The Odessa File

17

THE MORNING had turned out gray and overcast after a brief and brilliant dawn which he had not seen.

Beneath the clouds the snow glittered under the trees and a wind keened off the mountains.

The road led upward, winding out of town and immediately becoming lost in the sea of trees that make up the Romberg Forest. After he had cleared town, the carpet of snow along the road was almost virgin, only one set of tracks running parallel through it, where an early-morning visitor to Kenigstein for church service had headed an hour before.

Miller took the branch-off toward Glashutten, skirted the flanks of the towering Feldberg mountain, and took a road signposted as leading to the village of Schmitten. On the flanks of the mountain the wind howled through the pines, its pitch rising to a near-scream among the snow-clogged boughs.

Although Miller had never bothered to think about it, it was once out of these and other oceans of pine and beech that the old Germanic tribes had swarmed to be checked by Caesar at the Rhine. Later, converted to Christianity, they had paid lip service by day to the Prince of Peace, dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power. It was this ancient atavism, the worship in the dark of the private gods of screaming endless trees, that Hitler had ignited with a magic touch.

After another twenty minutes of careful driving, Miller checked his map again and began to look for a gateway off the road onto a private estate.

When he found it, it was a barred gate held in place by a steel catch, with a notice board to one side saying: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT.

Leaving the engine running, he climbed out and swung the gate inward.

Miller entered the estate and headed up the driveway. The snow was untouched, and he kept in low gear, for there was only frozen sand beneath the snow.

Two hundred yards up the track, a branch from a massive oak tree had come down in the night, overladen with half a ton of snow. The branch had crashed into the undergrowth to the right, and some of its twigs lay on the track. It had also brought down a thin black pole that had stood beneath it, and this lay square across the drive.

Rather than get out and move it, he drove carefully forward, feeling the bump as the pole passed under the front and then the rear wheels.

Clear of the obstruction, be moved on toward the house and emerged into a clearing, which contained the villa and its gardens, fronted by a circular area of gravel. He halted the car in front of the main door, climbed out, and rang the bell.

While Miller was climbing out of his car, Klaus Winzer made his decision and called the Werwolf. The Odessa chief was brusque and irritable, for it was long past the time he should have heard on the news of a sports car being blown to pieces, apparently by an exploding gas tank, on the autobahn south of Osnabruck. But as he listened to the man on the other end of the telephone, his mouth tightened in a thin, hard line.

“You did what? You fool, you unbelievable, stupid little cretin. Do you know what’s going to happen to you if that file is not recovered?…” Alone in his study in Osnabruck, Klaus Winzer replaced the receiver after the last sentences from the Werwolf came over the wire, and went back to his desk. He was quite calm. Twice already life had played him the worst of tricks: first the destruction of his war work in the lakes; then the ruin of his paper fortune in 1948. And now this. ‘Faking an old but serviceable Luger from the bottom drawer, he placed the end in his mouth and shot himself. The lead slug that tore his head apart was not a forgery.

The Werwolf sat and gazed in something close to horror at the silent telephone. He thought of the men for whom it had been necessary to obtain passports through Maus Winzer, and the fact that each of them was a wanted man on the list of those destined for arrest and trial if caught. The exposure of the dossier would lead to a welter of prosecutions that could only jerk the population out of its growing apathy toward the que9tion of continuing pursuit of wanted SS men, regalvanize the hunting agencies…. The prospect was appalling.

But his first priority was the protection of Roschmann, one of those he knew to be on the list taken from Winzer. Three times he dialed the Frankfurt area code, followed by the private number of the house on the hill, and three times he got a busy signal. Finally he tried through the operator, who told him the line must be out of order.

Instead, he rang the Hohenzollern Hotel in Osnabruck and caught Mackensen about to leave. In a few sentences he told the killer of the latest disaster, and where Roschmann lived.

“It looks as if your bomb hasn’t worked,” he told him. “Get down there faster than you’ve ever driven,” he said. “Hide your car and stick close to Roschmann. There’s a bodyguard called Oskar as well. If Miller goes straight to the police with what he’s got, we’ve all had it. But if he comes to Roschmann, take him alive and make him talk. We must know what he’s done with those papers before he dies.” Mackensen glanced at his road map inside the phone booth and estimated the distance.

“I’ll be there at one o’clock,” he said.

