The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The convenience stores and fast food restaurants rapidly gave way to the sparkle of steel and glass. As they passed by the Gherkin, another London landmark that had sprouted in Tom's absence, Hackney receded and the glistening towers of Canary Wharf became visible.

‘You drive,’ Rebecca had said as they walked away from the Kingsland Law Centre. ‘I want to think.’ And she had sat there in the passenger seat, her face grim with determination.

In a court of law, Tom could have just about constructed an argument that all the evidence they had uncovered was circumstantial, that there was no ironclad proof connecting Gershon Matzkin to any one of the killings, let alone all of them. Most had been recorded as suicides or road traffic accidents; there was nothing that could establish beyond doubt that foul play had occurred. And even if it had, young Gershon might have served as only a minor accomplice, perhaps a lookout. There was no proof that he was a killer.

And yet, neither he nor Rebecca doubted that Gershon Matzkin had been an assassin. Who else would keep a score-sheet, a roll call of war criminals, their names crossed out on the occasion of their deaths, but the man responsible? This, surely, was the record of his labours, maintained with pride. (It was something Tom's friends in the criminal lawyer fraternity had told him often undid felons: sheer professional pride, the desire to be credited for one's work. One way or another, consciously or otherwise, they had wanted their endeavours to be recognized. It was a basic human impulse.)

As they drove on, Tom began to see everything slip into place. Of course Gershon had always eschewed publicity, refusing to address seminars or be interviewed for oral history archives: he could not dare risk his story slipping into public view. No wonder those last few pages of the notebook had been torn out. Carried away by the equally human desire to shape the narrative of one's own life, he must have begun to set down his story in full – only to realize that what he had written amounted to a confession of serial murder. Tom could picture him realizing his error, frantically tearing out the incriminating sheets of paper, shredding or burning them, until their remarkable reminiscences were once more consigned to oblivion.

He thought back to the corpse he had seen little more than twenty-four hours ago in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, how he had been struck by the toned muscle, the body of a strong man who had fought to keep his shape. Now that strength made sense. He had been a human weapon, deployed to hit back at those who had nearly wiped out his entire people. He had chosen to do what the Jews had barely been able to do when it counted: to fight back. Of course he had to be strong. He needed to be a Samson, with enough muscle in his arms to smite every last one of the Jews' murderous enemies. This man had been their avenging angel.

Tom's phone rang. ‘It's in my pocket,’ he said, his eyes on the road. ‘Take it out, but don't answer it. Just tell me who it is.’

Rebecca reached across, trying to find the opening in his jacket, her fingers brushing against him. There were layers of clothes between them, but still the sensation sent a charge through him. He gripped the steering wheel tight.

‘Unknown caller,’ she said.

He took the phone from her and pressed the green button. ‘Tom Byrne.’

‘Tom, how you doin'?’

‘Who is this?’

‘A very satisfied customer, that's who.’

‘Oh, Mr Fantoni. Nice of you to call.’ He could hear himself enunciating more clearly, ramping up his Englishness. It was a cheap tactic, but the high-paying clients seemed to like it. ‘As it happens, I'm in London just now. I wonder if-’

‘Look, this won't take a minute. We were real happy with the job you did for us: the sale's gone through. My father's very pleased.’

‘I'm glad.’

‘So pleased, he wants you to work on another big job we have here. Similar time scale.’

‘Well, we could meet next week and-’

‘Too late. We need this done right away. I'll book you a first class ticket on the next flight out of there.’

‘Unfortunately-’

‘We'll pay triple rates, Mr Byrne. What can I tell you, my father likes what you do.’

Triple. That would be a quarter of a million dollars for no more than a fortnight's work. He shot a glance at Rebecca, her face in profile as she gazed out of the window. Just that brief sight of her was enough to send a surge into his chest.

‘You know what, Mr Fantoni. I'd love to, I really would. But I'm on a case here in London I cannot abandon. I hope-’

The voice on the phone adopted a stage Italian accent. ‘I make-a an offer you can't-a refuse!’ The accent disappeared; the tone became chilly. ‘You're making a mistake, Mr Byrne.’

