The Final Reckoning (19 page)

As they pulled up and paid the fare, Tom wondered if this was the first time she had been back to her father's place since his death. He braced
himself to see Rebecca hit by yet another emotional freight train: how much could one person endure?

He watched her produce a ring of keys, choose one and turn it in the lock. She did not linger in the hallway but strode up the thinly carpeted stairs. The smell was just as he expected: stale and musty. On the third floor, she made for the first door by the staircase. Tom noticed her hands trembling as she unlocked the door. As she switched on the main light, she gasped.

Tom peered past her. The place had been ransacked, worked over just as thoroughly as her own apartment. The cushions were slashed, the books strewn on the floor like casualties in a battlefield. Even the carpet had been rolled back to expose the dirty, dust-caked floorboards underneath. At least two now jutted out, as if they had been prised up, then banged roughly back into place. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, an abstract collage in the hallway and a sub-Chagall knock-off depicting what seemed to be a rabbinic violinist in the living room. Both were now badly askew.

Even with the light on, the place was cast in a stubborn gloom. Heavy brown curtains were drawn across the windows. Tom waded through the wreckage, trying to construct an image of how the place would have looked. The kitchen was small and off-white, the appliances museum pieces from the 1970s. There was a basic two-person table by the wall. Close by, also intact, was a catering pack of a dozen cartons of orange juice.
Next to it sat a similarly cellophane-wrapped bulk load of baked bean tins. Gershon Matzkin had clearly never forgotten the lesson of the Kovno ghetto: always keep food, just in case.

There was a radio and a vase and several framed photos, the glass broken on almost all of them. He peered closely at one holiday snap, showing a tanned man, his shirt off, with his right arm around a woman and his left around a young girl, all seated at a table in an outdoor cafe in bright sunshine. The girl was about twelve and gawky, all elbows and bony shoulders. But the crystal green eyes were clear even then. The woman was dark-haired, too, but her eyes were unlike her daughter's, warmer and darker.

Tom focused on Gershon. He looked at least ten years older than his wife, already bald, the prodigious crop of hair on his chest silver. But his body was in remarkable shape, the muscle firm and toned, the chest and stomach hard and flat. And his eyes were as luminous as his daughter's.

Tom went back out into the living room, examining the slashed remains of a single well-worn armchair by the window. Next to it stood a table bearing a telephone and a radio-cassette player, a hulking relic of the 1980s. All over the floor, emptied out from a large, glass-fronted cabinet, were candlesticks, assorted silver knick-knacks, a few books and many more family photos. One caught Tom's eye: Rebecca with a wide smile and a mortarboard, her whole life ahead of her.

He found her in the bedroom contemplating another depressing scene: clothes strewn across the carpet, cupboard doors flung wide open. Each sock drawer had been emptied; ties dangling like forlorn party decorations. Tom expected her to sink onto the bed and burst into tears, but instead she went back into the living room. A look of relief passed across her face. ‘They're still here.’

She knelt down and began poring over the framed photographs dumped on the floor. Tom joined her, instinctively searching for any pictures from the 1940s, from the dawn of DIN. Perhaps they would find an image of the teenage Gershon Matzkin in the forests in his patched-together uniform, maybe with his lover and partner-in-grief, Rosa. But most of the snaps were of Gershon's post-war self, settled in Britain: the newly minted Gerald Merton.

Rebecca studied one of these images closely. It was in that peculiar shade of dull orange that seemed to veil all colour photographs from the 1970s and it showed five men beaming widely, four of them wearing large square glasses. Tom recognized Gerald, his wide sideburns flecked with grey. All five were in black tie, though they had their jackets off. The one on the far right was raising a glass.

‘Joe Tannenbaum. He must have died soon after this picture was taken,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘And Geoffrey Besser, he died about ten years ago.’ Her finger hovered over the last man in the shot, cheerfully drinking to the health of the photographer. ‘I can't remember him though.’

‘What is this picture?’

‘These were my dad's best friends.’

Tom looked at her face, scanning it for a sign of nostalgia or reminiscence. But her brow was furrowed.

‘I don't understand. What are you looking for?’

‘Sorry. I should have said. This would have been my cousin's wedding in 1976. And this group here,’ she angled the picture for him to look at it properly, ‘this is the poker club.’

Tom took a step back, crunching a picture book of Jerusalem under foot as he did so. The photo showed five middle-aged men, their jowls thickening, their heads getting balder, probably laughing at a corny joke. They were five survivors of the inferno who had made new lives in London: Gerald Merton with his dry cleaning shop and Henry Goldman's father, wholesaler of ladies' outerwear. Looking at this photograph, no one would have guessed what these men had been capable of – the focused, unwavering campaign of targeted killings they had pursued across several continents. And no one would have known the hell they had endured to make them do it.

