The Final Reckoning (23 page)

He hesitated before suggesting a return to her father's flat. Hard enough to be among the worldly remains of a dead parent: harder still to be in a place that had been trashed, a subliminal reminder that her father had not been allowed to die an old man's death, but had been murdered.

Besides, it was making things easy for their pursuers, returning to a place they had already targeted. And yet he knew there was a flaw in that logic. For if they had intended to kill them, why had they not simply come out and done it? It couldn't be moral scruple: the corpse of Henry Goldman was testament to that. Nor could it be lack of guile: whoever was after them was patently efficient enough to have followed their movements over the last twenty-four hours, to have bugged their meeting with Goldman so precisely that they had managed to terminate it at the crucial moment and, for all he knew, to be aware of everything they had discovered since.

He and Rebecca Merton were clearly enemies of somebody, but those people had not shown themselves or made any demand. Tom's best guess was that he and Gershon Matzkin's daughter had become like the Russian arms-dealer in Brighton Beach. Their job was to play it out, to do whatever they were doing so that those watching could watch. Were they meant to lead them somewhere? Were they meant to find out something these men didn't already know? Could that explain the envelope that had mysteriously arrived at Rebecca's apartment yesterday? Was that the gesture of an enemy or a friend?

As they left the internet café, hopping on the 76 bus, Rebecca took the decision out of his hands. ‘The answer is somewhere in his flat, I'm sure of it.’

‘They've turned it upside down. Don't you think that if there was something there, they'd have found it?’

‘No. That's why it was so trashed. Because they hadn't found it. If they had, they wouldn't have needed to start slashing cushions.’

Tom was about to say that made no sense, when Rebecca's phone rang. He sat up. She looked at the display and shook her head: not connected with this.

‘Nick, hi. No problem, I can talk.’ She nodded. ‘OK, that sounds good. Let's hope her luck's beginning to change. Check to make sure she's still in remission, change out her lines, and let
the transplant team know she's a go. We can tee up her brother's harvest for next week. Speak soon.’

Tom was only half listening. He was concentrating instead on a man in his twenties who had just boarded the bus, wearing iPod headphones. Tom was trying to see if they were plugged into a music player or something else.

Rebecca put aside her phone and resumed her argument with Tom precisely where she had left off. ‘Anyway, there's nothing else we can do. We don't have a Plan B.’ Even then, despite everything, that ‘we’ warmed him.

And so they made their return visit to Kyverdale Road, to see if there was something that, no matter how improbably, had been overlooked by the burglars. The pair of them tiptoed around the place, picking up every remaining photograph, peering inside every ornament, including the broken ones. Rebecca stayed in the bedroom, working through her father's jackets, probing into each pocket. Tom went, methodically, through the old man's books, shaking each one by the spine just in case some long-forgotten note from 1946 would tumble out.

All the while he was thinking of what had happened in that room just a few hours earlier. Not just the sex, but the way she had finally dropped her guard in the minutes afterwards. She had felt guilty about it all, to be sure, but if he could choose to be anywhere in the world, Tom decided, he would choose to be inside that moment
once more, the two of them together and naked, telling the truth.

He was flicking through the pages of an
Antiques Roadshow Compendium
for 1981 when he came across something: yellowing, handwritten and impossible to understand. Tom could make out no more than a few of the letters. All he could tell for certain was that these were not regular English words. Perhaps they were names, German names.

‘Rebecca! Come here!’

She ran from the bedroom and was by his side in seconds. She took the paper from him, bringing it closer to her eyes for deciphering. Tom was breathing faster.

Finally, she turned towards him with a smile. ‘These are names all right. May even be German. Trouble is, these are the names of dry-cleaning fluids. This is one of my dad's old shopping lists.’

Tom scrunched it up and fell into a chair with his eyes closed. When he opened them Rebecca was staring at him coldly.

‘Not that one.’

‘What?’

‘Don't sit there.’

‘Why not?’

‘That's Dad's chair.’

Tom immediately leapt up, and tried to pretend the moment hadn't happened. ‘So what do we know?’

‘We know that my father, Sid Steiner, Goldman and the others from DIN went round killing Nazis.
They did it in two phases, straight after the war in occupied Germany and then again in the fifties and sixties all over the world, Europe, South America, everywhere. And now we know that their biggest operation was at the Nuremberg bakery, where they may have killed thousands of Nazis.’

‘OK.’

