"From the Odessa. They must have a forger somewhere who can turn them out," Wiesenthal said.

 

 

Miller thought for a while. "If one could find the passport-forger, one might find the man who could identify Roschmann today?" he suggested.

 

 

Wiesenthal shrugged. "One might. But it would be a long shot. And to do that one would have to penetrate the Odessa. Only an ex-SS man could do that." "Then where do I go from here?" said Miller.

 

 

"I should think your best bet would be to try and contact some of the survivors of Riga. I don't know whether they would be able to help you further, but they'd certainly be willing. We are all trying to find Roschmann. Look." He flicked open the diary on his desk. "There's reference here to a certain Olli Adler fromMunich, who was in Roschmann's company during the war. It may be she survived and came home to Munich." Miller nodded. "If she did, where would she register?" "At the Jewish Community Center. It still exists. It contains the archives of the Jewish community of Munich-since the war, that is.

 

 

Everything else was destroyed. I'd try there." "Do you have the address?" Simon Wiesenthal checked through an address book. "Reichenbachstrasse, number twenty-seven, Munich," he said. "I suppose you want the diary of Salomon Tauber back?" "Yes, I'm afraid I do." "Too bad. I'd like to have kept it. A remarkable diary." He rose and escorted Miller to the front door. "Good luck," he said, "and let me know how you get on."

 

 

Miller had dinner that evening in the House of the Golden Dragon, which had been in business as a beer house and restaurant in the Steindelgasse without a break from 1566, and thought over the advice. He had little hope of finding more than a handful of survivors of

 

 

Riga still in Germany or Austria, and even less hope that any might help him track Roschmann beyond November 1955. But it was a hope, a last hope.

 

 

He left the next morning for the drive back to Munich.

 

 

MILLER DROVE into Munich at 10 midmorning of January 9 and found 27 Reichenbachstrasse from a map of Munich bought at a newspaper kiosk in the out skirts. Parking down the road, he surveyed the Jewish Community Center before entering. It was a flat-fronted five-story building. The fagade of the ground floor was of uncovered stone blocks; above this the faqade was of gray cement over brick. The fifth and top floor was marked by a row of mansard windows set in the red tiled roof. At ground level there was a double door of glass panels at the extreme left end of the building.

 

 

The building contained a kosher restaurant, the only one in Munich, on the ground floor, the leisure rooms of the old people's home on the one above. Ile third floor contained the administration and records depart- ment, and the upper two housed the guest rooms and sleeping quarters of the inmates of the old people's home. At the back was a synagogue.

 

 

He went up to the third floor and presented himself at the inquiry desk.

 

 

While he waited he glanced around the room. There were rows of books, all new, for the original library had long since been burned by the Nazis.

 

 

Between the library shelves were portraits of some of the leaders of the Jewish community, stretching back hundreds of years, teachers and rabbis, gazing out of their frames above luxuriant beards, like the figures of the prophets he had seen in his Scripture textbooks at school. Some wore phylacteries bound to their foreheads, and all were hatted.

 

 

There was a rack of newspapers, some in German, others in Hebrew. He presumed the latter were flown in from Israel. A short dark man was scanning the front page of one of these.

 

 

"Can I help you?" He looked around to the inquiry desk to find it now occupied by a dark-eyed woman in her mid-forties. There was a strand of hair failing over her eyes, which she nervously brushed back into place several times a minute.

 

 

Miller made his request: any trace of Olli Adler, who might have reported back to Munich after the war?

 

 

"Where would she have returned from?" asked the woman.

 

 

"From Magdeburg. Before that, Stutthof. Before that, from Riga." "Oh dear, Riga," said the woman. "I don't think we have anyone on the lists who came back here from Riga. They all disappeared, you know. But I'll look." She went into a back room, and Miller could see her going steadily through an index of names. It was not a big index. She returned after five minutes.

 

 

"I'm sorry. Nobody of that name reported back here after the war. It is a common name. But there is nobody listed." Miller nodded. "I see. That looks like it, then. Sorry to have troubled you." "You might try the International Tracing Service," said the woman. "It's really their job to find people who are missing. They have lists from all over Germany, whereas we only have the lists of those originating in Munich who came back." "Where is the Tracing Service?" asked Miller.

 

 

"It's at Arolsen-in-Waldeck. That's just outside Hanover, Lower Saxony.

 

 

It's run by the Red Cross, really." Miller thought for a minute. "Would there be anybody else left in Munich who was at Riga? The man I'm really trying to find is the former commandant." There was silence in the room. Miller sensed the man by the newspaper rack turn around to look at him. The woman seemed subdued.

 

 

"It might be possible there are a few left who were at Riga and now live in Munich. Before the war there were twenty-five thousand Jews in Munich.

 

 

About a tenth came back. Now we are about five thousand again, half of them children bom since nineteen forty-five. I might find someone who was at Riga. But I'd have to go through the whole list of survivors. The camps they were in are marked against the names. Could you come back tomorrow?" Miller thought for a moment, debating whether to give up and go home. The chase was getting pointless.

 

 

"Yes," he said at length. "I'll come back tomorrow. Thank you." He was back in the street, reaching for his car keys, when he felt a step behind him.

 

 

"Excuse me," said a voice. He turned. The man behind him was the one who had been reading the newspapers.

 

 

"You are inquiring about Riga?" asked the man. "About the commandant of Riga? Would that be Captain Roschmann?" "Yes, it would," said Miller. "Why?" "I was at Riga," said the man. "I knew Roschmann. Perhaps I can help you." The man was short and wiry, somewhere in his midforties, with button-bright brown eyes and the rumpled air of a damp sparrow.

 

 

"My name is Mordecai," he said. "But people call me Motti. Shall we have coffee and talk?" They adjourned to a nearby coffee shop. Miller, melted slightly by his companion's chirpy manner, explained his bunt so far, from the back streets of Altona to the Community Center of Munich.

 

 

The man listened quietly, nodding occasionally. "Mmmm. Quite a pilgrimage. Why should you, a German, want to track down Roschmann?" "Does it matter? I've been asked that so many times I'm getting tired of it. What's so strange about a German being angry at what was done years ago?"

 

 

Motti shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "It's unusual for a man to go to such lengths, that's all. About Roschmann's disappearance in nineteen fifty-five. You really think this new passport must have been provided by the Odessa?" "That's what I've been told," replied Miller. "And it seems the only way to find the man who forged it would be to penetrate the Odessa." Motti considered the young German in front of him for some time. "What hotel are you staying at?" he asked at length.

 

 

Miller told him he had not checked into any hotel yet, as it was stiff early afternoon. But there was one he knew, that he had stayed in before.

 

 

At Motti's request he went to the coffee-shop telephone and called the hotel for a room.

 

 

When he got back to the table, Motti had gone. There was a note under the coffee cup. It said: "Whether you get a room there or not, be in the residents' lounge at eight tonight." Miller paid for the coffees and left.

 

 

The same afternoon, in his lawyer's office, the Werwolf read once again the written report that had come in from his colleague in Bonn, the man who had introduced himself to Miller a week earlier as Dr. Schmidt.

 

 

The Werwolf had had the report already for five days, but his natural caution had caused him to wait and reconsider before taking direct action.

 

 

The last words his superior, General GlUcks, had spoken to him in Madrid in late November virtually robbed him of any freedom of action, but like most deskbound men he found comfort in delaying the inevitable. "A permanent solution" had been the way his orders were expressed, and he knew what that meant. Nor did the phraseology of "Dr. Schmidt" leave him any more room for maneuver.

 

 

"A stubborn young man, truculent and headstrong, probably obstinate, and with an undercurrent of genuine and personal hatred in him for the Kamerad in question, Eduard Roscbmann, for which no explanation seems to exist. Unlikely to listen to reason, even in the face of personal threat...." The Werwolf read the doctor's summing up again and sighed. He reached for the phone and asked his secretary, Hilda, for an outside line. When he had it he dialed a number in Diisseldorf.

 

 

After several rings it was answered, and a voice said simply, "Yes." "There's a call for Herr Mackensen," said the Werwolf.

 

 

The voice from the other end said simply, "Who wants him?" Instead of answering the question directly, the Werwolf gave the first part of the identification code. "Who was greater than Frederick the Great?" The voice from the other end replied, "Barbarossa." There was a pause, then: "This is Mackensen," said the voice.

 

 

"Werwolf," replied the chief of the Odessa in West Germany. "The holiday is over, I'm afraid. There is work to be done. Get over here by tomorrow morning." "When?" replied Mackensen.

 

 

"Be here at ten," said the Werwolf. "Tell my secretary your name is Keller. I will ensure you have an appointment in that name." He put the phone down. In Diisseldorf, Mackensen rose and went into the bathroom of his flat to shower and sbave. He was a big, powerful man, a former sergeant of the Das Reich division of the SS, who bad learned his killing when hanging French hostages in Tulle and Limoges, back in 1944.

 

 

After the war he had driven a truck for the Odessa, running human cargoes south through Germany and Austria into the South Tirol province of Italy.

 

 

In 1946, stopped by an overly suspicious American patrol, he had slain all four occupants of the jeep, two of them with his bare hands: From then on, he too was on the run.

 

 

Employed later as a bodyguard for senior men of the Odessa, he had been saddled with the nickname "Mack the Knife," although, oddly, he never used a knife, preferring the strength of his butcher's hands to strangle or break the necks of his "assignments." Rising in the esteem of his superiors, he had become in the mid-fifties the executioner of the Odessa, the man who could be relied on to cope quietly and discreetly with those who came too close to the top men of the organization, or those from within who elected to squeal on their comrades.

 

 

By January 1964 he had fulfilled twelve assignments of this kind.

 

 

The call came on the dot of elght. It was taken by the reception clerk, who put his head around the comer of the residents' lounge, where Miller sat watching television.

 

 

He recognized the voice on the end of the phone.

 

 

"Herr Miller? It's me, Motti. I think I may be able to help you. Rather, some friends may be able to. Would you like to meet them?" "I'll meet anybody who can help me," said Miller, intrigued by the maneuvers.

 

 

"Good," said Motti. "Leave your hotel and turn left down Schillerstrasse.

 

 

Two blocks down on the same side is a cake and coffee shop called Lindemann. Meet me in there." "When? Now?" asked Miller.

 

 

"Yes. Now. I would come to the hotel, but I'm with my friends here. Come right away." He hung up. Miller took his coat and walked out through the doors. He turned left and headed down the pavement. Half a block from the hotel something hard was jabbed into his ribs from behind, and a car slid up to the curb.

 

 

"Get into the back seat, Herr Miller," said a voice in his ear.

 

 

The door beside him swung open and with a last dig in the ribs from the man behind, Mifler ducked his bead and entered the car. The driver was up front; the back seat contained another man, who slid over to make room for him. He felt the man behind him enter the car also; then the door was slammed and the car slid from the curb.

 

 

Miller's heart was thumping. He glanced at the three men in the car with him, but recognized none of them.

