The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY

He hesitated before suggesting a return to her father's flat. Hard enough to be among the worldly remains of a dead parent: harder still to be in a place that had been trashed, a subliminal reminder that her father had not been allowed to die an old man's death, but had been murdered.

Besides, it was making things easy for their pursuers, returning to a place they had already targeted. And yet he knew there was a flaw in that logic. For if they had intended to kill them, why had they not simply come out and done it? It couldn't be moral scruple: the corpse of Henry Goldman was testament to that. Nor could it be lack of guile: whoever was after them was patently efficient enough to have followed their movements over the last twenty-four hours, to have bugged their meeting with Goldman so precisely that they had managed to terminate it at the crucial moment and, for all he knew, to be aware of everything they had discovered since.

He and Rebecca Merton were clearly enemies of somebody, but those people had not shown themselves or made any demand. Tom's best guess was that he and Gershon Matzkin's daughter had become like the Russian arms-dealer in Brighton Beach. Their job was to play it out, to do whatever they were doing so that those watching could watch. Were they meant to lead them somewhere? Were they meant to find out something these men didn't already know? Could that explain the envelope that had mysteriously arrived at Rebecca's apartment yesterday? Was that the gesture of an enemy or a friend?

As they left the internet café, hopping on the 76 bus, Rebecca took the decision out of his hands. ‘The answer is somewhere in his flat, I'm sure of it.’

‘They've turned it upside down. Don't you think that if there was something there, they'd have found it?’

‘No. That's why it was so trashed. Because they hadn't found it. If they had, they wouldn't have needed to start slashing cushions.’

Tom was about to say that made no sense, when Rebecca's phone rang. He sat up. She looked at the display and shook her head: not connected with this.

‘Nick, hi. No problem, I can talk.’ She nodded. ‘OK, that sounds good. Let's hope her luck's beginning to change. Check to make sure she's still in remission, change out her lines, and let the transplant team know she's a go. We can tee up her brother's harvest for next week. Speak soon.’

Tom was only half listening. He was concentrating instead on a man in his twenties who had just boarded the bus, wearing iPod headphones. Tom was trying to see if they were plugged into a music player or something else.

Rebecca put aside her phone and resumed her argument with Tom precisely where she had left off. ‘Anyway, there's nothing else we can do. We don't have a Plan B.’ Even then, despite everything, that ‘we’ warmed him.

And so they made their return visit to Kyverdale Road, to see if there was something that, no matter how improbably, had been overlooked by the burglars. The pair of them tiptoed around the place, picking up every remaining photograph, peering inside every ornament, including the broken ones. Rebecca stayed in the bedroom, working through her father's jackets, probing into each pocket. Tom went, methodically, through the old man's books, shaking each one by the spine just in case some long-forgotten note from 1946 would tumble out.

All the while he was thinking of what had happened in that room just a few hours earlier. Not just the sex, but the way she had finally dropped her guard in the minutes afterwards. She had felt guilty about it all, to be sure, but if he could choose to be anywhere in the world, Tom decided, he would choose to be inside that moment once more, the two of them together and naked, telling the truth.

He was flicking through the pages of an Antiques Roadshow Compendium for 1981 when he came across something: yellowing, handwritten and impossible to understand. Tom could make out no more than a few of the letters. All he could tell for certain was that these were not regular English words. Perhaps they were names, German names.

‘Rebecca! Come here!’

She ran from the bedroom and was by his side in seconds. She took the paper from him, bringing it closer to her eyes for deciphering. Tom was breathing faster.

Finally, she turned towards him with a smile. ‘These are names all right. May even be German. Trouble is, these are the names of dry-cleaning fluids. This is one of my dad's old shopping lists.’

Tom scrunched it up and fell into a chair with his eyes closed. When he opened them Rebecca was staring at him coldly.

‘Not that one.’

‘What?’

‘Don't sit there.’

‘Why not?’

‘That's Dad's chair.’

Tom immediately leapt up, and tried to pretend the moment hadn't happened. ‘So what do we know?’

