The Odessa File

1

THERE was a thin robin’s-egg blue dawn coming up over Tel Aviv when the intelligence analyst finished typing his report. He stretched the cramped muscles of his shoulders, lit another filter-tipped Time, and read the concluding paragraphs. The man on whose debriefing the report was based stood at the same hour in prayer fifty miles to the east at a place called Yad Vashem, but the analyst did not know this. He did not know precisely how the information in his report had been obtained, or how many men had died before it reached him. He did not need to know. All he needed was to be assured the information was accurate and that his forward-analysis was soundly and logically arrived at.

The analyst signed the foot of the document and dated it: February 23, 1964. Then he pressed a bell to summon a dispatch rider who would take it to the office of the Prime Minister.

Everyone seems to remember with great clarity what he was doing on November 22, 1963, at the precise moment he heard President Kennedy was dead. Kennedy was hit at twelve-thirty in the afternoon, Dallas time, and the announcement that he was dead came at about half past one in the same time zone. It was two thirty in New York, seven-thirty in the evening in London, and eight-thirty on a chilly, sleet-swept night in Hamburg.

Peter Miller was driving back into the town center after visiting his mother at her home in Osdorf, one of the outer suburbs of the city. He always visited her on Friday evenings, partly to see if she had everything she needed for the weekend and partly because he felt he had to visit her once a week. He would have telephoned her if she had a telephone, but as she had none, he drove out to see her. That was why she refused to have a telephone.

As usual, he had the radio on, and was listening to a music show being broadcast by Northwest German Radio. At half past eight he was in the Osdorf Way, ten minutes from his mother’s flat, when the music stopped in the middle of a bar and the voice of the announcer came through, taut with tension.

“Achtung, Achtung. Here is an announcement. President Kennedy is dead. I repeat, President Kennedy is dead.” Miller took his eyes off the road and stared at the dimly illuminated band of frequencies along the upper edge of the radio, as if his eyes would be able to deny what his ears had heard, assure him he was tuned in to the wrong radio station, the one that broadcast nonsense.

“Jesus,” he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal, and swung to the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up. Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona toward the center of Hamburg, other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had.

Along his own side he could see the brake lights glowing on as the drivers ahead swung to the right to park at the curb and listen to the supplementary information pouring from their radios. On the left the headlights of the cars heading out of town wavered wildly as they too swung away toward the pavement.

Two cars overtook him, the first hooting angrily, and he caught a glimpse of the driver tapping his forehead in Miller’s direction in the usual rude sign, indicating lunacy, that one German driver makes to another who has annoyed him.

He’ll learn soon enough, thought Miller.

The light music on the radio had stopped, replaced by the “Funeral March,” which was evidently all the disk jockey had on hand. At intervals he read snippets of further information straight off the teleprinter, as they were brought in from the newsroom. The details began to fill in: the open-car ride into Dallas, the rifleman in the window of the School Book Depository. No mention of an arrest.

The driver of the car ahead of Miller climbed out and walked back towards him. He approached the lefthand window, then realized that the driver’s seat was inexplicably on the right and came round the car.

He wore a nylon-fur-collared jacket. Miller wound down his window.

“You heard it?” asked the man, bending down to the window.

“Yeah,” said Miller.

“Absolutely fantastic,” said the man. All over Hamburg, Europe, the world, people were walking up to complete strangers to discuss the event.

“You reckon it was the Communists?” asked the man.

“I don’t know.”

“It could mean war, you know, if it was them,” said the man.

“Maybe,” said Miller. He wished the man would go away. As a reporter he could imagine the chaos sweeping across the newspaper offices of the country as every staff man was called back to help put out a crash edition for the morning breakfast tables. There would be obituaries to prepare, the thousands of instant tributes to correlate and typeset, the telephone lines jammed with yelling men seeking more and ever more details because a man with his head shattered lay dead in a city in Texas.

He wished in a way he were back on the staff of a daily newspaper, but since he had become a freelance three years earlier he bad specialized in news features inside Germany, mainly connected with crime, the police, the underworld. His mother hated the job, accusing him of mixing with “nasty people,” and his arguments that he was becoming one of the most sought-after reporter-investigators in the country availed nothing in persuading her that a reporter’s job was worthy of her only son.

As the reports from the radio came through, his mind was racing, trying to think of another “angle” that could be chased up inside Germany and might make a sidebar story to the main event. The reaction of the Bonn government would be covered out of Bonn by the staff men; the memories of Kennedy’s visit to Berlin the previous June would be covered from there. There didn’t seem to be a good pictorial feature he could ferret out to sell to any of the score of German picture magazines that were the best customers of his kind of journalism.

The man leaning on the window sensed that Miller’s attention was elsewhere and assumed it was out of grief for the dead President. Quickly he dropped his talk of world war and adopted the same grave demeanor.

