The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

If nothing else, this trip was proving to be a first class tour of contemporary London. Rebecca had driven them back to Upper Street but instead of heading east into the grime of Essex Road en route to Hackney, she had headed up the Holloway Road and into the well-heeled charm of Highgate village.

Neither of them spoke, but the silence was different now. The tension between them had been building steadily, like a darkening sky on a close summer's day. Thanks to the stand-up row, and the kiss that followed it, the weather had broken. He sat alongside her, no longer fighting the urge to stare or, occasionally, touch her.

‘Rebecca, we talked about the injury on your father's leg didn't we?’

‘There was no injury; I told you. Why?’

‘His body was found with a kind of metal shin-pad.’

‘So you say.’

‘Even though there was no injury.’ He reached around to the back seat. ‘Can I get your father's notebook from your bag?’

She nodded, giving him another flash of the crooked smile whose power over him she surely understood. Tom thumbed through the handwritten pages. They looked like something altogether more valuable now, an authentic historical document of genuine significance. Gerald Merton had been one of the prime movers in a remarkable post-script to the Holocaust, a story that would shock anybody who had heard it. It would do to them what it had already done to Tom: force them to revise their view of an event about which they thought they already knew all there was to know.

When Goldman had used that phrase – sheep to the slaughter – Tom had felt a pang of shame. That was precisely the image he had long held of the Jewish victims of the Nazis, filing into the gas chambers without protest. He dimly recalled his history teacher at school using the phrase, and not un-sympathetically ‘Pity those poor Jews, as defenceless as lambs sent to the abattoir’. That had been the teacher's meaning, Tom was sure of it. But today he had seen how insulting, how wounding that notion must have been to men like Gerald Merton.

There. He had found it: a passage describing young Gershon's involvement with the partisans, hiding in the forests. It was one of those Tom had had to skim read, but something had lodged. And here it was.

For those months, I did not often serve as a fighter, at least not directly. As usual, my great value was my Aryan looks. So instead of simply firing a gun, I was involved in procuring guns. As I had sometimes done in the ghetto, I became a smuggler. I would run from our place in the woods to a meeting point, pick up a pistol or grenade or detonator, pay for it with whatever I had – sometimes cash, usually a watch or a ladies' necklace – and then creep back to camp. Often the supplier would believe he was arming a young blond volunteer for the Lithuanian resistance. He would not have sold weapons to a Jew so easily.

The trick with smuggling is to be prepared for getting caught. You need to let them find something on you. Once they have found it, they will usually congratulate themselves on having done a good job and let you go on your way. And only you will know that this ‘something’ was not the real thing at all. The real thing is hidden somewhere else and this you keep. So whenever I bought a gun, I would also make sure to pick up some cigarettes or perhaps some meat and these I would hide – but not so well. If somebody stopped me, they would find the cigarettes, maybe beat me a bit – but the gun strapped to my back by bandages, this they didn't find…

Tom smiled to himself. So that explained the metal shin-pad. Gerald Merton was preparing himself for the metal detectors he knew would be at the entrance to the United Nations building. The alarm would go off and, with an apologetic shrug, the old man would reach down, roll up his left trouser leg and show the security staff the metal plate he had to wear for medical reasons. He would probably crack a joke – ‘Airports are the worst’ – and they would smile and nod him through. And no-one would think to check for the state-of-the-art weapon he had disassembled and bandaged to himself, with the steel inserts and ammunition stashed along his spine or in some other formation.

The gun hadn't been on him that day: it was still in the hotel bathroom. The Monday morning trip to the UN had surely been a reconnaissance mission, of the kind young Gershon had doubtless done down the backstreets of Buenos Aires or Bonn or Rome or San Sebastián or any of the other cities where he had conducted operations for DIN. He might even have acquired the reconnaissance habit along the crunching footpaths of the Lithuanian forests or in the fetid backstreets of the Viriampole district of Kaunas that became the Kovno ghetto.

It would have been a smart plan: if Merton had returned to the UN the next day, and the metal detectors had gone off again, chances are, one of the security staff would have recognized him: that nice old boy with the plate in his leg. More smiles and they'd have waved him through, no need to roll up his trousers a second time: ‘You just have a nice day, sir.’