In the silence, Tom felt his throat dry. ‘I'm sorry. It's just bad timing.’

‘I hope you don't regret it.’

‘I hope not, too.’

Tom passed the phone back to Rebecca, hoping she had not heard Fantoni's booming, mugging voice. She gave no hint that she had. He would try to put Fantoni out of his mind for the time being, call when he got back to New York, hope he could smooth things over. For now, he had to focus on this case. Should the contents of Merton's secret box affect his advice to Henning? Could the UN argue that the man they had killed was himself a proven killer? Hardly. Those deaths had taken place five decades ago; the trail of evidence would be frozen, let alone cold. If the UN tried to mitigate its error, its crime, in killing an unarmed seventy-seven-year-old by claiming he had, back in the 1950s and 1960s, been some kind of hitman, it would probably backfire. The organization would sound unhinged. The press corps would demand hard evidence, beyond a ropey shoebox containing a few crumbling press clippings. They probably wouldn't even get to that stage. They would ask the question that had been throbbing in Tom's mind ever since they had opened that dusty container: What does any of this have to do with the United Nations?

The instant he had decoded the fading evidence of that box, he had tried to come up with an answer. Is that what had taken Gerald Merton to the UN, one last assignment, one last Nazi to kill? Decades back, the Secretary-General from Austria, Kurt Waldheim, had been exposed as having lied about his military service in the Wehrmacht, glossing over his knowledge of Nazi war crimes – an affair which older hands in the UN bureaucracy still recalled with a shudder. But that was in the 1980s. There was no one who could possibly fit that bill now, no one old enough for a start. He thought about Paavo Viren, the new Secretary-General. Now in his late sixties, he would have been a toddler during wartime. Besides, he was Finnish; the country had stayed out of the Nazis' clutches. Tom vaguely remembered reading a profile of the SG after his appointment, noting his cleric father's long-time record, out in the Finnish sticks somewhere, as a preacher of tolerance and peace. He cast his mind over the rest of the UN staff, but couldn't think of anyone who came into the right age range.

On the other hand, it was General Assembly week: the place was teeming with representatives of every country, each bringing large delegations in tow…

They found a parking space and while Rebecca fumbled for change for the meter, Tom stepped a few paces away and dialled Henning's number. They were in Canary Wharf now, an area that Tom had never visited. Back when he lived in London, Docklands had still been largely desolate and empty, a wasteland dotted with the odd overpriced apartment and served by a Toytown light railway. People spoke of it as a kind of Siberia, a place remote from the hubbub of ‘real’ London. Now, it seemed, all that had changed. The tower blocks that had once lain empty were brimming with offices, with new, taller buildings arising like spirits from the swamp. The area had built-up a serious high-rise skyline, something London had always lacked. And it oozed money.

‘Munchau.’

‘Hi Henning, it's Tom.’

‘You've either fucked her or she's just filed suit. Which is it?’

‘Neither.’

‘OK, I give up.’

‘Henning, I won't bore you with all the details, but there's some information I could use.’

‘Bore me.’

Tom looked over at Rebecca, now placing the pay and display ticket in the front windscreen. ‘It's just a hunch at the moment, nothing more.’

‘Don't really have time for hunches, mate. At the risk of repeating myself, General Assembly, General Assembly, General Assembly.’

‘That's what I'm thinking about too. Could you get someone in the OLC to compile a list of every official either in New York for the GA already or due to arrive this week who's aged seventy or above?’

‘Are we still on the hitman theory?’

Tom paused. ‘It's a bit difficult to explain right now.’

‘Oh, she's with you! Why didn't you say? Is she really, unbelievably gorgeous?’

‘Thanks, Henning. I appreciate it.’

‘All right, I'll see what we can get. Seventy? That's the cut-off?’

Tom did his sums once again: even seventy was pretty young, anyone below that age would have been a baby. Still, best to err on the side of caution. ‘Yes. Seventy. Heads of government, foreign ministers, ambassadors, obviously. But anyone else: aides, translators, anyone coming in for the week.’

