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Back The One from the Other
Chapters (50)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. FIVE
  11. SIX
  12. SEVEN
  13. EIGHT
  14. NINE
  15. TEN
  16. ELEVEN
  17. TWELVE
  18. THIRTEEN
  19. FOURTEEN
  20. FIFTEEN
  21. SIXTEEN
  22. SEVENTEEN
  23. EIGHTEEN
  24. NINETEEN
  25. TWENTY
  26. TWENTY-ONE
  27. TWENTY-TWO
  28. TWENTY-THREE
  29. TWENTY-FOUR
  30. TWENTY-FIVE
  31. TWENTY-SIX
  32. TWENTY-SEVEN
  33. TWENTY-EIGHT
  34. TWENTY-NINE
  35. THIRTY
  36. THIRTY-ONE
  37. THIRTY-TWO
  38. THIRTY-THREE
  39. THIRTY-FOUR
  40. THIRTY-FIVE
  41. THIRTY-SIX
  42. THIRTY-SEVEN
  43. THIRTY-EIGHT
  44. THIRTY-NINE
  45. FORTY
  46. FORTY-ONE
  47. FORTY-TWO
  48. EPILOGUE
  49. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  50. Teaser chapter

“Warzok was last seen in Ebensee, near Salzburg,” I said. “His wife says he was being helped to escape by the old comrades. The ODESSA.”

Gebauer shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t have been the ODESSA,” he said. “The ODESSA and the Comradeship are two very different things. The ODESSA is largely an American-run organization, not German. At the bottom level, yes, it uses a lot of the same people who work for the Comradeship, but at the top it’s CIA. The CIA set it up to help some Nazis escape when they outlived their usefulness as anticommunist agents. And I can’t see that Warzok would have been much good as a CIA agent. For a start, he knew nothing about intelligence matters. If he ever got away it’s the Comradeship, or the Web as it’s sometimes called, who would have helped. You’d have to ask one of the spiders where he might have gone.”

I chose my next words carefully. “My late wife was always afraid of spiders,” I said. “Really afraid. Every time she found one I would have to go and deal with it. The curious thing is that now she’s gone, I never see a spider. I wouldn’t know where to look for one. Would you?”

Gebauer grinned. “He really doesn’t speak a word of German,” he said, referring to the guard. “It’s all right.” Then he shook his head. “One hears things in here about the Comradeship. To be frank, I don’t know how reliable any of this is. After all, none of us ever managed to escape. We got caught and banged up in this place. It also occurs to me that what you’re doing could be dangerous, Herr Gunther. Very dangerous. It’s one thing to avail yourself of a secret escape route, it’s quite another to ask questions about such a thing. Have you considered the risks you are running? Yes, even you, a man who was in the SS himself. After all, you wouldn’t be the first SS man to cooperate with the Jews. There’s a fellow in Linz, a Nazi hunter by the name of Simon Wiesenthal, who uses an SS informer.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said.

“If you were looking to go missing in Germany,” Gebauer said carefully, “the best thing to do would be to go and see the experts. The Bavarian Red Cross are very good at finding missing persons. I believe they also have some expertise in achieving the opposite result. Their offices are in Munich, are they not?”

I nodded. “Wagmullerstrasse,” I said.