The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The place was still not tidied up as they sat next to each other, in the dead of night, on the slashed remains of Gerald Merton's couch, both staring at the small, brightly lit device cradled between Tom's hands. It was his BlackBerry, though they were not using it for email. The machine also had an internet browser, even if it did move with painful sloth. They were trying to navigate their way around the online archive of The Jewish Chronicle, searching past editions of the paper's personal announcements. Tom was struggling to concentrate against the noise of the TV set. Turning it on had been his idea: if someone was eavesdropping on their conversations, as he was convinced they had at Goldman's Canary Wharf office, then at least they could make the eavesdroppers' job a little more difficult. It was a low-tech form of counter-surveillance but he couldn't think of anything better.

At Rebecca's suggestion, he had typed in the single word ‘Steiner’ and the website had come up with hundreds. They scrolled through looking for Sids and, to Rebecca's dismay, they had found a Sid Steiner easily, dated six years ago:

STEINER. Sid. Passed away peacefully, aged 89, after much suffering. A much loved and special gentleman who will be sadly missed by wife Beryl, son David and daughter-in-law Gaby, grandchildren, Josh, Daniel, Richard, Simon and sister-in-law Helen. May he rest in peace.

‘OK, that's not him. Wife wasn't called Beryl.’

‘You sure?’

‘I'm sure. Hold on, here's another one.’ This was more recent, just two years ago.

STEINER. Sid. Our dear dad who is now at peace and reunited with his Ada. A strong, supportive and wonderful father who will remain in our hearts forever. May his soul rest in peace. Ruth and Jack.

Tom looked at Rebecca, next to him on the couch, with an eyebrow raised. She shook her head. ‘Kids didn't have those names.’

‘How can you be sure? You didn't remember his last name a minute ago.’

‘They had a son called Daniel. Dan. I remember because I had a crush on him.’ Absurdly, Tom felt a stab of jealousy. Then, remembering their kiss just a few hours earlier, it turned into a pang of desire. He looked at her for a second or two longer, fighting the urge to touch her: he couldn't make a pass at her here, in the trashed apartment of her dead father, even if he desperately wanted to. He forced his gaze back to the machine: he could see no more Sid Steiners.

‘OK, I think that's our lot,’ he said.

‘You haven't tried Social and Personal.’

‘Those were the personal ads. That's what we've been looking through.’

‘No, those were the classified personal ads. There's also Social and Personal; different column. Bigger type, different page. Costs more.’

‘Two different classes of death announcement? You're kidding.’

‘I'm not.’

‘So death is not the great leveller after all.’

‘Not in The Jewish Chronicle. There it is, Social and Personal. Enter Sid Steiner there.’

He did and three came back. Tributes to a ‘Dear brother, now at peace and sadly missed’ and ‘thoughts with the family at this sad time’, but none that struck Rebecca as the right Sid Steiner. Either the age or the family names were wrong.

Tom put the machine to one side and shifted position to face her. ‘Is it possible he died quietly, without an announcement?’

‘No. If you're as Jewish as Sid Steiner, you die in The Jewish Chronicle.’

‘So where is he?’

‘I don't know.’

‘OK,’ said Tom. 'We'll do this the old-fashioned way. We'll get some sleep and in the morning we'll start working the phones.

On an improvised bed of slashed cushions and a torn sofa, Tom tried to slip into sleep. Rebecca was next door, in her father's bedroom. He knew he was exhausted, that the days seemed to have merged into a single stretch of time without rest. And yet his mind was sprinting.

A succession of images was flipping through his head like the pages of a child's flick-book. He saw a boy in ghetto rags, then an old man shot on the steps of the UN, then a woman's body swinging from a rafter, then the smiling pathologist in New York, then Rebecca's crooked smile and then, without warning… Rebecca.

There she was, framed in the doorway, the bedroom light revealing her shape. She was wearing only a shirt.

Tom brought himself up so that he was resting on his elbows. He didn't say a word, and neither did she.

