The Final Reckoning (11 page)

Luckily Tom had set the BlackBerry to silent; Rebecca hadn't heard Sherrill's text message arrive and now was not the time to tell her what it had said. Besides, it was only confirmation of what Tom had already told her he suspected: that her father had been in New York with a hitman's weapon.

Above all, he didn't want to break the mood that had entered the room, established first by that fleeting embrace and, now, by his sighting of the message on the noticeboard, the plea for the remembrance of a dead mother. There was a hush in the room, a quiet that somehow seemed to connect them. Occasionally Rebecca would meet his gaze, say nothing, then return to prodding the now-limp sandwiches her friends had brought over that morning.

‘Your mother, was that the girl I read about in your father's book?’ It was the first chance he'd had to speak about what he'd read.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Rosa. Was that your mother?’

‘Oh no. That's a long story.’

‘I've got time.’

She smiled, the warmth of it moving across the table and spreading through him. ‘I never met Rosa. She and my father did stay together after the war. And she came here, to England.’

‘But?’

‘But I'm not sure they loved each other in a normal way. They clung to each other. They needed each other.’

For an instant an image floated before Tom's eyes, two teenage children who had witnessed the gravest horror. He pictured young bodies and old faces.

‘They had no children. My guess is that she was infertile. Sustained malnutrition and emotional trauma in the early years of puberty prevented regular ovulation.’

‘Is that your medical opinion?’

There was a glimpse of the crooked smile and it was gone.

‘My father always said the light had gone out. That she had no light left inside her.’

‘Maybe you were both right.’

She turned to look at him, the X-Men power-beam now at half-strength. ‘She died in 1966. My father was still young, relatively speaking. He grieved but he was not a man who could be alone, and a few years later he met a woman here, in London. They married and a few years after that they had me. He was forty-five.’

‘Did that make a difference, having a dad who was a bit older?’

‘Not as much as having a dad who survived the Holocaust.’

Tom nodded, accepting the scolding. He was aware that he had avoided so much as uttering that word.

‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘he was always really fit. Took great care of himself.’

I saw that for myself, Tom thought, the memory of her father's autopsy coming back to him.

‘Did the experience of the war— did the experience of the Holocaust leave a physical mark on him of any kind?’

‘Well, he never had a number on his arm, if that's what you're asking. Sometimes I wish he had.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, that's what people expect, don't they? Holocaust survivor, tattoo on the arm. But they only did that in Auschwitz. Did you know that? That was the only place where they branded the Jews with a number.’ She was speaking faster now, her voice different. It seemed to jangle somehow, like broken glass. ‘But my father was never in Auschwitz or in any death camp. So people couldn't
see
it. They couldn't tell, just by looking, what he'd been through. And he couldn't say it in one word either. Couldn't just say, I was in Treblinka. Or Sobibor. Or Belzec. Or Majdanek. Mind you, not many could say they were from there because hardly anyone ever came out. Hardly anyone
survived those places. So my father either had to tell people the whole story – of the village and the burning barn and the pogroms in Kovno and his mother hanging there from the ceiling and the ghetto and the pits – or he had to say nothing. So most of the time, he chose nothing. He kept quiet. He made no speeches. He went on none of the remembrance tours. He never went back.’

She paused, thinking.

‘I didn't answer your question.’ The tone was the same one he had heard on the phone, Dr Rebecca Merton. ‘You asked about physical signs. There was one.’

‘What was that?’

‘His left foot. He was missing three toes. He lost them to frostbite in the forests, I think. When he was fighting with the partisans. It's in the notebook: how they had to wear felt shoes in the bitter cold. They didn't have any boots. You had to wait for someone to die and take theirs.’

‘And did that affect him? Missing those toes?’

‘Not really. He walked with a slight limp. As if he was carrying a heavy bag on one side. But it didn't stop him keeping in very good shape. He swam, he ran, he used to lift weights.’

There was no point hinting at it. He would have to ask directly. ‘I'm told that your father was found with some kind of metal plate on his leg, taped to his shin. Why might that be?’

She looked at Tom again, her gaze lingering, examining him. ‘I saw my father regularly,
including before he made this trip and, I can tell you, he had absolutely nothing wrong with his leg. You must be mistaken.’

Tom wouldn't push it. He would just file the metal shin pad that he had seen with his own eyes among the ever-lengthening list of mysteries attached to this case.

‘And what about you?’ she said, taking the plates to the sink. ‘Do you have family here?’

