“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.
12
IT WAS actually on the evening of 12 Wednesday, February 19, that Peter Miller finally bade farewell to Alfred Oster in his cottage in Bayreuth 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, Oster muttered to himself, “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 heavy-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 cafe 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 he 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 schön.” 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.