Man From Barbarossa

1

HAWTHORNE

The town of Hawthorne, New Jersey, is less than one hour’s drive from the centre of Manhattan, yet a stranger, dropped there by some magic, could be forgiven for imagining that he was in a small English North Country town.

True, the main road is wider than any you will find in Lancashire, Yorkshire, or Tyne and Wear, but the terraced brick houses have that same look you see in some of the hardy uncompromising communities around, say, Bolton or Blackburn. The overhead power lines and traffic lights signal that you are in America, but the feel of the place is strangely similar to the English North.

One of Hawthorne’s favourite eating places is a single-storey Italian restaurant called Ossie’s, named after its proprietor. On most nights it is full, and the tall dark figure of Ossie threads his way through the tables, taking orders, engaging in banter with his regulars and providing what he, and his clients, believe to be the best Italian food in the whole of the United States.

On Wednesday December 26th, 1990, he greeted one of his most stalwart customers with a sympathetic, almost compassionate smile, for old Joel Penderek ate at Ossie’s on at least four nights of the week. Before the previous September, Joe, as he was generally known, had only been a weekly visitor together with his wife Anna. But Anna, who was never known to have had a day’s illness, had died with a suddenness which shattered old Joe’s happy and ordered life, on the previous Labor Day. There, baking and chattering one minute, and dead the next. The doctor said it was a massive heart attack and that he had already warned Anna several times that she carried too much weight and her cholesterol level was way above the acceptable norm.

This helped old Joe Penderek not a jot. He had met, and fallen in love with Anna, on the boat in 1946, and had married her as soon as they both knew they had been accepted by the immigration authorities.

Joe was twenty-nine years old when he came to America, Anna was twenty-seven and they both acknowledged that they were among the lucky ones. They seldom talked about their experiences in Europe, but those who spent any time with them knew they were Russian Jews who had been saved from one of the Nazi extermination camps, spending several months in one of the Allied DP centres before being passed on, via a compassionate American major, and swallowed by a group of assorted survivors earmarked for the USA. Anna had told her neighbour, Debbie Mansell, that all her family who had escaped death had been sent back to Russia where they disappeared. Joel’s relatives had all died in the camps. It was wicked and cruel, but who said life would be fair?

Within a year of their marriage, Joe, who, until then, had kept them both by taking casual labour, landed a good job with a local construction company, and, as the years passed, so he had risen, from labourer to foreman, from foreman to site manager, and from site manager to retirement with a healthy pension. Now he had become a sad, lost figure who preferred his own company, as though some inner pride dictated that a man should be able to exist alone, and in his own private environment, once his life’s partner had gone for ever.

So he kept to himself, nodded a half-hearted thanks-but-no-thanks to those who tried to befriend him, going about some routine which became almost ritualistic and included dining alone at Ossie’s on four nights of the week. People stopped at his table, passed a few words with him, but seldom stayed long, for the old man seemed positively to resent old friendships. For the first time, people noticed that the tall, once muscular, man had acquired a haunted look, there, deep in his eyes. It was a look which said, ‘have care; do not come too close, for I am a man estranged from the world. I am a man born to sorrows.’ The craggy face seemed to have been affected by the eyes which appeared to have grown larger than folk recalled. The leathery skin was cracked, as though some plastic surgeon’s work had gone awry, the skin itself taut against the cheekbones, while the lips were afflicted with a perpetual tremble. People said he was not at all like the old Joel Penderek they had known and loved all their lives. This was a shadow of that man.

Nobody had seen Joel over the holidays – which in the United States, unlike the splurge in the UK, last only for Christmas Day – but on the night of Wednesday 26th, Penderek ate well, drank a small carafe of his favourite red wine, paid his bill, and left around nine in the evening by the side door. It was the last time anyone saw him, though nobody reported him missing until the following night when Debbie Mansell became alarmed, having heard no sound from her neighbour’s house and noting that the blinds remained drawn. This was odd, for she usually heard the old man’s radio every day.

When the local police broke in they fully expected to find a body. Instead, Joel Penderek’s home was almost abnormally tidy, with little out of place, the bed made up and not slept in, the kitchen clean and neat without a pot or pan out of place and a scattering of junk mail uncollected in the box.