 

 

The man to his right, who had opened the door for him to enter, spoke first. "I am going to bind your eyes," he said simply, producing a sort of black sock. "We would not want you to see where you are going." Miller felt the sock being pulled over his head until it covered his nose. He remembered the cold blue eyes of the man in the Dreesen Hotel and recalled what the man in Vienna had told him. "Do be careful, these men can be dangerous." Then he remembered Motti and wondered how one of them could have been reading a Hebrew newspaper in the Jewish Community Center.

 

 

The car drove for twenty-five minutes, then slowed and stopped. He heard some gates being opened; the car surged forward again and stopped finally. He was eased out of the back seat, and with a man on each side he was helped across a courtyard. For a momfnt he felt the cold night air on his face; then he was back inside again. A door slammed behind him, and he was led down some steps into what seemed to be a cellar. But the air was warm and the chair into which he was lowered was well upholstered.

 

 

He heard a voice say, "Take off the bandage," and the sock over his head was removed. He blinked as his eyes got used to the light.

 

 

The room he was in was evidently below ground, for it had no windows. But an air extractor hummed high on one wall. It was well decorated and comfortable, evidently a form of committee room, for there was a long table with eight chairs ranged close to the far wall. The remainder of the room was an open space, fringed by five armchairs. In the center were a circular carpet and a coffee table.

 

 

Motti was standing, smiling quietly, almost apologetically, beside the committee table. The two men who had brought Miller, both well built and in early middle age, were perched on the arms of the armchairs to his left and right. Directly opposite him, across the coffee table, was a fourth man. Miller supposed the car driver had remained upstairs to lock up.

 

 

The fourth man was evidently in command. He sat at case in his chair while his three lieutenants stood or perched around him. Miller judged him to be about sixty, lean and bony, with a hollow-cheeked, hook-nosed face. The eyes worried Miller. They were brown and deep-sunk into the sockets, but bright and piercing, the eyes of a fanatic. It was he who spoke.

 

 

"Welcome, Herr Miller. I must apologize for the strange way in which you were brought to my home. The reason for it was that if you decide you wish to turn down my proposal to you, you can be returned to your hotel and will never see any of us again.

 

 

"My friend here"-he gestured to Motti-"informs me that for reasons of your own you are hunting a certain Eduard Roschmarm. And that to get closer to him you might be prepared to attempt to penetrate the Odessa.

 

 

To do that you would need help. A lot of help. However, it might suit our interests to have you inside the Odessa. Therefore we might be prepared to help you. Do you follow me?" Miller stared at him in astonishment. "Let me get one thing straight," he said at length. "Are you telling me you are not from the Odessa?" The man raised his eyebrows. "Good heavens, you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick." He leaned forward and drew back the sleeve of his left wrist. On the forearm was tattooed a number in blue ink.

 

 

"Auschwitz," said the man. He pointed to the two men at Miller's sides.

 

 

"Buchenwald and Dachau." He pointed at Motti. "Riga and Treblinka." He replaced his sleeve.

 

 

"Herr Miller, there are some who think the murderers of our people should be brought to trial. We do not agree. Just after the war I was talking with a British officer, and he told me something that has guided my life ever since. He said to me, 'If they had murdered six million of my people, I too would build a monument of skulls. Not the skulls of those who died in the concentration camps, but of those who put them there.' Simple logic, Herr Miller, but persuasive. I and my group are men who decided to stay on inside Germany after nineteen forty-five with one object, and one only, in mind. Revenge, revenge pure and simple. We don't arrest them, Herr Miller; we kill them like the swine they are. My name is Leon."

 

 

Leon interrogated Miller for four hours before he was satisfied of the reporter's genuineness. Like others before him, he was puzzled about the motivation but had to concede it was possible Miller's reason was the one he gave, indignation at what had been done by the SS during the war. When he had finished, Leon leaned back in his chair and surveyed the younger man for a long time.

 

 

"Are you aware how risky it is to try and penetrate the Odessa, Herr Miller?" he asked.

 

 

"I can guess," said Miller. "For one thing, I'm too it young.

 

 

Leon shook his head. "There's no question of your trying to persuade former SS men you are one of them under your own name. For one thing, they have lists of former SS men, and Peter Miller is not on that list. For another, you have to age ten years at least. It can be done, but it involves a complete new identity, and a real identity. The identity of a man who really existed and was in the SS. That alone means a lot of research by us, and the expenditure of a lot of time and trouble."

 

 

"Do you think you can find such a man?" asked Miller.

 

 

Leon shrugged. "It would have to be a man whose death cannot be checked out," he said. "Before the Odessa accepts a man at all, it checks him out. You have to pass all the tests. That also means you will have to live for five or six weeks with a genuine former SS man who can teach you the folklore, the technical terms, the phraseology, the behavior patterns. Fortunately, we know such a man." Miller was amazed. "Why should he do such a thing?" "The man I have in mind is an odd character. He is a genuine SS captain who sincerely regretted what was. done. He experienced remorse. Later he was inside the Odessa and passed information about wanted Nazis to the authorities. He would be doing so still, but he was 'shopped' and was lucky to escape with his life. Now he lives under a new name, in a house outside Bayreuth." "What else would I have to learn?" "Everything about your new identity. Where he was born, his date of birth, how he got into the SS, where he trained, where he served, his unit, his commanding officer, his entire history from the end of the war onward. You will also have to be vouched for by a guarantor. That will not be easy. A lot of time and trouble will have to be spent on you, Herr Miller. Once you are in, there will be no pulling back." "What's in this for you?" asked Miller suspiciously.

 

 

Leon rose and paced the carpet. "Revenge," he said simply. "Like you, we want Roschmann. But we want more. The worst of the SS killers are living under false names. We want those names. That's what's in it for us." "That sounds like information that might be of use to Israeli Intelligence," said Miller.

 

 

Leon glanced at him shrewdly. "It is," he said shortly. "We occasionally cooperate with them, though they do not own us."

 

 

"Have you ever tried to get your own men inside the Odessa?" asked Miller.

 

 

Leon nodded. "Twice," he said.

 

 

"What happened?" "The first was found floating in a canal without his fingernails. The second disappeared without trace. Do you still want to go ahead?" Miller ignored the question. "If your methods are so efficient, why were they caught?" "They were both Jewish," said Leon shortly. "We tried to get the tattoos from the concentration camps off their arms, but they left scars.

 

 

Besides, they were both circumcised. That was why, when Motti reported to me on a genuine Aryan German with a grudge against the SS, I was interested. By the way, are you circumcised?" "Does it matter?" inquired Miller.

 

 

"Of course. If a man is circumcised it does not prove he's a Jew. Many Germans are circumcised as well. But if he is not, it more or less proves he is not a Jew." "I'm not," said Miller shortly.

 

 

Leon nodded with pensive satisfaction. "Certainly that improves your chances. That just leaves the problem of changing your appearance and training you to play a very dangerous role." It was long past midnight. Leon looked at his watch. "Have you eaten?" he asked Miller. The reporter shook his head.

 

 

"Motti, I think a little food for our guest." Motti grinned and nodded. He disappeared through the door of the cellar room and went up into the house.

 

 

"You'll have to spend the night here," said Leon to Miller. "We'll bring a bedroll down to you. Don't try to leave, please. The door has three locks, and all will be shut on the far side. Give me your car keys, and I'll have your car brought around here. It will be better out of sight for the next few weeks. Your hotel bill will be paid and your luggage brought around here too. In the morning you will write letters to your mother and girl friend, explaining that you will be out of contact for several weeks, maybe months. Understood?" Miller nodded and handed over his car keys. Leon gave them to one of the other two men, who quietly left.

 

 

"In the morning we will drive you to Bayreuth, and you will meet our SS officer. His name is Alfred Oster. He's the man you will live with. I will arrange it. Meanwhile, excuse me. I have to start looking for a new name and identity for you." He rose and left. Motti soon returned with a plate of food and half a dozen blankets, leaving Miller to his cold chicken, potato salad, and growing doubts.

 

 

Far away to the north, in the General Hospital of Bremen, a ward orderly was patrolling his ward in the small hours of the morning. Around a bed at the end of the room was a tall screen that shut off the occupant from the rest of the ward.

 

 

The orderly, a middle-aged man called Hartstein, peered around the screen at the man in the bed. He lay very still. Above his head a dim light was burning through the night. The orderly entered the screened-off area and checked the patient's pulse. There was none.

 

 

He looked down at the ravaged face of the cancer victim, and something the man had said in delirium three days earlier caused the orderly to lift the left arm of the dead man out of the blankets. Inside the man's armpit was tattooed a number. It was the dead man's blood group, a sure sign that the patient bad once been in the SS. The reason for the tattoo was that SS men were regarded in the Reich as more valuable than ordinary soldiers, so when wounded they always had first chance at any available plasma. Hence the tattooed blood group.

 

 

Orderly Hartstein covered the dead man's face and glanced into the drawer of the bedside table. He drew out the driving license that bad been placed there along with the other personal possessions when the man had been brought in after collapsing in the street. It showed a man of about thirty-nine, date of birth June 18, 1925, and the name of Rolf Gunther Kolb.

 

 

The orderly slipped the driving license into the pocket of his white coat and went off to report the death to the night physician.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Don't bother," he said. "It's a hired car, taken out in a false name." "Well, it's nice to know one is among professionals," said Miller.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Well, we can always try," he said. "How long can I have him?" "We don't know yet," said Motti. "Obviously, until be's ready. Also, it will be necessary to devise a new identity for him. We will let you know." A few minutes later he wasgone. - Oster led Miller into the living room and drew the curtains against the descending dusk before be put on the light. "So, you want to be able to pass as a former SS man, do you?" he asked.

 

 

Miller nodded. "That's right," he said.

 

 

Oster turned on him. "Well, we'll start by getting a few basic facts rights. I don't know where you did your military service, but I suspect it was in that ill-disciplined, democratic, wet-nursing shambles that calls itself the new German Army. Here's the first fact. The new German Army would have lasted exactly ten seconds against any crack regiment of the British, Americans, or Russians during the last war. Whereas the Waffen SS, man for man, could beat the shit out of five times their own number of Allies of the last war.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Heels together," roared Oster. "I want to hear the leather smack. All right, since we may not have much time, we'll press on, starting from tonight. Before supper we'll tackle the ranks, from private up to full general. You'll learn the titles, mode of address, and collar insignia of every SS rank that ever existed. Then we'll go on to the various types of uniform used, the differing branches of the SS and their different insignia, the occasions when gala uniform, full-dress uniform, walkingout uniform, combat uniform, and fatigue dress would be worn.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"In the normal course of events," resumed the Werwolf, "we would be prepared to let the matter rest, either convinced that the reporter would eventually give up for lack of progress, or because the man being sought was not worth our while making an expensive and hazardous effort to save." "But this time-it's different?" asked Mackensen softly.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Kill him," confirmed the Werwolf.

 

 

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

 

 

The other place would be his own flat, where his girl friend lives with him. You should represent yourself as a man sent by one of the major magazines for which be normally works. That way, the girl will probably talk to you, if she knows his whereabouts. He drives a noticeable car. You'll find all the details of it there." "I'll need money," said Mackensen. The Werwolf had foreseen the request. He pushed a wad of 10,000 marks across the desk.