“Ja, ja, ja,” he murmured with sagacity, as if he had seen it coming all along. “Violent people, these Americans, mark my words, violent people. There’s a streak of violence in them that we over here will never understand.”

“Sure,” said Miller, his mind still miles away.

The man took the hint at last. “Well, I must be getting home,” he said, straightening up. “Gruss Gott.” He started to walk back to his own car.

Miller became aware he was going. "Ja, gute Nacht,” he called out of the open window, then wound it up against the sleet whipping in off the Elbe River. The music on the radio continued in funereal vein, and the announcer said there would be no more light music that night, just news bulletins interspersed with suitable music.

Miller leaned back on the comfortable leather upholstery of his Jaguar and lit up a Roth-Handl, a filterless black-tobacco cigarette with a foul smell, another thing that his mother complained about in her disappointing son.

It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if… or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries. But it is probably accurate to say that if Miller had not had his radio on that night he would not have pulled in to the side of the road for half an hour. He would not have seen the ambulance, or heard of Salomon Tauber or Eduard Roschmann, and forty months later the republic of Israel would probably have ceased to exist.

He finished his cigarette, still listening to the radio, wound down the window, and threw the stub away.

At a touch of the button the 3.8-liter engine beneath the long sloping bonnet of the Jaguar XK 150 S thundered once and settled down to its habitual and comforting rumble, like an angry animal trying to get out of a cage. Miller flicked on the two headlights, checked behind, and swung out into the growing traffic stream along Osdorf Way.

He had got as far as the traffic lights on Stresemannstrasse, and they were standing at red, when he heard the clamor of the ambulance behind him. It came past him on the left, the wail of the siren rising and falling, slowed slightly before heading into the road junction against the red light, then swung across Miller’s nose and down to the right into Daimlerstrasse. Miller reacted on reflexes alone. He let in the clutch. and the Jaguar surged after the ambulance, twenty meters behind it.

As soon as he had done it he wished he had gone straight home. It was probably nothing, but one never knew. Ambulances meant trouble, and trouble could mean a story, particularly if one were first on the scene and the whole thing had been cleared up before the staff reporters arrived. It could be a major crash on the road, or a big wharf fire, a tenement building ablaze, with children trapped inside. It could be anything. Miller always carried a small Yashica with flash attachment in the glove compartment of his car because one never knew what was going to happen right in front of one’s eyes.

He knew a man who had been waiting for a plane at Munich airport on February 6, 1958, and the plane carrying the Manchester United football team bad crashed a few hundred meters from where he stood.

The man was not even a professional photographer, but be had unslung the camera he was taking on a skiing holiday and snapped the first exclusive pictures of the burning aircraft. The pictorial magazines had paid more than 50,000 marks for them.

The ambulance twisted into the maze of small and mean streets of Altona, leaving the Altona railway station on the left and heading down toward the river. Whoever was driving the flat-snouted, high-roofed Mercedes ambulance knew his Hamburg and knew how to drive. Even with his greater acceleration and hard suspension, Miller could feel the back wheels of the Jaguar skidding across the cobbles slick with rain.

Miller watched Menck’s auto-parts warehouse rush by, and two streets later his original question was answered. The ambulance drew up in a poor and sleazy street, ill lit and gloomy in the slanting sleet, bordered by crumbling tenements and rooming-houses. It stopped in front of one of these, where a police car already stood, its blue roof light twirling, the beam sending a ghostly glow across the faces of a knot of bystanders grouped round the door.

A burly police sergeant in a rain cape roared at the crowd to stand back and make a gap in front of the door for the ambulance. Into this the Mercedes slid. Its driver and attendant climbed down, ran round to the back, and eased out an empty stretcher. After a brief word with the sergeant, the pair hastened upstairs.

Miller pulled the Jaguar to the opposite curb twenty yards down the road and raised his eyebrows. No crash, no fire, no trapped children. Probably just a heart attack. He climbed out and strolled over to the crowd, which the sergeant was holding back in a semicircle around the door of the rooming-house.

“Mind if I go up?” asked Miller.

“Certainly do. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I’m press,” said Miller, proffering his Hamburg city press card.

“And I’m police,” said the sergeant. “Nobody goes up. Those stairs are narrow enough as it is, and none too safe. The ambulance men will be down right away.” He was a big man, standing six feet three, and in his rain cape, with his arms spread wide to hold back the, crowd, he looked as immovable as a barn door.

“What’s up, then?” asked Miller.

“Can’t make statements. Check at the station later on.

A man in civilian clothes came down the stairs and emerged onto the pavement. The turning light on top of the Volkswagen patrol car swung across his face, and Miller recognized him. They had been at school together at Hamburg Central High. The man was now a junior detective inspector in the Hamburg police, stationed at Altona Central.