The door opened at the second ring, and a gust of warm air flowed out of the hall. The man who stood in front of Miller had evidently come from his study, the door of which Miller could see standing open and leading off the hallway.

Years of good living had put weight on the once lanky SS officer. His face had a flush, either from drinking or from the country air, and his hair was gray at the sides. He looked the picture of middle-aged, upper-middleclass, prosperous good health. But although different in detail, the face was the same Tauber had seen and described.

The man surveyed Miller without enthusiasm. “Yes?” he said.

It took Miller another ten seconds before he could speak. What he had rehearsed just went out of his head.

“My name is Miller,” he said, “and yours is Eduard Roschmann.” At the mention of both names, something flickered through the eyes of the man in front of him, but iron control kept his face muscles straight.

“This is preposterous,” he said at length. “I’ve never heard of the man you are talking about.” Behind the façade of calm, the former SS officer’s mind was racing.

Several times in his life since 1945 he had survived through sharp thinking in a crisis. He recognized the name of Miller well enough and recalled his conversation with the Werwolf weeks before. His first instinct was to shut the door in Miller’s face, but he overcame it.

“Are you alone in the house?” asked Miller.

“Yes,” said Roschmann truthfully.

“Well go into your study,” said Miller flatly.

Roschmann made no objection, for he realized he was now forced to keep Miller on the premises and stall for time, until…

He turned on his heel and strode back across the hallway. Miller slammed the front door after him and was at Roschmann’s heels as they entered the study. It was a comfortable room, with a thick, padded door, which Miller closed behind him, and a log fire burning in the grate.

Roschmann stopped in the center of the room and turned to face Miller.

“Is your wife here?” asked Miller.

Roschmann shook his head. “She has gone away for the weekend to visit relatives,” he said. This much was true. She had been called away the previous evening at a moment’s notice and had taken the second car. The first car owned by the pair was, by ill luck, in the garage for repairs.

She was due back that evening.

What Roschmann did not mention, but what occupied his racing mind, was that his bulky, shaven-headed chauffeur-bodyguard, Oskar, had bicycled down to the village half an hour earlier to report that the telephone was out of order. He knew he had to keep Miller talking until the man returned.

When he turned to face Miller, the young reporter’s right hand held an automatic pointed straight at his belly.

Roschmann was frightened but covered it with bluster. “You threaten me with a gun in my own house?”

“Then call the police,” said Miller, nodding at the telephone on the writing desk. Roschmann made no move toward it.

“I see you still limp a little,” remarked Miller. “The orthopedic shoe almost disguises it, but not quite. The missing toes, lost in an operation in Rimini camp. The frostbite you got wandering through the fields of Austria caused that, didn’t it?” Roschmann’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he said nothing.

“You see, if the police come, they’ll identify you, Herr Direktor. The face is still the same, the bullet wound in the chest, the scar under the left armpit where you tried to remove the Waffen SS blood-group tattoo, no doubt. Do you really want to call the police?” Roschmann let out the air in his lungs in a long sigh. “What do you want, Miller?”

“Sit down,” said the reporter. “Not at the desk, there in the armchair, where I can see you. And keep your hands on the armrests. Don’t give me an excuse to shoot, because, believe me, I’d dearly love to.” Roschmann sat in the armchair, his eyes on the gun.

Miller perched on the edge of the desk, facing him. “So now we talk,” he said.

“About what?”

“About Riga. About eighty thousand people, men, women, and children, whom you had slaughtered up there.” Seeing he did not intend to use the gun, Roschmann began to regain his confidence. Some of the color returned to his face. He switched his gaze to the face of the younger man in front of him.

“That’s a lie. There were never eighty thousand disposed of in Riga.”

“Seventy thousand? Sixty?” asked Miller. “Do you really think it matters precisely how many thousand you killed.”

“That’s the point,” said Roschmann eagerly. “It doesn’t matter-not now, not then. Look, young man, I don’t know why you’ve come after me. But I can guess. Someone’s been filling your head with a lot of sentimental claptrap about so-called war crimes and suchlike. It’s all nonsense. Absolute nonsense. How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.”

“Then you were in the Army for military service?”

“Yes. One of the first national servicemen of the postwar army. Two years in uniform.”

“Well, then, you know what the Army is like. A man’s given orders; he obeys those orders. He doesn’t ask whether they are right or wrong. You know that as well as I do. All I did was to obey my orders.”