 

 

"And the orders?" asked the killer.

 

 

"Locate and liquidate," said the Werwolf.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"All right," said Alfred Oster to his pupil. "Now we'll start on the songs.

 

 

You've heard of the 'Horst Wessel Song'?"

 

 

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

 

 

"Oh, yes, I remember hearing it now. But I can't remember the words." "Okay," said Oster. "I'll have to teach you about a dozen songs. Just in case you are asked. But this is the most important. You may even have to join in a singsong, when you're among the Kameraden. Not to know it would be a death sentence. Now, after me:

 

 

"The flags are high, The ranks are tightly closed.

 

 

It was January 18.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The intern sat on one of the chairs and flicked through the dossier. It revealed simply that Kolb had collapsed in the street and been brought in by ambulance. An examination had diagnosed cancer of the intestine in a virulent and terminal form. A decision had later been made not to operate. The patient had been put on a series of drugs, without any hope, and later on painkillers. The last sheet in the file stated simply: "Patient deceased on the night of January 8/9. Cause of death: carcinoma of the main intestine. No next of kin. Corpus delicti delivered to the municipal mortuary January 10." It was signed by the doctor in charge of the case.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Now he had it, and he liked it.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The door opened, and his wife put her head around it. "Dinner's ready," she said.

 

 

"Coming, dear," said Eduard Roschmann.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"What about his career in the SST' asked Oster. "At the moment we have reached something of a dead end." "How is he so far?" asked Leon. Miller might as well not have been there.

 

 

"Pretty good," said Oster. "I gave him a two-hour interrogation yesterday, and he could pass. Until someone starts asking for specific details of his career. Then he knows nothing." Leon nodded for a while, examining some papers he had taken from his attach6 case. "We don't know Kolb's career with the SS," he said. "It couldn't have been very much, for he's not on any wanted list and nobody has ever heard of him. In a way that's just as well, for the chances are the Odessa has never heard of him either. But the disadvantage is, be has no reason to seek refuge and help from the Odessa unless he is being pursued. So we have invented a career for him. Here it is." He passed the sheets over to Oster, who began to read them. When he had finished he nodded. "It's good," he said. "It all fits with ' the known facts. And it would be enough to get him arrested if he were exposed." Leon grunted with satisfaction. "That's what you have to teach him.

 

 

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

 

 

The man is now a bakery-owner. When Miller presents himself, which must be after February sixteenth, he will have a letter from this man assuring the Odessa that Kolb, his employee, is genuinely a former SS man and genuinely in trouble. By that time the bakery-owner will be on the high seas and uncontactable. By the way"he turned to Miller and passed a book across to him44you can learn baking as well. That's what you have been since nineteen forty-five, an employee in a bakery." He did not mention that the bakery-owner would be away for only four weeks, and that after that period Miller's life would hang by a thread.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

The weekly meeting of the Mossad had reached its end when General Amit raised his hand and said, "There is just one last matter, though I regard it as of comparatively low importance. Leon has reported from Munich that he has for some time had under training a young German, an Aryan, who for some reason of his own has a grudge against the SS and is being prepared to infiltrate the Odessa." "His motive?" asked one of the men suspiciously.

 

 

General Amit shrugged. "For reasons of his own, he wants to track down a certain former SS captain called Roschmann." The head of the Office for the Countries of Persecution, a former Polish Jew, jerked his head up. "Eduard Roschmann? The Butcher of Riga?" "That's the man."

 

 

"Phew. If we could get him, that would be an old score settled." General Amit shook his bead. "I have told you before, Israel is no longer in the retribution business. My orders are absolute. Even if the man finds Roschmann, there is to be no assassination. After the Ben-Gal affair, it would be the last straw on Erhard's back. The trouble now is that if any ex-Nazi dies in Germany, Israeli agents get the blame." "So what about this young German?" asked the Shabak chief.

 

 

"I want to try and use him to identify any more Nazi scientists who might be sent out to Cairo this year. For us that is priority number one. I propose to send an agent over to Germany, simply to put the young man under surveillance. Just a watching brief, nothing else." "You have such a man in mind?" "Yes," said General Amit. "He's a good man, reliable. He'll just follow the German and watch him, reporting back to me personally. He can pass for a German. He's a Yekke. He came from Karlsruhe." "What about Leon?" asked someone else. "Will he not try to settle accounts on his own?" "Leon will do what he's told," said General Amit angrily. "There is to be no more settling of accounts."

 

 

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

 

 

"Okay," said Oster, "what are the words engraved on the hilt of the SS dagger?" "Blood and Honor," replied Miller.

 

 

"Right. When is the dagger presented to an SS man?" "At his passing-out parade from training camp," replied Miller.

 

 

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

 

 

"Repeat the blood oath of the SS." Miller complied.

 

 

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

 

 

Hence the skull and the crossbones, signifying the world beyond the grave." "Right. Were all SS men automatically members of death's-head units?" "No." Oster rose and stretched. "Not bad," he said. "I can't think of anything else you might be asked in general terms. Now let's get on to specifics.

 

 

This is what you would have to know about Flossenburg Concentration Camp, your first and only posting......

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Now seal it," said Leon.

 

 

Miller did so. "Who's the man I have to present myself to?" he asked.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"All right. Thursday it is." "Two last things," said Leon. "Apart from hying to trace koschmann, which is your desire, we also would like some information. We want to know who is now recruiting scientists to go to Egypt and develop Nasser's rockets for him. The recruiting is being done by the Odessa, here in Germany. We need to know specifically who the new chief recruiting officer is.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Reliable? he's the best chance we have ever had for penetrating the Odessa. You heard Oster. He can pass for a former SS man in any company, provided he keeps his head." Josef retained his doubts. "My brief was to watch him at all times," he grumbled. "I ought to be sticking to him when he moves, keeping an eye on him, reporting back on the men he is introduced to and their position in the Odessa. I wish I'd never agreed to let him go off alone and check in by phone when he sees fit. Supposing he doesn't check in?" Leon's anger was barely controlled. It was evident they had been through this argument before. "Now, listen one more time. This man is my discovery. His infiltration into the Odessa was my idea. He's my agent. Ive waited years to get someone where he is now-a non-Jew. I'm not having him exposed by someone tagging along behind him." "He's an amateur. I'm a pro," growled the agent- "He's also an Aryan," riposted Leon. "By the time he's outlived his usefulness, I hope he'll have given us the names of the top ten Odessa men in Germany. Then we go to work on them one by one. Among them, one must be the recruiter of the rocket scientists. Don't worry, we'll find him, and the names of the scientists he intends to send to Cairo."

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

IT WAS actually on the evening of 12 Wednesday, February 19, that Peter Miller finally bade farewell to Alfred Oster in his cottage in Bay reuth and headed for Nuremberg.

 

 

The former SS officer shook him by the hand on the doorstep. "Best of luck, Kolb. I've taught you everything I know. Let me give you a last word of advice. I don't know how long your cover can hold. Probably not long. If you ever spot anyone who you think has seen through the cover, don't argue. Get out and revert to your real name." As the young reporter walked down the drive, Orster muttered to himseff, "Craziest idea I ever heard," shut the door, and went back to his hearth.

 

 

Miller walked the mile to the railway station, going steadily downhill and passing the public parking lot. At the small station, with its Bavarian eaves and gables, he bought a single ticket to Nuremberg.

 

 

It was only as he passed through the ticket barrier toward the windswept platform that the collector told him, "I'm afraid you'll have quite a wait, sir. The Nuremberg train will be late tonight." Miller was surprised. German railroads make a point of honor of running on time. "What's happened?" he asked.

 

 

The ticket collector nodded up the line, where the track disappeared into close folds of hills and valleys beavy-hung with fresh snow. "There's been a large snowfall down the track. Now we've just heard the snow plow's gone on the blink. The engineers are working on it." Years in journalism bad given Miller a deep loathing of waiting rooms.

 

 

He had spent too long in them, cold, tired, and uncomfortable. In the small station caf6 be sipped a cup of coffee and looked at his ticket. It had already been clipped. His mind went back to his car parked up the hill.

 

 

Surely, if he parked it on the other side of Nuremberg, several miles from the address he had been given... ? If, after the interview, they sent him on somewhere else by another means of transport, he would leave the Jaguar in Munich. He could even park it in a garage, out of sight.

 

 

No one would ever find it. Not before the job was done. Besides, he reasoned, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have another way of getting out fast if the occasion required. There was no reason for him to think anyone in Bavaria had ever heard of him or his car.

 

 

He thought of Motti's warning about its being too noticeable, but then he recalled Oster's tip an hour earlier about getting out in a hurry. To use it was a risk, of course, but then so was to be stranded on foot. He gave the prospect another five minutes, then left his coffee, walked out of the station and back up the hill. Within ten minutes he was behind the wheel of the Jaguar and heading out of town.

 

 

It was a short trip to Nuremberg. When he arrived, Miller checked into a small hotel near the main station, parked his car in a side street two blocks away, and walked through the King's Gate into the old walled medieval city of Albrecht DUrer.

 

 

It was already dark, but the lights from the streets and windows lit up the quaint pointed roofs and decorated gables of the walled town. It was almost possible to think oneself back in the Middle Ages, when the Kings of Franconia had ruled over Nuremberg, one of the richest merchant cities of the Germanic states. It was hard to recall that almost every brick and stone of what he saw around him had been built since 1945, meticulously reconstructed from the actual architects' plans of the original town, which had been reduced with its cobbled streets and timbered houses to ashes and rubble by the Allied bombs of 1943.

 

 

He found the house he was looking for two streets from the square of the main market, almost under the twin spires of Saint Sebald's Church. The name on the doorplate checked with the one typed on the letter he carried, the forged introduction supposedly from former SS Colonel Joachim Eberhardt of Bremen. As be had never met Eberhardt, he could only hope the man in the house in Nuremberg bad not met him either.

 

 

He walked back to the market square, looking for a place to have supper.

 

 

After strolling past two or three traditional Franconian eating houses, he noticed smoke curling up into the frosty night sky from the red-tiled roof of the small sausage house in the comer of the square, in front of the doors of Saint Sebald's. It was a pretty little place, fronted by a terrace fringed with boxes of purple heather, from which a careful owner had brushed the morning's snow.

 

 

Inside, the warmth and good cheer hit him like a wave. The wooden tables were almost all occupied, but a couple from a comer table were leaving, so he took it, bobbing and smiling back as the couple, on their way out, wished him a good appetite. He ordered the specialty of the house, the small spiced Nuremberg sausages, a dozen on one plate, and treated himself to a bottle of the local wine to wash them down.

 

 

After his meal he sat back and dawdled over his coffee and chased the black liquid home with two Asbachs. He didn't feel like bed, and it was pleasant to sit and gaze at the logs flickering in the open fire, to listen to the crowd in the comer roaring out a Franconian drinking song, locking arms and swinging from side to side to the music, voices and wine tumblers raised high each time they reached the end of a stanza.

 

 

For a long time he wondered why he should bother to risk his life in the quest for a man who had committed crimes twenty years before. He almost decided to let the matter drop, to shave off his mustache, grow his hair again, go back to Hamburg and the bed warmed by Sigi.