Their kisses were as hungry now as before – hungrier for having been thwarted. The touch of her skin, the scent of her, sent such a voltage through him he felt he might be burning. And there in the shadows, their sweat and their taste mingling, the moment he entered her was as if they had entered each other. The intensity of it, so great that it banished all awareness of their surroundings, frightened him.

Afterwards, the silence seemed to bind them together. Her head lay on his chest and it was the sensation of a tear falling onto his skin that made him speak.

‘Rebecca?’

He could feel her trembling now, a quiet sob.

‘Is this because… of here? Because of where we are?’

‘No.’

‘What is it?’

‘I just wish this hadn't happened like this.’

He stroked her hair, certain that his first instinct had been right: it was madness for them to have made love here, in the home of her dead father.

She spoke again. ‘With all this going on, I mean. I wish it could have happened another way. I'm so sorry.’

‘I can handle it if you can.’

The silence returned, but this time Tom knew it was the prelude to another question.

‘How come there's no Mrs Byrne?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘It is to me. Was there ever one?’

‘No. I used to be married to the work. And then, after everything that happened, I sort of shut out the future, along with the past. Made my home in the present. I couldn't plan much beyond dinner reservations.’

‘You're speaking in the past tense.’

‘Maybe I've changed.’

‘When?’

‘In the last day or two.’

She got up, headed for the kitchen and returned with a glass of water. She drank from it, passed it to him, then lay back down, skin touching skin.

‘How come there's no Mr Merton? Sorry, I mean-’

‘It's OK. Well, there's the patients. They take a lot out of you.’

‘But that's not the whole story.’

‘No. The truth is, it was hard with my dad. I was his only child. And then, after Mum died, I was his only family. Marrying someone would have felt like I was-’

‘-leaving him.’

‘Maybe.’

‘What would he have thought of me?’

‘Well, you're not Jewish for a start.’

‘So?’

‘So, let's not get into it. That's a whole other psycho-drama you don't need to know about.’

‘Rebecca-’

She turned swiftly to face him and placed a finger on his lips. ‘Don't. Don't say anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I'm trying to be like you. I grew up my whole life either drowning in the past or worrying about the future. I want to see if I can enjoy the present. Just for once.’

When he woke a little after eight Rebecca was no longer lying next to him. She was up and dressed, explaining that she had been too impatient to sleep. She wanted to start the search for Sid Steiner immediately.

She reached for the phone, tried directory enquiries first, and in vain, then turned to the phone book. She circled one number and dialled it, only for the call to be fielded by an answering machine. The voice belonged to Sid Steiner – but it was an accountancy practice in Hendon, no connection.

‘All right then,’ said Tom, swallowing his pride. ‘What about this Dan, then?’

‘That was twenty-five years ago. I was about seven years old. I have no idea where he is now.’ Tom was relieved: she hadn't said it was a childhood crush.

‘You haven't stayed in touch at all? Do you know where he works?’

She shook her head. Then she brightened, instantly reaching over for Tom's BlackBerry. ‘Can you get Facebook on this?’

Tom felt a sudden awareness of the age gap between them: he relied on old-fashioned, steam-powered email. Still, at least he knew what she was talking about. ‘I'm sure I can. Why?’

‘Because that'll be the easiest way to find Dan Steiner.’

Sure enough, once logged on, it took a matter of seconds in the search box to generate an image of a depressingly handsome man about Tom's age, with a full head of dark hair.

‘I could just poke him,’ Rebecca said. When she saw Tom's startled expression, she smiled. ‘That's not what it sounds like. It's a Facebook thing.’