‘What we need to work out is why any of that would matter now. Even if DIN was out to kill one last Nazi – which is obviously what you suspect my father was doing in New York – that's over now. My father was … stopped.’ She paused. ‘And he was the last one. He was always the youngest. There's no one after him. Goldman wasn't going to do anything. So why kill him? Why do all this?’ She was gesturing at the scene of destruction in the flat.

‘To stop the name getting out,’ Tom said. ‘Maybe it's a Nazi everyone's forgotten. Or he's got a false name. Or your father knew his address. If I was a Nazi and I knew Gerald Merton had been coming to get me, I'd also want to make sure he hadn't left any clues behind.’

‘No, that can't be it,’ Rebecca said, biting her lower lip. ‘Goldman had something else to tell us, remember.’

‘Might have been the name.’

‘What, and this geriatric Nazi has been spying on us, breaking into my house, tearing up—’

‘You can get people to do these things.’ Tom sat up. ‘What's that?’

‘Oh.’ Rebecca turned to face the picture in the hallway. Barely lit in the windowless space, and obscured by the coat-rack, was an abstract painting, a formless collection of greys and blacks at least three feet wide and two feet tall, the paint piled on thick. Tom had not paid attention to it before. Nor, it seemed, had the intruders: it didn't appear to have been touched.

‘Rosa did that. I think it was the only thing my father had left of hers. I hated it as a child, so dark and depressing. My mother hated it too. She'd only let him have it in the basement.’

‘But when he had his own place, he hung it on the wall. That's interesting, isn't it?’

‘Maybe he felt he owed her something, I don't know.’ Rebecca moved closer to the painting. ‘As a child I always resented the idea of Rosa: you know, “the woman who came before mummy” and all that. But you look at this and realize what an awful life she had. When she died, she was younger than I am now.’

‘What's it called? The painting.’

‘It's called Aleph. See the grey lines, they just about make the shape of an Aleph. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.’

‘Right.’

The two of them stood there, gazing at it, the shape of the letter now obvious. Tom was trying to imagine the world these two young-old people, a boy and a girl, inhabited those sixty years ago. A world of massacres and constant death and
cruelty which, they believed, could only be redeemed by more death. He imagined Gershon in the bakery, doubtless praying that the tainted bread would touch the lips of the man who had murdered his beloved sisters.

And then it struck him, an idea thudding into his brain with such force he could barely grasp it.

He turned to Rebecca, grabbing her arm. ‘What was it you said before, when we were arguing about coming here? On the bus.’

‘I said that we had to come, we might have overlooked something—’

‘Not that, something else, keep going.’

‘I said, we didn't have any other option—’

‘That's it!’

‘—we had no plan B.’

‘Exactly! That's it: Plan B. What happened at the bakery wasn't the main operation after all. It was Plan B. That's what Sid called it.’

‘I thought B was for bakery.’

‘So did I.
Brot
, German for bread; or
Bäckerei
for bakery. Remember, that's what I said to Sid. “B for bakery”. And he said “No. Wrong again”. I thought that was the dementia, but when he was talking about the bakery operation he was perfectly lucid. He even remembered the exact date! Don't you see, he was telling the truth. Of course he was. Think about it, why would all these Jews from Poland and Lithuania use German for an operation's codename? They wouldn't. They would use Hebrew, just like they did with the
name of their organization. Goldman told us, DIN was Hebrew for judgment. What's the Hebrew for bread?’

‘Lechem.’

‘Right. No “b” there. And what's the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet?’

‘Bet.’

‘You see! Plan Bet. Plan B. And it was called Plan B because it was plan b. It was the fallback plan.’

‘So what was the main plan?’

Tom smiled. ‘Plan A.’

‘Oh, well done, Sherlock.’

‘Or rather, as I think DIN might have called it, Plan Aleph.’

Slowly, they both turned to contemplate Rosa's assemblage of baleful blacks and night-time greys.

They took the painting down as carefully as their impatience would allow. One holding each end, they carried it into the centre of the room, where they leaned it in a forty-five degree angle against a chair.

They had already examined the picture microscopically, looking at it from an inch away, studying the thick accretions of oil paint, searching for clues – but they had found nothing.

Rebecca had returned from the kitchen with a steak knife and set about scraping the paint away from random sections of the canvas. Tom tried to divine whether the fierce energy she brought to the task was the urgent desire to see what the picture might conceal – or simply a long-repressed fury at the painting and indeed the artist who had created it. For all her efforts, they had found nothing, just the smudged blankness of the canvas underneath.