‘There's Henry Goldman's father, just there,’ she pointed, her voice still quiet. ‘The only one I don't know about is this bloke here. Sid something, he was called.’

Tom looked hard at the man she indicated, the one with the raised glass. Now that he knew the story of this band of brothers, was he deluding
himself or could he really see something else in these five faces? Gerald Merton had a wariness in his eyes discernible in every photograph Tom had seen. But there was something like it in the gazes of the other men, too. A steel below the surface, despite the apparently avuncular smiles. And then Tom saw it.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ he asked, pointing at the blur of grey on the forearm of the Sid whose last name Rebecca could not remember. His sleeve was rolled up, his forehead twinkling with sweat, perhaps the aftermath of a strenuous dance. Tom had been to a Jewish wedding once, a friend from college. Those traditional dances were quite a workout.

‘Yes, that's what you think it is. Sid was in Auschwitz.’ And her finger hovered over the blurred image of a number, tattooed on the arm of a man, raising his glass at a wedding more than three decades earlier.

Tom couldn't help but stare into his eyes, barely visible behind the thick apparently tinted glasses. What horrors had they seen? Had the images lingered? Could Sid see them even then, on a night of dancing, sweaty dress shirts and toasts?

‘Sid Steiner! That was his name. Sid Steiner.’

‘Is he alive?’

‘I have no idea. But I think we'd better find out.’

The place was still not tidied up as they sat next to each other, in the dead of night, on the slashed remains of Gerald Merton's couch, both staring at the small, brightly lit device cradled between Tom's hands. It was his BlackBerry, though they were not using it for email. The machine also had an internet browser, even if it did move with painful sloth. They were trying to navigate their way around the online archive of
The Jewish Chronicle
, searching past editions of the paper's personal announcements. Tom was struggling to concentrate against the noise of the TV set. Turning it on had been his idea: if someone was eavesdropping on their conversations, as he was convinced they had at Goldman's Canary Wharf office, then at least they could make the eavesdroppers' job a little more difficult. It was a low-tech form of counter-surveillance but he couldn't think of anything better.

At Rebecca's suggestion, he had typed in the single word ‘Steiner’ and the website had come
up with hundreds. They scrolled through looking for Sids and, to Rebecca's dismay, they had found a Sid Steiner easily, dated six years ago:

STEINER. Sid. Passed away peacefully, aged 89, after much suffering. A much loved and special gentleman who will be sadly missed by wife Beryl, son David and daughter-in-law Gaby, grandchildren, Josh, Daniel, Richard, Simon and sister-in-law Helen. May he rest in peace.

‘OK, that's not him. Wife wasn't called Beryl.’

‘You sure?’

‘I'm sure. Hold on, here's another one.’ This was more recent, just two years ago.

STEINER. Sid. Our dear dad who is now at peace and reunited with his Ada. A strong, supportive and wonderful father who will remain in our hearts forever. May his soul rest in peace. Ruth and Jack.

Tom looked at Rebecca, next to him on the couch, with an eyebrow raised. She shook her head. ‘Kids didn't have those names.’

‘How can you be sure? You didn't remember his last name a minute ago.’

‘They had a son called Daniel. Dan. I remember because I had a crush on him.’ Absurdly, Tom felt a stab of jealousy. Then, remembering their kiss just a few hours earlier, it turned into a pang of desire. He looked at her for a second or two longer, fighting the urge to touch her: he couldn't make a pass at her here, in the trashed apartment of her dead father, even if he desperately wanted to. He forced his gaze back to the machine: he could see no more Sid Steiners.

‘OK, I think that's our lot,’ he said.

‘You haven't tried Social and Personal.’

‘Those were the personal ads. That's what we've been looking through.’

‘No, those were the classified personal ads. There's also Social and Personal; different column. Bigger type, different page. Costs more.’

‘Two different classes of death announcement? You're kidding.’

‘I'm not.’

‘So death is not the great leveller after all.’

‘Not in
The Jewish Chronicle.
There it is, Social and Personal. Enter Sid Steiner there.’

He did and three came back. Tributes to a ‘Dear brother, now at peace and sadly missed’ and ‘thoughts with the family at this sad time’, but none that struck Rebecca as the right Sid Steiner. Either the age or the family names were wrong.

Tom put the machine to one side and shifted position to face her. ‘Is it possible he died quietly, without an announcement?’

‘No. If you're as Jewish as Sid Steiner, you die in
The Jewish Chronicle.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I don't know.’