There was only one space left in the car park; the rest were taken up with three mini-buses which, Tom noticed, were equipped even on the outside with assorted ramps and handles for wheelchair access. The building itself was large, fashioned out of the grey concrete that seemed to have been the only material available to the architects working when Tom had come of age: Sheffield had been full of dull, faceless exteriors like this too. The housing benefit office, the local library, the council: in the 1970s all British buildings looked like this. They walked up the ramp, pausing by the entrance for Tom to roll two quick cigarettes, both making rapid work of sucking them down to a tiny stub. Rebecca had only ‘poked’ Dan Steiner an hour ago. He had – entirely unsurprisingly in Tom's view – responded immediately, happily supplying Rebecca with a phone number. She had wanted to call him there and then but Tom had vetoed it: if they were being followed, if their meeting with Henry Goldman had somehow been bugged, then it made no sense to use the phone in her father's flat. If their pursuers had been in there to wreck the place, it wouldn't have cost them too much effort to put an ear on the phone line. They had driven instead to a phone box three streets away, bringing the admission from the thirty-one year old Rebecca Merton, child of the cellular generation, that she had never used one before. Once guided by Tom, glad for the excuse to be crammed in the booth with her, so close their faces almost touched, she placed the call. She accepted Dan's condolences, asked charmingly after his wife and children, then asked if she might make contact with Dan's elderly father. She screwed up her eyes with that last request, bracing herself for Dan breaking the news that his father had moved to Israel or Manchester or even that he had, despite The Jewish Chronicle, died recently – but instead he gave her the address of the old age home on Stamford Hill where his father now lived. It was a five-minute drive from her own father's place: the last two boys of the poker club had somehow stuck together.

They had not phoned ahead, but Dan had: the lady at reception said she was expecting two visitors for Sid. As it happened, they had picked a good time to come: there was bingo in the main hall and Sid would have come down from his room. They should just wait here and she'd find someone to lead the way.

Tom looked around, his eye settling on the glass display-case in the lobby. Inside were a couple of the eight-branched candelabra he recognized from New York: they were everywhere in Manhattan in the lead-up to Christmas, as Jews marked the festival of Chanukah. There were silver wine goblets in there too, engraved wth Hebrew lettering. Pride of place went to a commemorative shield, the kind that had so delighted young Tom Byrne when he and his mates had brought one back following the under-13 football championships for ‘Sheffield and region’.

There were two trolleys laden with teacups, a few forlorn balloons and a noticeboard. He stepped forward to read it: ‘Don't Forget: Chair-Based Exercise with Maureen at 3pm on Thursday’. Another promised ‘Judith's Sing-Along’. Next was a condolence board, with a standard message and a blank space where the name of the latest resident to collide with mortality could be inserted.

‘Hello!’

He turned to see a large woman in her mid-fifties, her chest a rock-solid shelf, striding towards them. From her ID tag Tom could see that her name was Brenda and that she was described as a ‘facilitator’.

‘We haven't seen you at the centre before, have we?’ She sounded breathless. ‘You're here to see Sid?’

The loss of the surname; the same thing had happened to Tom's father the minute he turned frail. Tom always used to correct them – nurses, doctors, all of them – referring to his own father as Mr Byrne, but they rarely got the hint. Mostly it would still be ‘Ron's very good at his wees, aren't you, Ron?’

‘We are,’ said Rebecca, back in doctor mode. Her professional voice was deep, like a lake at night. ‘We're not family. But he and my father were very close.’

‘And has your husband met Sid before?’

‘I'm not-’

‘He's not-’

They shot each other a quick look.

‘Well, I'm glad anyway. Visitors, he doesn't get so many.’ The voice was part East London and part something else, something Tom couldn't place. It was musical, almost sing-song: a Jewish melody. ‘The sons come every now and then, but you know how it is. Everyone's busy.’

She led them through double doors into a large hall, divided by what seemed to be a wooden garden trellis. Brenda pointed at it and said, ‘This is our dining area. That side's meat, this side's milk,’ as if that made matters clearer. Apparently to Rebecca it did.