Now they were looking at the back. It had been expensively framed, with a thick wooden border, the canvas secured at the rear by copious amounts
of binding tape. Tom took the knife from Rebecca and slowly sliced around the edge. He half-expected the picture to pop out, but it had been in too long for that. He began removing the tape, layers of it, soon realizing that the back was not the back of the canvas after all, merely a mounting that bulged out by a good quarter of an inch. He would have to remove this too.

He fought the urge simply to slice through the layers of cardboard backing, operating more gingerly instead. Eventually the surrounding tape was gone and he could see the edge of the card. Slowly, he lifted it off.

The second he had, they could both see his work had not been in vain. Stuck to the back of the painting, not glued but pressed there by time, was a set of papers. His hands trembling, Tom reached in and peeled them loose.

There were five sheets inside, all roughly the same size, about A3. When Tom turned the first one over, he almost pulled back in surprise. It was not what he was expecting – a photograph or a list of names that would at last unlock this mystery – but a drawing, something between a map and an architect's blueprint. The next was not identical but similar and so was the next and the next.

‘What the hell are these?’ he said, but Rebecca was too stunned to answer. Of all the revelations about her father, this one seemed to have blind-sided her most.

Tom stared hard at the first drawing. He wondered
if it was an old-fashioned electrical diagram, a sketch for a circuit board perhaps. Then he wondered if it was, perhaps, a map of an underground railway; it certainly seemed to depict pathways and routes.

He looked more closely, his eye now just a matter of inches from the paper, close enough to smell the must. In a tiny hand, he could see numbers written at various intervals. They were, he decided, measurements.

And then Rebecca spoke. ‘Of course,’ she said quietly.

‘What is it?’ Tom said, his voice rising. ‘What?’

‘Do you remember from the notebook, how Rosa and the others escaped? From the ghetto?’

Tom shook his head. That would have been in the section he had skimmed, the pages dealing with the final stages of the war, the flight into the forests awaiting the arrival of the Red Army. The first mention of Rosa Tom could remember was when she and Gershon became lovers, which would have been long after she had broken free of the ghetto.

'Sewers. Rosa and the others, the leaders of the resistance – they all got out on the last day of the liquidation of the ghetto. The Jews were being rounded up and sent to the camps. But the resistance always had a plan for the last day, when there could be no more fighting back.

'So Rosa and the rest, they went down into the ground. Not my father. He was already on the road by then, spreading the word. But later Rosa told him what had happened. And he told me.

'The stench down there was just terrible. It had been raining that day and apparently that made it worse. And the pipes were so narrow, not much wider than their bodies, that they had to crawl through all that shit and piss on their hands and knees. And then, in some places, the pipes got even smaller, so they had to slither along on their stomachs – tilting their heads back just to gasp at the few inches of air. The liquid was giving off all kinds of gas; people were fainting. Not Rosa, though. She just pressed on. That's what she said anyway.

‘They did that for nearly two miles, until they got to an opening outside the ghetto walls where two fighters from the Communist underground were waiting to pull them out.’

‘And so—’

‘It took a lot of work. There was one senior member of the resistance who had been working on it for months, mapping every inch, every tunnel, every manhole cover. The sewers weren't just an escape route; the resistance used them for smuggling too, bringing in weapons. Plenty of people died down there: some were overwhelmed by the stench; others simply got lost.’

The words were just flowing out of her now, as if on a tape recorded long ago, waiting to be played back. For a moment, Tom could see Rebecca as a child, listening intently in the darkness to bedtime tales of resistance, heroism and war. She seemed to have memorized every word.

‘So these—’

‘These must be the maps of the sewers.’

Tom looked hard at the maps which, he now realized, were indeed hand-drawn. He ran his fingertips across the paper. What an extraordinary document this was. Not just a precisely rendered map but a testament to an almost superhuman resourcefulness. And to think that, according to the late Henry Goldman at least, even the most senior of these people, these warriors, had not been a day over twenty-five years old.

But now, as he squinted at every inch of the paper, he examined more closely what had seemed to be a pattern, a printed stamp, in the bottom right-hand corner. Now he could see that it was not a printed badge at all but a block made up of words, written in a tiny, fine-point script. He could decipher none of them, except for one in block capitals:
NURNBERG.
He looked in the same place on the next map. München. The next three were Weimar, Hamburg and Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin.

He gestured for Rebecca to take a look and her brow instantly furrowed. ‘
I
don't understand.’

‘Your father was never in those places, was he?’ Tom hesitated. ‘
I
mean, there were no ghettoes in Germany itself, were there? The Nazis kicked the Jews out and set up the camps and the ghettoes in Eastern Europe, right?’

‘Yes.’