‘I have a mother in Sheffield. My father's dead.’

‘Will you go and see her, while you're here?’

‘I don't think so. I used to do the dutiful son thing. Now I save the nostalgia for Christmas.’

The phone rang, the landline this time; another condolence call. Rebecca took the cordless phone and headed out into the hall.

While she was gone, Tom surveyed the damaged kitchen. Whoever had come here really had spared no mercy. They had turned the place over with brutal efficiency. Between saying goodbye to Rebecca on the doorstep and her phone call ordering him to rush back, no more than an hour had passed. They had managed to trash this place in less than sixty minutes. What had they been looking for? Was this break-in connected to the killing at UN Plaza or could it have been a coincidence? Either way, some unseen and brutal enemy now clearly had Rebecca Merton in its sights. The thought of it made him bristle.

He looked up to see her, breathless, in the kitchen doorway.

‘I just saw this downstairs, on the doormat.’ She was holding up a large white envelope. ‘Hand-delivered.’

‘What is it?’

She handed it over, sitting herself on the bench next to him, so close their thighs touched. She leaned across as he examined the blank envelope. He could smell her, the scent flooding him with lust. He tried to focus. Inside the envelope were two sheets of paper, soft to the touch, almost furry with age, held together by a single staple. On each of them was the distinct print of a manual typewriter; it was hard to tell, but it could have been a copy, the kind made by an old-fashioned stencil machine. Tom had been taught at Manchester by a professor who had clearly been setting the same reading lists since the 1950s: back in his seminars was the last time Tom had handled a document like this one.

There was no title or explanatory heading. Instead the first page featured only a list of names, apparently arranged alphabetically:

Wilhelm Albert

Wilhelm Altenloch

Hans Bothmann

Hans Geschke

Paul Giesler

Odilo Globocnik

Richard Glücks

Albert Hohlfelder

Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger

Kurt Mussfeld

Adalbert Neubauer

Karl Puetz

Christian Wirth

In each case the names had been neatly crossed out by two inked lines forming an X, the way a prisoner strikes out days on a calendar. Tom turned to the next page. The font was slightly different this time and the names were no longer sorted alphabetically:

Hans Groetner

Hans Stuckart

Joschka Dorfman

Otto Abetz

Theo Dannecker

Karl-Friedrich Simon

Fritz Kramer

Jacob Sprenger

Georg Puetz

Herbert Cukors

Alexander Laak

These names too had all been crossed out, though this time less neatly and in strokes that were not uniform, not even in the same colour ink. It seemed as if the first list had been marked in one sitting, the second at different points over time.

Other than that, the document in his hand gave no clues. Yet the more Tom looked at it, the more convinced he became that this list would explain at last the mystery of Gershon Matzkin.

‘This is all that came, nothing else?’

‘That's it.’

‘No note?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Did they buzz on the door when they delivered it? Do you know when it arrived?’

‘It was on the mat when I went down just now.’

‘OK.’ Tom went straight to the window, looking for the man he had seen before: no sign. He began to pace, working out his line of questioning, when he caught Rebecca looking at him, her eyes sweeping up and down his body. Aware that she'd been noticed, she looked away.

‘First off, do any of those names look familiar to you?’

She looked unsure. ‘No.’

‘Could you have met any of them? Might they be friends of your father's, business associates?’

‘My father owned a dry cleaning shop on Stoke Newington Church Street.’

‘Right. So not much in the way of business associates then.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Could any of them be relatives, distant family members?’

‘I'm telling you, I don't recognize any of them.’

Tom looked back at the list. A hunch was beginning to form.

Her computer was gone – proof, along with the upended bookshelves and filing cabinet, that it was information, not saleable goods, that the intruders had been after – but the cables and modem were all still in place. He took out and connected his own laptop and, once the Google page was displayed, Tom entered the first of the names. An entry on Wilhelm Albert, fifth Duke of Urach, born in 1957, appeared: not what he was expecting. He tried the second name. Wilhelm Altenloch was a major in the Nazi SS in Bialystock. He looked up at Rebecca, standing over his shoulder.

Hans Bothmann was identified as the Kommandant of the Chelmno death camp, where he had directed mass killing operations from spring 1942 to March 1943. Google drew a blank on Hans Geschke but Paul Giesler had a Wikipedia entry all his own. He was an early recruit to National Socialism, signing up to Hitler's fledgling movement in 1924, rising to be Gauleiter of Westphalia South and, by 1942, Munich and Upper Bavaria. His claim to fame was the supervision of the Dachau concentration camp; apparently, when the liberators were approaching, he drew up a last-minute
plan to ensure they arrived too late – by exterminating all the camp's Jews.