On the milk side of the divide, there were perhaps fifteen old people seated at five or six round tables arranged in café formation. At the head of the room was a man at a table of his own, clutching a microphone and, with no expression in his voice, reading out a series of numbers. Occasionally, one of the old folks would scratch away at a card. Despite the absence of patter or laughter, Tom realized the man was a bingo-caller. The electronic sign on the table at his side, flashing each number as he called it, was for the benefit of those too deaf to hear.

‘Ooh, I'm surprised,’ said Brenda, laying a hand across her vast bust. ‘I thought he'd be here. I hope he hasn't gone wandering. You know about Sid's condition? His son explained, yes?’

Rebecca flashed Tom a look of panic. ‘No. No, he didn't. He said it might be difficult to talk to his father, but he-’

‘Oh, I expect he didn't like to talk about it. But Sid's not the only one here, you know. Lots of them have it. I sometimes think it's a blessing. To protect them from remembering too much. Although the trouble is, they do remember-’

‘Can we meet him, do you think?’ Rebecca was getting impatient.

Brenda now led them out of the hall and down a small flight of stairs. ‘This is the art room,’ she announced, like a head teacher guiding prospective parents around a school. Tom saw a man with white stubble carefully add a stick to a model steam train made entirely of matchsticks. ‘That's Melvyn,’ Brenda announced. ‘He used to be a watchmaker.’

Next, Brenda poked her head around the door of a room decked out as a hairdresser's salon, just like the one Tom's mother used to visit on alternate Fridays when he was a boy. It came complete with those sit-under, helmet-style hairdryers: Tom remembered manoeuvring himself as a five-year-old into one and pretending he was a cosmonaut.

‘I didn't think he'd be here, but checking never hurt. It's mainly the ladies who come here. For a chat.’ Tom saw a price list by the door: shampoo and set £5.

They ascended two flights of stairs. ‘They do wander sometimes, I'm afraid,’ Brenda said, catching her breath from the climb. ‘When they're like that. Sometimes they leave the building altogether. And you know where we find them? Usually standing outside the house where they lived as a child.’ A sad look changed the shape of Brenda's mouth. ‘Although not in Sid's case of course.’ Suddenly her face brightened. ‘I think I can hear someone,’ she sing-songed. She pushed open a pair of double doors and they walked into a large room whose floor was almost entirely covered in a mat the colour of a billiard table. At the far end was a solitary upright piano and, hunched over it, a man with white hair on both sides of a bald head, playing scales over and over.

‘This is the room we use for mat bowls – oh, our gentlemen residents like that – and for line dancing,’ Brenda said, not to be diverted from her tour. ‘And there, at the piano, is Sid.’ She smiled with satisfaction, as if vindicated that the system worked after all. ‘Sid, visitors for you!’

The old man's gaze remained fixed on his left hand as it moved up and down the keyboard.

‘I say, Sid, these nice young people have come for a chat.’ She turned to Rebecca and Tom, her back deliberately to Sid Steiner. ‘Maybe now's not a good time. Could you come back tomorrow? Or at the weekend?’

‘We'd love to, we really would.’ The doctor voice again. ‘But unfortunately I lost my own father this week and there's something urgent that has come up. I think Sid might be the only person who can help us.’

‘I wish you long life, dear.’ Brenda took Rebecca's hand. ‘And you need to ask Sid something? You need to find out information?’

Rebecca nodded. Brenda's mouth formed itself into an expression suggesting scepticism verging on alarm. She looked at Sid, then back to Rebecca. ‘Lets see what a cup of tea can do.’

At the mention of tea, Sid halted mid-scale. He lifted his arm up and placed it back on his lap. Gently, Brenda took hold of his shoulders and turned him towards Rebecca and Tom.

His face was liver-spotted and veined but he was still recognizable as the man who had toasted the poker club's collective good health thirty years earlier. His eyebrows had become overgrown, like an unkempt hedge, and his earlobes were long and furred. He was, Brenda had reminded them, eighty-nine years old. When DIN were in their first hunting season, Sid Steiner would have been in his twenties: fit, strong and fearless.