They both stared at the diagrams trying to decipher their meaning. Tom regrouped and spoke
again. ‘But we do know that they were there after the war. We know that he was in Nuremberg.’ He pointed at the Nuremberg drawing. ‘And we know that this, all of this, somehow relates to Plan A. That's why it was hidden in the painting.’

But Rebecca was no longer listening. Something in the pile of discarded binding and paper had caught her eye. It was stuck so flat as to be barely visible, but taped to the backing board was a square of card whose edges had turned almost yellow. With great care she pulled at one corner, feeling the tug of adhesive as it came away. She moved slowly, as if she knew that to move too rapidly was to risk losing whatever buried message from the past was contained here.

She turned it over and Tom found himself staring at a line of random squiggles, half-squares and incomplete hieroglyphs which looked like no language he had ever seen.

‘What is it?’

Rebecca was gazing at it intently. ‘It's either one or the other.’

‘I don't understand.’

‘The characters I recognize,’ she said. ‘I'm just not sure of the language.’

The noise of the TV was even more distracting now, but it was his own fault. He had turned up the volume as soon as Rebecca had realized the
postcard carried a message: if someone was listening, now was the time to stop them. But the background chatter of a daytime soap made concentration all but impossible.

Tom prided himself on his facility for languages. Even those he couldn't speak, he could at least recognize – he knew his Korean from his Thai – and he would have liked to think he could have identified a sentence of Hebrew when it was set down in front of him. But Rebecca had had to explain that the printed alphabet was not the same as the script used in everyday handwriting: the shape of each character was vaguely related, but not identical. Even to someone who would recognize a bible printed in Hebrew, a sentence of Hebrew handwriting could look like a string of corrupted computer icons.

Although Rebecca could make out each character, she wasn't sure she could do much more. ‘I can just about read Hebrew,’ she said, adding that she had endured basic Hebrew classes as a child. ‘Kind of like Jewish Sunday school.’

‘So what's the problem?’

‘The problem is, this might not be Hebrew. It could be Yiddish.’

‘I thought Yiddish was like German.’

‘It is, mostly. But it's written in Hebrew characters.’

Tom had to smile at that. Yiddish was surely tailor-made for undercover communication. A German might understand it if he heard it, but
he would not be able to make head or tail of the written version. How many non-Jews knew the Hebrew alphabet at all, let alone in this handwritten form? Almost none. It meant DIN would have had no need of cryptography: their own language, written down, was sufficient.

‘OK,’ Rebecca said finally. ‘This much I've worked out. It says,
Fargess nicht
!’

'OK, said Tom. ‘That's simple enough. That means “Don't forget”.’

She read on.
‘Yir-mee-ya …Yirmiyahu!
It's a name: Yirmiyahu, like Jeremiah.’

‘Keep going.’

‘
Yirmiyahu vet zine
– and now there's the number twenty-three – then there's the word
dem
and then another number, fifteen. And then it finishes with another exclamation:
Lomir zich freien!’

‘Lomir zich freien.
It's some kind of exhortation, like “Come let's party, come celebrate”. Read the whole thing again.’

‘Fargess nicht! Yirmiyahu vet zine
twenty-three
dem
fifteen.
Lomir zich frein.’

‘Don't forget, Jeremiah turns twenty-three on the fifteenth. Let's celebrate!’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don't tell me all we've got is a party invitation.’

Tom got up to pace, but it was no good. Finally he marched over to the TV set and stabbed at the off button. In the quiet, perhaps twenty seconds later, it came to him. ‘Oh, that's very neat. Very neat indeed.’

‘What's neat?’

‘Do you remember, in your dad's notebook, the message they gave him to take to the other ghettoes?’ Just as Rebecca was about to answer, Tom placed a finger over his lips – and turned the TV back on.

‘“Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4”.’ She paused. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘We need a Bible.’

It took them a while, wading through the rubble of books and junk heaped on the floor, but eventually they found one, a volume much larger than the Bibles Tom was used to. Not that he was an expert: his militantly atheist father had always refused to have ‘that sodding book’ in the house, since it had only brought ‘misery to millions’. This was perhaps twice the size of a hotel-room Bible, as large as a volume of an encyclopedia.

Rebecca turned the pages hesitantly, eventually turning back two pages, then forward one, like someone narrowing down to a single reference in a dictionary. ‘Here we go. The Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 23, Verse 15.’

‘Read it.’

Tracing each word with her finger, she read aloud: ‘“Therefore, this is what the Lord Almighty says concerning the prophets: ‘I will make them eat bitter food and drink poisoned water, because from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land’”.’