 

 

The waiter came over, bowed, deposited the bill on the table with a cheerful "Bitte schbn." He reached into his pocket for his wallet, and his fingers touched a photograph. He pulled it out and gazed at it for a while. The pale red-rimmed eyes and the rattrap mouth stared back at him above the collar with the black tabs and the silver lightning symbols. After a while he muttered, "You shit," and held the comer of the photograph above the candle on his table. When the picture had been reduced to ashes he crumpled them in the copper tray. He would not need it again. He could recognize the face when he saw it.

 

 

Peter Miller paid for his meal, buttoned his coat about him, and walked back to his hotel.

 

 

Mackensen was confronting an angry and baffled Werwolf at about the same time.

 

 

"How the hell can he be missing?" snapped the Odessa chief. "He can't vanish off the face of the earth, he can't disappear into thin air. His car must be one of the most distinctive in Germany, visible half a mile off. Six weeks of searching, and all you can tell me is that he hasn't been seen....

 

 

Mackensen waited until the outburst of frustration had spent itself.

 

 

"Nevertheless, it's true," be pointed out at length. "I've had his apartment in Hamburg checked out, his girl friend and mother interviewed by supposed friends of Miller, his colleagues contacted. They all know nothing. His car must have been in a garage somewhere all this time. He must have gone to ground. Since he was traced leaving the airport parking lot in Cologne, after returning from London, and driving south, he has gone." "We have to find him," repeated the Werwolf. "He must not get near this Kamerad. It would be a disaster." "He'll show up," said Mackensen with conviction. "Sooner or later he has to break cover. Then we'll have him." The Werwolf considered the patience and logic of the professional hunter. He nodded slowly. "Very well. Then I want you to stay close to me. Check into a hotel here in town, and we'll wait it out. If you're nearby, I can get you easily." "Right, sir. I'll get into a hotel downtown and call you to let you know.

 

 

You can get me there any time." He bade his superior good night and left.

 

 

It was just before nine the following morning that Miller presented himself at the house and rang the brilliantly polished bell. He wanted to get the man before he left for work. The door was opened by a maid, who showed him into the living room and went to fetch her employer.

 

 

The man who entered the room ten minutes later was in his mid-fifties with medium-brown hair and silver tufts at each temple, self-possessed and elegant. The furniture and decor of his room also spelled elegance and a substantial income.

 

 

He gazed at his unexpected visitor without curiosity assessing at a glance the inexpensive trousers and jacket of a working-class man. "And what can I do for you?" he inquired calmly.

 

 

The visitor was plainly embarrassed and ill at ease among the opulent surroundings of the room. "Well, Herr Doktor, I was hoping you might be able to help me.~l "Come now," said the Odessa man, "I'm sure you know my office is not far from here. Perhaps you should go there and ask my secretary for an appoint- ment." "Well, it's not actually professional help I need," said Miller. He had dropped into the vernacular of the Hamburg and Bremen area, the language of working people. He was obviously embarrassed. At a loss for words, he produced a letter from his inside pocket and held it out. "I brought a letter of introduction from the man who suggested I come to you, Sir." The Odessa man took the letter without a word, slit it open, and cast his eyes quickly down it. He stiffened slightly and gazed narrowly across the sheet of paper at Miller. "I see, Herr Kolb. Perhaps you had better sit down." He gestured toward an upright chair, while he himself took an easy chair.

 

 

He spent several minutes looking speculatively at his guest, a frown on his face. Suddenly he snapped, "What did you say your name was?" "Kolb, sir." "First names?" "Rolf Gfinther, sir." "Do you have any identification on you?" Miller looked nonplused. "Only my driving license." "Let me see it, please." The lawyer-for that was his profession-stretched out a hand, forcing Miller to rise from his seat and place the driving license in the outstretched palm. The man took it, flicked it open, and digested the details inside. He glanced over it at Miller, comparing the photograph and the face. They matched.

 

 

"What is your date of birth?" he snapped suddenly.

 

 

"My birthday? Oh--er-June eighteenth, Sir." "The year, Kolb?" "Nineteen twenty-five, sir." The lawyer considered the driving license for another few minutes. "Wait here," he said suddenly, got up, and left.

 

 

He traversed the house and entered the rear portion of it, an area that served as his office and was reached by clients from a street at the back.

 

 

He went straight into the office and opened the wall safe. From it he took a thick book and thumbed through it.

 

 

By chance he knew the name of Joachim Eberhardt but had never met the man.

 

 

He was not completely certain of Eberhardt's last rank in the SS. The book confirmed the letter. Joachim Eberhardt, promoted colonel of the Waffen SS on January 10, 1945. He flicked over several more pages and checked against Kolb. There were seven such names, but only one Rolf Giinther. Staff Sergeant as of April, 1945. Date of birth

 

 

18/6/25. He closed the book, replaced it, and locked the safe. Then he returned through the house to the living room. His guest was still sitting awkwardly on the upright chair.

 

 

He settled himself again. "It may not be possible for me to help you. You realize that, don't you?" Miller bit his lip and nodded. "I've nowhere else to go, Sir. I went to Herr Eberhardt for help when they started looking for me, and he gave me the letter and suggested I come to you. He said if you couldn't help me no one could." The lawyer leaned back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. "I wonder why he didn't call me if he wanted to talk to me," he mused. Then he evidently waited for an answer.

 

 

"Maybe he didn't want to use the phone on a matter like this," Miller suggested hopefully.

 

 

The lawyer shot him a scornful look. "It's possible," he said shortly.

 

 

"You'd better tell me how you got into this mess in the first place." "Oh, yes. Well, sir-I mean I was recognized by this man, and then they said they were coming to arrest me. So I got out, didn't I? I mean, I had to." The lawyer sighed. "Start at the beginning," he said wearily. "Who recognized you, and as what?" Miller drew a deep breath. "Well, Sir, I was in Bremen. I live there, and I work-well, I worked, until this happened, for Herr Eberhardt. In the bakery. Well, I was walking in the street one day about four months back, and I suddenly got very sick. I felt terribly W, with stomach pains.

 

 

Anyway, I must have passed out. I fainted on the pavement. So they took me away to the hospital." "Which hospital?" "Bremen General, Sir. They did some tests and they said I had cancer. In the intestine. I thought that was it, see?" "it usually is it," observed the lawyer dryly.

 

 

"Well, that's what I thought, Sir. Only apparently it was caught at an early stage. Anyway, they put me on a course of drugs instead of operating, and after some time the cancer went into a remission." "So far as I can see, you're a lucky man. What's all this about being recognized?" "Yes, well, it was this hospital orderly, see? He was Jewish, and he kept staring at me. Every time he was on duty he kept staring at me. It was a funny sort of look, see? And it got me worried. The way he kept looking at me. With a sort of 'I know you' look on his face. I didn't rccognize him, but I got the impression he knew me." "Go on." The lawyer was showing increasing interest.

 

 

"So about a month ago they said I was ready to be transferred, and I was taken away and put in a convalescent clinic. It was the employees' insurance plan at the bakery that paid for it. Well, before I left the Bremen General, I remembered him. The Jew-boy I mean. It took me weeks; then I got it. He was an inmate at Flossenburg." The lawyer jackknifed upright. "You were at Flossenburg?" "Yes, I was getting around to telling you that, wasn't I? I mean, sir.

 

 

And I remembered this hospital orderly from then. I got his name in the Bremen hospital. But at Flossenburg he had been in the party of Jewish inmates that we used to bum the bodies of Admiral Canaris and the other officers we hanged for their part in the assassination attempt on the FUhrer." The lawyer stared at him again. "You were one of those who executed Canaris and the others?" he asked.

 

 

Miller shrugged. "I commanded the execution squad," he said simply.

 

 

"Well, they were traitors, weren't they? They tried to kill the FUhrer." The lawyer smiled. "My dear fellow, I'm not reproaching you. Of course they were traitors. Canaris had even been passing information to the Allies. They were all traitors, those Army swine, from the generals down.

 

 

I just never thought to meet the man who killed them."

 

 

Miller grinned weakly. "The point is, the police would like to get their hands on me for that. I mean, knocking off Jews is one thing, but now there's a lot of them saying Canaris and that crowd-saying they were sort of heroes." The lawyer nodded. "Yes, certainly that would get you into bad trouble with the present authorities in Germany. Go on with your story." "I was transferred to this clinic, and I didn't see the Jewish orderly again. Then last Friday I got a telephone call at the convalescent clinic. I thought it must be the bakery calling, but the man wouldn't give his name. He just said he was in a position to know what was going on, and that a certain person had informed those swine at Ludwigsburg who I was, and there was a warrant being prepared for my arrest. I didn't know who the man could be, but he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Sort of officialsounding voice, if you know what I mean, Sir?" The lawyer nodded understandingly. "Probably a friend on the police force of Bremen. What did you do?" Miller looked surprised. "Well, i got out, didn't I? I discharged myself.

 

 

I didn't know what to do. I didn't go home in case they were waiting for me there. I didn't even go and pick up my Volkswagen, which was still parked in front of my house. I slept out Friday night; then on Saturday I had an idea. I went to see the boss, Herr Eberhardt, at his house. He was in the telephone book. He was real nice to me. He said he was leaving with Frau Eberhardt for a winter cruise the next morning, but he'd try and see that I was all right. So he gave me the letter and told me to come to you." "What made you suspect Herr Eberhardt would help you?" "Well, you see I didn't know what he had been in the war. But he was always real nice to me at the bakery. Then about two years back we were having the staff party. We all got a little drunk, and I went to the men's room. There was Herr Eberhardt washing his hands. And singing. He was singing the 'Horst Wessel Song.'

 

 

So I joined in. There we were, singing it in the men's room. Then he clapped me on the back, and said, 'Not a word, Kolb,' and went out. I didn't think any more about it till I got into trouble. Then I tbought-well, he might have been in the SS like me. So I went to him for he] p." "And he sent you to me?" Miller nodded.

 

 

"What was the name of this Jewish orderly?" "Hartstein, Sir." "And the convalescent clinic you were sent to?" "The Arcadia Clinic, at Delmenborst, just outside Bremen." The lawyer nodded again, made a few notes on a sheet of paper taken from a desk, and rose. "Stay here," he said and left again.

 

 

He crossed the passage and entered his study. From the telephone information operator be elicited the numbers of the Eberhardt Bakery, the Bremen General Hospital, and the Arcadia Clinic at Delmenhorst. He called the bakery first.

 

 

Eberhardt's secretary was most helpful. "I'm afraid Herr Eberhardt is away, Sir. No, he can't be contacted, he has taken his usual winter cruise to the Caribbean with Frau Eberhardt. Hell be back in four weeks. Can I be of any assistance?" The lawyer assured her she could not and hung up. Next he dialed the Bremen General and asked for Personnel and Staff.

 

 

"This is the Department of Social Security, Pensions Section," he said smoothly. "I just wanted to confirm that you have a ward orderly on the staff by the name of Hartstein." There was a pause while the girl at the other end went through the staff file. "Yes, we do," she said. "David Hartstein." "Thank you," said the lawyer in Nuremberg and hung up. He dialed the same number again and asked for the registrar's office.