“Hey, Karl.” The young inspector turned at the call of his name and scanned the crowd behind the sergeant. In the next swirl of the police-car light he caught sight of Miller and his raised right hand. His face broke into a grin, part of pleasure, part of exasperation. He nodded to the sergeant.

“It’s all right, Sergeant. He’s more or less harmless.” The sergeant lowered his arm, and Miller darted past. He shook hands with Karl Brandt.

“What are you doing here?”

“Followed the ambulance.”

“Damned vulture. What are you up to these days?”

“Same as usual. Freelancing.”

“Making quite a bundle out of it by the look of it. I keep seeing your name in the picture magazines.”

“It’s a living. Hear about Kennedy?”

“Yes. Hell of a thing. They must be turning Dallas inside out tonight. Glad it wasn’t on my turf.”

Miller nodded toward the dimly lit hallway of the rooming-house, where a low-watt naked bulb cast a yellow glare over peeling wallpaper.

“A suicide. Gas. Neighbors smelled it coming under the door and called us.

Just as well no one struck a match; the place was reeking with it.”

“Not a film star by any chance?” asked Miller “Yeah. Sure. They always live in places like us. No, it was an old man.

Looked as if he had been dead for years anyway. Someone does it every night.”

“Well, wherever he’s gone now, it can’t be worse than this.” The inspector gave a fleeting smile and turned as the two ambulance men negotiated the last seven steps of the creaking stairs and came down the hallway with their burden. Brandt turned around. “Make some room. Let them through.” The sergeant promptly took up the cry and pushed the crowd back even farther. The two ambulance men walked out onto the pavement and around to the open doors of the Mercedes. Brandt followed them, with Miller at his heels.

Not that Miller wanted to look at the dead man, or even intended to.

He was just following Brandt. As the ambulance men reached the door of the vehicle, the first one hitched his end of the stretcher into the runners and the second prepared to shove it inside.

“Hold it,” said Brandt and flicked back the comer of the blanket above the dead man’s face. He remarked over his shoulder, “Just a formality. My report has to say I accompanied the body to the ambulance and back to the morgue.” The interior lights of the Mercedes ambulance were bright, and Miller caught a single two-second look at the face of the suicide. His first and only impression was that he had never seen anything so old and ugly. Even given the effects of gassing, the dull mottling of the skin, the bluish tinge at the lips, the man in life could have been no beauty. A few strands of lank hair were plastered over the otherwise naked scalp. The eyes were closed. The face was hollowed out to the point of emaciation, and with the man’s false teeth missing, each cheek seemed to be sucked inward till they almost touched inside the mouth, giving the effect of a ghoul in a horror film. The lips hardly existed, and both upper and lower were lined with vertical creases, reminding Miller of the shrunken skull from the Amazon basin he had once seen, whose lips had been sewn together by the natives.

To cap the effect, the man seemed to have two pale and jagged scars running down his face, each from the temple or upper ear to the corner of the mouth.

After a quick glance, Brandt pulled the blanket back and nodded to the ambulance attendant behind him.

He stepped back as the man rammed the stretcher into its berth, locked the doors, and went around to the cab to join his partner. The ambulance surged away. The crowd started to disperse accompanied by the sergeant’s muted growls: “Come on, it’s all over. There’s nothing more to see. Haven’t you got homes to go to?”

Miller looked at Brandt and raised his eyebrows. “Charming.”

“Yes. Poor old guy. Nothing in it for you, though?” Miller looked pained.

“Not a chance. Like you say, there’s one a night. People are dying all over the world tonight, and nobody’s taking a bit of notice. Not with Kennedy dead.” Inspector Brandt laughed mockingly.

“You lousy journalists.”

“Let’s face it. Kennedy’s what people want to read about. They buy the newspapers.”

“Yeah. Well, I must get back to the station. See you, Peter.” They shook hands again and parted. Miller drove back toward Altona station, picked up the main road back into the city center, and twenty minutes later swung the Jaguar into the underground garage off the Hansa Square, two hundred yards from the house where he had his penthouse apartment.

Keeping the car in an underground garage all winter was costly, but it was one of the extravagances he permitted himself. He liked his fairly expensive apartment because it was high and be could look down on the bustling boulevard of the Steindamm. Of his clothes and food he thought nothing, and at twenty-nine, just under six feet, with the rumpled brown hair and brown eyes that women go for, he didn’t need expensive clothes.

An envious friend had once told him, “You could pull broads in a monastery,” and he had laughed but been pleased at the same time because he knew it was true.

The real passions of his life were sports cars, reporting, and Sigrid, though he sometimes shamefacedly admitted that if it came to a choice between Sigi and the Jaguar, Sigi would have to find her loving somewhere else.

