The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

‘Rebecca, I'm afraid there's no other way to understand it. Don't you see the pattern?’

They were standing next to each other, their arms just touching, poring over the papers spread out on the table.

‘For every date stamp on a passport, there's a cutting. Look.’

Methodically, Tom set out the pile of newspaper clippings alongside the passports. There was one from Liberation in late 1952. He translated, falteringly, out loud: ‘Detectives in Les Halles are seeking witnesses who may be able to help them with information about the death on Tuesday evening of a man apparently hit by a speeding car and flung onto the railings of a Metro station. Police said the man's injuries suggested he had been hit at top speed…’ In neat handwriting, a hand Tom recognized, a short sentence had been pencilled in the margin: SS Captain Fritz Kramer, Birkenau.

And there it was: a stamp in Gerald Merton's British passport establishing that he had flown into Orly airport two days earlier and left the day after the reported accident.

Next, a news report of a corpse found hanging in a Rio suburb later that same year. Tom checked the date and, sure enough, ‘Fernando Matutes’ had arrived in Brazil four days before the hanging and had left the same day. The passport showed he had travelled direct from Brazil to Argentina, just in time, it seemed, for the mysterious road traffic accident which would strike two days later – the newspaper account of which had been carefully preserved in this same box.

An explosion in an apartment building in Lille, a botched operation in a Munich hospital: each time, Tom could find a passport stamp that coincided. There were reports of men killed in car accidents, some of them only months apart. One was found dead in a gutter. The pencilled note identified him as Hans Stuckart, Ministry of Interior. An account from 1953 reported police bafflement after a driver was burned alive, his car having suffered a rare steering failure which sent it spinning across the highway. The handwritten note added that the deceased was Otto Betz, deported Jews of France.

Now Rebecca was working through the cuttings herself, rapidly turning them over, one after another, in date order. After the first set from 1945 and 1946, they jumped to 1952, then paused again before the final item, which dated from the early 1960s in the Winnipeg Free Press. It reported the death of an Estonian immigrant, found hanged in his home. The police were looking for no one else. In pencil, the suicide was identified as Alexander Laak, commandant of the Jägala concentration camp in Estonia.

Silently, Tom tucked each news story into a passport, inserting it alongside the page where there was a matching stamp. By the end he had done that for nearly three quarters of the news reports; all that was left was the small pile of German items from 1945.

‘Rebecca, what languages did your father speak?’

‘Lots,’ she said quietly, staring down at the table. ‘German, Russian. French, I think. Maybe Spanish.’

A sentence from the notebook surfaced. My sisters and I went to the school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it.

Tom didn't know what to say. First the shooting in New York and now this: the father Rebecca thought she knew had been killed twice over.

She fell into a chair, biting her lip so hard he thought it might bleed.

He dragged his gaze away. ‘Look, Rebecca, this is-’

‘Don't say anything.’

‘I don't know what else we-’

‘I need time to think.’

Tom retreated, clearing up the items from the table and putting them back.

At last, Rebecca stood, picked up her father's box and strode over to Julian. Tom watched her hand it back to him, and then ask for what appeared to be a favour. Julian scribbled down a number, kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye. Tom ran after her as she went out the door and onto the street, feeling like a dog on a lead.

‘Where are we going now?’

‘To see the one man who might know the truth about my father.’