Nobody had seen anything strange, and that was the way it had been planned. What happened on the Wednesday night was never fully explained, but in reality the facts were simple. The old man had walked out into the car park alongside Ossie’s, turning up his greatcoat collar against the cold and pulling his woolly hat down over his ears: a blue and white knitted concoction he wore like a badge of office – for nobody saw him without it in the winter.

Being slightly hard of hearing, Joe shut out sound completely with the thick hat, so he only became aware of the car pulling out from the other parked vehicles when it came abreast of him. The driver’s window was down and the man at the wheel shouted, ‘Hey, buddy. You tell us the way to Parmelee Avenue?’ He brandished a map, and Joe pulled the hat from his right ear, took two steps towards the car and muttered something which sounded like, ‘You want what?’

Then another man jumped him from behind, the rear door of the car sprang open and, in less than thirty seconds, the vehicle was just another set of taillights heading back towards Manhattan, but with Joel Penderek already unconscious in the rear, where a former medical orderly had plunged a hypo needle through three layers of clothing and into his right arm.

Nobody could possibly have foreseen that the abduction of an old man in New Jersey would be the prelude to a drama played out on the world’s stage. Or that it was the first step in a plot, so ingenious and skilful, that the stability of nations would rock wildly to its adroit tune. One missing old man, and the fate of the free world would be at stake.

Even when they knew he was missing, none of his acquaintances in Hawthorne connected him with the big news story that broke on the Friday morning.

It came in over the wire services and was picked up by most of the national newspapers, while the major TV networks ran it as a third lead. If the Russian government had wanted to keep it quiet, they could not have done it, for the Scales of Justice, as they called themselves, made certain all the wire services had the text at exactly the same time as the Kremlin. The message was short and very much to the point.

Communiqué Number One: Fifty years ago, in June, the Jewish population of Kiev was brutally disposed of at Babi Yar. The chief executioner has long since been brought to book, but his assistant, Josif Vorontsov, a man of Russian origin, was never taken into custody. We now have the criminal Vorontsov who has been masquerading as a citizen of the United States of America. We hold him safe in Eastern Europe and we are prepared to hand him over to the authorities. The new spirit which is abroad in our beloved land promises true and complete justice. We require the government to commit itself to a complete and unbiased trial of Vorontsov. The government must prove that it is still willing to right wrongs suffered in the past and we will hand the criminal over once we are assured that he will be given a full trial open to the world’s press corps. The government has one week to comply.

It was signed simply Scales of Justice, in Russian Chushi Pravosudia.

Nobody seemed to have heard of the Scales of Justice, but the world’s media were able to run and rerun the facts concerning Babi Yar. They also pointed to this new event as an opportunity for the true spirit of perestroika and glasnost to be fully active. Trials in the old Russian Empire had often been for show, or remained secret. Now, with glasnost, the government could demonstrate their impartiality by bringing to book the assistant murderer of so many Russian Jews.

The media also took note that the communiqué appeared to contain an unspecified threat, by giving a time limit for the judicial authorities to declare themselves willing and able to prosecute a mass murderer.

The Kremlin announced they were reviewing the entire matter, and would give an answer before the deadline set by the Scales of Justice, whoever they were.

It was not a huge, headline-grabbing story, but there was plenty of interest to keep it alive.

Nobody, not even the media, knew of the dilemmas which existed behind the political scenes. There was no way in which they could be aware of the controlled panic the Scales of Justice had brought about within the KGB, or the secret and alarming interest suddenly expressed by the Israeli Mossad, or even the slew of signals that passed between Dzerzhinsky Square, Moscow, and the British Secret Intelligence Service in London.

If the media had caught a minute whiff of the confusion, the story would have quickly knocked most other subjects off the front pages, and the in-depth investigators would have been burrowing into those secret covens which still exist in all countries.

In London, the complete facts were not handed on until January 2nd, six days after the first Scales of Justice communiqué. But once the ball began to roll, Fallen Timbers, as it became known, took on a momentum of its own.