS man would simply apply for renewal at the state capital of any state other than Lower Saxony. The clerk in Bavaria, for example, would check with Hanover: “Did you issue a passport number so-and-so in nineteen fifty to one Walter Schumann, place of birth such and date of birth such?” In Hanover another clerk would check the records in the files and reply, “Yes.” The Bavarian clerk, reassured by his Hanoverian colleague that the original passport was genuine, would issue a new one, stamped by Bavaria.

So long as the face on the application form in Hanover was not compared with the face in the passport presented in Munich, there could be no problem. And comparison of faces never took place. Clerks rely on forms correctly filled in, correctly approved, and passport numbers, not faces.

Only after 1955, more than five years after the original issuing of the Hanover passport, would immediate renewal be necessary for the holder of a Winzer passport. Once the passport was obtained, the wanted SS man could acquire a fresh driving license, social-security card, bank account, credit card, in short an entire new identity.

By the spring of 1964 Winzer had supplied forty-two passports out of his stock of sixty originals.

But the cunning little man had taken one precaution. It occurred to him that one day the Odessa might wish to dispose of his services, and of him. So he kept a record. He never knew the real names of his clients; to make out a false passport in a new name, it was not necessary, The point was immaterial. He took a copy of every photograph sent to him, pasted the original in the passport he was sending back, and kept the copy. Each photograph was pasted onto a sheet of cartridge paper. Beside it was typed the new name, the address (addresses are required on German passports), and the new passport number.

These sheets were kept in a file. The file was his life insurance. There was one in his house, and a copy with a lawyer in Zurich. If his life were ever threatened by the Odessa, he would tell them about the file and warn them that if anything happened to him the lawyer in Zurich would send the copy to the German authorities.

The West Germans, armed with a photograph, would soon compare it with their rogues’ gallery of wanted Nazis. The passport number alone, checked quickly with each of the sixteen state capitals, would reveal the domicile of the holder. Exposure would take no more than a week. It was a foolproof scheme to ensure that Klaus Winzer stayed alive and in good health.

This, then, was the man who sat quietly munching his toast and jam, sipping his coffee, and glancing through the front page of the Osnabruck Zeitung over breakfast at half past eight that Friday morning, when the phone rang. The voice at the other end was first peremptory, then reassuring.

“There is no question of your being in any trouble with us at all,” the Werwolf assured him. “It’s just this damn reporter. We have a tip that he’s coming to see you. It’s perfectly all right. We have one of our men coming up behind him, and the whole affair will be taken care of within the day. But you must get out of there within ten minutes. Now here’s what I want you to do….”

Thirty minutes later a very flustered Klaus Winzer had a small bag packed, cast an undecided glance in the direction of the safe where the file was kept, came to the conclusion he would not need it, and explained to a startled housemaid, Barbara, that he would not be going to the printing plant that morning.

On the contrary, he had decided to take a brief vacation in the Austrian Alps. A breath of fresh air-nothing like it to tone up the system.

Barbara stood on the doorstep open-mouthed as Winzees Kadett shot backward down the drive, swung out into the residential road in front of his house, and drove off. Ten minutes after nine o’clock he had reached the cloverleaf four miles west of the town, where the road climbed up to join the autobahn. As the Kadett shot up the incline to the motorway on one side, a black Jaguar was coming down the other side, heading into Osnabruck.

Miller found a filling station at the Saar Platz at the western entrance to the town. He pulled up by the pumps and climbed wearily out. His muscles ached and his neck felt as if it were locked solid. The wine he had drunk the evening before gave his mouth a taste like parrot droppings.

“Fill her up. Super,” he told the attendant. “Have you got a pay phone?”

“In the comer,” said the boy.

On the way over, Miller noticed a coffee machine and took a steaming cup into the phone booth with him. He flicked through the phone book for Osnabruck. There were several Winzers, but only one Klaus. The name was repeated twice. Against the first entry was the word “Printer.” The second Klaus Winzer had the abbreviation “res.” for residence against it.

It was nine-twenty. Working hours. He rang the printing plant.

The man who answered was evidently the foreman. “I’m sorry, he’s not in yet,” said the voice. “Usually he’s here at nine sharp. He’ll no doubt be along soon. Call back in half an hour.” Miller thanked him and considered dialing the house. Better not. If Winzer was at home, Miller wanted him personally. He noted the address and left the booth.