“Firstly, you weren’t a soldier,” said Miller quietly. “You were an executioner. Put more bluntly, a murderer, and a mass-murderer. So don’t compare yourself with a Soldier.”

“Nonsense,” said Roschmann earnestly. “It’s all nonsense. We were soldiers just like the rest. We obeyed our orders just like the rest. You young Germans are all the same. You don’t want to understand what it was like then.”

“So tell me, what was it like?” Roschmann, who had leaned forward to make his point, leaned back in the chair, almost at ease, the immediate danger past.

“What was it like? It was like ruling the world. Because we did rule the world, the Germans. We had beaten every army they could throw at us. For years they had looked down on us, we poor Germans, and we had shown them, yes, all of them, that we were a great people. You youngsters today don’t realize what it is to be proud of being a German.

“It lights a fire inside you. When the drums beat and the bands played, when the flags were waving and the whole nation was united behind one man, we could have marched to the ends of the world. That is greatness, young Miller, greatness your generation has never known and never will know. And we of the SS were the elite, still are the elite. Of course they hunt us down now, first the Allies and thon the wishy-washy old women of Bonn. Of course they want to crush us. Because they want to crush the greatness of Germany, which we represented and still do.

“They say a lot of stupid things about what happened then in a few camps a sensible world would long since have forgotten about. They make a big fuss because we had to clean up Europe from the pollution of this Jewish filth that impregnated every facet of German life and kept us down in the mud with them.

We had to do it, I tell you. It was a mere sideshow in the great design of a Germany and a German people, pure in blood and ideals, ruling the world as is their right, our right, Miller, our right and our destiny, if those hell-damned Britishers and the eternally stupid Americans had not stuck their prissy noses in. For make no bones about it, you may point that thing at me, but we are on the same side, young man, a generation between us, but still on the same side. For we are Germans, the greatest people in the world. And you would let your judgment of all this, of the greatness that once was Germany’s-and will be again one day-of the essential unity of us, all of us, the German people, you will let your judgment of all this be affected by what happened to a few miserable Jews?

Can’t you see, you poor misled young fool, that we are on the same side, you and me, the same side, the same people, the same destiny?” Despite the gun, he rose from his chair and paced the carpet between the desk and the window.

“You want proof of our greatness? Look at Germany today. Smashed to rubble in nineteen forty-five, utterly destroyed and prey to the barbarians from the east and the fools in the west. And now? Germany is rising again, slowly and surely, still lacking the essential discipline that we were able to give her, but increasing each year in her industrial and economic power. Yes, and military power. One day, when the last vestiges of the influence of the Allies of nineteen forty-five have been shaken off, we will be as mighty again as we ever were. It will take time, and a new leader, but the ideals will be the same, and the glory-yes, that will be the same too.

“And you know what brings this about? I will tell you, yes, I will tell you, young man. It’s discipline and management. Harsh discipline, the harsher the better, and management, our management, the most brilliant quality after courage that we possess. For we can manage things; we have shown that. Look at all this-you see all this? This house, this estate, the factory down in the Ruhr, mine and thousands like it, tens, hundreds of thousands, churning out power and strength each day, with each turn of the wheel another ounce of might to make Germany mighty once again.

“And who do you think did all this? You think people prepared to spend time mouthing platitudes over a few miserable Yids did all this? You think cowards and traitors trying to persecute good honest, patriotic German soldiers did all this? We did this, we brought this prosperity back to Germany, the same men as we had twenty, thirty years ago.”

He turned from the window and faced Miller, his eyes alight. But he also measured the distance from the farthest point of his pacing along the carpet to the heavy iron poker by the fire. Miller had noticed the glances.

“Now, you come here, a representative of the young generation, full of your idealism and your concern, and point a gun at me. Why not be idealistic for Germany, your own country, your own people? You think you represent the people, coming to hunt me down? You think that’s what they want, the people of Germany?”

Miller shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he said shortly.

“Well, there you are, then. If you call the police and turn me in to them, they might make a trial out of it. I say only ‘might’ because even that is not certain, so long afterward, with all the witnesses scattered or dead. So put your gun away and go home. Go home and read the true history of those days, learn that Germany’s greatness then and her prosperity today stem from patriotic Germans like me.”

