The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The front door was open, just as it had been earlier, but this time there were no other voices. He reached the landing where he had first met Rebecca Merton three hours earlier. Now all he could see was her back, as she surveyed the wreckage of her apartment.

The floor was covered with books, every shelf methodically emptied. Their pages had been flung open, their bindings ripped. On the wall hung frames denuded of pictures; posters and canvasses lay torn among broken glass.

The sofa had been slashed, its stuffing bursting out like unkempt hair. The TV had been upended; even the plants had been shaken from their pots. Tom had never seen a place so comprehensively trashed. This was no ordinary robbery.

Suddenly she wheeled around, her eyes ablaze. ‘Well, this bloody confirms it. Did you watch them do it then? Did you stand and watch?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘I'm talking about the fact that my home just happens to have been smashed up straight after you came here. And look, five minutes after I call you, you're back. Were you on the corner the whole time, making sure they did a good job?’

‘Are you mad? This had nothing to do with me.’

‘It's a bit of a coincidence, isn't it? First the UN kill my father and the next day my flat – which has never once been burgled by the way – is suddenly wrecked.’

‘You think the UN did this?’

‘What were you looking for? Dirt?’ There was a hint of the crooked smile. ‘Is that why you sent the boys in, Tom Byrne? To see what discrediting filth you could dig up on the dead man's daughter? So if I dared to demand justice from the organization that killed my father, you'll start telling the News of the World who I fucked at medical school? Jesus, and this is the holier-than-thou United Nations.’

‘Look, you're getting hysterical.’ He regretted the word instantly. Call a woman any name you like, but never, ever say she's hysterical. ‘You think the UN goes around smashing up people's houses? You don't think that, at this particular moment, we're in quite enough trouble with the Merton family without adding this to the pile?’ He gestured towards the debris of her apartment. ‘The UN doesn't have the people to do anything, let alone household burglaries in EC1.’

She looked at him hard, as if scrutinizing his face for signs of truthfulness. He found the gaze unnerving, because all he wanted to do was look back. Then she turned around as if remembering something and sprinted upstairs.

Tom saw his chance. He swiftly reached into his briefcase, pulled out Gershon Matzkin's notebook and was about to throw it onto the pile in the centre of the room when something stopped him: he wanted to be straight with her. He put the book back inside his bag, waiting for the right moment.

A few seconds later, she was back, brushing past him into the kitchen. She only touched him for a second but it was enough: he almost rocked back on his heels from the charge of it. The arousal was instant. Was he the kind of man to get turned on by the sight of a woman in distress? He didn't think so. Or was it just the combined effects of fatigue and adrenalin? He had no guide; he hadn't felt this way since adolescence.

She came back past him, and he caught the musky smell of her. The urge to grab hold of her wrist and pull her close nearly overwhelmed him. He felt as if his powers of reason were shrinking, the space filled up by a growing, expanding desire.

He followed her on her tour of devastation: what on earth had happened here? It would have been extremely rapid; she and he had barely been gone an hour. And expert, too: the perpetrators must have seen both of them leave. The superficial items of value – TV set, stereo – were still in place. This wasn't the work of crackheads out to make fifty quid. They had been desperate to find something specific.

And now Rebecca was searching, clearly panicked that some precious object had been stolen. She went back up the short flight of stairs, past a bedroom, to a study. Here she gasped, as she saw box files in heaps on the floor, their contents scattered like feathers from a pillow.

She stood still for a while and then turned to Tom. ‘If you're behind this in any way-’

‘For God's sake-’

‘I will get in my car, drive to the nearest newspaper office and give them the story that will ruin the reputation of the UN – and you. Do you understand me? All I have to do is tell them the truth of what happened here – and what kind of man the UN killed yesterday. After that, I'll make sure you're prosecuted for murder and robbery.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘No wonder you wanted to cut a deal.’

‘Now, why don't you just calm down? If anyone should be trying to cut a deal here, it's you.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that there's a few things for you to explain too.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the fact that the number of a known arms dealer was on your father's cellphone. Like the fact that a gun favoured by assassins and hitmen was hidden in his hotel room.’

Something passed across Rebecca Merton's face, but it was so brief, so fleeting, Tom couldn't catch it. Was it doubt or shock or panic? It was gone too quickly for him to tell.

The pair of them stood there for a full three or four seconds, facing each other and saying nothing, like medieval knights ready to joust, until finally she stepped backwards and sat on what had once been her couch. She remained very still, as if thinking through a decision. Finally, she sighed heavily and then spoke in a voice that was new and quiet. ‘Listen. I think you need to know the truth about my father.’