‘What about the entire UN staff, while we're at it?’

‘Actually, that's not a bad idea. Start with-’

‘Tom, I was joking.’

He hung up and hurried to catch up with Rebecca, already walking towards the offices of Roderick Jones &? Partners, one of the grander City law firms that had moved into Canary Wharf in the late 1990s. The recently retired senior partner was Julian Goldman's father, Henry. But, Julian had told them with a roll of his eyes, Goldman père couldn't quite make the break, so spent at least two days a week in the office, nominally as a ‘consultant’ to his erstwhile colleagues but, Julian had implied, more accurately because he didn't have anything else to do.

The moment they walked into the lobby, Tom smiled to himself: just seeing it instantly gave him the measure of the young man they had left behind in Hackney. A steel-and-glass affair, it had a vast atrium, tall enough to house an impressive, if vaguely absurd, indoor tree. The marble floor stretched for acres before reaching a white desk as wide as a Politburo platform, with not one, but three different receptionists, each equipped with a telephone headset. It was a textbook example of the paradox of corporate relations: the easiest way to impress clients was to show them just how profligate you were with their money.

What options had that left poor Julian Goldman? Born on the top of the mountain, where else could he go but down? He had clearly turned his back on Daddy's riches and gone the ethical route, opening his battered legal aid practice in deepest Hackney on a street which probably lay in the direct shadow of his father's corporate palace. Julian's career would be a rebuke to Henry Goldman; he would be a lawyer driven not by money but by conscience. Tom smiled to himself at the predictability of it all. While men from Tom's background were striving with each sinew to climb up the prestige ladder, the likes of Julian Goldman were in a hurry to slide down.

When they stepped out of the lift, Henry Goldman was waiting for them. He stretched his arms open to embrace Rebecca, but clumsily, as if handling a new-fangled device he had not yet mastered. He shook Tom's hand, then ushered them both into a conference room more plushly furnished than even the grandest meeting place in the United Nations.

‘Rebecca, I was so sorry to hear of your news. We all were.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘My father always said your father was his best friend.’

‘That's true. I think my father regarded Gerald as a kind of younger brother.’ A wounded expression briefly flitted across his face. ‘Maybe even another son.’

‘I presume he told you things. As his lawyer.’

At that, Goldman stretched out his legs and smoothed a hand over his tie. Tom recognized the colours of the Garrick Club.

‘You've come here from Julian's office, you say? You know the key,’ Goldman paused, ‘materials are kept there now.’

‘I know,’ said Rebecca. ‘I've just seen them.’

‘I see.’

The lawyer got to his feet and began to pace away from the table, towards the window. The light was fading; Canary Wharf was beginning to glitter in the twilight. ‘I cannot claim to be wholly surprised by this turn of events. No matter what we tell our clients, it's a simple truth that nothing can stay secret forever. Isn't that right, Mr Byrne?’

Tom was barely paying attention. He had not got past the clipped English accent, straight out of a Kenneth More movie. This was the son of a Holocaust survivor, underground fighter and forest partisan; this stuffed-shirt in a Garrick Club tie? He should have been used to it by now, having spent the last decade in the ultimate city of immigrants, but this seemed such an extreme case. Perhaps this is what people meant when they talked of becoming ‘more English than the English’.

Rebecca didn't give Tom time to answer. ‘Can you tell us what you know?’

Tom fought the urge to inhale sharply. What an elementary blunder: there would be no mistaking Rebecca Merton for a lawyer. Let the guy warm up.

‘I did know that one day this would come out. But, for some reason, I always suspected it would be Julian who would discover it and confront me over it.’

‘Can you tell me-’

Tom gritted his teeth, worried that she would scare Goldman off. But he needn't have worried: Henry Goldman simply talked over Rebecca.

‘Of course my father knew it all and he brought me into his confidence on some of the key aspects. I will not deny that it became a source of great tension between us, especially when I was a younger man first reading jurisprudence at Cambridge and, later, as an articled clerk and so on. I imagined Julian and I would re-run some of those arguments, with my son in the role of my father.’