Miller had sat through the tirade mute, observing with bewilderment and rising disgust the man who paced the carpet in front of him, seeking to convert him to the old ideology. He had wanted to say a hundred, a thousand things about the people he knew and the millions beyond them who did not want or see the necessity of purchasing glory at the price of slaughtering millions of other human beings. But the words did not come.

They never do when one needs them. So he just sat and stared until Roschmann had finished.

After some seconds of silence Miller asked, “Have you ever heard of a man called Tauber?”

“Who?”

“Salomon Tauber. He was a German too. Jewish. He was in Riga from the beginning to the end.”

Roschmann shrugged. “I can’t remember him. It was a long time ago. Who was he?”

“Sit down,” said Miller. “And this time stay seated.”

Roschmann shrugged impatiently and went back to the armchair. With his rising conviction that Miller would not shoot, his mind was concerned with the problem of trapping him before he could get away, rather than with an obscure and long-dead Jew.

“Tauber died in Hamburg on November twenty-second last year. He gassed himself. Are you listening?”

“Yes. If I must.”

“He left behind a diary. It was an account of his story, what happened to him, what you and others did to him, in Riga and elsewhere. But mainly in Riga. But he survived, be came back to Hamburg, and he lived for eighteen years, because he was convinced you were alive and would never stand trial.

I got hold of his diary. It was my starting point in finding you today, here, under your new name.”

“The diary of a dead man’s not evidence,” growled Roschmann.

“Not for a court, but enough for me.”

“And you really came here to confront me over the diary of a dead Jew?”

“No, not at all. There’s a page of that diary I want you to read.” Miller opened the diary at a certain page and pushed it into Roschmann’s lap.

“Pick it up,” he ordered, “and read it-aloud.”

Roschmann unfolded the sheet and began to read it. It was the passage in which Tauber described the murder by Roschmann of an unnamed German Army officer wearing the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster.

Roschmann reached the end of the passage and looked up. “So what?” he said, puzzled. “The man struck me. He disobeyed orders. I had the right to commandeer that ship to bring the prisoners back.”

Miller tossed a photograph onto Roschmann’s lap. “Is that the man you killed?” Roschmann looked at it and shrugged. “How should I know? It was twenty years ago.”

There was a slow ker-lick as Miller thumbed the hammer back and pointed the gun at Roschmann’s face. “Was that the man?”

Roschmann looked at the photograph again. “All right. So that was the man. So what?”

“That was my father,” said Miller.

The color drained out of Roschmann’s face as if a plug had been pulled.

His mouth dropped open; his gaze dropped to the gun barrel two feet from his face, and the steady hand behind it.

“Oh, dear God,” he whispered, “you didn’t come about the Jews at all.”

“No. I’m sorry for them, but not that sorry.”

“But how could you know, how could you possibly know from that diary that the man was your father? I never knew his name. This Jew who wrote the diary never knew. How did you know?”

“My father was killed on October eleventh, nineteen forty-four, in Ostland,” said Miller. “For twenty years that was all I knew. Then I read the diary. It was the same day, the same area, the two men had the same rank. Above all, both men wore the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, the highest award for bravery in the field. There weren’t all that many of those awarded, and very few to mere Army captains. It would have been millions to one against two similar officers dying in the same area on the same day.”

Roschmann knew he was up against a man whom no argument could influence.

He stared, as if mesmerized, at the gun. “You’re going to kill me. You mustn’t do that, not in cold blood.

You wouldn’t do that. Please, Miller, I don’t want to die.” Miller leaned forward and began to talk.

“Listen to me, you repulsive piece of dogshit. I’ve listened to you and your twisted mouthings till I’m sick to my guts. Now you’re going to listen to me while I make up my mind whether you die here or rot in some jail for the rest of your days.

“You had the nerve, the damned crass nerve, to tell me that you, you of all people, were a patriotic German. I’ll tell you what you are. You and your kind were and are the filthiest crap that was ever elevated from the gutters of this country to positions of power. And in twelve years you smeared my country with your dirt in a way that has never happened throughout our history.

“What you did sickened and revolted the whole of civilized mankind and left my generation a heritage of shame to live down that’s going to take us all the rest of our lives. You spat on Germany throughout your lives.

You bastards used Germany and the German people until they could not be used any more, and then you quit while the going was good. You brought us so low it would have been inconceivable before your crew came along-and I don’t mean in terms of bomb damage.