“Where’s Westerberg?” he asked the pump attendant as he paid for the gas, noting that he had only 500 marks left of his savings. The boy nodded across to the north side of the road.

“That’s it. The posh suburb. Where all the rich people live.”

Miller bought a town plan as well and traced the street he wanted. It was barely ten minutes away.

The house was obviously prosperous, and the whole area spoke of well-to-do professional people living in comfortable surroundings. He left the Jaguar at the end of the drive and walked to the front door.

The maid who answered it was in her late teens and very pretty. She smiled brightly at him.

“Good morning. I’ve come to see Herr Winzer,” he told her.

“Oooh, he’s left, Sir. You just missed him by about twenty minutes.” Miller recovered. Doubtless Winzer was on his way to the printing plant and had been held up.

“Oh, what a pity. I’d hoped to catch him before he went to work,” he said.

“He hasn’t gone to work, Sir. Not this morning. He’s gone off on vacation,” replied the girl helpfully.

Miller fought down a rising feeling of panic. “Vacation? That’s odd at this time of year. Besides”—he invented quickly—“we had an appointment this morning. He asked me to come here especially.”

“Oh, what a shame,” said the girl, evidently distressed. “He went off very suddenly. He got this phone call in the library; then he went upstairs. ‘Barbara,’ he said—that’s my name—‘Barbara, I’m going on a vacation in Austria. I must for a week,’ he said. Well, I hadn’t heard any plans for a vacation. He told me to call the plant and say he’s not coming in for a week. Then off he went. That’s not like Herr Winzer at all. He’s usually so quiet.” Inside Miller, the hope began to die. “Did he say where he was going?” he asked.

“No. Nothing. Just said he was going to the Austrian Alps.

“No forwarding address? No way of getting in touch with him?”

“No, that’s what’s so strange. I mean, what about the printing plant? I just called them before you came. They were very surprised, with all the orders they had to be completed.” Miller calculated fast. Winzer had a half-hour’s start on him. Driving at eighty miles an hour, he would have covered forty miles. Miller could keep up a hundred, overtaking at twenty miles an hour. That would mean two hours before he saw the tail of Winzer’s car. Too long.

Winzer could be anywhere in two hours. Besides, there was no proof he was heading south to Austria.

“Then could I speak to Frau Winzer, please?” he asked.

Barbara giggled and looked at him archly. “There isn’t any Frau Winzer,” she said. “Don’t you know Herr Winzer at all?”

“No, I never met him.”

“Well, he’s not the marrying kind, really. I mean very nice, but not really interested in women, if you know what I mean.”

“So he lives here alone, then?”

“Well, except for me, I mean, I live in. It’s quite safe. From that point of view.” She giggled.

“I see. Thank you,” said Miller and turned to go.

“You’re welcome,” said the girl, and watched him go down the drive and climb into the Jaguar, which had already caught her attention. What with Herr Winzer being away, she wondered if she might be able to ask a nice young man home for the night before her employer got back. She watched the Jaguar drive away with a roar of exhaust, sighed for what might have been, and closed the door.

Miller felt the weariness creeping over him, accentuated by the last and, so far as he was concerned, final disappointment. He surmised Bayer had wriggled free from his bonds and used the hotel telephone in Stuttgart to call Winzer and warn. him. He had got so close, fifteen minutes from his target, and almost made it. Now he felt only the need for sleep.

He drove past the medieval wall of the old city, followed the map to the Theodor Heuss Platz, parked the Jaguar in front of the station, and checked into the Hohenzollern Hotel across the square.

He was lucky; they had a room available at once, so he went upstairs, undressed, and lay on the bed.

There was something nagging in the back of his mind, some point he had not covered, some tiny detail of a question he had left unasked. It was still unsolved when he fell asleep at half past ten.

Mackensen made it to the center of Osnabruck at half past one. On the way into town he had checked the house in Westerberg, but there was no sign of a Jaguar. He wanted to call the Werwolf before he went there, in case there was more news.

By chance the post office in Osnabruck flanks one side of the Theodor Heuss Platz. A whole comer and one side of the square is taken up by the main railway station, and a third side is occupied by the Hohenzollern Hotel. As Mackensen parked by the post office, his face split in a grin.

The Jaguar he sought was in front of the station.

The Werwolf was in a better mood. “It’s all right. Panic over for the moment,” he told the killer. “I reached the forger in time, and he got out of town. I just phoned his house again. It must have been the maid who answered. She told me her employer had left barely twenty minutes before a young man with a black sports car came inquiring after him.”