Rebecca leaned forward to get a closer look at the screen, one loose curl of her hair brushing Tom's face.

Odilo Globocnik had an entry too, one befitting a senior SS apparatchik and former police leader in Lublin, credited with overseeing the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units who massacred Jews throughout Poland from 1942 to 1943.

The pattern grew clearer with each entry. SS Colonel Albert Hohlfelder, decorated for his work sterilizing Jews and other slaves through mass exposure to X-rays. SS Lieutenant General Dr Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, member of the planning staff responsible for the comprehensive liquidation of the Jewish ghettoes of Poland. SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld, supervisor of Auschwitz crematorium number two in 1944. Christian Wirth, assistant to Globocnik, and responsible for implementing the principles of the T-4 euthanasia project, in which the disabled were gassed or killed by lethal injection, on a dramatically larger scale by developing extermination camps which served as state-of-the-art, industrialized factories of death.

‘So we have a list of big-time Nazis,’ Tom said finally, pushing the chair back from the desk.

‘I don't understand.’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to hand-deliver this to you? Anonymously?’

Her eyes were aflame with something Tom could not quite interpret. Was it grief, burning anew? Was it anger, at such manipulation? Was it fear at being menaced by violent intruders and anonymous callers? Tom could have looked and looked into those eyes, without ever being certain.

‘I have no idea what any of this means, Tom,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I know someone who might.’

Rebecca drove them through a north-east London landscape that would have been utterly alien to the Tom Byrne who grew up in Sheffield more than three decades earlier. A single, endless street seemed to pass not through neighbourhoods so much as entire continents. Turkish newsagents and kebab sellers gave way to clusters of Vietnamese restaurants, which in turn were replaced by Polish delicatessens, then storefronts promising internet access and cheap calls to Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Out on the pavements were women whose heads were covered by hijabs, and others concealed behind the full-face niqab, a tiny letterbox slit for their eyes. Brushing past them were ultra-orthodox Jewish men whose costume was familiar to Tom from New York: dressed head to toe in black, their heads covered either in homburgs or, occasionally, striking fur numbers from a mysterious, long-vanished age. Also hurrying to prayer, though in a different direction, were Muslimmen,
some in the knee-length kurta, with a kufi, a netted white skullcap, on their heads. Tom eyed up a crowd at a bus stop: a student in the shirt of the Brazilian national football team, two black men, a turbaned Sikh and three white women with prams that looked sufficiently rugged to negotiate serious off-road terrain. His expression must have been obvious because Rebecca, from the driving seat of her ancient Saab, said, ‘I see this is your first visit to the Kingsland High Street.’

They parked up and walked past a Kurdish greengrocer and a newsagent promising Muslim-friendly, porn-free shelves, until they arrived at a shabby shop front that announced itself as the Kingsland Law Centre.

Rebecca pushed the door open in a manner that suggested to Tom she had been here before. Inside, a bicycle was propped up in the entrance corridor which led to a staircase and, Tom guessed, some above-the-shop flats. There was a second door on their left which they went through.

The front half of the office was laid out like the waiting area of a down-at-heel doctors' surgery: three chairs arranged around a forlorn, fake wood table. On it were copies of
Hackney Today
, dated from three months earlier. The chairs were taken by men who Tom, expert in these matters after eleven years at the UN, would have guessed were Somali. One was holding a leaflet entitled
Your asylum rights in the UK.

Behind a flimsy partition, a conversation that was clearly meant to be private was audible.

‘Sorry, Lionel, I need to ask you again. Have you stopped taking your medication? Do I need to call someone for you?’

Even without trying, Tom could see over the screen. Towards the back, seated in front of a desk like a customer visiting a bank manager, was an unshaven man in a baseball cap, surrounded by half a dozen plastic bags. He was muttering, not pausing to interrupt his own monologue even when spoken to directly.

Behind the desk was a man no more than thirty years old with looks that were also familiar to Tom now, though they would have been downright exotic in the Sheffield of his youth. He was handsome with a head of dark curly hair and tortoiseshell glasses. In New York, Tom would have bet with confidence that this was a Jewish lawyer and he guessed the same now.

Rebecca smiled in the man's direction with a look that suggested the indulgence of an older sister; he held up a hand in silent greeting, without interrupting his discussion with Lionel.