‘Hello, Sid,’ Rebecca said gently. She gestured towards a column of stacking chairs, and Tom pulled out two of them. Once she was at eye level with the old man, she spoke again. ‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter, Rebecca.’

‘Who?’

‘I'm Gerald Merton's daughter.’

‘What do you say?’

‘Gershon Matzkin.’

‘Gershon Matzkin? You're Gershon's wife?’

‘I'm his daughter.’

‘Gershon's a good boy.’

Rebecca dipped her head and, as it hung there, low, Tom could see the sides of her eyes: they were wet. Was it despair at the pitiful state of Sid Steiner or the notion of her father as a boy that had done that? Tom didn't know, but he felt such a strong urge to touch her, to console her, that this time he didn't fight it. He squeezed her shoulder and, in thanks, she touched his hand briefly. Even now, even here, he could feel the crackle of electricity.

‘Do you remember when you last saw him?’

‘My mother won't like me talking to a girl like you, you know. She's warned me not to talk to girls like you. From across the river.’

Tom could feel Rebecca tensing. She reached out and placed a hand on Steiner's sleeve, a gesture which exposed how withered his arms had become. With a shudder, Tom thought of the skin that was concealed inside that too-large sleeve and, on it, the number etched in purple.

‘Can you tell me anything Gershon said to you recently? Did he come and visit you here?’

‘Now, did you get married in the end? Or wouldn't he have you?’

‘Who?’

‘What did you say?’

At that moment, Brenda pushed her way through the double doors, back first, holding a tray of tea. She must have caught Rebecca's expression, because she gave a small nod of recognition, as if to say: this is what I meant. Dementia.

‘It's teatime, Sidney.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Teatime.’

‘What's that?’ He was pointing at the tray.

‘That's a cup.’

‘I know that's a cup. What's that?’

‘Guess.’

The old man scrunched up his eyes, a child's caricature of concentration. Eventually, he opened them again and said three words which made Tom's eyes prick. ‘I can't remember.’

‘That's milk, Sidney. That's a jug of milk.’

Rebecca got to her feet and spoke quietly, almost inaudibly, to Brenda. ‘I'm sorry to have taken your time, Mrs Jacobs. But I don't think this is going to work. We made a mistake, I'm sorry.’

‘What is it you need him to remember?’

Rebecca looked over at Tom, with a question in her eyes: how much can we say?

‘We need him to remember something from long ago,’ said Tom, pulling an answer out of the air. ‘Maybe fifty or sixty years ago.’

Brenda smiled. ‘You should have said. Now come with me.’

They passed through a door set with patterned glass, the way front doors used to look. Next to it was a brass plate: The Y Dove Reminiscence Room. The space had been divided into two areas. The first was wood-floored and done up like a hallway with a hat-stand and a sideboard cluttered with objects: a portable, wind-up gramophone; a Philips wireless; a Frister & Rossman sewing machine and a heavy, black mechanical cash register, the buttons marking amounts in shillings and old pence. Opposite was a small kitchen area, including a big square sink, a washboard and a stack of battered enamel saucepans.

Sitting on the counter was a biscuit tin decorated with the face of George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Above it, a shelf laden with products not seen for decades: Flor Brite Mop Furniture Polish, Lipton's No.1 Quality Tea and Victory Lozenges.

The main part of the room boasted a floral carpet the like of which Tom had not seen since childhood visits to his grandparents in Wakefield. There was a fireplace, its surround made up of beige ceramic tiles, and on a sidetable a heavy, black Bakelite telephone. On the wall was a framed poster showing a strapping woman striding across a meadow with a pitchfork in her hand: ‘Come and help with the Victory Harvest’. A strapline at the foot of the poster read, ‘You are needed in the fields’. Beneath it, Sid Steiner sat in a big armchair.

This was the place residents with dementia came for sessions aimed at giving their ravaged memories a workout. Because, while short-term memory was the first casualty, the experiences of long ago tended to be forgotten last, with recollections of childhood clinging on until the very end. People who could not find the word for ‘cup’ or ‘jug’, who could not recognize their own children, could come in here and, at last, remember.