 

 

"This is the secretary of the Eberhardt Baking Company," he said. "I just wanted to check on the progress of one of our staff who has been in your hospital with a tumor in the intestine. Can you tell me of his progress? Rolf GUnther Kolb." There was another pause. The girl Ming clerk got out the file on Rolf GUnther Kolb and glanced at the last page.

 

 

"He's been discharged," she told the caller. "His condition improved to a point where he could be transferred to a convalescent clinic." "Excellent," said the lawyer. "I've been away on my annual skiing vacation, so I haven't caught up yet. Can you tell me which clinic?" "The Arcadia, at Delmenhorst," said the girl.

 

 

The lawyer hung up again and dialed the Arcadia Clinic. A girl answered.

 

 

After listening to the request, she turned to the doctor by her side. She covered the mouthpiece. "There's a question about that man you mentioned to me, Kolb," she said.

 

 

The doctor took the telephone. "Yes," he said. "This is the Chief of the Clinic. I am Doctor Braun. Can I help you?" At the name of Braun the secretary shot a puzzled glance at her employer.

 

 

Without batting an eyelid, he listened to the voice from Nuremburg and replied smoothly, "I'm afraid Herr Kolb discharged himself last Friday afternoon. Most irregular, but there was nothing I could do to prevent him. Yes, that's right, he was transferred here from the Bremen General.

 

 

A tumor, well on the way to recovery." He listened for a moment, then said, "Not at all. Glad I could be of help to you." The doctor, whose real name was Rosemayer, hung up and then dialed a Munich number. Without preamble he said, "Someone's been on the phone asking about Kolb. The checking up has started." Back in Nuremberg, the lawyer replaced the phone and returned to the living room. "Right, Kolb, you evidently are who you say you are." Miller stared at him in astonishment.

 

 

"However, I'd like to ask you a few more questions. You don't mind?" Still aniazed, the visitor shook his head. "No, Sir." "Good. Are you circumcised?" Miller stared back blankly. "No, I'm not," he said dumbly.

 

 

"Show me," said the lawyer calmly. Miller just sat in his chair and stared at him.

 

 

"Show me, Staff Sergeant," snapped the lawyer.

 

 

Miller shot out of his chair, ramrodding to attention. "Zu Befehl," he responded, quivering at attention. He held the attention position, thumbs down the seams of his trousers, for three seconds, then unzipped his fly.

 

 

The lawyer glanced at him briefly, then nodded that he could zip his fly up again.

 

 

"Well, at least you're not Jewish," he said amiably.

 

 

Back in his chair Miller stared at him, open-mouthed. "Of course I'm not Jewish," he blurted.

 

 

The lawyer smiled. "Nevertheless, there have been cases of Jews trying to pass themselves off as one of the Kameraden. They don't last long. Now you'd better tell me your story, and I'm going to shoot questions at you.

 

 

Just checking up, you understand. Where were you born?" "Bremen, Sir." "Right. Place of birth is in your SS records. I just checked. Were you in the Hitler Youth?" "Yes, Sir. Entered at the age of ten in nineteen thirtyfive, Sir." "Your parents were good National Socialists?" "Yessir, both of them." "What happened to them?" "They were killed in the great bombing of Bremen." "When were you inducted into the SST' "Spring nineteen forty-four, Sir. Age eighteen." "Where did you train?" "Dachau SS training camp, Sir." "You had your blood group tattooed under your right armpit?" "No, sir. And it would have been the left armpit."

 

 

"Why weren't you tattooed?" "Well, sir, we were due to pass out of training camp in August nineteen forty-four and go to our first posting in a unit of the Waffen SS. Then in July a large group of officers involved in the plot against the Fiihrer was sent down to Flossenburg camp. Flossenburg asked for immediate troops from Dachau training camp to increase the staff at Flossenburg. I and about a dozen others were singled out as cases of special aptitude and sent straight there. We missed our tattooing and the formal passing-out parade of our draft. The commandant said the blood group was not necessary, as we would never get to the front, sir." The lawyer nodded. No doubt the commandant had also been aware in July 1944 that, with the Allies well into France, the war was drawing to a close.

 

 

"Did you get your dagger?" "Yes, Sir. From the hands of the commandant." "What are the words on it?" "Blood and Honor, Sir." "What kind of training did you get at Dachau?" "Complete military training, sir, and political-ideological training to supplement that of the Hitler Youth." "Did you learn the songs?" "Yessir." "What was the book of marching songs from which the'Horst Wessel Song' was drawn?" "The album Time of Struggle for the Nation, Sir." "Where was Dachau training camp?" "Ten miles north of Munich, Sir. Three miles from the concentration camp of the same name." "What was your uniform?" "Gray-green tunic and breeches, jackboots, black collar lapels, rank on the left one, black leather belt, and gunmetal buckle." "The motto on the buckle?" "A swastika in the center, ringed with the words 'My honor is loyalty,' sir." The lawyer rose and stretched. He lit up a cigar and strolled to the window. "Now youll tell me about 226 TRE OD1388A FILE

 

 

Flossenburg Camp, Staff Sergeant Kolb. Where waa it?" "On the border of Bavaria and Thuringia, sir." "When was it opened?" "In nineteen thirty-four, sir. One of the first for the pigs who opposed the Fiffirer." "How large was it?" "When I was there, sir, three hundred meters by three hundred. It was ringed by nineteen watchtowers with heavy and light machine guns mounted.

 

 

It had a roll-call square one-twenty meters by one-forty. God, we had some fun there with them Yids-" "Stick to the point," snapped the lawyer. "What were the accommodations?" "Twenty-four barracks, a kitchen for the inmates, a washhouse, a sanatorium, and various workshops." "And for the SS guards?" "Two barracks, a shop, and a bordello." "How were the bodies of those who died disposed of?" "There was a small crematorium outside the wire. It was reached from inside the camp by an underground passage." "What was the main kind of work done?" "Stone-breaking in the quarry, sir. The quarry was also outside the wire, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers of its own." "What was the population in late nineteen forty-four?" "Oh, about sixteen thousand inmates, sir." "Where was the commandant's office?" "Outside the wire, sir, halfway up a slope overlooking the camp." "Who were the successive commandants?" "Two were before I got there, sir. The first was SS Major Karl Kunstler.

 

 

His successor was SS Captain Karl Fritsch. The last one was SS Lieutenant Colonel Max K6gel." "Which was the number of the political department?" "Department Two, sir." "Where was it?" "In the commandant's block."

 

 

"What were its duties?" "To ensure that requirements frona Berlin that certain prisoners received special treatment were carried out." "Canaris and the other plotters were so indicated?" "Yes, Sir. They were all designated for special treatment." "When was this carried out?" "April twentieth, nineteen forty-five, sit. Ile Americans were moving up through Bavaria, so the orders came to finish them off. A group of us was designated to do the job. I was then a newly promoted staff sergeant, although I had arrived at the camp as a private. I headed the detail for Canaris and five others. Then we had a burial party of Jews bury the bodies. Hartstein was one of them, damn his eyes. After that we burned the camp documents. Some time later we were ordered to march the prisoners northward. On the way we beard the Fiffirer had killed himself. Well, sit, the officers left us then. The prisoners started running off into the woods. We shot a few, us sergeants, but there didn't seem much point in marching on. I mean the Yanks were all over the place." "One last question about the camp, Staff Sergeant. When you looked up, from anywhere in the camp, what did you see?" Miller looked puzzled. "The sky," he Said.

 

 

"Fool, I mean what dominated the horizon?" "Oh, you mean the hill with the ruined castle keep on it?" The lawyer nodded and smiled. "Fourteenth century, actually," he said. "All right, Kolb, you were at Flossenburg. Now, how did you get away?" "Well, Sir, it was on the march. We all broke up. I found an Army private wandering around, so I hit him on the head and took his uniform. The Yanks caught me two days later. I did two years in a prisoner-of-war camp, but just told them I was an Army private. Well, you know how it was, Sir, there were rumors floating about that the Yanks were shooting SS men out of hand.

 

 

So I said I was in the Army."

 

 

The lawyer exhaled a draft of cigar smoke. "You weren't alone in that.

 

 

Did you change your name?" "No, Sir. I threw my papers away, because they identified me as SS. But I didn't think to change the name. I didn't think anyone would look for a staff sergeant. At the time the business with Canaris didn't seem very important. It was only much later people started to make a fuss over those Army officers, and made a shrine of the place in Berlin where they hanged the ringleaders. But then I had papers from the Federal Republic in the name of Kolb. Anyway, nothing would have happened if that orderly hadn't spotted me, and after that it wouldn't have mattered what I called myself." "True. Right, now we'll go on to a little of the things you were taught.

 

 

Start by repeating to me the oath of loyalty to the Fiffirer," said the lawyer.

 

 

It went on for another three hours. Miller was sweating, but was able to say he had left the hospital prematurely and had not eaten all day. It was past lunchtime when at last the lawyer professed himself satisfied.

 

 

"Just what do you want?" he asked Miller.

 

 

"Well, the thing is, sir, with them all looking for me, I'm going to need a set of papers showing I am not Rolf Giinther Kolb. I can change my appearance, grow my hair, let the mustache grow longer, and get a job in Bavaria or somewhere. I mean, I'm a skilled baker, and people need bread, don't they?" For the first time in the interview the lawyer threw back his head and laughed. "Yes, my good Kolb, people need bread. Very well. Listen.

 

 

Normally people of your standing in life hardly merit a lot of expensive time and trouble being spent on them. But as you are evidently in trouble through no fault of your own, obviously a good and loyal German, I'll do what I can. There's no point in your getting simply a new driving license. That would not enable you to get a social-security card without producing a birth certificate, which you haven't got. But a new passport would get you all these things. Have you got any money?" "No, Sir. I'm dead broke. I've been hitchhiking south for the past three days." The lawyer gave him a hundred-mark note. "You can't stay here, and it will take at least a week before your new passport comes through. I'll send you to a friend of mine who will acquire the passport for you. He lives in Stuttgart. You'd better check into a commercial hotel and go and see him.

 

 

I'll tell him you're coming, and he'll be expecting you." The lawyer wrote on a piece of paper. "He's called Franz Bayer, and here's his address. You'd better take the train to Stuttgart, find a hotel, and go straight to him. If you need a little more money, he'll help you out. But don't go spending a lot. Stay under cover and wait until Bayer can fix you up with a new passport. Then we'll find you a job in southern Germany, and no one will ever trace you." Miller took the hundred marks and the address of Bayer with embarrassed thanks. "Oh, thank you, Herr Doktor, you're a real gentleman." The maid showed him out, and be walked back toward the station, his hotel, and his parked car. An hour later he was speeding toward Stuttgart, while the lawyer rang Bayer and told him to expect Rolf Giinther Kolb, refugee from the police, in the early evening.

