The Odessa File

4

“But you don’t even know if he’s alive.”

Peter Miller and Karl Brandt were sitting side by side in Miller’s car outside the house of the detective inspector, where Miller had found him over Sunday lunch on his day off.

“No, I don’t. So that’s the first thing I have to find out. If Roschmann’s dead, obviously that’s the end of it.

Can you help me?” Brandt considered the request, then slowly shook his head. “No, sorry, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Look, I gave you that diary as a favor. Just between us. Because it shocked me, because I thought it might make a story for you. But I never thought you were going to try and track Roschmann down. Why can’t you just make a story out of the finding of the diary?”

“Because there’s no story in it,” said Miller. “What am I supposed to say? ‘Surprise, surprise, I’ve found a looseleaf folder in which an old man who just gassed himself describes what he went through during the war’? You think any editor’s going to buy that? I happen to think it’s a horrifying document, but that’s just my opinion. There have been hundreds of memoirs written since the war. The world’s getting tired of them. Just the diary alone won’t sell to any editor in Germany.”

“So what are you going on about?” asked Brandt.

“Simply this. Get a major police hunt started for Roschmann on the basis of the diary, and I’ve got a story.” Brandt tapped his ash slowly into the dashboard tray. “There won’t be a major police hunt,” he said. “Look, Peter, you may know journalism, but I know the Hamburg police. Our job is to keep Hamburg crime-free now, in nineteen sixty-three. Nobody’s going to start detaching overworked detectives to hunt a man for what he did in Riga twenty years ago. It’s not going to happen.”

“But you could at least raise the matter?” asked Miller.

Brandt shook his head. “No. Not me.”

“Why not? What’s the matter?”

“Because I don’t want to get involved. You’re all right. You’re single, unattached. You can go off chasing will-o’-the-wisps if you want to. I’ve got a wife and two kids and a good career, and I don’t intend to jeopardize that career.”

“Why should this jeopardize your career with the police? Roschmann’s a criminal, isn’t he? Police forces are supposed to hunt criminals. Where’s the problem?”

Brandt crushed out his stub. “It’s difficult to put your finger on. But there’s a sort of attitude in the police, nothing concrete, just a feeling. And that feeling is that to start probing too energetically into the war crimes of the SS can do a young policeman’s career no good.

Nothing comes of it anyway. The request would simply be denied. But the fact that it was made goes into a file. Then bang goes your chance of promotion. Nobody mentions it, but everyone knows it. So if you want to make a big issue out of this, you’re on your own. Count me out.”

Miller sat and stared through the windshield. “All right. If that’s the way it is,” he said at length.

“But I’ve got to start somewhere. Did Tauber leave anything else behind when he died?”

“Well, there was a brief note. I had to take it and include it in my report on the suicide. By now it will have been filed away. And the file’s closed.”

“What did he say in it?” asked Miller.

“Not much,” said Brandt. “He just said he was committing suicide. Oh, there was one thing; he said he left his effects to a friend of his, a Herr Marx.”

“Well, that’s a start. Where’s this Marx?”

“How the hell should I know?” said Brandt.

“You mean to say that’s all the note said? Just Herr Marx? No address?”

“Nothing,” said Brandt. “Just Marx. No indication where he lives.”

“Well, he must be around somewhere. Didn’t you look for him?”

Brandt sighed. “Will you get this through your head? We are very busy in the police force. Have you any idea how many Marxes there are in Hamburg?

Hundreds in the telephone directory alone. We can’t spend weeks looking for this particular Marx.

Anyway, what the old man left wasn’t worth ten pfennigs.”

“That’s all, then?” asked Miller. “Nothing else?”

“Not a thing. If you want to find Marx, you’re welcome to try.”

“Thanks. I will,” said Miller. The two men shook hands, and Brandt returned to his family lunch table.

Miller started the next morning by visiting the house where Tauber had lived. The door was opened by a middle-aged man wearing a pair of stained trousers supported by string, a collarless shirt open at the neck, and three days’ stubble around his chin.

“Morning. Are you the landlord?” The man looked Miller up and down and nodded. He smelled of cabbage.

“There was a man gassed himself here a few nights back,” said Miller.

“Are you from the police?”

“No. The press.” Miller showed the man his press card.

“I ain’t got nothing to say.” Miller eased a ten-mark note without too much trouble into the man’s hand.

“I only want to look at his room.”

“I’ve rented it.”

“What did you do with his stuff?”