Tom asked his first question. ‘And has Julian ever confronted you about this?’

‘No. It makes me wonder if perhaps he has not worked it out. But it's hardly Fermat's Last Theorem is it, Mr Byrne? Once that box is opened, it is a matter of adding two and two to reach a round and clear four.’

‘Perhaps Julian never opened the box.’ Tom didn't like taking over like this. But the Garrick tie had convinced him: a man like Henry Goldman would speak to a fellow white, male lawyer more openly than with a non-male, non-lawyer. For men of Goldman's ilk, that would be like communicating with another species. The fact that Rebecca was Jewish, while he, Tom, was not, did not seem to make any difference. The tie suggested Goldman was not that kind of Jew.

Goldman sat down at the table and gave them both a straight look in the eye. ‘It's difficult for me to talk about this without letting my own views show, and I am sure what you are both in need of is an uncoloured account. For which reason, perhaps it is best if I pass on – without too much commentary on my part – the arguments advanced by my father.’

‘Actually, a few facts at this stage would be an enormous help,’ Tom said, adopting the excessive politeness he affected whenever speaking with the English establishment.

‘Very well.’ Goldman leaned forward. ‘As you now know, Rebecca's father was involved in the-’ he searched for the right word, ‘-removal of certain men associated with the events of the Second World War.’

Tom could see Rebecca's leg oscillating up and down in a constant vibration.

‘Well, I have to tell you. He did not do this work alone. He was part of an organization. We would call them Holocaust survivors now, though no one used that word at the time. They were men, and a few women, who had seen unspeakable horrors. Unspeakable.’ Goldman gave a little shake of his head. ‘At the start, in the final weeks of the war and immediately afterwards, there were no more than fifty of them, with maybe two hundred more offering help on the outside. Almost all had been involved in the resistance in some way.’

An image floated into Tom's head of the young Gershon Matzkin, posing as Vitatis Olekas, hopping on and off trains as he criss-crossed occupied Europe, cheating death and desperately trying to warn others so that they might live. Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.

'They were ghetto fighters, my father included. And I suppose this effort evolved quite naturally out of that. They had been trying to kill Nazis before and they were killing Nazis now. Churchill and Roosevelt had declared the war over, but “it wasn't their war to finish”. That's what my father used to say. Hitler had declared war on the Jews long before he declared war on Britain or America or Russia. The Jews had their own score to settle.

‘But there was more to it than that. More to what we-’ he meant Tom and him, fellow lawyers, ‘-would speak of as motive. To understand that, you have to start from first principles.’

Tom didn't even have to look over at Rebecca to know she was squirming in her seat. He felt it too. Goldman had no appreciation of the urgency of their situation. They hadn't told him about last night's break-in for fear it would make him clam up. He hadn't become the emeritus senior partner of Roderick Jones, with a corner office view of Docklands, by wading balls deep into trouble. They would have to be patient.

‘You have to remember that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was impossible.’ Goldman raised his palm in protest, anticipating an objection. 'I know, I know. There was resistance. My father and your father, Rebecca, were part of it. Nevertheless, the logical starting point is that Jewish resistance was impossible. You have to understand that to understand anything.

‘As you know, Nazi control was absolute. Even the slightest act of defiance would be punished by swift and lethal retaliation. Dare to raise a hand to a Nazi and they would kill you, your family and your whole community, without compunction. For one of them, they would kill a thousand of you. But that's not the main thing.’

Rebecca was now drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair.

'The Jews lacked the essential requirements of any plausible resistance. They had no arms, no tradition of fighting. They had no army, no barracks, no arsenals. The Poles and the French had been sovereign nations, with their own armies; there were resources – arms dumps and so forth, even in the middle of the countryside – they could call on when under occupation. The Jews had none of that.

