The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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.

Odilo Globocnik, former SS leader, was found dead yesterday in an alpine hut, high in the mountains near Weissensee. Occupying authority sources said Globocnik, notorious for overseeing the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, had most likely taken his own life…

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.

The military spokesman yesterday announced that another high ranking official of the Third Reich had been found dead. SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld had been a senior officer at both the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps…

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.