Rebecca cleared her throat. ‘So Sid, when did you come to this country?’

Brenda shook her head. ‘Try to avoid factual questions, dates, that kind of thing,’ she whispered. ‘It can be stressful for them. Use the objects in the room, try to get him talking.’

Tom looked around and grabbed a packet of Park Drive cigarettes. He passed it to Rebecca who put it in Steiner's hands.

‘Do you smoke, Sid?’

‘We all do.’

‘Do you like smoking?’

‘It's warm.’

‘Did you ever smoke these, Sid?’

He looked down, turned the packet over a couple of times, then shook his head. ‘It's not easy to get cigarettes. Besides, when you get them, you don't smoke them. You use them. Don't you know that? Didn't they teach you anything in Warsaw?’

Rebecca leaned forward; it was the most coherent sentence they had yet heard from Sid Steiner. ‘What do you buy with them?’

‘Anything. To get in, to get out, to get past a guard. Cigarettes or jewels, it makes no difference.’

Neither Tom nor Rebecca knew where or when in his memory Sid had landed. Was it whichever ghetto he had been locked up in, or perhaps a camp; or was it the occupation zone of 1945, scene of DIN's first hunting season?

‘What about this?’ Hung up on a wall, among a display of documents and photographs, was the jacket from a British army uniform. Rebecca passed it to him.

‘Not bad.’ He assessed the three stripes on the upper arm. ‘Sergeant. That could be useful. What we need are MPs. If you can get me one of those, we can use it.’

Tom squeezed Rebecca's wrist in excitement: MPs were military police. This fitted precisely with the testimony Henry Goldman had given them, that MPs uniforms were the ones DIN prized most.

‘Use it for what, Sid?’

‘I'm not going to tell you that. If you're meant to know, you know already. If you don't know then you're not meant to know.’ Tom smiled: it was a smart answer.

‘Did you work with Gershon in DIN?’

‘You some kind of spy? I don't answer questions like that.’

‘I'm with Gershon.’

‘He's too young for a girl like you. He's only a boy.’

It must be 1945. Sid Steiner must have transported himself back to Allied-occupied Germany, probably the British zone. Maybe the uniform had done it. Tom looked around for another prop, something that might trigger a useful memory. In a glass case was a shoe-brush and, next to it, a Ministry of War Book of Air-Raid Precautions. That was no good; too British. He scanned the walls and shelves, desperate for anything that might light a spark.

Then Sid spoke unprompted. ‘I know how to use that.’ He was pointing at one of the display cabinets. Rebecca stood up, trying to follow the line of the old man's crooked finger.

‘This?’ She held up a tin of National Dried Milk issued by the Ministry of Food.

‘No! Not that, that!’ He aimed his finger leftward, until it rested on a rolling pin. Tom sighed: and just when we were getting somewhere.

Rebecca returned to her seat, her posture now deflated. They were heading back into la-la land.

‘What did you use it for, Sid?’ It was Brenda. She had pulled the rolling pin from its case and was handing it over.

‘Well, I had to train as a baker, didn't I? If the plan was going to work.’

Rebecca leaned forward once more. ‘What plan, Sid?’

‘Ask Gershon, he'll tell you. He trained too. We both did. Kneading the dough, glazing the cakes. I was very good at doughnuts. Bread was hard, though.’

‘And this was so that you could implement the plan?’

‘Of course.’

‘What's the name of the plan?’

‘Plan B.’

‘B for Bakery?’

‘No. Wrong again.’

‘Did Plan B work?’

‘It made the papers you know. New York flipping Times. Nuremberg, April 1946. But we could have done more.’

‘What was the plan?’ ‘Everyone needs bread, no?’ ‘You were making bread. Who for?’ ‘You may be pretty, but Gershon's picked himself a bit of a dunce if you don't mind my saying so. Who do you think it was for?’