The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

They were in his old office. It had been Henning's idea: the new occupant was away, in Slovenia on some EU-related business, and the room was empty.

When it had been his, Tom had found it cramped and dull. The shelves were cast in grey metal, as was the desk. It had the utilitarian appearance of a foreman's cabin watching over the factory floor.

But now he wasn't looking at the furniture. Nor was he focusing on the fact that there were only two window panels for this cubicle, unlike the three to be found in the more senior offices at each end of this corridor. Now he was gazing outward, enjoying the generous and direct view of the Chrysler Building, easily his favourite New York landmark. Perhaps it was the simple relief that this strange ordeal was at last over; that he no longer had to look over his shoulder, no longer had to fear which flat was about to be ransacked, which old man was about to wind up dead. But he could not take his eyes off the view. To him, it shimmered.

Rebecca was behind the desk, sitting in a graphite chair far grander than the creaking, fake leather contraption he remembered.

‘All that time,’ he said at last. ‘We were looking in the wrong place.’

She gave the smallest frown, two lines in the space above the bridge of her nose.

‘I was thinking Nazis. That's all I could think. Once I read your father's journal, I was certain that the only people who would be doing this – smashing up the house, stalking us around London – would be some bunch of old war criminals. I never once thought of… his own side.’

‘Why would you have thought of it?’ She gave him a smile, one that warmed even this metallic room. ‘Anyway, even if you're not much of a detective, you're a helluva negotiator. That was quite a move you made.’

‘He gave us time to think. All that talking; it wasn't difficult to come up with something. We just had to give him a reason not to get rid of us once he got the papers.’

‘Oh, yes. The papers.’ She was still smiling. ‘What exactly are these mystery papers?’

Tom looked back at the window. ‘You know your trouble, Rebecca Merton? Too little faith.’ He turned back, so that he could face her. ‘We can choose. It could be the blueprints of the waterworks-’

‘But those have no link to him.’

'Not now, they don't. But it wouldn't be difficult for you to add a few words to that postcard, now would it? Some clever little play on a Biblical verse that happens to name our old friend. There must be plenty of characters in the Bible with the same name as him.

‘I'm not convinced. What's the other option?’

‘Your father's notebook. You could fake his writing, add a section about Plan A, explaining how the now-famous Mr X brewed up the potion. We hand over that page and the blueprints. Enough stuff to make him realize we weren't bluffing.’

‘Except we were-’

‘Ssshh.’ Tom placed a single finger across his lips. ‘All that matters is that getting rid of us is now less attractive than it was. Or getting rid of me. He wouldn't lay a glove on you: you're a “daughter of the Shoah”.’

Rebecca sat back in the chair. They had gone to the Nations' Café first, straight after they had been escorted out of the presidential suite at the UN Millennium Plaza hotel, from where Tom immediately phoned Henning. He wanted to break it gently, but it just splurged out: he and Rebecca had come on a hastily arranged trip to New York because the resourceful Dr Merton had made an end-run around the UN bureaucracy, deploying her own contacts to get her precious meeting with the Secretary-General.

‘I know,’ Henning had said. ‘I just got a call from the SG's political office.’ He was furious. ‘I'd won the battle on this, Tom. The SG had some ludicrous idea about meeting your Dr Merton and I got it blocked. And now I'm undermined by an intervention from the bloody Israelis. You've made me look a prick.’

‘She's made you look a prick, Henning.’

‘Thanks a lot, that makes a big difference.’

Tom tried to placate his old friend. At least this way, there would be no publicity. He put his hand over the receiver and checked that Rebecca was happy for there to be no photographers. She nodded immediately, looking terrified at the very prospect of facing the media. ‘She agrees. We'll have no one there, no press, no advisers. Let's keep it simple, Henning – and leak-proof. By the time the media know about this meeting, it'll be over.’

Munchau told Tom the only reason he wasn't resisting this insane idea more strenuously was that he had been notified the previous day that the NYPD were dropping their inquiry into the Merton killing altogether. ‘Since it falls outside their jurisdiction, the DA says no prosecutable crime was committed.’

‘So the coast is clear?’

‘I suppose so. But I still want her to sign a comprehensive end-of-claim agreement. Can't have her throwing a meeting with the SG back in our face in some future civil action, claiming it as admission of liability. And a gag agreement, promising no publicity, no interviews, nothing.’

‘I'll draft something right away,’ Tom said, confirmed in his view that Henning was one of the best men the UN had, protective of the institution and its reputation even when the boss was cavalier. Tom felt a sting of guilt at how quickly he had doubted him.

‘I'm impressed,’ Rebecca was saying, swivelling her chair and alternating her gaze from the Chrysler building back to Tom. ‘You got it all worked out.’