He stood and looked at the Jaguar in the lights of the garage after he had parked it. He could seldom get enough of looking at that car. Even approaching it in the street, he would stop and admire it, occasionally joined by a passer-by who, not realizing it was Miller’s, would stop also and remark, “Some motor, that.”

Normally a young freelance reporter does not drive a Jaguar K 150 S. Spare parts were almost impossible to come by in Hamburg, the more so as the XK series, of which the S model was the last ever made, had gone out of production in 1960. He maintained it himself, spending hours on Sunday in overalls beneath the chassis or half buried in the engine. The gas it used, with its three SU carburetors, was a major strain on his pocket, the more so because of the price of gas in Germany, but he paid it willingly. The reward was to hear the berserk snarl of the blown exhausts when he hit the accelerator on the open autobahn, to feel the thrust as it rocketed out of a turn on a mountain road. He had even hardened up the independent suspension on the two front wheels, and as the car had stiff suspension at the back, it took comers steady as a rock, leaving other drivers rolling wildly on their cushion springs if they tried to keep up with him. Just after buying it, he had had it resprayed black with a long wasp-yellow streak down each side. As it had been made in Coventry, England, and not as an export car, the driver’s wheel was on the right, which caused an occasional problem in passing but allowed him to change gear with the left hand and hold the shuddering steering wheel in the right hand, which he had come to prefer.

Even now he wondered at the lucky stroke that had enabled him to buy it.

Earlier that summer he had idly opened a pop magazine while waiting in a barber shop to have his hair cut. Normally he never read the gossip about pop stars, but there was nothing else to read. The center-page spread bad been about the meteoric rise to fame and international stardom of four tousel-headed English youths. The face on the extreme right of the picture, the one with the big nose, meant nothing to him, but the other three faces rang a bell in his filing cabinet of a memory.

The names of the two disks that had brought the quartet to stardom, “Please, Please Me” and “Love Me, Do,” meant nothing either, but three of the faces puzzled him for two days. Then he remembered them, more than a year earlier, in 1962, singing way down on the program at a small cabaret off the Reeperbalm. It took him another day to recall the name, for he had only once popped in for a drink to talk to an underworld figure from whom he needed information about the Sankt Pauli gang. The Star Club. He went down there and checked through the billings for 1962 and found them. They had been five then, the three he recognized and two others, Pete Best and Stuart Sutliffe.

From there he went to the photographer who had done the publicity photographs for the impresario Bert Kumpfert, and had bought right and title to everyone he had. His story “How Hamburg Discovered the Beatles” had made almost every pop-music and picture magazine in Germany and a lot abroad. On the proceeds he had bought the Jaguar, which he bad been eyeing in a car showroom, where it had been sold by a British Army officer whose wife had grown too pregnant to fit into it. He even bought some Beatles records out of gratitude, but Sigi was the only one who ever played them.

He left the car and walked up the ramp to the street and back to his flat. It was nearly midnight, and although his mother had fed him at six that evening with the usual enormous meal, he was hungry again.

He made a plate of scrambled eggs and listened to the late-night news. It was all about Kennedy and heavily accented on the German angles, since there was little more news coming through from Dallas. The police were still searching for the killer. The announcer went to great lengths about Kennedy’s love of Germany, his visit to Berlin the previous summer, and his statement in German, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

There was then a recorded tribute from the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, his voice choked with emotion, and other tributes were read from Chancellor Ludwig Erhard and the former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had retired the previous October 15.

Peter Miller switched off and went to bed. He wished Sigi was home because he always wanted to snuggle up to her when he felt depressed, and then he got hard and then they made love, after which he fell into a dream-less steep, much to her annoyance because it was after lovemaking that she always wanted to talk about marriage and children. But the cabaret at which she danced did not close till nearly four in the morning, often later on Friday nights, when the provincials and tourists were thick down the Reeperbalm, prepared to buy champagne at ten times its restaurant price for a girl with big tits and a low-cut dress, and Sigi had the biggest and the lowest.

So he smoked another cigarette and fell asleep alone at quarter to two to dream of the hideous face of the old gassed man in the slums of Altona.

While Peter Miller was eating his scrambled eggs at midnight in Hamburg, five men were sitting drinking in the comfortable lounge of a house attached to a riding school near the pyramids outside Cairo. The time there was one in the morning. The five men had dined well and were in a jovial mood, the cause being the news from Dallas they had heard almost four hours earlier.

Three of the men were Germans, the other two Egyptians. The wife of the host and proprietor of the riding school, a favorite meeting place of the cream of Cairo society and the several-thousand-strong German colony, had gone to bed, leaving the five men to talk into the small hours.

Sitting in the leather-backed easy chair by the shuttered window was Hans Appler, formerly a Jewish expert in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Dr.