‘We know that my father, Sid Steiner, Goldman and the others from DIN went round killing Nazis. They did it in two phases, straight after the war in occupied Germany and then again in the fifties and sixties all over the world, Europe, South America, everywhere. And now we know that their biggest operation was at the Nuremberg bakery, where they may have killed thousands of Nazis.’

‘OK.’

‘What we need to work out is why any of that would matter now. Even if DIN was out to kill one last Nazi – which is obviously what you suspect my father was doing in New York – that's over now. My father was… stopped.’ She paused. ‘And he was the last one. He was always the youngest. There's no one after him. Goldman wasn't going to do anything. So why kill him? Why do all this?’ She was gesturing at the scene of destruction in the flat.

‘To stop the name getting out,’ Tom said. ‘Maybe it's a Nazi everyone's forgotten. Or he's got a false name. Or your father knew his address. If I was a Nazi and I knew Gerald Merton had been coming to get me, I'd also want to make sure he hadn't left any clues behind.’

‘No, that can't be it,’ Rebecca said, biting her lower lip. ‘Goldman had something else to tell us, remember.’

‘Might have been the name.’

‘What, and this geriatric Nazi has been spying on us, breaking into my house, tearing up-’

‘You can get people to do these things.’ Tom sat up. ‘What's that?’

‘Oh.’ Rebecca turned to face the picture in the hallway. Barely lit in the windowless space, and obscured by the coat-rack, was an abstract painting, a formless collection of greys and blacks at least three feet wide and two feet tall, the paint piled on thick. Tom had not paid attention to it before. Nor, it seemed, had the intruders: it didn't appear to have been touched.

‘Rosa did that. I think it was the only thing my father had left of hers. I hated it as a child, so dark and depressing. My mother hated it too. She'd only let him have it in the basement.’

‘But when he had his own place, he hung it on the wall. That's interesting, isn't it?’

‘Maybe he felt he owed her something, I don't know.’ Rebecca moved closer to the painting. ‘As a child I always resented the idea of Rosa: you know, “the woman who came before mummy” and all that. But you look at this and realize what an awful life she had. When she died, she was younger than I am now.’

‘What's it called? The painting.’

‘It's called Aleph. See the grey lines, they just about make the shape of an Aleph. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.’

‘Right.’

The two of them stood there, gazing at it, the shape of the letter now obvious. Tom was trying to imagine the world these two young-old people, a boy and a girl, inhabited those sixty years ago. A world of massacres and constant death and cruelty which, they believed, could only be redeemed by more death. He imagined Gershon in the bakery, doubtless praying that the tainted bread would touch the lips of the man who had murdered his beloved sisters.

And then it struck him, an idea thudding into his brain with such force he could barely grasp it.

He turned to Rebecca, grabbing her arm. ‘What was it you said before, when we were arguing about coming here? On the bus.’

‘I said that we had to come, we might have overlooked something-’

‘Not that, something else, keep going.’

‘I said, we didn't have any other option-’

‘That's it!’

‘-we had no plan B.’

‘Exactly! That's it: Plan B. What happened at the bakery wasn't the main operation after all. It was Plan B. That's what Sid called it.’

‘I thought B was for bakery.’

‘So did I. Brot, German for bread; or Bäckerei for bakery. Remember, that's what I said to Sid. “B for bakery”. And he said “No. Wrong again”. I thought that was the dementia, but when he was talking about the bakery operation he was perfectly lucid. He even remembered the exact date! Don't you see, he was telling the truth. Of course he was. Think about it, why would all these Jews from Poland and Lithuania use German for an operation's codename? They wouldn't. They would use Hebrew, just like they did with the name of their organization. Goldman told us, DIN was Hebrew for judgment. What's the Hebrew for bread?’

‘Lechem.’

‘Right. No “b” there. And what's the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet?’

‘Bet.’

‘You see! Plan Bet. Plan B. And it was called Plan B because it was plan b. It was the fallback plan.’

‘So what was the main plan?’

Tom smiled. ‘Plan A.’

‘Oh, well done, Sherlock.’

‘Or rather, as I think DIN might have called it, Plan Aleph.’

Slowly, they both turned to contemplate Rosa's assemblage of baleful blacks and night-time greys.