“It’s in the back yard. Nothing else I could do with it. The pile of junk was lying in a heap under the thin rain. It still smelled of gas. There were a battered old typewriter, two scuffed pairs of shoes, an assortment of clothes, a pile of books, and a fringed white silk scarf that Miller assumed must be something to do with the Jewish religion. He went through everything in the pile, but there was no indication of an address book and nothing addressed to Marx.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“That’s all,” said the man, regarding him sourly from the shelter of the back door.

“Do you have any tenant by the name of Marx?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know of any Marx?”

“Nope.”

“Did old Tauber have any friends?”

“Not that I knew of. Kept himself to himself. Came and went at all hours, shuffling about up there. Crazy, if you ask me. But he paid his rent regular. Didn’t cause no trouble.”

“Ever see him with anybody? Out in the street, I mean.”

“No, never. Didn’t seem to have any friends. Not surprised, the way he kept mumbling to himself. Crazy.”

Miller left and started asking up and down the street. Most people remembered seeing the old man shuffling along, head down, wrapped in an ankle-length overcoat, head covered by a woolen cap, bands in woolen gloves, from which the fingertips protruded.

For three days he quartered the area of streets where Tauber lived, checking through the dairy, the grocer, the butcher, the hardware store, the bar, the tobacconist, intercepting the milkman and the postman. It was Wednesday afternoon when he found the group of urchins playing football up against the warehouse wall.

“What, that old Jew? Mad Solly?” said the leader of the group in answer to his question. The rest gathered around.

“That’s the one,” said Miller. “Mad Solly.”

“He was crazy,” said one of the crowd. “He used to walk like this.” The boy hunched his head into his shoulders, hands clutching his jacket around him, and shuffled forward a few paces, muttering to himself and casting his eyes about. The others dissolved in laughter, and one gave the impersonator a hefty shove which sent him sprawling.

“Anyone ever see him with anyone else?” asked Miller. “Talking with anyone else? Another man?”

“Whatcher want to know for?” asked the leader suspiciously. “We didn’t do him no harm.” Miller flicked a five-mark coin idly up and down in one band. Eight pairs of eyes watched the silver glitter of the spinning coin. Eight heads shook slowly. Miller turned and walked away.

“Mister.” He stopped and turned around. The smallest of the group had caught up with him.

“I seen him once with a man. Talking, they was. Sitting and talking.”

“Where was that?”

“Down by the river. On the grass bank along the river. There are some benches there. They was sitting on a bench, talking.”

“How old was he, the other one?”

“Very old. Lot of white hair.” Miller tossed him the coin, convinced it had been a wasted gesture. But he walked to the river and stared down the length of the grass bank in both directions. There were a dozen benches along the bank, all of them empty.

In summer there would be plenty of people sitting along the Elbe Chaussee watching the great liners come in and out, but not at the end of November.

To his left along the near bank lay the fishing port, with half a dozen North Sea trawlers drawn up at the wharfs, discharging their loads of fresh-caught herring and mackerel or preparing for the sea again.

As a boy, Peter had returned to the shattered city from a farm in the country where he had been evacuated during the bombing, and had grown up amid the rubble and the ruins. His favorite playing place had been this fishing port along the river at Altona.

He liked the fishermen, gruff, kindly men who smelled of tar and salt and shag tobacco. He thought of Eduard Roschmann in Riga and wondered how the same country could have produced them both.

His mind came back to Tauber and went over the problem again. Where could he possibly have met his friend Marx? Miller knew there was something missing but could not put his finger on it. It was not until he was back in his car and had stopped for gas close to Altona railway station that the answer came. As so often, it was a chance remark. The pump attendant pointed out there had been a price increase in top grade gasoline and added, just to make conversation with his customer, that money went less and less far these days. He went to get the change and left Miller staring at the open wallet in Ws hand.

Money. Where did Tauber get his money? He didn’t work. He refused to accept any compensation from the German state. Yet he paid his rent regularly and must have bad something left over with which to eat.

He was fifty-six years old, so he could not have had an old-age pension, but he could well have had a disability pension. Probably did.

Miller pocketed his change, gunned the Jaguar to life, and drove to the Altona post office. He approached the window marked PENSIONS.

“Can you tell me when the pensioners collect their money?” he asked the fat lady behind the grille.

“Last day of the month, of course,” she said.

“That will be Saturday, then?”

“Except on weekends. This month it will be Friday, the day after tomorrow.”

“Does that include those with disability pensions?” he asked.

“Everyone who’s entitled to a pension collects it on the last day of the month.”