Josef Goebbels. Having lived in Egypt since shortly after the end of the war, where he had been spirited by the Odessa, Appler had taken the Egyptian name of Salah Chaff ar and worked as an expert on Jews in the Egyptian Ministry of Orientation. He held a glass of whisky. On his left was another former expert from Goebbels’ staff, Ludwig Heiden, also working in the Orientation Ministry. He had in the meantime adopted the Moslem faith, made a trip to Mecca, and was called El Hadj. In deference to his new religion he held a glass of orange juice. Both men were still fanatical Nazis.

The two Egyptians were Colonel Shamseddin Badran, personal aide to Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, later to become Vice-President of Egypt before being accused of treason after the Six-Day War of 1967 and later committing suicide. The other was Colonel Ali Samir, head of the Moukhabarat, the Egyptian Secret Intelligence Service.

There had been a sixth guest at dinner, the guest of honor, who had rushed back to Cairo when the news came through at nine-thirty, Cairo time, that President Kennedy was dead. He was the Speaker of the Egyptian National Asesmbly, Anwar el Sadat, a close collaborator of President Nasser and later to become his successor.

Hans Appler raised his glass toward the ceiling. “So Kennedy the Jew-lover is dead. Gentlemen, I give you a toast.”

“But our glasses are empty,” protested Colonel Samir.

Their host hastened to remedy the matter, filling the empty glasses from a bottle of Scotch from the sideboard.

The reference to Kennedy as a Jew-lover baffled none of the five men in the room. On March 14, 1960, while Dwight Eisenhower was still President of the United States, the Premier of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, had met secretly at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York, a meeting that ten years earlier would have been deemed impossible. What was deemed impossible even in 1960 was what happened at that meeting, which was why details of it took years to leak out and why even at the end of 1963 President Nasser refused to take seriously the information that the Odessa and the Moukhabarat of Colonel Samir placed on his desk.

The two statesmen had signed an agreement whereby West Germany agreed to open a credit account for Israel to the tune of fifty million dollars a year, without any strings attached. Ben-Gurion, however, soon discovered that to have money was one thing, to have a secure and certain source of arms was quite another. Six months later the Waldorf agreement was topped off with another, signed by the Defense Ministers of Germany and Israel, Franz-Josef Strauss and Shimon Peres. Under its terms, Israel would be able to use the money from Germany to buy weapons in Germany.

Adenauer, aware of the vastly more controversial nature of the second agreement, delayed for months, until in 1961 he was in New York to meet the new President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy put the pressure on.

He did not wish to have arms delivered directly from the United States to Israel, but he wanted them to arrive somehow. Israel needed fighters, transport planes, Howitzer 105-mm. artillery pieces, armored cars, armored personnel carriers, and tanks, but above all tanks.

Germany had all of them, mainly of American make, either bought from America to offset the cost of keeping American troops in Germany under the NATO agreement, or now under license in Germany.

Under Kennedy’s pressure the Strauss-Peres deal was pushed through.

The first German tanks started to arrive at Haifa in late June 1963. It was difficult to keep the news secret for long; too many people were involved. The Odessa had found out in late 1962 and promptly informed the Egyptians, with whom its agents in Cairo had the closest links.

In late 1963 things started to change. On October 15, Konrad Adenauer, the Fox of Bonn, the Granit Chancellor, resigned and went into retirement. Adenauer’s place was taken by Ludwig Erhard, a good vote-catcher as the father of the German economic miracle, but in matters of foreign policy weak and vacillating.

Even while Adenauer was in power there had been a vociferous group inside the West German cabinet in favor of shelving the Israeli arms deal and halting the supplies before they had begun. The old Chancellor had silenced them with a few terse sentences, and such was his power that they stayed silenced.

Erhard was quite a different man and already had earned himself the nickname of the Rubber Lion. As soon as he took the chair the anti-arms-deal group, based in the Foreign Ministry, ever mindful of its excellent and improving relations with the Arab world, opened up again. Erhard dithered. But behind them all was the determination of John Kennedy that Israel should get her arms via Germany.

And then he was shot. The big question in the small hours of the morning of November 23 was simply: would President Lyndon Johnson take the American pressure off Germany and let the indecisive Chancellor in Bonn renege on the deal? In fact he did not, but there were high hopes in Cairo that he would.

The host at the convivial meeting outside Cairo that night, having filled his guests’ glasses, turned back to the sideboard to top up his own. His name was Wolfgang Lutz, born at Mannheim in 1921, a former major in the German Army, a fanatical Jew-hater, who had emigrated to Cairo in 1961 and started his riding academy. Blond, blue-eyed, hawk-faced, he was a top favorite among both the influential political figures of Cairo and the expatriate German and mainly Nazi community along the banks of the Nile.