 

 

There was no autobahn between Nuremberg and Stuttgart in those days, and on a bright sunny day the road leading across the lush plain of Franconia and into the wooded hills and valleys of WUrttemberg would have been picturesque. On a bitter February afternoon, with ice glittering in the dips of the road surface and mist forming in the valleys, the twisting ribbon of tarmac between Ansbach and Crailsheim was murderous. Twice the heavy Jaguar almost slithered into a ditch, and twice Miller had to tell himself there was no hurry. Bayer, the man who knew how to get false passports, would still be there.

 

 

He arrived after dark and found a small hotel in the outer city that nevertheless had a night porter for those who preferred to stay out late, and a garage at the back for the car. From the hall porter he got a town plan and found Bayer's street in the suburb of Ostheim, a wellset-up area not far from the Villa Berg, in whose gardens the Princes of Wdrttemberg and their ladies had once disported themselves on summer nights.

 

 

Following the map, he drove the car down into the bowl of hills that frames the center of Stuttgart, along which the vineyards come up to the outskirts of the city, and parked his car a quarter of a mile from Bayer's house. As he stooped to lock the driver's-side door, he failed to notice a middle-aged lady coming home from her weekly meeting of the Hospital Visitors Committee at the nearby Villa Hospital.

 

 

It was at eight that evening that the lawyer in Nuremberg thought he had better ring Bayer and make sure the refugee Kolb had arrived safely. It was Bayer's wife who answered.

 

 

"Oh, yes, the young man. He and my husband have gone out to dinner somewhere." "I just rang to make sure he had arrived safe and sound," said the lawyer smoothly.

 

 

"Such a nice young man," burbled Frau Bayer cheerfully. "I passed him as he was parking his car. I was just on my way home from the Hospital Visitors Committee meeting. But miles away from the house. He must have lost his way. It's very easy, you know, in Stuttgart, so many dead ends and one-way streets-" "Excuse me, Frau Bayer," the lawyer cut in. "The man did not have his Volkswagen with him. He came by train." "No, no," said Frau Bayer, happy to be able to show superior knowledge.

 

 

"He came by car. Such a nice young man, and such a lovely car. I'm sure he's a success with all the girls with a-" "Frau Bayer, listen to me. Carefully, now. What kind of a car was it?" "Well, I don't know the make, of course. But a sports car. A long black one, with a yellow stripe down the side-" The lawyer slammed down the phone, then raised it and dialed a number in Nuremberg. He was sweating slightly. When he got the hotel he wanted be asked for a room number. The phone extension was lifted, and a familiar voice said, "Hello." "Mackensen," barked the Werwolf, "get over here fast. We've found Miller." FRANz 13AYER was as fat and 13 round and jolly as his wife.

 

 

Alerted by the Werwolf to expect the fugitive from the police, he welcomed Miller on his doorstep when he presented himself just before eight o'clock.

 

 

Miller was introduced briefly to his wife in the hallway before she bustled off to the kitchen.

 

 

"Well, now," said Bayer, "have you ever been in WUrttemberg before, my dear Kolb?" "No, I confess I haven't." "Ha, well, we pride ourselves here on being a very hospitable people. No doubt you'd like some food. Have you eaten yet today?" Miller told him he had had neither breakfast nor lunch, having been on the train all afternoon.

 

 

Bayer seemed most distressed. "Good heavens, how awful. You must eat. Tell you what, we'll go into town and have a really good dinner.... Nonsense, my boy, the least I can do for you." He waddled off into the back of the house to tell his wife he was taking their guest out for a meal in downtown Stuttgart, and ten minutes later they were heading in Bayer's car toward the city center.

 

 

It is at least a two-hour drive from Nuremberg to Stuttgart along the old E 12 highroad, even if one pushes the car hard. And Mackensen pushed his car that night. Half an hour after he received the Werwolf's call, fully briefed and armed with Bayer's address, he was on the road. He arrived at half past ten and went straight to Bayer's house.

 

 

Frau Bayer, alerted by another call from the Werwolf that the man calling himself Kolb was not what he seemed to be and might indeed be a police informer, was a trembling and frightened woman when Mackensen arrived. His terse manner was hardly calculated to put her at her ease.

 

 

"When did they leave?" "About a quarter to eight," she quavered.

 

 

"Did they say where they were going?" "No. Franz just said the young man had not eaten all day and he was taking him into town for a meal at a restaurant. I said I could make something here at home, but Franz just loves dining out. Any excuse will do-" "This man Kolb. You said you saw him parking his car. Where was this?" She described the street where the Jaguar was parked, and how to get to it from her house.

 

 

Mackensen thought deeply for a moment. "Have you any idea which restaurant your husband might have taken him to?" he asked.

 

 

She thought for a while. "Well, his favorite eating place is the Three Moors restaurant on Friedrichstrasse," she said. "He usually tries there first." Mackensen left the house and drove the half-mile to the parked Jaguar. He examined it closely, certain that he would recognize it again whenever he saw it. He was of two minds whether to stay with it and wait for Miller's return. But the Werwolf's orders were to trace Miller and Bayer, warn the Odessa man and send him home, then take care of Miller. For that reason he had not telephoned the Three Moors. To wam Bayer now would be to alert Miller to the fact that he had been uncovered, giving him the chance to disappear again.

 

 

Mackensen glanced at his watch. It was ten to eleven. He climbed back into his Mercedes and headed for the center of town.

 

 

In a small and obscure hotel in the back streets of Munich, Josef was lying awake on his bed when a call came from the reception desk to say a cable had arrived for him. He went downstairs and brought it back to his room.

 

 

Seated at the rickety table, he slit the buff envelope and scanned the lengthy contents. It began: Celery: 481 marks, 53 pfennigs.

 

 

Melons: 362 marks, 17 pfennigs.

 

 

Oranges: 627 marks, 24 pfennigs.

 

 

Grapefruit: 313 marks, 88 pfennigs....

 

 

The list of fruit and vegetables was long, but all the articles were those habitually exported by Israel, and the cable read like the response to an inquiry by the German-based representative of an export company for price quotations. Using the public international cable network was not secure, but so many commercial cables pass through Western Europe in a day that checking them all would need an army of men.

 

 

Ignoring the words, Josef wrote down the figures in a long line. The five-figure groups into which the marks and pfennigs were divided disappeared. When he had them all in a line, he split them up into groups of six figures. From each six-figure group he subtracted the date, February 20, 1964, which he wrote as 20264. In each case the result was another six-figure group.

 

 

It was a simple book code, based on the paperback edition of Webster's New World Dictionary as published by Popular Library of New York. The first three figures in the group represented the page in the dictionary; the fourth figure could be anything from one to nine. An odd number meant column one, an even number column two. The last two figures indicated the number of words down the column from the top. He worked steadily for half an hour, then read the message through and slowly held his head in his hands.

 

 

Thirty minutes later he was with Leon in the latter's house. The revenge-group leader read the message and swore. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I couldn't have known." Unknown to either man, three tiny fragments of information had come into the possession of the Mossad in the previous six days. One was from the resident Israeli agent in Buenos Aires to the effect that someone had authorized the payment of a sum equivalent to one million German marks to a figure called Vulkan "to enable him to complete the next stage of his research project." The second was from a Jewish employee of a Swiss bank known habitually to handle currency transfers from secret Nazi funds elsewhere to pay off Odessa men in Western Europe; it was to the effect that one million marks had been transferred to the bank from Beirut and collected in cash by a man operating an account at the bank for the previous ten years in the name of Fritz Wegener.

 

 

The third was from an Egyptian colonel in a senior position in the security apparat around Factory 333, who, for a substantial consideration in money to help him prepare a comfortable retirement, bad talked with a man from the Mossad for several hours in a Rome hotel. What the man had to say was that the rocket project was lacking only the provision of a reliable teleguidance system, which was being researched and constructed in a factory in West Germany, and that the project was costing the Odessa millions of marks.

 

 

The three fragments, among thousands of others, had been processed in the computer banks of Professor Youvel Neeman, the Israeli genius who had first harnessed science in the form of the computer to intelligence analysis, and who later went on to become the father of the Israeli atomic bomb. Where a human memory might have failed, the whirring microcircuits had linked the three items, recalled that up to his ex- posure by his wife in 1955 Roschmann had used the name of Fritz Wegener, and reported accordingly.

 

 

Josef rounded on Leon in their underground headquarters. "I'm staying here from now on. I'm not moving out of range of that telephone. Get me a powerful motorcycle and protective clothing. Have both ready within the hour. If and when your precious Miller checks in, I'll have to get to him fast." "If he's exposed, you won't get there fast enough," said Leon.

 

 

"No wonder they warned him to stay away. They'll kill him if lie gets within a mile of his man." As Leon left the cellar Josef ran his eye over the cable from Tel Aviv once again. It said:

 

 

RED ALERT NEW INFORMATION INDICATES VITAL KEY ROCKET SUCCESS GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST OPF RAT (ING) YOUR TERRITORY STOP CODE NAME VULCAN STOP PROBABLE IDENTIFICATION ROSH MAN STOP USE MILLER INSTANTLY STOP TRACE AND ELIMINATE STOP CORMORANT

 

 

Josef sat at the table and meticulously began to clean and arm his Walther PPK automatic. From time to tivae he glanced at the silent telephone.

 

 

Over dinner Bayer had been the genial host, roaring with laughter in great gusts as he told his own favorite jokes. Miller tried several times to get the talk around to the question of a new passport for himself.

 

 

Each time Bayer clapped him soundly on the back, told him not to worry, and added, "Leave it to me, old boy, leave it to old Franz Bayer." He tapped the right-hand side of his nose with his forefinger, winked broadly, and dissolved into gales of merriment.

 

 

One thing Miller had inherited from eight years as a reporter was the ability to drink and keep a clear head. He was not used to the white wine of which copious drafts were used to wash down the meal. But white wine has one advantage if one is trying to get another man drunk. It comes in buckets of ice and cold water, to keep it chilled, and three times Miller was able to tip his entire glass into the ice bucket when Bayer was looking the other way.

 

 

By the dessert course they had demolished two bottles of excellent cold bock, and Bayer, squeezed into his tight horn-buttoned jacket, was perspiring in torrents. The effect was to enhance his thirst, and he called for a third bottle of wine.

 

 

Miller feigned to be worried that it would prove impossible to obtain a new passport for him, and that he would be arrested for his part in the events at Flossenburg in 1945.

 

 

"You'll Deed some photographs of me, won't you?" he asked with concern.

 

 

Bayer guffawed. "Yes, a couple of photographs. No problem. You can get them taken in one of the automatic booths at the station. Wait till your hair's a little longer, and the mustache a little fuller, and no one will ever know it's the same man." "What happens then?" asked Miller, agog.

 

 

Bayer leaned over and placed a fat arm around his shoulders. Miller smelled the stench of wine as the fat man chuckled in his ear. "Then I send them away to a friend of mine, and a week later back comes the pass- port. With the passport we get you a driving licenseyou'll have to pass the test, of course-and a socialsecurity card. So far as the authorities are concerned, you've just arrived back home after fifteen years abroad.

 

 

No problem, old chap, stop worrying." Although Bayer was getting drunk, he was still in command of his tongue.

 

 

He declined to say more, and Miller was afraid to push him too far in case he suspected something was amiss with his young guest and closed up completely.