The unanswered phones, the threadbare carpet, the chaos: it all combined to trigger a wave of memory. Tom had briefly worked in a legal aid practice like this one when he had returned to Sheffield soon after graduating. His father's emphysema had finally caught up with him and his mother had asked Tom to return, to ‘give your
old man a decent send-off’. The clientele was not quite as diverse as this lot, Tom acknowledged, but the atmosphere was the same: a tiny, no-budget practice permanently on the brink of drowning in an ocean filled with sharks.

‘Rebecca, I'm so sorry.’ The lawyer had come over now, leaving Lionel to gather up his bags. His voice conveyed condolences for her father in a tone that suggested he knew them both. ‘I've been trying to call, left a couple of messages. I guess you've been swamped. We're all so shocked.’

Rebecca waved the apology away, then swivelled to make introductions. ‘Julian, this is Tom Byrne from the United Nations. Tom, this is Julian Goldman, legal linchpin of the Hackney community – and the grandson of one of my father's oldest friends.’

Julian's smile at that, his bathing in Rebecca's recognition, told Tom all he needed to know: that this was a bright young man who had been in love with Rebecca for years, probably since childhood.

‘Lequasia, can you get us some coffee?’ he called out to a secretary Tom hadn't noticed.

Seated at a desk next to Julian's, Lequasia was surely no more than eighteen, with extravagantly straightened hair and a current commitment to admiring a set of improbably lengthy nails rather than answering the phones. She looked up now with an expression that combined indolence and derision in equal measure.

‘Come, sit over here.’ Julian grabbed a couple
of stiff-backed, plastic chairs and arranged them in front of his desk.

Tom noticed that he had placed Rebecca's chair close to his own.

‘What about funeral arrangements? Is there anything I can do?’

‘When they rang to tell me what had happened, they said there'd be a delay. For an autopsy.’ She was speaking softly, Tom noticed. He wondered how much she would tell him; they had not discussed it on the way here. In New York, Tom Byrne would never have gone into a meeting to discuss the monthly stationery order without some kind of game plan. Yet here they were, winging it, with no strategy whatsoever. It was another reminder that he was losing control of this case – if he had ever had it.

‘Are you thinking of taking action against the—’ Julian shot a glance at Tom, ‘— at the people responsible for this?’

Here comes the ambulance-chaser, thought Tom.

‘I'm not thinking about that right now,’ Rebecca said, as if Gerald Merton's status as an innocent victim was beyond doubt. ‘But there are some things I need to find out. About my father.’

‘Well, you know everything, Rebecca. You were everything to him, anyone could see that.’ He turned to Tom. ‘You have never seen a father and daughter who were closer. Even when it was just the two of them, they were a family. A two-person family.’

‘What about the will?’

For the first time, Julian turned upon Rebecca an expression that was not undiluted adoration. He seemed shocked, the little boy who's just seen Snow White having a fag. ‘You can't be thinking of that now, surely.’

‘I want to know if there's anything he left for me.’

‘Oh, Rebecca.’

‘I don't mean money, Julian,’ she said with an impatience that pleased Tom. ‘I mean anything else he might have left here for safekeeping. To be given to me in the event of his death.’

Julian recovered himself. ‘You know he arranged his affairs when my father was still his lawyer, before Dad retired. I didn't actually do any of that with him myself.’

‘Can you check?’

Julian looked over at Lequasia, was about to ask her, shook his head and got up. ‘I won't be a minute.’

Tom looked over at Rebecca and raised his eyebrows, a gesture which in UN Plaza would have said everything but which here, he appreciated, needed explaining. ‘What's the story?’

‘My father was sentimental. He and Julian's grandfather came to this country together. I think he was also a partisan, though much older. When his son became a lawyer, my father became his first client. Out of loyalty. Then when the son retired, Dad moved onto the grandson.’

‘Did your father need a lawyer for any reason?’

The steel returned to Rebecca's eyes. ‘Not once.’

Tom got up, stretching his legs. The three Somali men were still waiting, their faces blank with weariness and disappointment. Quite a contrast, Tom thought, with the corporate suits and Mafia property developers who formed his own client base these days.

Julian emerged at last from a back store-room carrying a container structured like a shoe-box, though double the width, made of strong cardboard with metal reinforcements on the corners. The colour, once red, had faded to a pale pink; it was veneered in dust.

‘This is it, I'm afraid. Not exactly a house in Barbados, I know.’ He laid it on the desk.

‘How long has this been here?’ she asked, not touching it.