He turned to face the room and gave a broad snide. If there was anything false about that smile, no one noticed it. But it was false. He had been born a Jew in Mannheim but had emigrated to Palestine in 1933 at the age of twelve. His name was Ze’ev, and he held the rank of rav-seren (major) in the Israeli Army.

He was also the top agent of Israeli Intelligence in Egypt at that time. On February 28, 1965, after a raid on his home in which a radio transmitter was discovered in the bathroom scales, he was arrested. Tried on June 26, 1965, he was sentenced to hard labor in perpetuity. Released after the end of the 1967 war as part of an exchange against thousands of Egyptian prisoners of war, he and his wife stepped back onto the soil of home at Lod Airport on February 4, 1968.

But the night Kennedy died this was all in the future: the arrest, the tortures, the multiple rape of his wife.

He raised his glass to the four smiling faces in front of him.

In fact, he could hardly wait for his guests to depart, for something one of them had said over dinner was of vital importance to his country, and be desperately wished to be alone, to go up to his bathroom, get the transmitter out of the bathroom scales, and send a message to Tel Aviv. But he forced himself to keep smiling.

“Death to the Jew-lovers,” he toasted. “Sieg Heil.”

Peter Miller woke the next morning just before nine and shifted luxuriously under the enormous feather cushion that covered the double bed. Even half awake, he could feel the warmth of the sleeping figure of Sigi sleeping across the bed to him, and by reflex he snuggled closer so that her buttocks pushed into the base of his stomach. Automatically he began to erect.

Sigi, still fast asleep after only four hours in bed, grunted in annoyance and shifted away toward the edge of the bed. “Go away,” she muttered without waking up.

Miller sighed, turned onto his back, and held up his watch, squinting at the face of it in the half-light. Then he slipped out of bed on the other side, pulled a toweling bathrobe around him, and padded through into the living room to pull back the curtains. The steely November light washed across the room, making him blink. He focused his eyes and looked down into the Steindamm. It was a Saturday morning, and traffic was light down the wet black tarmac. He yawned and went into the kitchen to brew the first of innumerable cups of coffee. Both his mother and Sigi reproached him with living almost entirely on coffee and cigarettes.

Drinking his coffee and smoking the first cigarette of the day in the kitchen, he -considered whether there was anything particular he ought to do that day and decided there was not. For one thing, all the newspapers and the next issues of the magazines would be about President Kennedy, probably for days or weeks to come. And for another, there was no particular story he was chasing at the time. Besides which, Saturday and Sunday are bad days to get hold of people in their offices, and they seldom like being disturbed at home. He had recently finished a well-received series on the steady infiltration of Austrian, Parisian, and Italian gangsters into the gold mine of the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s half-mile of nightclubs, brothels, and vice, and had not yet been paid for it. the thought he might contact the magazine to which he had sold the series, then decided against it. It would pay in time, and he was not short of money for the moment. Indeed his bank statement, which had arrived three days earlier, showed he had more than 5000 marks to his credit, which he thought would keep him going for a while.

“The trouble with you, pal,” he told his reflection in one of Sigi’s brilliantly polished saucepans as he rinsed out the cup with his forefinger, “is that you are lazy.” He had been asked by a civilian-careers officer, at the end of his military service ten years earlier, what he wanted to be in life. He had replied, “An idle rich man,” and at twenty-nine, although he had not achieved it and probably never would, he still thought it a perfectly reasonable ambition.

He carried the portable transistor radio into the bathroom, closed the door so Sigi would not hear it, and listened to the news while he showered and shaved. The main item was that a man bad been arrested for the murder of President Kennedy. As he had supposed, there were no other items of news on the entire program but those connected with the Kennedy assassination.

After drying off he went back to the kitchen and made more coffee, this time two cups. He took them into the bedroom, placed them on the bedside table, slipped off his robe, and clambered back under the cushion beside Sigi, whose fluffy blond head was protruding onto the pillow.

She was twenty-two and at school had been a champion gymnast who, so she said, could have gone on to Olympic standing if her bust had not developed to the point where it got in the way and no leotard could safely contain it. On leaving school she became a teacher of physical training at a girls’ school. The change to striptease dancer in Hamburg came a year later and for the very best and most simple of economic reasons. It earned her five times more than a teacher’s salary.

Despite her willingness to take her clothes off to the buff in a nightclub, she was remarkably embarrassed by any lewd remarks made about her body by anyone whom she could see when the remarks were made.

“The point is,” she once told an amused Peter Miller with great seriousness, “When I’m on the stage I can’t see anything behind the lights, so I don’t get embarrassed. If I could see them, I think I’d run offstage.”