 

 

Although he was dying for coffee, Miller declined, in case the coffee should begin to sober up Franz Bayer. The fat man paid for the meal from a well-stuffed wallet, and they headed for the coat-check counter. It was half past ten.

 

 

"It's been a wonderful evening, Herr Bayer. Thank you very much." "Franz, Franz," wheezed the fat man as he struggled into his coat.

 

 

238 THE ODESSA FUE

 

 

"I suppose that's the end of what Stuttgart has to offer in the way of night life," observed Miller as he slipped into his own.

 

 

"Ha, silly boy. That's all you know. We have a great little city here, you know. Half a dozen good cabarets. You'd like to go on to one?" "You mean there are cabarets, with stripteases and everything?" asked Miller, pop-eyed.

 

 

Bayer wheezed with mirth. "Are you kidding? I wouldn't be against the idea of watching some of the little ladies take their clothes off." Bayer tipped the coatcheck girl handsomely and waddled outside.

 

 

"What nightclubs are there in Stuttgart?" asked Miller innocently.

 

 

"Well, now, let's see. There's the Moulin Rouge, the Balzac, the Imperial, and the Sayonara. Then there's the Madeleine in Eberhardtstrasse-" "Eberhardt? Good Lord, what a coincidence. That was my boss in Bremen, the man who got me out of this mess and passed me on to the lawyer in Nuremberg," exclaimed Miller.

 

 

"Good. Good. Excellent. Let's go there, then," said Bayer and led the way to his car.

 

 

Mackensen reached the Three Moors at quarter past eleven. He inquired of the headwaiter, who was supervising the departure of the last guests.

 

 

"Herr Bayer? Yes, he was here tonight. Left about half an hour ago." "He had a guest with him? A tall man with short brown hair and a mustache." "That's right. I remember them. Sitting at the comer table over there." Mackensen slipped a twenty-mark note into the man's hand without difficulty. "It's vitally important that I find him. It's an emergency.

 

 

His wife, you know, a suddencollapse..." The headwaiter's face puckered with concern. "Oh dear, how terrible!"

 

 

"Do you know where they went from here?" "I confess I don't," said the headwaiter. He called to one of the junior waiters. "Hans, you served Herr Bayer and his guest at the comer table. Did they mention if they were going on anywhere?" "No," said Hans. "I didn't hear them say anything about going on anywhere." "You could try the hat-cbeck girl," suggested the headwaiter. "She might have heard them say something." Mackensen asked the girl. Then he asked for a copy of the tourist booklet, What's Going on in Stuttgart. In the section for cabarets were half a dozen names. In the middle pages of the booklet was a street map of the city center. He walked back to his car and headed for the first name on the list of cabarets.

 

 

Miller and Bayer sat at a table for two in the Madeleine nightclub. Bayer, on his second large tumbler of whisky, stared with pop eyes at a generously endowed young woman gyrating her hips in the center of the floor while her fingers unhooked the fasteners of her brassi6re. When it finally came off, Bayer jabbed Miller in the ribs with his elbow. He was quivering with mirth.

 

 

"What a pair, eh, ]ad, what a pair?" He chuckled. It was well after midnight, and he was becoming very drunk.

 

 

"Look, Herr Bayer, I'm worried," whispered Miller. "I mean, it's me who's on the run. How soon can you make this passport for me?" Bayer draped his arm around Miller's shoulders. "Look, Rolf, old buddy, I've told you. You don't have to worry, see? Just leave it to old Franz." He winked broadly. "Anyway, I don't make the passports. I just send off the photographs to the chap who makes them, and a week later, back they come.

 

 

No problem. Now, have a drink with old pal Franz." He raised a pudgy hand and flapped it in the air. "Waiter, another round." Miller leaned back and considered. If he had to wait until his hair grew before the passport photographs could be taken, he might wait weeks. Nor was he going to get the name and address of the Odessa passportmaker from Bayer by guile. Drunk the man might be, but not so drunk he would give away his contact in the forging business by a slip of the tongue.

 

 

He could not get the fat Odessa man away from the club before the end of the first floor show. When they finally made it back to the cold night air outside, it was after one in the morning. Bayer was unsteady on his feet, one arm slung around Miller's shoulders, and the sudden shock of the cold air made him worse.

 

 

"I'd better drive you home," Miller told him as they approached the car parked by the curb. He took the car keys from Bayer's coat pocket and helped the unprotesting fat man into the passenger seat. After slamming the door on him, he walked around to the driver's side and climbed in.

 

 

At that moment a gray Mercedes slewed around the comer behind them and jammed on its brakes to stop twenty yards up the road.

 

 

Behind the windshield Mackensen, who had already visited five nightclubs, stared at the number plate of the car moving away from the curb outside the Madeleine. It was the number Frau Bayer had given him. Her husband's car. Letting in the clutch, he followed it.

 

 

Miller drove carefully, fighting his own alcohol level. The last thing he wanted was to be stopped by a patrol car and tested for drunkenness.

 

 

He drove not back to Bayer's house, but to his own hotel. On the way Bayer dozed , -his -head- nodding -forward, -spreading out his multiple chins into an apron of fat over his collar and tie.

 

 

Outside the hotel, Miller nudged him awake. "Come on," he said, "come on, Franz, old pal, let's have a nightcap." The fat man stared about him. "Must get home," he mumbled. "Wife waiting." "Come on, just a little drink to finish the evening. We can have a noggin in my room and talk about the old times." Bayer grinned drunkenly. "Talk about the old times. Great times we had in those days, Rolf." Miller climbed out and came around to the passenger door to help the fat man to the pavement.

 

 

"Great times," he said as he helped Bayer across the pavement and through the door. "Come and have a chat about old times." Down the street the Mercedes had doused its lights and merged with the gray shadows of the street.

 

 

Miller had kept his room key in his pocket. Behind his desk the night porter dozed. Bayer started to mumble.

 

 

"Ssssh," said Miller, "got to be quiet." "Got to be quiet," repeated Bayer, tiptoeing like an elephant toward the stairs. He giggled at his own playacting. Fortunately for Miller, his room was on the second floor, or Bayer would never have made it. He eased open the door, flicked on the light, and helped Bayer into the only armchair in the room, a hard upright affair with wooden arms.

 

 

Outside in the street, Mackensen stood across from the hotel and watched the blacked-out faqade. At two in the morning there were no lights burning.

 

 

When Miller's light came on, he noted it was on the second floor, to the right of the hotel as he faced it.

 

 

He debated whether to go straight up and hit Miller as he opened his bedroom door. Two things decided him against it. Through the glass door of the lobby he could see that the night porter, waked by the heavy tread of Bayer past his desk, was puttering around the inside of the foyer. He would undoubtedly notice a nonresident heading up the stairs at two in the morning, and later give a good description to the police. The other thing that dissuaded him was Bayer's condition. He had watched the fat man being helped across the pavement, and knew he could never get him out of the hotel in a hurry after killing Miller. If the police got Bayer, there 242 THE ODRSSA FILE would be trouble with the Werwolf. Despite appearances, Bayer was a much-wanted man under his real name, and important inside the Odessa.

 

 

One last factor persuaded Mackensen to go for a window-shot. Across from the hotel was a building halfway through construction. The frame and the floors were in place, with a rough concrete stairway leading up to the second and third floors. He could wait; Miller was not going anywhere.

 

 

He walked purposefully back to his car and the hunting rifle locked in the trunk.

 

 

Bayer was taken completely by surprise when the blow came. His reactions, slowed by drink, gave him no chance to duck in time. Miller, pretending to search for his bottle of whisky, opened the wardrobe door and took out his spare tie. The only other one he had was around his neck. He took this off too.

 

 

He had never had occasion to use the blows he and his fellow rookies had practiced in the gymnasium of their Army training camp ten years before and was not entirely certain how effective they were. The vast bulk of Bayer's neck, like a pink mountain when seen from behind as the man sat in the chair muttering, "Good old times, great old times caused him to hit as hard as he could.

 

 

It was not even a knockout blow, for the edge of his hand was soft and inexperienced, and Bayer's neck was insulated by layers of fat. But it was enough. By the time the Odessa contact man had cleared the dizziness from his brain, both his wrists were lashed tightly to the arms of the wooden chair.

 

 

"What the shit?" he growled thickly, shaking his head to clear the muzziness. His own tie came off and secured his left ankle to the foot of the chair, and the telephone cord secured the right one.

 

 

He looked up owlishly at Miller as comprehension began to dawn in his button eyes. Like all of his kind, Bayer had one nightmare that never quite left him.

 

 

"You can't get me away from here," he said. "You'll never get me to Tel Aviv. You can't prove anything. I never touched you people-" The words were cut off as a rolled-up pair of socks was stuffed in his mouth and a woolen scarf, a present to Miller from his ever-solicitous mother, was wound around his face. From above the patterned knitting his eyes glared balefully out.

 

 

Miller drew up the other chair in the room, reversed it, and sat astride, his face two feet away from that of his prisoner.

 

 

"Listen, you fat slug. For one thing, I'm not an Israeli agent. For another, you're not going anywhere. You're staying right here, and you're going to talk right here. Understand?" For answer Franz Bayer stared back above the scarf. Ile eyes no longer twinkled with merriment. They were red-tinged, like those of an angry boar in a thicket.

 

 

"What I want, and what I'm going to have before this night is through, is the name and address of the man who makes the passports for the Odessa." Miller looked around, spotted the lamp on the bedside table, unhooked the wall socket, and brought it over.

 

 

"Now, Bayer, or whatever your name is, I'm going to take the gag off. You are going to talk. If you attempt to yell, you get this right across the head. I don't really care if I crack your head or not. Got it?" Miller was not telling the truth. He had never killed a man before and had no desire to start now.

 

 

Slowly he eased off the scarf and pulled the rolled socks out of Bayer's mouth, keeping the lamp poised in his right hand, high over the fat man's head.

 

 

"You bastard," whispered Bayer. "You're a spy. Youll get nothing out of me." He hardly got the words out before the socks went back into his bulging cheeks. The scarf was replaced.

 

 

"No?" said Miller. "We'll see. I'll start on your fingers and see how you like it." He took the little finger and ring finger of Bayer's right hand and bent them backward until they were almost vertical. Bayer threw himself about in the chair so that it almost fell over. Miller steadied it and eased the pressure on the fingers.

 

 

He took off the gag again. "I can break every finger an both your hands, Bayer," he whispered. "After that I'll take the bulb out of the table lamp, switch it on, and stuff your prick down the socket." Bayer closed his eyes, and sweat rolled in torrents off his face. "No, not the electrodes. No, not the electrodes. Not there," he mumbled.

 

 

"You know what it's like, don't you?" said Miller, his mouth a few inches from Bayer's ear.

 

 

Bayer closed his eyes and moaned softly. He knew what it was like. Twenty years before, he bad been one of the men who had pounded the White Rabbit, Wing Commander Yeo-Thomas, to a maimed pulp in the cellars beneath Fresnes Jail in Paris. He knew too well what it was like, but not on the receiving end.