‘Above all, they had no friends. No one would help them at all. I'm sure you know the stories, the lengths the Jews had to go to, the bribes they had to pay, to get the Poles or Lithuanians or Ukrainians to sell them so much as a single pistol. And if they ever got out, ever escaped the Nazis, woe betide them if they ran into the rest of the resistance. The Poles or Lithuanians or anyone else for that matter hated the Jews so much, they were only too glad to finish off anybody the Nazis had been foolish enough to let slip away. As my late father, who loved English idiom, used to say, “We went from the fire into the frying pan”.’

Tom could feel Rebecca shuffling, desperate for Goldman to get to the point. ‘Could I-’

The raised palm again. ‘You'll soon see where this is leading.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Add to this the fact that the Nazis did not exactly advertise their plans. They hid behind euphemisms: “resettlement in the east”, and so on. And of course the Jews swallowed it up. “Never underestimate a man's inability to imagine his own destruction.” Those were the words of a member of this group. A rabbi, as it happens. Oh yes, there was a rabbi. A poet too. A couple of journalists. Farmers, merchants, doctors. They were a very mixed bunch. Anyway, this rabbi used to speak of Hitler's bus.’ He leaned forward, his eyes bright. 'You know about Hitler's bus, yes? That he was planning to exterminate every single Jew, except twelve? These twelve would be saved, as specimens. Human exhibits. They were to travel the world in a specially equipped bus, a mobile display of “the extinct Jewish people”. That was Hitler's plan. And you know what this rabbi would say? “Every Jew in Europe believed he would be one of the twelve who would make it onto that bus”.

'This is the context in which your father, Rebecca, and mine acted. They believed that the Jews, for all the reasons I have mentioned, had accepted their fate too passively. A few individuals had fought back, but the damage they had inflicted amounted to mere pinpricks. They were just children, the leaders of the resistance. Even the most senior commanders were in their very early twenties. There was so little they could do. You know the phrase, “Like sheep to the slaughter”? That was coined by the poet of the group. He said the Jews had walked into the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter.

‘It was this that those three hundred men could not stand, that Jewish life had been extinguished so cheaply, without punishment. They wanted to teach the world a different lesson: that to kill a Jew came at a price. That such a crime would be avenged. And so they looked back into history and found an ancient vow: Dam Israel Nokeam. “The blood of Israel will take vengeance”. They took the first letter of each Hebrew word of that slogan to form another word, DIN. A word in itself, it means “judgement” and that became the name of this group. Your father and my father, they were both in it. And I believe, Rebecca, that your father was its very last member.’

Tom was thinking hard about everything he had seen: the passports, the press clippings, the evidence in New York. Had there been any pointer to this word, DIN; some clue he had missed?

‘In the beginning, it was quite straightforward. By the middle of 1945, the Allies ruled Berlin and DIN could operate relatively freely. They cultivated informants in the British and American bureaucracies, especially in the prosecutors' offices, finding men who for their own reasons were only too happy to leak information on Nazis who had melted back into civilian life. One way or another, DIN acquired a target list. Then they used all the old techniques of the ghetto resistance to acquire the uniforms and IDs they needed. My father was good at this work: he would follow a military policeman and knock him out cold, taking great care to steal everything he had: wristwatch, wallet, belt. The soldier would come to a few hours later, stark naked, unaware that the only things his attacker had really wanted were his uniform and military ID. But I believe the female members of DIN were especially adept in this task – though they didn't use force to part the MPs from their uniforms.’

Goldman allowed himself a smile at this, but it passed quickly. The earlier ebullience and pomposity had gone now; his face appeared to be in shadow, a shade entirely of its own making. The more of the story he told, the greater the weight it seemed to press on him.

'Posing as military police made the job easy; they could walk right up to a target and “arrest” him, just like that, bold as brass. Or they could do a “snatch”, an abduction. They could do all this because DIN were wearing the uniforms of the Allied authorities – and the Allies were the masters now.

'Then they would act like a court, reading out the charge sheet, listing the prisoner's crimes. Only then would they announce themselves: “We act in the name of the Jews and we have come to administer justice.”