“Here, at this window?”

“If the person lives in Altona, yes,” replied the woman.

“At what time?”

“From opening time onward”

“Thank you.”

Miller was back on Friday morning, watching the queue of old men and women begin to filter through the doors of the post office when it opened. He positioned himself against the wall opposite, watching the directions they took as they departed. Many had white hair, but most wore bats against the cold. The weather had turned dry again, sunny but chill.

Just before eleven an old man with a shock of white hair like candy floss came out of the post office, counted his money to make sure it was all there, put it in his inside pocket, and looked around as if searching for someone. After a few minutes he turned and began to walk slowly away. At the comer he looked up and down again, then turned down Museum Street in the direction of the riverbank. Miller eased himself off the wall and followed him.

It took the old man twenty minutes to get the half mile to the Elbe Cbaussee; then he turned up the bank, crossed the grass, and settled himself on a bench. Miller approached slowly from behind.

“Herr Marx?” The old man turned as Miller came around the end of the bench. He showed no surprise, as though he were often recognized by complete strangers.

“Yes,” he said gravely, “I am Marx.”

“My name is Miller.” Marx inclined his head gravely in acceptance of this news.

“Are you—er—waiting for Herr Tauber?”

“Yes, I am,” said the old man without surprise.

“May I sit down?”

“Please.”

Miller sat beside him, so they both faced toward the Elbe River. A giant dry-cargo ship, the Kota Maru out of Yokohama, was easing downriver on the tide.

“I’m afraid Herr Tauber is dead.” The old man stared at the passing ship. He showed neither grief nor surprise, as if such news was brought frequently. Perhaps it was.

“I see,” he said.

Miller told him briefly about the events of the previous Friday night. “You don’t seem surprised. That he killed himself.”

“No,” said Marx, “he was a very unhappy man.”

“He left a diary, you know.”

“Yes, he told me once about that.”

“Did you ever read it?” asked Miller.

“No, he never let anybody read it. But he told me about it.”

“It described the time he spent in Riga during the war.”

“Yes, he told me he was in Riga.”

“Were you in Riga too?”

The man turned and looked at him with sad old eyes. “No, I was in Dachau.”

“Look, Herr Marx, I need your help. In his diary your friend mentioned a man, an SS officer, called Roschmann. Captain Eduard Roschmann. Did he ever mention him to you?”

“Oh, yes. He told me about Roschmann. That was really what kept him alive. Hoping one day to give evidence against Roschmann.”

“That’s what he said in his diary. I read it after his death. I’m a press reporter. I want to try and find Roschmann. Bring him to trial. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“But there’s no point if Roschmann is already dead.

Can you remember if Herr Tauber ever learned whether Roschmann was still alive and free?” Marx stared out at the disappearing stem of the Kola Maru for several minutes.

“Captain Roschmann is alive,” he said simply, “and free.”

Miller leaned forward earnestly. “How do you know?”

“Because Tauber saw him.”

“Yes I read that. It was in early April nineteen forty-five.”

Marx shook his head slowly. “No, it was last month.” For several more minutes there was silence as Miller stared at the old man and Marx stared out at the water.

“Last month?” repeated Miller at length. “Did he say how he saw him?”

Marx sighed, then turned to Miller. “Yes. He was walking late at night, as be often used to do when he could not sleep. He was walking back home past the State Opera House just as a crowd of people started to come out. He stopped as they came to the pavement. He said they were wealthy people, the men in dinner jackets, the women in furs and jewels. There were three taxis lined up at the curb waiting for them. The doorman held the passers-by back so they could climb in. And then he saw Roschmann.”

“In the crowd of opera-goers?”

“Yes. He climbed into a taxi with two others, and they drove off.”

“Now listen, Herr Marx, this is very important. Was he absolutely sure it was Roschmann?”

“Yes, he said he was.”

“But it was almost nineteen years since he last saw him. He must have changed a lot. How could he be so sure?”

“He said he smiled.”

“He what?”

“He smiled. Roschmann sniffed.”

“That is significant?”

Marx nodded several times. “He said once you had seen Roscbmann smile that way, you never forgot it.

He could not describe the smile but just said he would recognize it among a million others, anywhere in the world.”

“I see. Do you believe him?”

“Yes. Yes, I believe he saw Roschmann.”

“All right. Let’s accept that I do too. Did he get the number of the taxi?”

“No. He said his mind was so stunned he just watched it drive away.”

“Damn,” said Miller. “It probably drove to a hotel. If I had the number I could ask the driver where he took that party. When did Herr Tauber tell you all this?”