And then he'd have gone in and… what? If only he could speak to the shade of Gershon Matzkin, ask him who that gun was meant for. Tom had still not heard back from Henning with that list. Who might have been in the headquarters of the United Nations this week who would have warranted DIN's last, aged warrior to don his assassin's cloak one more time? Tom pushed back into his seat, wishing that those missing pages from the old man's notebook would somehow reappear. Had Gershon torn them out and destroyed them? Or had he hidden them somewhere? Is that what the thieves were after when they turned Rebecca's apartment upside down?

Now they were driving alongside Hampstead Heath, the vast green woodland and park on their left, houses of extraordinary opulence and size on their right. When Rebecca slowed down, Tom shook his head: ‘Don't tell me he lives round here.’

Rebecca nodded.

‘In one of these? No wonder young Julian's so screwed up.’ Rebecca gave him a look of mock disapproval. To Tom's great pleasure, the expression seemed somehow complicit, as if the two of them were now together, with Julian on the outside.

‘Here we go,’ she said, signalling a right-turn into a steep, sloping driveway. The house was vast and absurdly palatial; Tom could see sixteen windows, half of them lit, before he lost count. Rebecca pulled the car up alongside a sleek Mercedes and turned off the engine. ‘Remember, all charm this time.’

Rebecca pressed the doorbell. A traditional ding-dong chime sounded, unexpectedly suburban for a house so grand and Tom was reminded of the days when his mother had dragged him around the wealthier parts of Sheffield, carol-singing.

No answer.

‘Try the knocker,’ he said. ‘Really hard. These houses are so big, they probably can't hear the doorbell.’

Rebecca reached for the brass knocker, fashioned as a bar of metal held between the jaws of a fierce lion. She pulled it back then banged it firmly down, twice.

The first knock gave nothing away, but the second rang oddly hollow and the door swung inward. It had not been locked at all.

Rebecca furrowed her brow at Tom, then stepped in. He followed her into a wide hallway, where their footsteps were muffled by a huge shimmering rug, an irregular checkerboard of different colours. Rebecca called out, ‘Hello?’ and walked further in, to a large reception area bordered on all sides by cream sofas, with two large, low coffee tables in the centre. The facing wall was covered with a vast picture that seemed part-photograph, part-painting. Recognizable were the faces of a forty-something Henry Goldman and, with buck teeth and curly hair, a teenage Julian.

Rebecca tried again: ‘Mr Goldman?’

‘Perhaps we should leave,’ Tom suggested, glad of an excuse for an early exit – and perhaps a return to Rebecca's flat. ‘We can call him tomorrow.’

‘But Julian said he was definitely home.’

‘Does he live alone?’

Distractedly, her head peering into the darkness of a corridor, Rebecca said, ‘Yes. His wife died years ago.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Often when I was younger, but not recently. I'm just going to try the study and, if he's not there, we'll go.’

She stepped gingerly into the gloom, calling out ‘Mr Goldman? Henry?’ as she moved. She reached a door and as she opened it, the corridor was filled with light. Behind her by several paces, Tom felt vaguely disappointed: if the lights were on in the study, then the old boy was clearly home. He'd probably nodded off in his chair.

Rebecca's scream tore the air. She stood frozen in the doorway, then darted forward. Tom ran after her, only to find her hunched over a slumped body, her ear clamped to the chest of Henry Goldman, whose cold white face was staring upward. He looked aghast. Rebecca straddled his body and began pounding at his chest, bringing both hands, her fingers laced together, down in a series of massive thumps. Crouching at her side, Tom could hear her exertion as she sent all her strength plunging down in successive blows. But he could also hear a different sound, a kind of desperate whimpering issuing from her. Tears streaked down her cheeks like rain on a window pane.

Finally, she climbed off the unmoving body and let her head fall onto Tom's shoulder. ‘He's dead,’ she sobbed, the tears soaking into his shirt. ‘He's dead. He's dead.’ Her fingers were scratching at his side and his arms. ‘He's dead, he's dead, he's dead.’ Finally, she pulled back so that Tom could see her face. ‘He's dead – and we killed him.’