 

 

"Talk," whispered Miller. "The forger, his name and address." Bayer slowly shook his head. "I can7t," he whispered. "They'll. kill me." Miller replaced the gag. He took Bayer's little finger, closed his eyes, and jerked once. The bone snapped at the knuckle. Bayer heaved in his chair and vomited into the gag.

 

 

Miller whipped it off before he could drown. The fat man's head jerked forward, and the evening's highly expensive meal, accompanied by two bottles of wine and several double Scotches, poured down his chest into his lap.

 

 

"Talk," said Miller. "You've got seven more fingers to go." Bayer swallowed, eyes closed. "Winzer," he said.

 

 

"Who?" "Winzer. Klaus Winzer. He makes the passports." "He's a professional forger?" "He's a printer." "Where? Which town?"

 

 

"They'll kill me." "I'll kill you if you don't tell me. Which town?" "Osnabriick," whispered Bayer.

 

 

Miller replaced the gag across Bayer's mouth and thought. Klaus Winzer, a printer in OsnabrUck. He went to his attach6 case, which contained the diary of Salomon Tauber and various maps, and took out a road map of Germany.

 

 

The autobahn to OsnabrUck, far away to the north in Nord Rhine/ Westphalia, led through Mannheim, Frankfurt, Dortmund, and MUnster. It was a four- to five-hour drive, depending on road conditions. It was already nearly three in the morning of February 21.

 

 

Across the road Mackensen shivered in his niche on the third floor of the half-completed building. The light still shone in the room over the road, the secondfloor front. He flicked his eyes constantly from the illuminated window to the front door. If only Bayer would come out, he thought, he could take Miller alone. Or if Miller came out, he could take him farther down the street. Or if someone opened the window for a breath of fresh air.

 

 

... He shivered again and clasped the heavy Remington.300 rifle. At a range of thirty yards there would be no problems with such a gun. Mackensen could wait; he was a patient man.

 

 

In his room Miller quietly packed his things. He needed Bayer to remain quiescent for at least six hours. Perhaps the man would be too terrified to warn his chiefs that he had given away the secret of the forger. But Miller couldn't count on it.

 

 

He spent a last few minutes tightening the bonds and the gag that held Bayer immobile and silent, then eased the chair onto its side so the fat man could not raise an alarm by rolling the chair over with a crash. The telephone cord was already ripped out. He took a last look around the room and left, locking the door behind him.

 

 

He was almost at the top of the stairs when a thought came to him. The night porter might have seen them both mount the stairs. What would be think if only one came down, paid his bill, and left? Miller retreated and headed toward the back of the hotel.

 

 

At the end of the corridor was a window looking out onto the fireescape.

 

 

He slipped the catch and stepped out onto the escape ladder. A few seconds later he was in the rear courtyard, where the garage was situated. A back entrance led to a small alley behind the hotel.

 

 

Two minutes later he was striding the three miles to where he had parked his Jaguar, half a mile from Bayer's house. ne effect of the drink and the night's activities combined to make him feel desperately tired. He needed sleep badly but realized he had to reach Winzer before the alarm was raised.

 

 

It was almost four in the morning when he climbed into the Jaguar, and half past the hour before he had made his way back to the autobahn leading north for Heilbronn and Mannheim.

 

 

Almost as soon as he had gone, Bayer, by now completely sober, began to struggle to get free. He tried to lean his head forward far enough to use his teeth, through the sock and the scarf, on the knots of the ties that bound his wrists to the chair. But his fatness prevented his head from getting low enough, and the sock in his mouth forced his teeth apart.

 

 

Every few minutes he had to pause to take deep breaths through his nose.

 

 

He tugged and pulled at his ankle bonds, but they held. Finally, despite the pain from his broken and swelling little finger, he decided to wriggle his wrists free.

 

 

When this did not work, he spotted the table lamp lying on the floor. The bulb was still in it, but a crushed light bulb leaves enough slivers of glass to cut a single necktie. it took him an hour to inch the overturned chair across the floor and crush the light bulb. it may sound easy, but it isn't, to use a piece of broken glass to cut wrist-bonds. It takes hours to get through a single strand of cloth.

 

 

Bayer's wrists poured sweat, dampening the cloth of the neckties and making them even tighter around his fat wrists. It was seven in the morning, and light was beginning to filter over the roofs of the town, before the first strands binding his left wrist parted from the effects of being rubbed on a piece of broken glass. It was nearly eight when his left wrist came free.

 

 

By that time Miller's Jaguar was boring around the Cologne Ring to the east of the city with another hundred miles before 0snabrUck. It had started to rain, an evil sleet running in curtains across the slippery autobahn, and the mesmeric effect of the windshield wipers almost sent him to sleep.

 

 

He slowed down to a steady cruise at eighty m.p.h., rather than risk running off the road into the muddy fields on either side.

 

 

With his left hand free, Bayer took only a few minutes to rip off his gag, then lay for several minutes, whooping in great gulps of air. The smell in the room was appalling, a mixture of sweat, fear, vomit, and whisky. He unpicked the knots on his right wrist, wincing as the pain from the snapped finger shot up his arm, then released his feet.

 

 

His first thought was the door, but it was locked. He tried the telephone, lumbering about on feet long since devoid of feeling from the tightness of the bindings. Finally he staggered to the window, ripped back the curtains, and jerked the windows inward and open.

 

 

In his shooting niche across the road, Mackensen was almost dozing despite the cold, when he saw the curtains of Miller's room pulled back.

 

 

Snapping the Remington up into the aiming position, he waited until the figure behind the net curtains jerked the windows inward, then fired straight into the face of the figure.

 

 

The bullet hit Bayer in the base of the throat, and he was dead before his reeling bulk tumbled backward to the floor. The crash of the rifle might be put down to a car backfiring for a minute, but not longer. Within less than a minute, even at that hour of the morning, Mackensen knew someone would investigate.

 

 

Without waiting to cast a second look into the room across the road, be was out of the third floor and running down the concrete steps of the building toward the ground. He left by the back, dodging two cementmixers and a pile of gravel in the rear yard. He regained his car within sixty seconds of firing, stowed the gun in the trunk, and drove off.

 

 

He knew as he sat at the wheel and inserted the ignition key that all was not right. He suspected he had made a mistake. The man the Werwolf had briefed him to kill was tall and lean. The mind's-eye impression of the figure at the window was of a fat man. From what he had seen the previous evening, he was sure it was Bayer he had hit.

 

 

Not that it was too serious a problem. Seeing Bayer dead on his carpet, Miller would be bound to flee as fast as his legs would carry him.

 

 

Therefore he would return to his Jaguar, parked three miles away. Mackensen headed the Mercedes back to where he had last seen the Jaguar. He only began to worry badly when he saw the space between the Opel and the Benz truck where the Jaguar had stood the previous evening in the quiet residential street.

 

 

Mackensen would not have been the chief executioner for the Odessa if he had been the sort who panics easily. He had been in too many tight spots before. He sat at the wheel of his car for several minutes before he reacted to the prospect of Miller's now being hundreds of miles away.

 

 

If Miller had left Bayer alive, he reasoned, it could only be because he bad got nothing from him or he bad got something. In the first case, there was no harm done; he could take Miller later. There was no hurry. If Miller had got something from Bayer, it could only be information. The Werwolf alone would know what kind of information Miller had been seeking, that Bayer had to give. Therefore, despite his fear of the Werwolf's rage, he would telephone him.

 

 

It took him ten minutes to find a public telephone. He always kept a pocketful of one-mark pieces for longdistance calls.

 

 

When he took the call in Nuremberg and heard the news, the Werwolf went into a transport of rage, mouthing abuse down the line at his hired killer. It took several seconds before he could calm down. "You'd better find him, you oaf, and quickly. God knows where he's gone now." Mackensen explained to his chief he needed to know what kind of information Bayer could have supplied to Miller before he died.

 

 

At the other end of the line the Werwolf thought for a while. "Dear God," he breathed, "the forger. He's got the name of the forger." "What forger, Chief?" asked Mackensen.

 

 

The Werwolf pulled himself together. "I'll get on to the man and warn him," he said crisply. "This is where Miller has gone." He dictated an address to Mackensen and added, "You get the hell up to 0snabriick like you've never moved before. You'll find Miller at that address, or somewhere in the town. If be's not at the house, keep searching the town for the Jaguar. And this time, don't leave the Jaguar. It's the one place he always returns." He slammed down the phone, then picked it up again and asked for Information. When he had the number he sought, he dialed a number in 0snabrOck.

 

 

In Stuttgart, Mackensen was left holding a buzzing receiver. With a shrug he replaced it and went back to his car, facing the prospect of a long, wearying drive followed by another "job." He was almost as tired as Miller, by then twenty miles short of 0snabrilck. Neither man bad slept for twenty-four hours, and Mackensen had not even eaten since the previous lunch.

 

 

Chilled to the marrow from his nighfs vigil, longing for piping-hot coffee and a SteinhUger to chase it, he got back into the Mercedes and headed it north on the road to Westphalia.

 

 

TO LooK at him, there was noth- 14ing about Klaus Winzer to suggest he had ever been in the SS. For one thing, he was weft below the required height of six feet; for an other, he was nearsighted. At the age of forty, he was plump and pale, with fuzzy blond hair and a diffident manner.

 

 

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

 

 

Klaus took after his mother, and to his father's disgust grew up small, weak, shortsighted, and peaceful. He hated violence, sports, and belonging to the Hitler Youth. At only one thing did he excel: from his early teens he fell completely in love with the art of handwriting and the preparation of illuminated manuscripts, an activity his disgusted father regarded as an occupation for sissies.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Klaus's mother explained to him that all food had to be bought on ration cards issued by the Americans. In amazement Klaus looked at the ration cards, noted they were locally printed on fairly cheap paper, took a hand- ful, and retired to his room for a few days. When he emerged, it was to hand over to his astonished mother sheets of American ration cards, enough to feed them all for six months.

 

 

"But they're forged," gasped his mother.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

To his horrified mother he explained his simple philosophy. "A document is not either genuine or forged; it is either efficient or inefficient. If a pass is supposed to get you past a checkpoint, and it gets you past the checkpoint, it is a good document." In October 1948 came the second dirty trick played on Klaus Winzer. The authorities reformed the currency, substituting the new Deutschmark for the old Reichsmark. But instead of giving one for one, they simply abolished the Reichsmark and gave everyone the flat sum of 1000 new marks. He was mined. Once again his fortune was mere useless paper.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

To his amazement, Molders produced a genuine diamond necklace. He explained that he had been in a concentration camp, and one of the Jewish inmates bad tried to buy his freedom with the family jewelry. Molders had taken the jewelry, ensured that the Jew was in the first party to the gas chambers, and against orders had kept the booty.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

Thirty ininutes later a very flustered Klaus Winzer had a small bag packed, cast an undecided glance in the direction of the safe where the file was kept, came to the conclusion he would not need it, and explained to a startled housemaid, Barbara, that he would not be going to the printing plant that morning. On the contrary, he had decided to take a brief vacation in the Austrian Alps. A breath of fresh air-nothing like it to tone up the system.

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

"Fill her up. Super," he told the attendant. "Have you got a pay phone?" "In the comer," said the boy.