“I’ve got some news too,” said Mackensen. “The Jaguar is parked right here on the square in front of me. Chances are he’s sleeping it off in the hotel. I can take him right here UI the hotel room. I’ll use the silencer.”

“Hold it, don’t be in too much of a hurry,” warned the Werwolf. “I’ve been thinking. For one thing, he must not get it inside Osnabruck town. The maid has seen him and his car.

She would probably report to the police. That would bring attention to our forger, and he’s the panicking kind. I can’t have him involved. The maid’s testimony would cast a lot of suspicion on him. First he gets a phone call, then he dashes out and vanishes, then a young man calls to see him, then the man is shot in a hotel room. It’s too much.” Mackensen’s brow was furrowed. “You’re right,” he said at length. “I’ll have to take him when he leaves.”

“He’ll probably stick around for a few hours, checking for a lead on the forger. He won’t get one. There’s one other thing. Does Miller carry a document case?”

“Yes,” said Mackensen. “He had it with him as he left the cabaret last night. And took it with him when he went back to his hotel room.”

“So why not leave it locked in the trunk of his car? Why not in his hotel room?

Because it’s important to him. You follow me?”

“Yes,” said Mackensen.

“The point is,” said the Werwolf, “he has now seen me and knows my name and address. He knows of the connection with Bayer and the forger. And reporters write things down. That document case is now vital. Even if Miller dies, the case must not fall into the hands of the police.”

“I’ve got you. You want the case as well?”

“Either get it or destroy it,” said the voice from Nuremberg.

Mackensen thought for a moment. “The best way to do both would be for me to plant a bomb in the car.

Linked to the suspension, so it will detonate when he hits a bump at high speed on the autobahn.”

“Excellent,” said the Werwolf. “Will the case be destroyed?”

“With the bomb I have in mind, the car, Miller, and the case will go up in flames and be completely gutted. Moreover, at high speed it looks like an accident. The gas tank exploded, the witnesses will say. What a pity.”

“Can you do it?” asked the Werwolf.

Mackensen grinned. The killing kit in the trunk of his car was an assassin’s dream. It included nearly a pound of plastic explosive and two electric detonators.

“Sure,” he growled, “no problem. But to get at the car I’ll have to wait until dark.” He stopped talking, gazed out of the window of the post office, and barked into the phone, “Call you back.” He called back in five minutes. “Sorry about that. I just saw Miller, attaché case in hand, climbing into his car. He drove off. I checked the hotel, and he’s registered there all right. He’s left his traveling bags, so he’ll be back. No panic, I’ll get on with the bomb and plant it tonight.”

Miller had waked up just before one, feeling refreshed and somewhat elated. In sleeping he had remembered what was troubling him. He drove back to Winzer’s house.

The maid was plainly pleased to see him. “Hello. You again?” She beamed.

“I was just passing on my way back home,” said Miller, “and I wondered, how long have you been in service here?”

“Oh, about ten months. Why?”

“Well, with Herr Winzer not being the marrying kind, and you being so young, who looked after him before you came?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. His housekeeper, Fraulein Wendel.”

“Where is she now?”

“Oh, in the hospital. I’m afraid she’s dying. Cancer of the breast, you know, Terrible thing. That’s what makes it so funny that Herr Winzer dashed off like that. He goes to visit her every day. He’s devoted to her. Not that they ever-well, you know-did anything, but she was with him for a long time, since nineteen fifty, I think, and he thinks the world of her. He’s always saying to me, ‘Fräulein Wendel did it this way,’ and so on.”

“What hospital is she in?” asked Miller.

“I forget now. No, wait a minute. It’s on the telephone notepad. I’ll get it.” She was back in two minutes and gave him the name of the clinic, an exclusive private sanatorium just beyond the outskirts of the town.

Finding his way by the map, Miller presented himself at the clinic just after three in the afternoon.

Mackensen spent the early afternoon buying the ingredients for his bomb.

