“Do you know him?” asked Miller.
Lord Russell nodded. “I’d better give you a letter. He gets a lot of visitors wanting information. An introduction would help.” He went to the writing desk, swiftly wrote a few lines on a sheet of headed notepaper, folded the sheet into an envelope, and sealed it.
“Good luck, you’ll need it,” he said as he showed Miller out.
The following morning Miller took the BEA flight back to Cologne, picked up his car, and set off on the two-day run through Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, and Linz to Vienna.
He spent the night at Munich, having made slow time along the snow-encrusted autobahns, frequently narrowed down to one lane while a snowplow or sanding truck tried to cope with the steadily falling snow. The following day he set off early and would have made Vienna by lunchtime had it not been for the long delay at Bad Tolz just south of Munich.
The autobalm was passing through dense pine forests when a series Of SLOW signs brought the traffic to a halt. A police car, blue light spinning a warning, was parked at the edge of the road, and two white-coated patrolmen were standing across the road, holding back the traffic. In the lefthand, northbound lane the procedure was the same. To the right and left of the autobahn a drive cut into the pine forests, and two soldiers in winter clothing, each with a battery-powered illuminated baton, stood at the entrance to each, waiting to summon something hidden in the forests across the road.
Miller fumed with impatience and finally wound down his window to call to one of the policemen.
“What’s the matter? What’s the hold-up?” The patrolman walked slowly over and grinned. “The Army,” he said shortly.
“They’re on maneuvers. There’s a column of tanks coming across in a minute.” Fifteen minutes later the first one appeared, a long gun barrel poking out of the pine trees, like a pachyderm scenting the air for danger; then with a rumble the flat armored bulk of the tank eased out of the trees and clattered down to the road.
Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank was a happy man. At the age of thirty he had already fulfilled his life’s ambition, to command his own tank. He could remember to the day when his life’s ambition had been born in him. It was January 1945 when, as a small boy in the city of Mannheim, he had been taken to the cinema. The screen during the newsreels was full of the spectacle of Hasso von Manteuffel’s King Tiger tanks rolling forward to engage the Americans and British.
He stared in awe at the muffled figures of the commanders, steel-helmeted and goggled, gazing forward out of the turrets. For Ulrich Frank, eleven years old, it was a turning point. When he left the cinema be had made a vow, that one day he would command his own tank.
It took him nineteen years, but he made it. On those winter maneuvers in the forests around Bad Tolz, Top Sergeant Ulrich Frank commanded his first tank, an American-built M-48 Patton.
It was his last maneuver with the Patton. Waiting for the troop back at camp was a row of shining, brand-new French AMX-13s with which the unit was being reequipped. Faster, more heavily armed than the Patton, the AMX would become his in another week.
He glanced down at the black cross of the new German Army on the side of the turret, and the tank’s personal name stenciled beneath it, and felt a touch of regret. Though he had commanded it for only six months, it would always be his first tank, his favorite. He had named it Drachenfels, the Dragon Rock, after the rock overlooking the Rhine where Martin Luther, translating the Bible into German, had seen the Devil and hurled his inkpot at him. After the reequipment, he supposed the Patton would go for scrap.
With a last pause on the far side of the autobalm, the Patton and its crew breasted the rise and vanished into the forest.
Miller finally made it to Vienna in midafternoon of that day, January 3.
Without checking into a hotel, he drove straight into the city center and asked his way to Rudolf Square.
He found number 7 easily enough and glanced at the list of tenants. Against the third floor was a card saying DOCUMENTATION CENTER. He mounted and knocked at the cream-painted wooden door, From behind it someone looked through the peephole before he heard the lock being drawn back. A pretty blond girl stood in the doorway.
“Please?”
“My name is Miller. Peter Miller. I would like to speak with Herr Wiesenthal. I have a letter of introduction.” He produced his letter and gave it to the girl. She looked uncertainly at it, smiled briefly, and asked him to wait.
Several minutes later she reappeared at the end of the corridor onto which the door gave access, and beckoned him. “Please come this way.” Miller closed the front door behind him and followed her down the passage, around a comer, and to the end of the apartment. On the right was an open door. As he entered, a man rose to greet him.
“Please come in,” said Simon Wiesenthal.
He was bigger than Miller had expected, a burly man over six feet tall, wearing a thick tweed jacket, stooping as if permanently looking for a mislaid piece of paper. He held Lord Russell’s letter in his hand.
The office was small to the point of being cramped. One wall was lined from end to end and ceiling to floor in shelves, each crammed with books.
The wall facing was decorated with illuminated manuscripts and testimonials from a score of organizations of former victims of the SS. The back wall contained a long sofa, also stacked with books, and to the left of the door was a small window looking down on a courtyard. The desk stood away from the window, and Miller took the visitor’s chair in front of it. The Nazi-hunter of Vienna seated himself behind it and reread Lord Russell’s letter.
“My friend Lord Russell tells me you are trying to hunt down a former SS killer,” he began without preamble.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“May I have his name?”
“Roschmann. Captain Eduard Roschmann.”
Simon Wiesenthal raised his eyebrows and exhaled his breath in a whistle.
“You’ve heard of him?” asked Miller.
“The Butcher of Riga? One of my top fifty wanted men,” said Wiesenthal.
“May I ask why you are interested in him?” Miller began to explain briefly.
“I think you’d better start at the beginning,” said Wiesenthal. “What’s all this about a diary?” With the man in Ludwigsburg, Cadbury, and Lord Russell, this made the fourth time Miller had had to relate the story.
Each time it grew a little longer as another period had been added to his knowledge of Roschmann’s life story. He began again and went through until he had described the help given by Lord Russell.
“What I have to know now,” he ended, “is where did he go when he jumped from the train?” Simeon Wiesenthal was gazing out into the court of the apartment house, watching the snowflakes dropping down the narrow shaft to the ground three floors below.
“Have you got the diary?” he asked at length. Miller reached down, took it out of his briefcase, and laid it on the desk.
Wiesenthal eyed it appreciatively. “Fascinating,” he said. He looked up and smiled. “All right, I accept the story,” he said.
Miller raised his eyebrows. “Was there any doubt?”
Simon Wiesenthal eyed him keenly. “There is always a little doubt, Herr Miller,” he said. “Yours is a very strange story. I still cannot follow your motive for wanting to track Roschmann down.”
Miller shrugged. “I’m a reporter. It’s a good story.”
“But not one you will ever sell to the press, I fear. And hardly worth your own money. Are you sure there’s nothing personal in this?”
Miller ducked the question. “You’re the second person who has suggested that.