The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

They took the painting down as carefully as their impatience would allow. One holding each end, they carried it into the centre of the room, where they leaned it in a forty-five degree angle against a chair.

They had already examined the picture microscopically, looking at it from an inch away, studying the thick accretions of oil paint, searching for clues – but they had found nothing.

Rebecca had returned from the kitchen with a steak knife and set about scraping the paint away from random sections of the canvas. Tom tried to divine whether the fierce energy she brought to the task was the urgent desire to see what the picture might conceal – or simply a long-repressed fury at the painting and indeed the artist who had created it. For all her efforts, they had found nothing, just the smudged blankness of the canvas underneath.

Now they were looking at the back. It had been expensively framed, with a thick wooden border, the canvas secured at the rear by copious amounts of binding tape. Tom took the knife from Rebecca and slowly sliced around the edge. He half-expected the picture to pop out, but it had been in too long for that. He began removing the tape, layers of it, soon realizing that the back was not the back of the canvas after all, merely a mounting that bulged out by a good quarter of an inch. He would have to remove this too.

He fought the urge simply to slice through the layers of cardboard backing, operating more gingerly instead. Eventually the surrounding tape was gone and he could see the edge of the card. Slowly, he lifted it off.

The second he had, they could both see his work had not been in vain. Stuck to the back of the painting, not glued but pressed there by time, was a set of papers. His hands trembling, Tom reached in and peeled them loose.

There were five sheets inside, all roughly the same size, about A3. When Tom turned the first one over, he almost pulled back in surprise. It was not what he was expecting – a photograph or a list of names that would at last unlock this mystery – but a drawing, something between a map and an architect's blueprint. The next was not identical but similar and so was the next and the next.

‘What the hell are these?’ he said, but Rebecca was too stunned to answer. Of all the revelations about her father, this one seemed to have blind-sided her most.

Tom stared hard at the first drawing. He wondered if it was an old-fashioned electrical diagram, a sketch for a circuit board perhaps. Then he wondered if it was, perhaps, a map of an underground railway; it certainly seemed to depict pathways and routes.

He looked more closely, his eye now just a matter of inches from the paper, close enough to smell the must. In a tiny hand, he could see numbers written at various intervals. They were, he decided, measurements.

And then Rebecca spoke. ‘Of course,’ she said quietly.

‘What is it?’ Tom said, his voice rising. ‘What?’

‘Do you remember from the notebook, how Rosa and the others escaped? From the ghetto?’

Tom shook his head. That would have been in the section he had skimmed, the pages dealing with the final stages of the war, the flight into the forests awaiting the arrival of the Red Army. The first mention of Rosa Tom could remember was when she and Gershon became lovers, which would have been long after she had broken free of the ghetto.

'Sewers. Rosa and the others, the leaders of the resistance – they all got out on the last day of the liquidation of the ghetto. The Jews were being rounded up and sent to the camps. But the resistance always had a plan for the last day, when there could be no more fighting back.

'So Rosa and the rest, they went down into the ground. Not my father. He was already on the road by then, spreading the word. But later Rosa told him what had happened. And he told me.

'The stench down there was just terrible. It had been raining that day and apparently that made it worse. And the pipes were so narrow, not much wider than their bodies, that they had to crawl through all that shit and piss on their hands and knees. And then, in some places, the pipes got even smaller, so they had to slither along on their stomachs – tilting their heads back just to gasp at the few inches of air. The liquid was giving off all kinds of gas; people were fainting. Not Rosa, though. She just pressed on. That's what she said anyway.

‘They did that for nearly two miles, until they got to an opening outside the ghetto walls where two fighters from the Communist underground were waiting to pull them out.’

‘And so-’

‘It took a lot of work. There was one senior member of the resistance who had been working on it for months, mapping every inch, every tunnel, every manhole cover. The sewers weren't just an escape route; the resistance used them for smuggling too, bringing in weapons. Plenty of people died down there: some were overwhelmed by the stench; others simply got lost.’

The words were just flowing out of her now, as if on a tape recorded long ago, waiting to be played back. For a moment, Tom could see Rebecca as a child, listening intently in the darkness to bedtime tales of resistance, heroism and war. She seemed to have memorized every word.

‘So these-’

‘These must be the maps of the sewers.’

Tom looked hard at the maps which, he now realized, were indeed hand-drawn. He ran his fingertips across the paper. What an extraordinary document this was. Not just a precisely rendered map but a testament to an almost superhuman resourcefulness. And to think that, according to the late Henry Goldman at least, even the most senior of these people, these warriors, had not been a day over twenty-five years old.

But now, as he squinted at every inch of the paper, he examined more closely what had seemed to be a pattern, a printed stamp, in the bottom right-hand corner. Now he could see that it was not a printed badge at all but a block made up of words, written in a tiny, fine-point script. He could decipher none of them, except for one in block capitals: NURNBERG. He looked in the same place on the next map. München. The next three were Weimar, Hamburg and Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin.

