And I knew about Africa and white mercenaries hired to fight in jungle wars. Perhaps a return to the rain forests, not to another civil war but to a mercenary-led coup d’état?
I wrote both down, as required, on a single sheet of A4 paper and presented them to Harold Harris that Friday. He skimmed through them and decided without a second’s hesitation.
“Nazis first, mercenaries second. And I want the first manuscript by December next year.”
I did not know at the time that he was Jewish, lapsed but from an Orthodox parentage. Nor that in April 1945 he had been a young German-speaking officer in British Army Intelligence. Nor that he had been summoned across Schleswig-Holstein to interrogate a mysterious but suspicious prisoner. He had not yet arrived in his jeep when the prisoner bit on a cyanide capsule and killed himself. That man was Heinrich Himmler.
I had one last problem before signing the three-novel contract. Apart from the coming five hundred pounds, I was still broke.
“There will be living costs and research and traveling and lodgings,” I said. “Could I have something to tide me through?”
He scrawled something on a sheet of paper and gave it to me.
“Take this to accounts,” he said. “Good luck and stay in touch. Oh, and get an agent. I recommend Diana Baring.”
The piece of paper I clutched was quite an act of faith. It was an authority to draw six thousand pounds against future royalties. In 1970, that was rather a lot of money.
Back on the street again, I started to think. Who the hell knows about Nazis? Then I recalled a book called The Scourge of the Swastika, which I had read years earlier. It was by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who had been a senior British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials during the forties. I would have to track him down and see if he could help.
Before then, I had yet another lucky break. I had met a man called John Mallinson, who prided himself on being an agent, albeit without clients. I did not look him up, but coincidentally we met again at the flat of a friend. I told him what had happened in Great Portland Street. He became quite excited.
“What about the film rights?” he asked. I had not a clue. He scoured the Hutchinson contract. “They’re still yours. Appoint me as your film agent and I’ll find a buyer.”
By November, he had done exactly that. The film deal was done with Romulus Films of Park Lane, headed by John Woolf. But his right-hand man in all things was John Rosenberg, and it was with him that we dealt. The offer was £17,500 plus a small percentage of net profits, or £20,000 outright sale in perpetuity.
Most people are good at some things and useless at others. I am pathetic at money. I had never seen £20,000, so I took it. I have no idea how many millions the film has made over the years. I can only excuse myself with the thought that I had no idea the book would sell over a hundred copies or the film would ever be made. Even the way it was made was a fluke.
That winter, the Hollywood giant Fred Zinnemann flew over to discuss a project with John Woolf. It was to film a successful play called Abelard and Heloise. There had always been a problem. The film could not be made while the play was onstage anywhere. That December, it closed in England and was not staging anywhere else.
The day before Zinnemann arrived, it was decided the play would reopen in a British provincial city. The Hollywood director’s trip was fruitless after all. Desperately embarrassed, John Woolf was apologizing in his office, knowing his guest had to face a rainy London weekend with nothing to read. Frantically, he reached for something John Rosenberg had placed on his desk.
“We have just bought this,” he said. Mr. Zinnemann took it and left. He was back on Monday. “This is my next movie,” he told a delighted Romulus Films.
I knew none of all this until later. As I look back, it was not really The Day of the Jackal, the one-off to clear my debts, that changed my life. It was Harold Harris and his three-novel contract. It just occurred to me that if I could make a good living dashing off this nonsense, why get my head blown off in an African rain ditch?
But the more immediate problem was trying to find Lord Russell of Liverpool to ask him about underground Nazis. And I had the problem of what to call them. I needed two titles. In German, ODESSA stood for Organization of Former Members of the SS. As far as the
world was concerned, Odessa was a city in Ukraine or a town in Texas. Well, here was a third one. The Odessa File.
For the mercenaries I recalled a quote from Shakespeare. “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.” I had heard someone had used Cry Havoc, but not The Dogs of War. So I filched it from the Bard.
THE ODESSA
Lord Russell of Liverpool had retired to a small cottage at Dinard, a town on the French coast facing the Atlantic, and that was where I found him. I had no introduction, so I just turned up and knocked. When I explained what I needed, he was helpfulness itself.
Though he was a mine of information about the war and the Nuremberg trials, these had been twenty years earlier. I sought details about secret pro-Nazi elements still in existence in 1971. He referred me to the wellspring of Nazi-hunting, the Vienna-based researcher Simon Wiesenthal. With a letter of introduction, I headed south to Austria.
Like David Ben-Gurion, Simon Wiesenthal began by conceding he could spare me twenty minutes of his time, but when I explained what I sought, he became so enthusiastic that we spent days poring over his records. The germ of my idea was not for a Nazi fugitive who had fled to South America, but one who had changed his name and disappeared right in the heart of Germany, with help from equally covert friends. The response of Herr Wiesenthal was that the right choice might be difficult, not because there were so few but that there were thousands of them.
It seemed there were two mutual-help brotherhoods still very much active in the Germany of 1971. There was the Kameradschaft, or Comradeship, and the ODESSA, which was in no way fictional.
“What I seek,” I explained, “is to invent a mass murderer of the Nazi era who, like so many, had stripped off his uniform at the very end, adopted another persona, and disappeared into postwar German society, returning to office, influence, and respectability under another name. Like a concentration camp commander.”
He beamed and gestured to a shelf of files behind his desk.
“Why invent one? I have a dozen real ones.”
We pored through the files and settled on Eduard Roschmann, former camp commander at Riga, Latvia, and known as the Butcher of Riga. He had been a real monster, but one among many.