The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Tom was staring. Not, for once, at Rebecca, but at the man sitting two seats away from her.

There was no reason to gawp. He was just a guy tapping away at a computer screen. But something about him had stopped Tom short. He seemed out of place here; too well dressed, not poor enough…

They were in an internet café on Kingsland High Street, just a few hundred yards from Julian Goldman's shabby legal aid practice and only a ten minute walk from the Brenner Centre, home of the near-senile Sid Steiner.

It had been Tom's idea to come here. They could hardly go back to Rebecca's flat, he had said: whoever was pursuing them could be there, waiting. It was a risk even to use his computer there: their stalkers would doubtless be able to hack into it and see whatever they were seeing.

So he had suggested coming to this place. ‘Internet café’ was not quite an accurate description. Coffee was available from a sorry-looking vending machine in one corner, a mess of sachets, crusted sugar and discarded stirrers. But otherwise it looked no different from any other shabby shop, the display window entirely covered in stickers promoting discounted rates for calls to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Addis Ababa. One wall was divided up into telephone booths, each partitioned off by the flimsiest, palest, plastic imitation of wood. They were all full, the soundproofing so basic that the babble of conversation, in a dozen different languages, was loud and constant. Inside were young men, none older than thirty-five, Tom reckoned. He could imagine the longing expressed in these phone-calls to wives, mothers and children back home, people whose livelihoods depended on cash remittances sent from London and whose hope depended on these phone calls. The sound of it was unmistakable. It was the sound of desperation.

The terminals were all in use too, with pretty much the same clientele. Tom's years at the UN meant he could make a pretty good guess at the range of nationalities gathered in the room: Kenyan, Somali, Sudanese would have been his initial estimate. Their presence here said something depressing about their presence in London: that they had not come anywhere close to settling in, that everything they cared about was elsewhere. They were like landless people, just passing through, and this place, this internet café, was a way station.

All except for the one white man, two seats away from them.

Rebecca began with a cursory check of her email, Tom watching over her shoulder, trying to sniff out any sign of a boyfriend. It was a deluge of condolence messages, mainly from acquaintances as far as he could tell. She clicked her way through them, then called up NYTimes.com, finding the page which promised to open up the archive of The New York Times.

‘All right,’ Rebecca said, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

‘Now remember,’ Tom whispered, conscious of the man close by. ‘He told us the date. April 13th 1946. So let's start with that.’

‘It wants keywords.’

‘Try “Nuremberg, poison”.’

She typed the words in slowly, with two fingers.

Your search for Nuremberg, poison in all fields returned 0 results.

Tom bit his lip. ‘Try Nuremberg, SS, deaths.’

Your search for Nuremberg, SS, deaths in all fields returned 0 results.

They tried Stalag 13, bakery, loaves. Still nothing.

‘Look,’ Rebecca said at last. ‘Steiner's memory is shot. What are the chances he'd remember an exact date?’ She keyed in a new entry in the date field, suggesting not a single day, but a range of a week: April 12th to April 19th.

Nothing.

Tom fell back into his hard plastic chair. Maybe they'd got excited over no more than a daydream spun by an old man who no longer knew the word for a jug.

Rebecca's face suggested she had arrived at the same state of resignation: a lead had become a dead end. She reached around her chair to collect her coat.

Tom's eye scrolled down the screen, looking at the other stories on the page, none of them even close to what they were looking for. He clicked on one at random, marvelling as the screen filled up with words written from the heart of occupied Europe more than six decades ago. He was about to click on the red circle that would close down the browser altogether: he had decided he would leave no details on screen, where they could be glimpsed. He shot another look at the man he'd noticed when they first walked in: if he was watching them, he was doing a good job of concealing it.

Just as Tom's cursor hovered over the red circle, a phrase leapt out at him: ‘This report filed by arrangement with the military censor.’

Of course. News from occupied Europe did not come out instantly. This was not the age of cable TV, satellite feeds and the internet. News crawled out back then, delayed by technology and military authorities who filtered out anything they didn't like.

Now he sat in Rebecca's chair, still warm from her. He repeated the keywords – Nuremberg, poison – but this time keyed in a three-month range for the dates, March to May. Five items filled the screen, each headline fascinating. There was a story datelined Munich from April 24th – Nazis in Bavaria Regaining Position; Hitler Youth Aide in Key Job – and another from Frankfurt: Haushofer, Hitler's ‘Geopolitician’, Commits Suicide With His Wife. But it was the first and second items that drew in Tom almost instantly. He clicked on the first.

Poison Bread Fells 1,900 German Captives in US Army Prison Camp Near Nuremberg

April 20th 1946, Saturday Page 6, 351 words

FRANKFORT ON THE MAIN, Germany, April 19 (AP) – Nineteen hundred German prisoners of war were poisoned by arsenic in their bread early this week in a United States camp and all are ‘seriously ill’, United States headquarters announced tonight.

Tom turned to Rebecca whose eyes were growing wider with each sentence she read. And now he clicked on the second item, filed three days later:

Poison Plot Toll of Nazis at Stalag 13: 2,283

Arsenic Bottles Found by US Agents in Nuremberg Bakery that Served Prison Camp April 23rd 1946, Tuesday Page 9, 347 words

NUREMBERG, Germany, April 22 (AP) – United States Army authorities said tonight that additional German prisoners of war have been stricken with arsenic poisoning, bringing to 2,283 the number taken ill in a mysterious plot against 15,000 former Nazi elite guardsmen confined in a camp near Nuremberg.