“You weren’t even brave. You were the most sickening cowards ever produced in Germany or Austria.

You murdered millions for your own profit and in the name of your maniac power-lust, and then you got out and left the rest of us in the shit. You ran away from the Russians, hanged and shot Army men to keep them fighting, and then disappeared and left me to carry the can back.

“Even if there could be any-oblivion about what you did to the Jews and the others, there can never be any forgetting that your bunch ran and hid like the dogs you are. You talk of patriotism; you don’t even know the meaning of the word. And as for daring to call Army soldiers and others who fought, really fought, for Germany, Kamerad, it’s a damned obscenity.

“I’ll tell you one other thing, as a young German of the generation you so plainly despise. This prosperity we have today-it’s got nothing to do with you. It’s got a lot to do with millions who do a hard day’s work and never murdered anyone in their lives. And as for murderers like you who may still be among us, as far as I and my generation are concerned, we would put up with a little less prosperity if we could be sure scum like you were not still around. Which, incidentally, you are not going to be for very long.”

“You’re going to kill me,” mumbled Roschmann.

“As a matter of fact, I’m not.” Miller reached behind him and pulled the telephone over toward where he sat on the desk. He kept his eyes on Roschmann and the gun pointed. He took the receiver off the cradle, slid it onto the desk, and dialed. When he had finished, he picked up the receiver.

“There’s a man in Ludwigsburg who wants to have a chat with you,” he said and put the telephone to his ear. It was dead.

He laid it back in the cradle, took it off again, and listened for the dial tone. There was none.

“Have you cut this off?” he asked.

Roschmann shook his head.

“Listen, if you’ve pulled the connection out, I’ll drill you here and now.”

“I haven’t. I haven’t touched the phone this morning. Honestly.” Miller remembered the fallen branch of the oak tree and the pole lying across the track to the house. He swore softly.

Roschmann gave a small smile. “The fines must be down,” he said. “You’ll have to go into the village. What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to put a bullet through you unless you do as you’re told,”

Miller snapped back. He dragged the handcuffs he had thought to use on a bodyguard out of his pocket.

He tossed the bracelets over to Roschmann. “Walk over to the fireplace,” he ordered and followed the man across the room.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to handcuff you to the fireplace, then go and phone from the village,” said Miller.

He was scanning the wrought-iron scrollwork that composed the surround of the fireplace when Roschmann dropped the handcuffs at his feet. The SS man bent to pick them up, and Miller was almost caught unawares when Roschmann instead gripped a heavy poker and swung it viciously at Miller’s kneecaps.

The reporter stepped back in time, the poker swished past, and Roschmann was off balance.

Miller stepped in, whipped the barrel of the pistol across the bent head, and stepped back. “Try that again, and I’ll kill you,” he said.

Roschmann straightened up, wincing from the blow to the bead.

“Clip one of the bracelets around your right wrist,” Miller commanded, and Roschmann did as he was told. “You see that vine-leaf ornament in front of you? At head height? There’s a branch next to it that comes out of the metalwork and rejoins it again. Lock the other bracelet onto that.”

When Roschmann had snapped the second link home, Miller walked over and kicked the fire-tongs and poker out of reach.

Keeping his gun against Roschmann’s jacket, he frisked him and cleared the area around the chained man of all objects which he could throw to break the window.

Outside in the driveway, the man called Oskar pedaled toward the door, his errand to report the broken phone line accomplished. He paused in surprise on seeing the Jaguar, for his employer had assured him before he went that no one was expected.

He leaned the bicycle against the side of the house and quietly let himself in by the front door. In the hallway he stood irresolute, bearing nothing through the padded door to the study and not being heard himself by those inside.

Miller took a last look around and was satisfied. “Incidentally,” be told the glaring Roschmann, “it wouldn’t have done you any good if you bad managed to hit me. Its eleven o’clock now, and I left the complete dossier of evidence on you in the bands of my accomplice, to drop into the mailbox, addressed to the right authorities, if I have not returned or phoned by noon. As it is, I’m going to phone from the village. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. You won’t be out of there in twenty minutes, even with a hacksaw. When I get back, the police will be thirty minutes behind me.”