‘OK,’ said Tom. 'We'll do this the old-fashioned way. We'll get some sleep and in the morning we'll start working the phones.

On an improvised bed of slashed cushions and a torn sofa, Tom tried to slip into sleep. Rebecca was
next door, in her father's bedroom. He knew he was exhausted, that the days seemed to have merged into a single stretch of time without rest. And yet his mind was sprinting.

A succession of images was flipping through his head like the pages of a child's flick-book. He saw a boy in ghetto rags, then an old man shot on the steps of the UN, then a woman's body swinging from a rafter, then the smiling pathologist in New York, then Rebecca's crooked smile and then, without warning … Rebecca.

There she was, framed in the doorway, the bedroom light revealing her shape. She was wearing only a shirt.

Tom brought himself up so that he was resting on his elbows. He didn't say a word, and neither did she.

Their kisses were as hungry now as before – hungrier for having been thwarted. The touch of her skin, the scent of her, sent such a voltage through him he felt he might be burning. And there in the shadows, their sweat and their taste mingling, the moment he entered her was as if they had entered each other. The intensity of it, so great that it banished all awareness of their surroundings, frightened him.

Afterwards, the silence seemed to bind them together. Her head lay on his chest and it was the sensation of a tear falling onto his skin that made him speak.

‘Rebecca?’

He could feel her trembling now, a quiet sob.

‘Is this because … of here? Because of where we are?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?’

‘I just wish this hadn't happened like this.’

He stroked her hair, certain that his first instinct had been right: it was madness for them to have made love here, in the home of her dead father.

She spoke again. ‘With all this going on, I mean. I wish it could have happened another way. I'm so sorry.’

‘I can handle it if you can.’

The silence returned, but this time Tom knew it was the prelude to another question.

‘How come there's no Mrs Byrne?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘It is to me. Was there ever one?’

‘No. I used to be married to the work. And then, after everything that happened, I sort of shut out the future, along with the past. Made my home in the present. I couldn't plan much beyond dinner reservations.’

‘You're speaking in the past tense.’

‘Maybe I've changed.’

‘When?’

‘In the last day or two.’

She got up, headed for the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. She drank from it, passed it to him, then lay back down, skin touching skin.

‘How come there's no Mr Merton? Sorry, I mean—’

‘It's OK. Well, there's the patients. They take a lot out of you.’

‘But that's not the whole story.’

‘No. The truth is, it was hard with my dad. I was his only child. And then, after Mum died, I was his only family. Marrying someone would have felt like I was—’

‘—leaving him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What would he have thought of me?’

‘Well, you're not Jewish for a start.’

‘So?’

‘So, let's not get into it. That's a whole other psycho-drama you don't need to know about.’

‘Rebecca—’

She turned swiftly to face him and placed a finger on his lips. ‘Don't. Don't say anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I'm trying to be like you. I grew up my whole life either drowning in the past or worrying about the future. I want to see if I can enjoy the present. Just for once.’

When he woke a little after eight Rebecca was no longer lying next to him. She was up and dressed, explaining that she had been too impatient to sleep. She wanted to start the search for Sid Steiner immediately.

She reached for the phone, tried directory
enquiries first, and in vain, then turned to the phone book. She circled one number and dialled it, only for the call to be fielded by an answering machine. The voice belonged to Sid Steiner – but it was an accountancy practice in Hendon, no connection.

‘All right then,’ said Tom, swallowing his pride. ‘What about this Dan, then?’

‘That was twenty-five years ago. I was about seven years old. I have no idea where he is now.’ Tom was relieved: she hadn't said it was a childhood crush.

‘You haven't stayed in touch at all? Do you know where he works?’

She shook her head. Then she brightened, instantly reaching over for Tom's BlackBerry. ‘Can you get Facebook on this?’

Tom felt a sudden awareness of the age gap between them: he relied on old-fashioned, steam-powered email. Still, at least he knew what she was talking about. ‘I'm sure I can. Why?’

‘Because that'll be the easiest way to find Dan Steiner.’

Sure enough, once logged on, it took a matter of seconds in the search box to generate an image of a depressingly handsome man about Tom's age, with a full head of dark hair.

‘I could just poke him,’ Rebecca said. When she saw Tom's startled expression, she smiled. ‘That's not what it sounds like. It's a Facebook thing.’