‘Afterwards, they would go to some lengths to hide the body. That way the investigation into the victim's disappearance took longer, giving DIN time either to get away or to strike again. Ideally, the death, once discovered, was recorded as a suicide.’

Tom thought back to the sheaf of cuttings he had seen in the cardboard box that afternoon: most of the deaths reported there were either car accidents or suicides.

Goldman continued. 'This approach had the obvious advantage of ensuring that no other ex-Nazis would know there was a group actively pursuing them; they would not raise their guard. But, you have to realize, the way DIN saw things, that was also a disadvantage. They wanted the Nazis to know the Jews were out for revenge. They wanted the Nazis to fear the Jews.

‘I must stress that they went only after those who had a hand in the Final Solution. SS men who had staffed the extermination camps, those who had served in the mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen. You know about those, Mr Byrne?’

Tom nodded, remembering the story in the notebook, the same story recounted in countless history books: the pits, the shooting, the pile of bodies, still writhing even in death.

‘I see that I have avoided speaking of the actual executions themselves, as my father would have called them. I should correct that.’ Goldman sighed. 'My father hinted at all kinds of exotic methods. A punishment fit for the crime was one approach: a Nazi who had been involved with the gas chambers might be locked in his garage, properly sealed, with his car engine left running. Carbon monoxide was a poor substitute for Zyklon B, but at least the point was made. I heard about another method, also involving the garage. The target would be forced to stand on the roof of his car, while a noose, suspended from the ceiling, would be placed around his neck. Then a DIN member would drive the car away, leaving the target swinging.

‘Still, I'm not sure I believe these accounts. My best guess is that DIN preferred to kill with their bare hands – strangulation – or maybe a knife.’

‘Mr Goldman,’ Rebecca cut in. ‘What we saw today was nothing to do with this wartime period. The actions my father took were much later, in the fifties and sixties.’

Henry Goldman fell back in his chair, the air escaping from him like a punctured tyre. ‘I'm sorry. I've talked too long.’

‘No, not at all, I only-’

‘You see, I knew, of course, that this day would come, that one day I'd have to tell this story. But that does not prepare one for it.’ He gave a forced smile, an expression not of pleasure but of containment, of holding back a great floodtide of emotion. ‘I have not shared it with my wife or my sons. I have carried it, as it were, for many, many years. I don't know how else to tell it, except as I heard it.’

Tom decided to act as diplomat. ‘There's no problem with the way you're telling it, Mr Goldman. You take your time.’

Goldman nodded his silent thanks, cleared his throat and went on. ‘The killings I have described were known as “the first hunting season”. They arose out of the strong belief that there would be no other kind of justice. The Allies had promised it of course, fine speeches about bringing every last Nazi killer to book. But even before the war was over, those promises were fading. Soon there was the suggestion that only those in charge of the Third Reich would face prosecution. Which is how we came to have the great show at Nuremberg, in which a grand total of twenty-four men were brought to account. Twenty-four!’

There was something strange about Goldman's narrative, and suddenly Tom realized that he was witnessing an act of ventriloquism. He was channelling the arguments, even the voice, of his long-dead father. He told the story the way it had been told to him. It had been preserved, as if on a reel of quarter-inch magnetic tape, inside his head for nearly fifty years.

‘DIN were repelled by the spectacle of the Nuremberg trial, the pretence that only two dozen men were responsible for this massive, international crime. They had seen with their own eyes the men who had whipped Jews to death for sport, who had herded them onto trains and shot them into pits, the men who had shoved them into gas chambers and then shovelled their bodies into crematoria – they had seen all this, and they knew it was not the work of twenty-four men. It was the work of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions!’

There was no interrupting Goldman now, the words poured out of him in a hot torrent.

‘As the crimes began to be revealed, as people saw the newsreel footage of those mountains of naked bodies, people in the West demanded better. The Russians were executing Nazis by the thousands; people here and in America expected something similar. The Allies felt they had to do something. By the end of 1946, they had jailed nearly half a million Germans, holding them before trial on charges of direct participation in mass murder. There were another three and a half million listed for “significant criminal complicity”. Think of that number: three and a half million. But the United Nations War Crimes Commission drew up another list, made up of all those liable for automatic arrest as former members of the Nazi Party: in the American occupation zone alone the total was more than thirteen million people.’