As he talked, Roschmann’s hopes began to flicker. He knew he had only one chance left-for the returning Oskar to take Miller alive so that he could be forced to make the phone call from a phone in the village at their demand and keep the documents from reaching the mailbox. Miller swung open the door at the other side of the room and walked through it. He found himself staring at the roll-neck pullover worn by a man a full head taller than he was. From his place by the fire Roschmann recognized Oskar and screamed, “Hold him.”

Miller stepped back into the room and jerked up the gun he had been replacing in his pocket. He was too slow. A swinging left backhander from Oskar’s paw swept the automatic out of his grasp, and it flew across the room. At the same time Oskar thought his employer cried, “Hit him.” He crashed a right hand into Miller’s jaw. The reporter weighed 170 pounds, but the blow lifted him off his feet and threw him backward. His feet caught in a low newspaper rack, and as he went over, his head slammed into the comer of a mahogany bookcase.

Crumpling like a rag doll, his body slid to the carpet and rolled onto one side.

For several seconds there was silence as Oskar took in the spectacle of his employer manacled to the fireplace, and Roschmann stared at the inert figure of Miller, from the back of whose head a trickle of blood flowed onto the floor.

“You fool,” yelled Roschmann when he had taken in what had happened. Oskar looked baffled. “Get over here.” The giant lumbered across the room and stood waiting for orders.

Roschmann thought fast. “Try and get me out of these handcuffs,” he commanded. “Use the fire-irons.”

But the fire-irons had been made in an age when craftsmen intended their handiwork to last for a long time. The result of Oskar’s efforts was a curly poker and a pair of wriggly tongs.

“Bring him over here,” he told Oskar at last. While Oskar held Miller up, Roschmann looked under the reporter’s eyelids and felt his pulse. “He’s still alive, but out cold,” he said. “He’ll need a doctor to come around in less than an hour. Bring me a pencil and paper.” Writing with his left hand, he scribbled two phone numbers on the paper while Oskar brought a hacksaw blade from the tool chest under the stairs.

When he returned, Roschmann gave him the sheet of paper.

“Get down to the village as fast as you can,” he told Oskar. “Ring this Nuremberg ‘ number and tell the man who answers it what has happened.

Ring this local number and get the doctor up here immediately. You understand? Tell him it’s an emergency. Now hurry.” As Oskar ran from the room, Roschmann glanced at the clock again.

Ten-fifty. If Oskar could make the village by eleven, and he and the doctor could be back by eleven-fifteen, they might bring Miller around in time to get to a phone and delay the accomplice, even if the doctor would only work at gunpoint. Urgently, Roschmann began to saw at his handcuffs.

In front of the door Oskar grabbed his bicycle, then paused and glanced at the parked Jaguar. He peered through the driver’s window and saw the key in the ignition. His master had told him to burry, so he dropped the bicycle, climbed behind the wheel of the car, gunned it into life, and spurted gravel in a wide arc as he slid the sports car out of the forecourt into the driveway.

He had got up into third gear and was boring down the slippery track as fast as he could take it when he hit the snow-covered telegraph pole lying across the road.

Roschmann was still sawing at the chain linking the two bracelets when the shattering roar in the pine forest stopped him. Straining to one side, he could peer through the French windows, and although the car and the driveway were out of sight, the plume of smoke drifting across the sky told him at least that the car had been destroyed by an explosion.

He recalled the assurance he had been given that Miller would be taken care of. But Miller was on the carpet a few feet away from him, his bodyguard was certainly dead, and time was running out without hope of reprieve. He leaned his head against the chill metal of the fire-surround and closed his eyes.

“Then its over,” he murmured quietly. After several minutes be continued sawing. It was over an hour before the specially hardened steel of the military handcuffs parted to the now blunt hacksaw.

As he stepped free, with only a bracelet around his right wrist, the clock chimed twelve.

If he had bad time, he might have paused to kick the body on the carpet, but he was a man in a hurry.

From the wall safe he took a passport and several fat bundles of new, high-denomination banknotes.

Twenty minutes later, with these and a few clothes in a bag, he was bicycling down the track, around the shattered hulk of the Jaguar and the still-smoldering body lying face down in the snow, past the scorched and broken pines, toward the village.

From there he called a taxi and ordered it to take him to Frankfurt international airport. He walked to the flight-information desk and inquired. “What time is the next flight out of here for Argentina-preferably within an hour? Failing that, for Madrid.”