“Last month, when we picked up our pensions. Here, on this bench.”

Miller stood up and sighed. “You must realize that nobody would ever believe his story?” Marx shifted his gaze off the river and looked up at the reporter.

“Oh yes,” he said softly. “He knew that. You see, that was why he killed himself.”

That evening Peter Miller paid his usual weekend visit to his mother, and as usual she fussed over whether he was eating enough, the number of cigarettes he smoked in a day, and the state of his laundry.

She was a short, plump, matronly person in her early fifties who had never quite resigned herself to the idea that all her only son wanted to be was a reporter.

During the course of the evening she asked him what be was doing at the moment. Briefly he told her, mentioning his intention to try to track down the missing Eduard Roschmann. She was aghast.

Peter ate away stolidly, letting the tide of reproach and recrimination flow over his head.

“It’s bad enough that you always have to go around covering the doings of those nasty criminals and people,” she was saying, “without going and getting mixed up with those Nazi people. I don’t know what your dear father would have thought, I really don’t.”

A thought struck him. “Mother.”

“Yes, dear?”

“During the war-those things that the SS did to people… in the camps. Did you ever suspect—did you ever think that it was going on?”

She busied herself furiously, tidying up the table. After a few seconds she spoke. “Horrible things. Terrible things. The British made us look at the films after the war. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” She bustled out.

Peter rose and followed her into the kitchen. “You remember in nineteen fifty when I was sixteen and I went to Paris with a school party?”

She paused, filling the sink for the dishwashing. “Yes, I remember.”

“And we were taken to see a church called the Sacre Coeur. And there was a service just finishing, a memorial service for a man called Jean Moulin. Some people came out, and they heard me speaking German to another boy. One of the group turned and spat at me. I remember the spittle running down my jacket. I remember I came home later and told you about it. Do you remember what you said?” Mrs. Miller was furiously scouring a dinner plate.

“You said the French were like that. Dirty habits, you said.”

“Well, they have. I never did like them.”

“Look, Mother, do you know what we did to Jean Moulin before he died? Not you, not Father, not me. But us, the Germans, or rather the Gestapo, which for millions of foreigners seems to be the same thing.”

“I don’t want to hear. Now, that’s enough of that.”

“Well, I can’t tell you, because I don’t know.

Doubtless it’s recorded somewhere. But the point is, I was spat on not because I was in the Gestapo, but because I’m a German.”

“And you should be proud of it.”

“Oh, I am, believe me, I am. But that doesn’t mean I’ve got to be proud of the Nazis and the SS and the Gestapo.”

“Well, nobody is, but there’s no point in keeping talking about it.” She was flustered, as always when he argued with her, drying her hands on the dishtowel before bustling back into the living room. He trailed after her.

“Look, Mother, try to understand. Until I read that diary I never even asked precisely what it was we were all supposed to have done. Now at least I’m beginning to understand. That’s why I want to find this man, this monster, if he’s still around. It’s right that he should be brought to trial.”

She sat on the settee, close to tears. “Please, Peterkin, leave them alone. Just don’t keep probing into the past. It won’t do any good. It’s over now, over and done with. It’s best forgotten.” Peter Miller was facing the mantelpiece, which was dominated by the clock and the photograph of his dead father, who was wearing his Army captain’s uniform, staring out of the frame with the kind, rather sad smile that Miller remembered. It was taken before he returned to the front after his last leave.

Peter remembered his father with startling clarity, looking at his photograph nineteen years later as his mother asked him to drop the Roschmann inquiry. He could remember before the war, when he was five years old, and his father had taken him to Hagenbeck’s zoo and pointed out all the animals to him, one by one, patiently reading the details off the little tin plaques in front of each cage to reply to the endless flow of questions from the boy.

He could remember bow his father came home after enlisting in 1940, and how his mother had cried and how he had thought bow stupid women are to cry over such a wonderful thing as having a father in uniform. He recalled the day in 1944 when he was ten years old, and an Army officer had come to the door to tell his mother that her war-hero husband had been killed on the Eastern Front.

“Besides, nobody wants these awful exposes anymore. Nor these terrible trials that we keep having, with everything dragged out into the open again. Nobody’s going to thank you for it, even if you do find him. They’ll just point to you in the street; I mean, they don’t want any more trials.

Not now, it’s too late. Just drop it, Peter, please, for my sake.” He remembered the black-edged column of names in the newspaper, the same length as every day, but different that day in late October, for halfway down was the entry: “Fallen for Fuhrer and Fatherland. Miller, Erwin, Captain, on October 11.