‘They'd have ended up jailing the entire male population,’ said Tom quietly, a memory of his own now surfacing. But Goldman was listening to only one voice: the one in his head, belonging to his father.

'At last it seemed as if they were going to get justice after all. And not simply by grabbing it for themselves. They had a hard debate but concluded that, if justice was truly on its way, they had no business carrying on as judge, jury and executioner. They decided to lay down their weapons, to disband and go their separate ways, start their own lives. My father and yours came here to London. Some went to America, many to Israel. They believed it was all over. But it was not to be.

He paused, as if remembering himself. ‘Are you fond of statistics, Mr Byrne?’ He did not wait for an answer. 'I am. I like nothing more than a neat table of numbers. My father was the same way. “One number can tell you more than a thousand words.” That's what he would say. There's a table in a book by Raul Hilberg, one of the great historians of the Holocaust. A very revealing table. My father would look at it often. You just put your finger on the column of numbers, move it downward and there you are: it tells you all you need to know.

‘It starts off with the Fragebogen, the “registrants”, those thirteen million or more who were part of the Nazi apparatus. Then you move your finger down a line, to the total number of men charged. And this figure, you notice, is much smaller: just three million four hundred and forty-five thousand one hundred, if I recall. The figure on the next line relates to those who, having been charged, were released without so much as a trial. A blanket amnesty, if you like. It's large, this number: two million four hundred and eighty thousand seven hundred. They just walk away. If you have a head for mental arithmetic, as I do, you can work out that the gap between those last two numbers is just shy of a million. That is the number of Nazis still in the prosecutors’ sights.

'How are they punished? Just look at the table. Precisely five hundred and sixty-nine thousand six hundred of them are fined. The slate is wiped clean with a cash payment. Go down to the next line and you see that a further one hundred and twenty-four thousand four hundred men had to suffer the indignity of employment restrictions. Unfortunately, for certain jobs, being a Nazi mass murderer was an immediate disqualification. The same was true of eligibility for public office. Twenty-three thousand one hundred Nazis were told their political careers were on hold.

‘If memory serves, another twenty-five thousand nine hundred had their property confiscated. I say “their” but this was property acquired through a rather unorthodox route. Those deemed guilty had seen their neighbours in Hamburg or Frankfurt dragged off to the camps, shed a tear – and then ransacked their homes once they were gone.’

Goldman's eyes were bright. 'The table then speaks of “special labour without imprisonment”: I suppose we would call that community service now. Thirty thousand five hundred get that. And nine thousand six hundred are sent to labour camps.

‘If you tot it all up, it leaves about ninety thousand convicted Nazi war criminals who were meant to go to jail for various sentences of up to ten years. But then we look at the very last figure in the table, the most important number of all: “Assignees still serving sentence”. And that figure is,’ he paused, as if expecting a drum roll, 'three hundred.

'Now remember these statistics were compiled in 1949. What this little table is telling us, is that within just a few years of the war fewer than three hundred of those Nazis were still behind bars. Do you see where this is going, Mr Byrne? Out of more than thirteen million men once deemed complicit in the horrors of the Third Reich, we have eleven death sentences at Nuremberg and three hundred men in jail. That's all.

‘And when the West Germans took over responsibility for war crimes prosecutions, they were no better. They convicted, to take just one example, Wilhelm Greiffenberger for involvement in eight thousand one hundred murders – and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment and three years' “loss of honour” even though the court found he had a role in the deaths of eight thousand one hundred people. I could name cases like that for a week and still not run out. Almost every man convicted melted back into German society. They walked free from those prisons, as if they were guilty of nothing more serious than a parking fine. They were so arrogant, so certain there would be no consequences, they didn't even hide what they had done. They were in the phone book.