This did not stop her from later taking her place at one of the tables in the club when she was dressed again, and waiting to be invited for a drink by one of the customers. The only drink allowed was champagne, in half bottles or preferably whole bottles. On these she collected a fifteen-per-cent commission. Although almost without exception the customers who invited her to drink champagne with them hoped to get much more than an hour of gazing in stunned admiration at the canyon between her breasts, they never did. She was a kindly and understanding girl, and her attitude to the pawing attentions of the customers was one of gentle regret rather than the contemptuous loathing that the other girls hid behind their neon smiles.

“Poor little men,” she once said to Miller, “they ought to have a nice woman to go home to.”

“What do you mean, poor little men?” protested Miller.

“They’re dirty old creeps with a pocketful of cash to spend.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be if they had someone to take care of them,” retorted Sigi, and on this her feminine logic was unshakable.

Miller had seen her by chance on a visit to Madame Kokett’s bar just below the Cafe Keese on the Reeperbahn, when he had gone to have a chat and a drink with the owner, an old friend and contact. She was a big girl, five feet, nine inches tall and with a figure to match, which, on a shorter girl, would have been out of proportion. She stripped to the music with the habitual supposedly sensual gestures, her face set in the usual bedroom pout of strippers. Miller had seen it all before and sipped his drink without batting an eyelid.

But when her brassi6re came off even he had to stop and stare, glass half-raised to his mouth. His host eyed him sardonically. “She’s stacked, eh?” he said.

Miller bad to admit she made Playboy’s Playmates of the Month look like severe cases of undernourishment. But she was so firmly muscled that her bosom stood outward and upward without a vestige of support.

At the end of her turn, when the applause started, the girl had dropped the bored poise of the professional dancer, bobbed a shy, half-embarrassed little bow to the audience, and given a big sloppy grin like a half trained bird dog which against all the betting has just brought back a downed partridge. It was the grin that got Miller, not the dance routine or the figure. He asked if she would like a drink, and she was sent for.

As Miller was in the company of the boss, she avoided a bottle of champagne and asked for a gin fizz.

To his surprise, Miller found she was a very nice person to be around and asked if he might take her home after the show.

With obvious reservations, she agreed. Playing his cards coolly, Miller made no pass at her that night. It was early spring, and she emerged from the cabaret, when it closed, clad in a most unglamorous duffel coat, which he presumed was intentional.

They just had coffee together and talked, during which she unwound from her previous tension and chatted gaily. He learned she liked pop music, art, walking along the banks of the Alster, keeping house, and children. After that they started going out on her one free night a week, taking in a dinner or a show, but not sleeping together.

After three months Miller took her to his bed and later suggested she might like to move in. With her single-minded attitude toward the important things of life, Sigi had already decided she wanted to marry Peter Miller, and the only problem was whether she should try to get him by not sleeping in his bed or the other way around. Sensing his ability to fill the other half of his mattress with other girls if the need arose, she decided to move in and make his life so comfortable that he would want to marry her. They bad been together for six months by the end of November.

Even Miller, who was hardly house-trained, had to admit she kept a beautiful home, and she made love with a healthy and bouncing enjoyment.

She never mentioned marriage directly but tried to get the message across in other ways. Miller feigned not to notice. Strolling in the sun by the Alster lake, she would sometimes make friends with a toddler under the benevolent eyes of its parent.

“Oh, Peter, isn’t he an angel?” Miller would grunt. “Yeah. Marvelous.” After that she would freeze him for an hour for having failed to take the hint. But they were happy together, especially Peter Miller, who was suited down to the ground by this arrangement of all the comforts of marriage, the delights of regular loving, without the ties of marriage.

After drinking half his coffee, Miller slithered down into the bed and put his anus around her from behind, gently caressing her crotch, which he knew would wake her up. After a few minutes she muttered with pleasure and rolled over onto her back. Still massaging, he leaned over and started to kiss her breasts.

Still half asleep, she gave vent to a series of long mmmms, and her hands started to move drowsily over his back and buttocks. Ten minutes later they made love, squealing and shuddering with pleasure.

“That’s a bell of a way to wake me up,” she grumbled afterward.

“There are worse ways,” said Miller.

“What’s the time?”

“Nearly twelve,” Miller lied, knowing she would throw something at him if she learned it was half past ten and she had had only five hours’ sleep. “Never mind, you go back to sleep if you feel like it.”

“Mmmm. Thank you, darling, you are good to me,” said Sigi and fell asleep again.

Miller was halfway to the bathroom after drinking the rest of his coffee and Sigi’s as well, when the phone rang. He diverted into the sitting room and answered it.

“Peter?”

“Yes, who’s that?”

“Karl. His mind was still fuzzed, and he did not recognize the voice. “Karl?” The voice was impatient. “Karl Brandt. What’s the matter? Are you still asleep?”