* * *

There was only one space left in the car park; the rest were taken up with three mini-buses which, Tom noticed, were equipped even on the outside with assorted ramps and handles for wheelchair access. The building itself was large, fashioned out of the grey concrete that seemed to have been the only material available to the architects working when Tom had come of age: Sheffield had been full of dull, faceless exteriors like this too. The housing benefit office, the local library, the council: in the 1970s all British buildings looked like this. They walked up the ramp, pausing by the entrance for Tom to roll two quick cigarettes, both making rapid work of sucking them down to a tiny stub. Rebecca had only ‘poked’ Dan Steiner an hour ago. He had – entirely unsurprisingly in Tom's view – responded immediately, happily supplying Rebecca with a phone number. She had wanted to call him there and then but Tom had vetoed it: if they were being followed, if their meeting with Henry Goldman had somehow been bugged, then it made no sense to use the phone in her father's flat. If their pursuers had been in there to wreck the place, it wouldn't have cost them too much effort to put an ear on the phone line. They had driven instead to a phone box three streets away, bringing the admission from the thirty-one year old Rebecca Merton, child of the cellular generation, that she had never used one before. Once guided by Tom, glad for the excuse to be crammed in the booth with her, so
close their faces almost touched, she placed the call. She accepted Dan's condolences, asked charmingly after his wife and children, then asked if she might make contact with Dan's elderly father. She screwed up her eyes with that last request, bracing herself for Dan breaking the news that his father had moved to Israel or Manchester or even that he had, despite
The Jewish Chronicle
, died recently – but instead he gave her the address of the old age home on Stamford Hill where his father now lived. It was a five-minute drive from her own father's place: the last two boys of the poker club had somehow stuck together.

They had not phoned ahead, but Dan had: the lady at reception said she was expecting two visitors for Sid. As it happened, they had picked a good time to come: there was bingo in the main hall and Sid would have come down from his room. They should just wait here and she'd find someone to lead the way.

Tom looked around, his eye settling on the glass display-case in the lobby. Inside were a couple of the eight-branched candelabra he recognized from New York: they were everywhere in Manhattan in the lead-up to Christmas, as Jews marked the festival of Chanukah. There were silver wine goblets in there too, engraved wth Hebrew lettering. Pride of place went to a commemorative shield, the kind that had so delighted young Tom Byrne when he and his mates had brought one back following the
under-13 football championships for ‘Sheffield and region’.

There were two trolleys laden with teacups, a few forlorn balloons and a noticeboard. He stepped forward to read it: ‘Don't Forget: Chair-Based Exercise with Maureen at 3pm on Thursday’. Another promised ‘Judith's Sing-Along’. Next was a condolence board, with a standard message and a blank space where the name of the latest resident to collide with mortality could be inserted.

‘Hello!’

He turned to see a large woman in her mid-fifties, her chest a rock-solid shelf, striding towards them. From her ID tag Tom could see that her name was Brenda and that she was described as a ‘facilitator’.

‘We haven't seen you at the centre before, have we?’ She sounded breathless. ‘You're here to see Sid?’

The loss of the surname; the same thing had happened to Tom's father the minute he turned frail. Tom always used to correct them – nurses, doctors, all of them – referring to his own father as Mr Byrne, but they rarely got the hint. Mostly it would still be ‘Ron's very good at his wees, aren't you, Ron?’

‘We are,’ said Rebecca, back in doctor mode. Her professional voice was deep, like a lake at night. ‘We're not family. But he and my father were very close.’

‘And has your husband met Sid before?’

‘I'm not—’

‘He's not—’

They shot each other a quick look.

‘Well, I'm glad anyway. Visitors, he doesn't get so many.’ The voice was part East London and part something else, something Tom couldn't place. It was musical, almost sing-song: a Jewish melody. ‘The sons come every now and then, but you know how it is. Everyone's busy.’

She led them through double doors into a large hall, divided by what seemed to be a wooden garden trellis. Brenda pointed at it and said, ‘This is our dining area. That side's meat, this side's milk,’ as if that made matters clearer. Apparently to Rebecca it did.

On the milk side of the divide, there were perhaps fifteen old people seated at five or six round tables arranged in café formation. At the head of the room was a man at a table of his own, clutching a microphone and, with no expression in his voice, reading out a series of numbers. Occasionally, one of the old folks would scratch away at a card. Despite the absence of patter or laughter, Tom realized the man was a bingo-caller. The electronic sign on the table at his side, flashing each number as he called it, was for the benefit of those too deaf to hear.

‘Ooh, I'm surprised,’ said Brenda, laying a hand across her vast bust. ‘I thought he'd be here. I hope he hasn't gone wandering. You know about Sid's condition? His son explained, yes?’

Rebecca flashed Tom a look of panic. ‘No. No, he didn't. He said it might be difficult to talk to his father, but he—’