‘And this, you see, is the dirty little secret of the Second World War. We're told, over and over again, that the attempted extermination of the Jews was the greatest crime in human history – and yet hardly anybody was punished for it. The guilty men got away with it. It was a crime that was unavenged, a genocide for which there was no reckoning.’

At last, Goldman slumped back in his chair; he seemed exhausted, emptied out, like a medium once the spirit has departed.

Rebecca and Tom sat in silence. It was Rebecca who spoke first.

‘And that's why DIN reformed.’

‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘In 1952.’

‘And the killing started then. Except now it was all over the world. Wherever the Nazis were hiding. Your dad and my dad.’

Goldman nodded. 'I found one of their lists. I was looking for something else, and I came across a file for his poker club. That was the cover they used: five Jewish men who met on Thursday nights to play poker. My father always said it was a secret society because if their wives knew how much they gambled there'd be hell to pay. So we could never know who was in it. Not even my mother was allowed to know.

‘When I saw the file I had to look. I wanted to know about this secret gambling world of my dad's, a man who did nothing more interesting than sell ladies' outerwear to department stores. Little did I know.’ He gave a rueful smile. 'Inside the file was a wad of foreign currency, several passports and a list of German names, crossed out one by one. I understood immediately. I was twenty years old, I think.

‘We had a fierce argument. We never stopped having it, from then until his dying day. I said I would alert the authorities. I was a newly qualified lawyer, an officer of the court. It was my duty.’ Tears began to appear in his right eye. ‘But I never did. I should have told the police what I knew, that my father was involved in a criminal gang.’

‘But they were hardly murderers,’ Tom said quietly. ‘They were ensuring that a grave crime did not go unpunished.’

Goldman looked at him anew. ‘I confess I am amazed to hear a man like yourself speak in such a manner, Mr Byrne.’

Tom could feel the veins on his neck begin to throb. His anger was rising: he would have to repress it. I'm sorry. But ‘I'm just thinking of what you said a moment ago. That the men behind this monumental crime got off scot-free.’

‘Mr Byrne, as you should well know, I was merely doing the job of an advocate, putting the case for DIN as best I could, so that you might understand it.’ The steel shutters were down again now, the moment of communion with the spirit of his dead father vanished. ‘The right course of action was the law. That was the course these men should have pursued.’

‘Except the law often leads nowhere. We both know that, if we're honest, don't we, Mr Goldman?’ Tom could hear a tremor in his own voice. ‘And isn't that because, when all's said and done, there's no such thing as “the law”? We like to imagine some wonderfully impartial, blind goddess of justice – but that's no more real than fairies at the bottom of the garden, is it?’

‘Tom-’

‘No, Rebecca, I know about this at first hand.’ His temperature was rising, unwelcome memories surfacing. ‘We think there's law. But the truth is, there's only politics. And politics never finds it convenient to pursue the guilty.’

‘Tom, really-’

‘I'm sorry, but it's true. The bigger the crime, the less convenient it is. When there's a clash of “reconciliation” and justice – and there's always a clash – reconciliation wins out every time. I've seen it again and again.’ There was that crack in his voice again, he could hear it. ‘So, inappropriate though it might be for a lawyer to say this, I have some sympathy for what this group, what DIN, were feeling. They had seen their whole families wiped out. Of course they wanted to hunt down those responsible. The law had let them walk free. I do wonder if, on this point, Mr Goldman, your father got it right and you got it wrong.’

Goldman was about to respond, when Rebecca stood up. Glaring at Tom she cried, ‘That's enough.’ Her eyes were burning. The unspoken reminder that she had just lost her father shamed them both into silence.

In the calm, she turned to Goldman and asked in a manner that conveyed both patience now exhausted and the desire for a brief, straight answer to a straight question, ‘Is there anything else at all, any other element in the DIN story, that you haven't told us? Some secret perhaps which someone, somewhere, might not want to come out?’

Tom, his pulse still throbbing, could see that Goldman was weighing his answer. As he leaned forward, about to speak, the air was filled with the brain-splitting sound of an alarm: not some distant siren, but one coming from inside the building.