At last, thought Tom.

‘There's something you need to read, but I can't-’

‘Is this what you're looking for?’ Tom produced Gershon Matzkin's journal from his case.

‘Oh, thank God.’ She grabbed the book and held it to her chest, her eyes closed, like a mother clutching a child lost in the park. Then her eyes opened into a wide stare. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘It was a mistake. I thought it was mine.’ He took out his own, near-identical notebook and held it up. ‘I was going to come right back here and give it to you.’

She held the book tight again, her face a picture of relief. He half wondered if she was going to thank him for inadvertently ensuring this heirloom had been kept safe from the break-in. But then she looked at him hard, her gaze powerful enough to make his muscles weaken. ‘I don't know whether I can believe a word you say.’

There was silence before she spoke again. ‘Did you read it?’

He hesitated. ‘Bits.’

‘Well, now I'd like you to read it properly.’ And she placed the book in his hands.

She went back upstairs where he soon heard the scraping and banging of furniture being moved and objects being returned to their rightful places.

He wondered if her plan had been to keep this book, this story, a secret. She hadn't mentioned her father's past when he had made his first visit here, even though it would have silenced him if she had: a suicide bomber, indeed. Would she have spoken about it eventually? Or did it take his mentioning of the concealed weapon, the assassin's gun, to make her feel the need to exonerate her dead father?

He flicked through the pages, finding the place he had reached when Sherrill phoned. He let his eye skim across the pages.

I carried the same message to ghetto after ghetto: ‘Auntie Esther has returned.’ Everyone understood what it meant, that we Jews did not face mere slavery or a random death here and there, but a plan of complete extermination. My job was to tell the Jews of Europe that the Nazis wanted there to be no more Jews in Europe…

Tom turned the page.

You never knew who was going to help. Sometimes a peasant woman would find me in a barn and give me a hunk of bread. But once, in Krakow, it was a doctor, a pillar of the community, who tipped off the authorities when he saw a young boy – me – slip into the ghetto at night.

…We thought once we had escaped the ghettoes and had made it to the forests our troubles would be over. But no. We learned that even if we all hated the Nazis, the Polish or Lithuanian resistance could still find time to hate the Jews…

Tom flicked through the next few pages, scanning for anything which might shed light on the circumstances of Merton's death more than sixty years later.

… I had somehow found my way back to Kaunas, or at least the forests outside. I met up with the handful of resistance fighters who had survived. Their uniform was no uniform: perhaps a coat stolen from a Russian, boots taken off a Lithuanian, a gun bought from some Polish black marketeer. I joined them and we did what we could, blowing up a bridge here, derailing a train there. We killed the enemy in ones and twos. On a very good day, tens.

Tom skipped to the next page.

…It was in the forest that I met my Rosa. She was older than me, but I was an old man no matter my age. To be a Jew in Europe in those years was to be old in the world…

… Rosa had met someone who survived the Ninth Fort. They said that the Nazis had not even needed to press-gang the local Lithuanian boys to take part in the mass killings: they had volunteered eagerly, including, of course, the Wolf. They all wanted to take a turn, firing bullets into the backs of naked Jews. Rosa told me the ghetto was finally cleared on July 8 1944. The last Jews to survive were sent off to Dachau. ‘There is no point going back to Kaunas,’ she told me. ‘There is nobody there. They are all dead.’

There was a space on the page, as if to denote the passage of time. Good, thought Tom: after the war.

Those of us who had survived were the only ones who understood each other. We could look into each other's eyes and see the same darkness. We wandered across Europe, looking for each other. Those of us who could not forget what we had seen. Those of us who were determined to-

The facing page was blank. Tom turned it, only for it to come loose in his hand. He looked up, hoping Rebecca had not seen him damage the book she had hugged like a baby. He wedged it back in, but as he did, he noticed the next page and the one after that also came loose. He held up the book, to examine the binding.

He could see what had happened. He remembered the same problem with his childhood exercise books: tear out one page from the front and a corresponding page from the back would come loose. It always happened where a book was bound down the middle. To be sure, he followed the page he was reading, to see if its other half was intact. It wasn't. Indeed, each of the last five or six sheets was ragged along its edge. Several pages of this notebook were missing, ripped out.

He read again the last line of Gerald Merton's testimony. There was nothing that came after it, just a sentence as elusive as the man himself.

Somehow we found each other… those of us who were determined to-