‘We had it transferred over here about two years ago, when my father retired. He started his law practice in 1967. So he could have got it from your father any time between those dates. It looks pretty old, doesn't it?’

Slowly, Rebecca removed the lid. Julian removed himself to the reception area, where he could be heard enunciating an apology to the three Somali men.

The moment the lid was off, Tom felt a surge of disappointment. He did not know what he had been expecting, but it was not this. The box seemed no different from the kind you might find in the homes
of most pensioners: a collection of once-important documents, expired passports and the like. What had he hoped to find in there, a gun?

Carefully, Rebecca took each item out, as if handling precious stones. The old passports were bundled together with a rubber band. Next to them she placed a document which elicited a wistful smile. It was titled Certificate of Naturalization, the sheet of paper issued by the Home Office in 1947 which accepted Gershon Matzkin as a loyal subject of King George VI and magicked him into a new creature: Gerald Merton.

There were more certificates, including the incorporation of his dry cleaning business in Stoke Newington and one for the purchase of premium bonds. The long-gone world of post-war Britain seemed to rise from this box like a cloud of dust.

‘Tom, look at this.’

Crumpled at the bottom was a thin pile of newspaper cuttings. Rebecca lifted them out especially gently, to prevent them disintegrating in her hands. Some were yellow, others an anaemic shade of beige. Only a couple were in English. Several were in Spanish, two in Portuguese and half a dozen in German. Handwritten at the top of each was a simple date. They seemed to be collected in chronological order, the first few, almost all in German, clustered in the same period, the second half of 1945, the rest spread through the 1950s and 1960s.

‘Do you speak German?’ Tom asked.

Rebecca shook her head: ‘That was one language I never wanted to learn.’

She turned the first fragile clippings over, until she came across one from
The Times.
It was hard to tell which of the four or five news items on the page they were meant to look at, until Rebecca noticed a fine, faded pencil line boxing a story just a paragraph long.

There were two more in German, one from
Die Welt
, originally published by the British occupying forces after the German surrender. It too was a single-paragraph item, in the news-in-brief column, marked out in a square of black ink. Tom's schoolboy skills were just about adequate to translate.

Tom now reached over Rebecca for the envelope that had come through her letter box an hour
earlier, his hand briefly brushing against hers and an electric charge coursing through him.

Forcing himself to concentrate, he laid out the hand-delivered list of names, then looked through the cuttings at the top of the pile, the 1945 ones, pulling out of the German news accounts the names of the men reported dead. He saw a Wilhelm Albert and a Karl Puetz. He glanced back at the list: there they both were, a cross by each of their names. He went deeper into the pile, finding names from the 1950s. They were on the list too, also crossed out.

An image of Gershon Matzkin floated into his head: prematurely old, hunched over his ledger, recording the deaths of ageing Nazis the world over. He imagined him scouring the newspapers, visiting the local library, crossing them off his list one by one, each death a balm to the terrible sorrow that must have devoured him. The deep tragedy of it – a man consumed by such grief and hatred, living only to hear of the faraway deaths of others – struck Tom. How powerless Gershon Matzkin must have felt, a boy whose family had been destroyed by these men, now grown up and watching from his dry cleaning shop, waiting for the day when a road accident here or a faulty electrical cable there might leave one less Nazi in the world. Is that why he had stayed fit, so that he might outlive them all, so that he might see the day when there were none of them left?

Or was that not how it was at all?

‘Rebecca, pass me the passports.’

Tom peeled off the rubber band – and he saw it straightaway. There were three old black, hardcover British passports, each in the name of Gerald Merton. But there was also a large, stiff, navy blue passport of the French Republic, issued in the name of Jean-Luc Renard – with a photo that was unmistakably the young Gerald. There was a travel document for Hans Borchardt, loyal citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. It too came attached to a photograph of Gerald Merton. Tom looked at the dates inside: most were issued in 1952, though there were also passports for Paraguay and Argentina valid for a full decade later. Tom stared at one passport in particular. Issued in 1952, it identified one Fernando Matutes as a Spanish citizen – even though the picture inside showed the same, unsmiling face of Gerald Merton.

Quickly now, sure that he was right, Tom flicked through the pages of the Spanish passport and saw that the first and last time it had been used was in August 1952. Quickly, he pored over the pile of newspaper cuttings until he found one in Spanish. And there it was. Faded and yellowing but nevertheless clear:
El Correo
, the newspaper of the Basque country, from the second week of August, 1952.