In Ostland.” And that was it. Nothing else. No hint of where, or when, or why. Just one of tens of thousands of names pouring back from the east to fill the ever-lengthening black-edged columns, until the government had ceased to print them because they destroyed morale.

“I mean,” said his mother behind him, “you might at least think of your father’s memory. You think he’d want his son digging around into the past, trying to drag up another war-crimes trial? Do you think that’s what he’d want?” Miller spun around and walked across the room to his mother, placed both hands on her shoulders, and looked down into her frightened china-blue eyes. He stooped and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

“Yes, Mutti,” he said. “I think that’s exactly what he’d want.” He let himself out, climbed into his car, and headed back into Hamburg, his anger seething inside him.

Everyone who knew him and many who did not agreed Hans Hoffmann looked the part. He was in his late forties, boyishly handsome with carefully styled graying hair cut in the latest trendy fashion, and manicured fingers. His medium-gray suit was from Savile Row, his heavy silk tie was from Cardin.

There was an air of expensive good taste of the kind money can buy about him.

If looks bad been his only asset be would not have been one of West Germany’s wealthiest and most successful magazine-publishers. Starting after the war with a hand-operated press, turning out handbills for the British Occupation authorities, he had founded in 1949 one of the first weekly picture magazines.

His formula was simple—tell it in words and make it shocking, then back it up with pictures that make all competitors look like novices with their first box brownies. It worked. His chain of eight magazines ranging from love stories for teenagers to the glossy chronicle of the doings of the rich and sexy had made him a multimillionaire. But Komet, the news and current-affairs magazine, was still his favorite, his baby.

The money had brought him a luxurious ranch-style house at Othmarschen, a chalet in the mountains, a villa by the sea, a Rolls-Royce, and a Ferrari.

Along the way he bad picked up a beautiful wife, whom he dressed from Paris, and two handsome children he seldom saw. The only millionaire in Germany whose succession of young mistresses, discreetly maintained and frequently exchanged, were never photographed in his gossip magazine was Hans Hoffmann. He was also very astute.

That Wednesday afternoon be closed the Cover of the diary of Salomon Tauber after reading the beginning, leaned back, and looked at the young reporter opposite.

“All right. I can guess the rest. What do you want?”

“I think that’s a great document,” said Miller. “There’s a man mentioned throughout the diary called Eduard Roschmann. Captain in the SS. Commandant of Riga ghetto throughout. Killed eighty thousand men, women, and children.

I believe he’s alive and here in West Germany. I want to find him.”

“How do you know he’s alive?” Miller told him briefly.

Hoffmann pursed his lips. “Pretty thin evidence.”

“True. But worth a second look. I’ve brought home stories that started on less.” Hoffmann grinned, recalling Miller’s talent for ferreting out stories that hurt the Establishment. Hoffmann had been happy to print them, once they were checked out as accurate. They sent circulation soaring.

“Then presumably this man-what do you call him, Roschmann? Presumably he’s already on the wanted list. If the police can’t find him, what makes you think you can?”

“Are the police really looking?” asked Miller.

Hoffmann shrugged. “They’re supposed to. That’s what we pay them for.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to help a little, would it? Just check out whether he’s really alive, whether he was ever picked up; if so, what happened to him?”

“So what do you want from me?” asked Hoffmann.

“A commission to give it a try. If nothing comes of it, I drop it.” Hoffmann swung in his chair, spinning around to face the picture windows looking out over the sprawling docks, mile after mile of cranes and wharfs spread out twenty floors below and a mile away.

“It’s a bit out of your line, Miller. Why the sudden interest?” Miller thought hard. Trying to sell an idea was always the hardest part. A freelance reporter has to sell the story, or the idea of the story, to the publisher or the editor first. The public comes much later.

“It’s a good human-interest story. If Komet could find the man where the police forces of the country had failed, it would be a scoop. Something people want to know about.” Hoffmann gazed out at the December skyline and slowly shook his head.

“You’re wrong. That’s why I’m not giving you a commission for it. I should think it’s the last thing people want to know about.”

“But look, Herr Hoffmann, this is different. These people Roschmann killed-they weren’t Poles and Russians. These were Germans-all right, German Jews, but they were Germans. Why wouldn’t people want to know about it?”