Miller recovered. “Oh, yes. Sure, Karl. Sorry, I just got up. What’s the matter?”

“Look, it’s about this dead Jew. I want to talk to you.”

Miller was baffled. “What dead Jew?”

“The one who gassed himself last night in Altona. Can’t you even remember that far back?”

“Yes, of course I remember last night,” said Miller. “I didn’t know he was Jewish. What about him?”

“I want to talk to you,” said the police inspector. “But not on the phone. Can we meet?” Miller’s reporter’s mind clicked into gear immediately. Anyone who has got something to say but does not wish to say it over the phone must think it important. In the case of Brandt, Miller could hardly suspect a police detective would be so cagy about something ridiculous.

“Sure,” he said. “Are you free for lunch?”

“I can be,” said Brandt.

“Good. I’ll buy it if you think it’s something worthwhile.” He named a small restaurant on the Goose Market for one o’clock and replaced the receiver. He was still puzzled, for he couldn’t see a story in the suicide of an old man, Jewish or not, in a slum tenement m Altona.

Throughout the lunch the young detective seemed to wish to avoid the subject about which he had asked for the meeting, but when the coffee came he said simply, “The man last night.”

“Yes,” said Miller. “What about him?”

“You must have heard, as we all have, about what the Nazis did to the Jews during the war and even before it?”

“Of course. They rammed it down our throats at school, didn’t they?” Miller was puzzled and embarrassed. Like most young Germans, he had been told at school when he was twelve or so that he and the rest of his countrymen had been guilty of massive war crimes.

At the time he had accepted it without even knowing what was being talked about.

Later it had been difficult to find out what the teachers had meant in the immediate postwar period. There was nobody to ask, nobody who wanted to talk-not the teachers, not the parents. Only with coming manhood had he been able to read a little about it, and although what he read disgusted him, he could not feel it concerned him. It was another time, another place, a long way away. He had not been there when it happened, his father had not been there, his mother had not been there. Something inside him had persuaded him it was nothing to do with Peter Miller, so he had asked for no names, dates, details. He wondered why Brandt should be bringing the subject up.

Brandt stirred his coffee, himself embarrassed, not knowing how to go on.

“That old man last night,” he said at length. “He was a German Jew, He was in a concentration camp.”

Miller thought back to the death’s head on the stretcher the previous evening. Was that what they ended up like? It was ridiculous. The man must have been liberated by the Allies eighteen years earlier and had lived on to die of old age. But the face kept coming back. He had never seen anyone who had been in a camp before-at least, not knowingly. For that matter he had never met one of the SS mass-killers, he was sure of that. One would notice, after all.

His mind strayed back to the publicity surrounding the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem two years earlier. The papers had been full of it for weeks on end. He thought of the face in the glass booth and remembered that his impression at the time had been how ordinary that face was, so depressingly ordinary. It was in reading the press coverage of the trial that for the first time he had gained an inkling of how the SS had done it, how they had got away with it.

But these had all been about things in Poland, Russia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, far away and a long time back. He could not make them personal.

He brought his thoughts back to the present and the sense of unease Brandt’s line of talk aroused in him.

“What about it?” be asked the detective.

For answer Brandt took a brown-paper-wrapped parcel out of his attache case and pushed it across the table. “The old man left a diary. Actually, be wasn’t so old. Fifty-six. It seems he wrote notes at the time and stored them in his foot-wrappings. After the war he transcribed them all. They make up the diary.”

Miller looked at the parcel with scant interest. “Where did you find it?”

“It was lying next to the body. I picked it up and took it home. I read it last night.”

Miller looked at his former friend quizzically. “It was bad?”

“Horrible. I had no idea it was that bad-the things they did to them.”

“Why bring it to me?” Now Brandt was embarrassed.

He shrugged. “I thought it might make a story for you.”

“Who does it belong to now?”

“Technically, Tauber’s heirs. But we’ll never find them. So I suppose it belongs to the Police Department. But they’d just file it. You can have it, if you want it. Just don’t let on that I gave it to you. I don’t need any trouble in the department.”

Miller paid the bill, and the pair walked outside.

“All right, I’ll read it. But I don’t promise to get steamed up about it.

It might make an article for a magazine.” Brandt turned to him with a half-smile. “You’re a cynical bastard,” he said.

“No,” said Miller, “it’s just that, like most people, I’m concerned with the here and now. What about you?

After ten years in the police I’d have thought you’d be a tough cop. This thing really upset you, didn’t it?”

Brandt was serious again. He looked at the parcel under Miller’s arm and nodded slowly. “Yes. Yes, it did. I just never thought it was that bad. And by the way, it’s not all past history. ‘That story ended here in Hamburg last night. Good-by, Peter.”

The detective turned and walked away, not knowing how wrong he was.