“The secret of sabotage,” his instructor had once told him, “is to keep the requirements simple. The sort of thing you can buy in any shop.” From a hardware store he bought a soldering iron and a small stick of solder; a roll of black insulating tape; a yard of thin wire and a pair of cutters; a one foot hacksaw blade and a tube of instant glue. In an electrician’s he acquired a nine-volt transistor battery; a small bulb, one inch in diameter; and two lengths of fine single-strand, five-amp plastic-coated wire, each three yards long, one colored red and the other blue. He was a neat man and liked to keep positive and negative terminals distinct. A stationer’s supplied him with five erasers of the large land, one inch wide, two inches long, and a quarter of an inch thick. In a drugstore he bought two p of condoms, each containing three rubber sheaths, and from a high-class grocer he got a canister of fine tea. It was a 250-gram can with a tight-fitting lid. As a good workman, he hated the idea of his explosive getting wet, and the tea can’s lid would keep out the air, let alone the moisture-with his purchases made, he took a room in the Hohenzollern Hotel overlooking the square, so that he could keep an eye on the parking area, to which he was certain Miller would return, while he worked.

Before entering the hotel, he took from his trunk half a pound of the plastic explosive, squashy stuff like children’s plasticene, and one of the electric detonator. Seated at the table in front of the window keeping half an eye on the square, with a pot of strong black coffee to stave off his tiredness, he went to work.

It was a simple bomb he made. First he emptied the tea down the toilet and kept the can only. In the fid he jabbed a hole with the handle of the wire clippers. He took the nine-foot length of red wire and cut a ten-inch length off it.

One end of this short length of red-coated wire he spot-soldered to the positive terminal of the battery.

To the negative terminal he soldered one end of the long, blue-colored wire. To ensure that these wires never touched each other, he drew one down each side of the battery and whipped both wires and battery together with insulating tape.

The other end of the short red wire was twirled around the contact point on the detonator. To the same contact point was fixed one end of the other, eight-foot piece of red wire.

He deposited the battery and its wires in the base of the square tea can, embedded the detonator deep into the plastic explosive, and smoothed the explosive into the can on top of the battery until the can was full.

A near-circuit had now been set up. A wire went from the battery to the detonator. Another went from the detonator to nowhere, its bare end in space. From the battery, another wire went to nowhere, its bare end in space but when these two exposed ends, one of the eight-foot-long red wire, the other of the blue wire, touched each other, the circuit would be complete. The charge from the battery would fire the detonator, which would explode with a sharp crack. But the crack would be lost in the roar as the plastic went off, enough to demolish two or three of the hotels bedrooms.

The remaining device was the trigger mechanism. For this he wrapped his hands in handkerchiefs and bent the hacksaw blade until it snapped in the middle, leaving him with two six-inch lengths, each one perforated at one end by the small hole that usually fixes a mackinaw blade to its frame.

He piled the five erasers one on top of another so that together they made a block of rubber. Using this to separate the halves of the blade, he bound them along the upper and lower side of the block of rubber, so that the six-inch lengths of steel stuck out, parallel to each other and one and a quarter inches apart. In outline they looked rather like the jaws of a crocodile. The rubber block was at one end of the lengths of steel, so four inches of the blades were separated only by air. To make sure there was a little more resistance than air to prevent their touching, Mackensen lodged the light bulb between the open jaws, fixing it in place with a generous blob of glue. Glass does not conduct electricity.

He was almost ready. He threaded the two lengths of wire, one red and one blue, which protruded from the can of explosive through the hole in the lid and replaced the lid on the can, pushing it firmly back into place.

Of the two pieces of wire, be soldered the end of one to the upper hacksaw blade, the other to the lower blade. The bomb was now live.

Should the trigger ever be trodden on, or subjected to sudden pressure, the bulb would shatter, the two lengths of sprung steel would close together, and the electric circuit from the battery would be complete.

There was one last precaution. To prevent the exposed hacksaw blades from ever touching the same piece of metal at the same time, which would also complete the circuit, he smoothed all six condoms over the trigger, one on top of another, until the device was protected from outside detonation by six layers of thin but insulating rubber. That at least would prevent accidental detonation.

His bomb complete, he stowed it in the bottom of the wardrobe, along with the binding wire, the clippers and the rest of the sticky tape, which he would need to fit it to Miller’s car. Then he ordered more coffee to stay awake and settled down at the window to wait for Mile; a return to the parking lot in the center of the square. He did not know where Miller had gone, nor did he care. The Werwolf had assured him there were no leads he could pick up to give him the whereabouts of the forger, and that was that. As a good technician, Mackensen was prepared to do his job and leave the rest to those in charge. He was prepared to be patient. He knew Miller would return sooner or later.