He gestured for Rebecca to take a look and her brow instantly furrowed. ‘I don't understand.’

‘Your father was never in those places, was he?’ Tom hesitated. ‘I mean, there were no ghettoes in Germany itself, were there? The Nazis kicked the Jews out and set up the camps and the ghettoes in Eastern Europe, right?’

‘Yes.’

They both stared at the diagrams trying to decipher their meaning. Tom regrouped and spoke again. ‘But we do know that they were there after the war. We know that he was in Nuremberg.’ He pointed at the Nuremberg drawing. ‘And we know that this, all of this, somehow relates to Plan A. That's why it was hidden in the painting.’

But Rebecca was no longer listening. Something in the pile of discarded binding and paper had caught her eye. It was stuck so flat as to be barely visible, but taped to the backing board was a square of card whose edges had turned almost yellow. With great care she pulled at one corner, feeling the tug of adhesive as it came away. She moved slowly, as if she knew that to move too rapidly was to risk losing whatever buried message from the past was contained here.

She turned it over and Tom found himself staring at a line of random squiggles, half-squares and incomplete hieroglyphs which looked like no language he had ever seen.

‘What is it?’

Rebecca was gazing at it intently. ‘It's either one or the other.’

‘I don't understand.’

‘The characters I recognize,’ she said. ‘I'm just not sure of the language.’

The noise of the TV was even more distracting now, but it was his own fault. He had turned up the volume as soon as Rebecca had realized the postcard carried a message: if someone was listening, now was the time to stop them. But the background chatter of a daytime soap made concentration all but impossible.

Tom prided himself on his facility for languages. Even those he couldn't speak, he could at least recognize – he knew his Korean from his Thai – and he would have liked to think he could have identified a sentence of Hebrew when it was set down in front of him. But Rebecca had had to explain that the printed alphabet was not the same as the script used in everyday handwriting: the shape of each character was vaguely related, but not identical. Even to someone who would recognize a bible printed in Hebrew, a sentence of Hebrew handwriting could look like a string of corrupted computer icons.

Although Rebecca could make out each character, she wasn't sure she could do much more. ‘I can just about read Hebrew,’ she said, adding that she had endured basic Hebrew classes as a child. ‘Kind of like Jewish Sunday school.’

‘So what's the problem?’

‘The problem is, this might not be Hebrew. It could be Yiddish.’

‘I thought Yiddish was like German.’

‘It is, mostly. But it's written in Hebrew characters.’

Tom had to smile at that. Yiddish was surely tailor-made for undercover communication. A German might understand it if he heard it, but he would not be able to make head or tail of the written version. How many non-Jews knew the Hebrew alphabet at all, let alone in this handwritten form? Almost none. It meant DIN would have had no need of cryptography: their own language, written down, was sufficient.

‘OK,’ Rebecca said finally. ‘This much I've worked out. It says, Fargess nicht!’

'OK, said Tom. ‘That's simple enough. That means “Don't forget”.’

She read on. ‘Yir-mee-ya…Yirmiyahu! It's a name: Yirmiyahu, like Jeremiah.’

‘Keep going.’

‘ Yirmiyahu vet zine – and now there's the number twenty-three – then there's the word dem and then another number, fifteen. And then it finishes with another exclamation: Lomir zich freien!’

‘Lomir zich freien. It's some kind of exhortation, like “Come let's party, come celebrate”. Read the whole thing again.’

‘Fargess nicht! Yirmiyahu vet zine twenty-three dem fifteen. Lomir zich frein.’

‘Don't forget, Jeremiah turns twenty-three on the fifteenth. Let's celebrate!’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Don't tell me all we've got is a party invitation.’

Tom got up to pace, but it was no good. Finally he marched over to the TV set and stabbed at the off button. In the quiet, perhaps twenty seconds later, it came to him. ‘Oh, that's very neat. Very neat indeed.’

‘What's neat?’

‘Do you remember, in your dad's notebook, the message they gave him to take to the other ghettoes?’ Just as Rebecca was about to answer, Tom placed a finger over his lips – and turned the TV back on.

‘“Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4”.’ She paused. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘We need a Bible.’

It took them a while, wading through the rubble of books and junk heaped on the floor, but eventually they found one, a volume much larger than the Bibles Tom was used to. Not that he was an expert: his militantly atheist father had always refused to have ‘that sodding book’ in the house, since it had only brought ‘misery to millions’. This was perhaps twice the size of a hotel-room Bible, as large as a volume of an encyclopedia.

Rebecca turned the pages hesitantly, eventually turning back two pages, then forward one, like someone narrowing down to a single reference in a dictionary. ‘Here we go. The Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 23, Verse 15.’

‘Read it.’

Tracing each word with her finger, she read aloud: ‘“Therefore, this is what the Lord Almighty says concerning the prophets: ‘I will make them eat bitter food and drink poisoned water, because from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has spread throughout the land’”.’