Hoffmann spun back from the window, put his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his knuckles. “Miller, you’re a good reporter. I like the way you cover a story; you’ve got style. And you’re a ferret. I can hire twenty, fifty, a hundred men in this city by picking up the phone, and they’ll all do what they’re told, cover the stories they’re sent to cover. But they can’t dig out a story for themselves. You can. That’s why you get a lot of work from me and will get a lot more in the future. But not this one.”

“But why? It’s a good story.”

“Listen, you’re young. I’ll tell you something about journalism. Half of journalism is about writing good stories. The other half is about selling them.

You can do the first bit, but I can do the second. That’s why I’m here and you’re there. You think this is a story everyone will want to read because the victims of Riga were German Jews. I’m telling you that’s exactly why no one will want to read the story. It’s the last story in the world they’ll want to read. And until there’s a law in this country forcing people to buy magazines and read what’s good for them, they’ll go on buying magazines to read what they want to read. And that’s what I give them. What they want to read.”

“Then why not about Roschmann?”

“You still don’t get it? Then I’ll tell you. Before the war just about everyone in Germany knew at least one Jew. The fact is, before Hitler started, nobody hated the Jews in Germany. We had the best record of treatment of our Jewish minority of any country in Europe. Better than France, better than Spain, infinitely better than Poland and Russia, where the pogroms were fiendish.

“Then Hitler started. Telling people the Jews were to blame for the First War, the unemployment, the poverty, and everything else that was wrong. People didn’t know what to believe. Almost everyone knew one Jew who was a nice guy. Or just harmless. People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws; they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything.”

“So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”

“For years people haven’t asked what happened to the Jews of Germany. They just disappeared-nothing else. It’s bad enough to read at every war-crimes trial what happened to the faceless, anonymous Jews of Warsaw, Lublin, Bialystok-nameless, unknown Jews from Poland and Russia. Now you want to tell them, chapter and verse, what happened to their next-door neighbors. Now can you understand it? These Jews’-he tapped the diary—:“these people they knew, they greeted them in the street, they bought in their shops, and they stood around while they were taken away for your Herr Roschmann to deal with. You think they want to read about that? You couldn’t have picked a story that people in Germany want to read about less.” Having finished, Hans Hoffmann leaned back, selected a fine panatela from a humidor on the desk, and lit it from a rolled-gold Dupont. Miller sat and digested what he had not been able to work out for himself.

“That must have been what my mother meant,” he said at length.

Hoffmann grunted. “Probably.”

“I still want to find that bastard.”

“Leave it alone, Miller. Drop it. No one will thank you.”

“That’s not the only reason, is it? The public reaction. There’s another reason, isn’t there?”

Hoffmann eyed him keenly through the cigar smoke. “Yes,” he said shortly.

“Are you afraid of them-still?” asked Miller.

Hoffmann shook his head. “No. I just don’t go looking for trouble, that’s all.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Have you ever heard of a man called Hans Habe?” asked Hoffmann.

“The novelist? Yes, what about him?”

“He used to run a magazine in Munich once. Back in the early fifties. A good one too-he was a damn good reporter, like you. Echo of the Week, it was called. He hated the Nazis, so he ran a series of expos6s of former SS men living in freedom in Munich.”

“What happened to him?”

“To him, nothing. One day he got more mail than usual. Half the letters were from his advertisers, withdrawing their custom. Another was from his bank, asking him to drop around. When he did, he was told the bank was foreclosing on the overdraft, as of that minute. Within a week the magazine was out of business. Now he writes novels, good ones too. But he doesn’t run a magazine anymore.”

“So what do the rest of us do? Keep running scared?”

Hoffmann jerked his cigar out of his mouth. “I don’t have to take that from you, Miller,” he said, his eyes snapping. “I hated the bastards then and I hate them now. But I know my readers. And they don’t want to know about Eduard Roschmann.”

“All right. I’m sorry. But I’m still going to cover it.”

“You know, Miller, if I didn’t know you, I’d think there was something personal behind it. Never let journalism get personal. It’s bad for reporting, and it’s bad for the reporter. Anyway, how are you going to finance yourself?”

“I’ve got some savings,” Miller rose to go.

“Best of luck,” said Hoffmann, rising and coming around the desk. “I tell you what I’ll do. The day Roschmann is arrested and imprisoned by the West German police, I’ll commission you to cover the story. That’s straight news, so it’s public property. If I decide not to print, I’ll buy it out of my pocket.

That’s as far as I’ll go. But while you’re digging for him, you’re not carrying the letterhead of my magazine around as your authority.” Miller nodded. “I’ll be back,” he said.