‘Not quite everything.’

‘No?’

‘There's one thing I've never understood. Barely had a minute to think about it in London. But I still don't understand it.’

‘Don't understand what?’

‘The envelope that arrived at your flat. The list of names. I don't get who would have done it. It can't be the Israelis, or whoever was working for the Pres-’

There was a knock on the door. Henning.

Rebecca leapt up from the chair, re-adopted the expression of grieving daughter, and extended her hand.

Tom did the introductions and Henning got straight to the point, too professional to show that his teeth were gritted. ‘Dr Merton, the Secretary General is so appreciative of the gesture you've made in coming here that he has asked if he can see you right away, in accordance with the conditions I have discussed with Mr Byrne.’ He looked towards Tom, who nodded. ‘He has cleared his next two appointments.’ He raised his hand in a beckoning gesture.

‘Hold on,’ Rebecca said. She took a deep breath, then exhaled. ‘Can we just take a minute?’

‘Of course.’ Henning shot another look over at Tom. She's not going to start crying, is she?

Rebecca collected herself. ‘Mr Munchau, I'm not used to this sort of thing. Meetings with world leaders.’

Tom looked at the floor.

‘From what I hear, you're pretty well-connected. Quite something to have the president of the state of Israel in your corner.’

‘Still, I think I might find it intimidating to walk into the Secretary-General's office, with him sitting behind some giant desk. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I think so.’

‘Is it possible that we meet somewhere, I don't know, less grand? Somewhere a bit quieter?’

‘Of course, Dr Merton.’ Henning's diplomatic veneer was back in place. ‘I can think of a place that will be ideal, wholly suitable for an encounter of this gravity.’

‘I really appreciate it.’

She stood up and visibly girded herself, like a candidate about to give a speech. Tom stepped forward, ready to follow her out. But Rebecca raised a single palm to block his path.

‘Tom, you've helped me so much. But I think I need to do this on my own.’

Tom nodded and retreated. Henning gave him a brief smile, then ushered Rebecca out. ‘Don't worry, I'll bring her back,’ he mouthed with the tiniest gleam in his eye.

Tom watched them go, giving Rebecca an unseen nod of encouragement, then looked back around the office, trying to remember what it had been like when it was his. There had been even less decoration then than now. He had not stuck up any photographs or garlanded the shelves with bandanas picked up on visits to some exotic, ‘developing’ hell-holes, in the style favoured by colleagues down the corridor.

A leaden memory surfaced, like a hunk of rusting metal on the end of a fishing line. It was in this room that he used to do it. It was here that he would read the testimonies, one after another, detailing the most horrendous war crimes. Sure, the language was different each time. The place-names changed. But the story was always the same: the most blood-curdling human cruelty.

At first, he always reacted the same way: revulsion, anger, a terrible, weighty sadness. But after Rwanda, he could feel no longer. After all, those emotions had been roused to full alert when he served on the Rwanda tribunal and what good had it done? How many killers had they actually prosecuted and convicted? Twenty-six.

After that, he stopped reading the accounts. He would skip over the human testimony and just get to the bottom line figure. That's what he had done with the Darfur paperwork that had come into this office. He had trained his eye to skip over the eye-witness stuff, the individual case-studies, and just find the hard number at the bottom of the page. Why read it? He knew what savagery human beings were capable of. And, much worse, he knew that there was nothing that anyone – not even the sainted bloody United Nations – could do about it.

Tom needed to get on with drafting the agreement for Rebecca and Henning to sign. He sat at the desk and switched on the computer. It asked for a name and password: his old one didn't work. He smiled and remembered the ‘system administrator’ code Henning had taught him when they had once had to hack into the machine of a colleague who had gone on vacation without first sending them a draft text he had been working on. He tapped in the password – UThant, the name of a past Secretary-General – and so, thanks to the sentimentality of the United Nations IT department, he was in.

He opened up a Word document and had tapped out a first sentence when he hesitated. Another lesson from Henning: for anything truly confidential, don't use the internal UN system. Anyone could access anything. If Munchau's chief objective was the avoidance of publicity, it made no sense to risk a leak. He would draft a text by hand.

He reached into his inside pocket, but there was no pen. Perhaps it had been taken during his unconscious flight. Or left behind at the hospital.

There were no loose pens on the desk and the drawers were locked. He saw Rebecca's bag: she had left it behind on a chair, along with her coat.

Guiltily, he walked around to get it. He never liked so much as peering inside a woman's handbag: it felt too much like going through his mother's purse. He opened it quickly, saw a fountain pen and grabbed it. There was some paper in the laserprinter: he took a couple of sheets and prepared to write.

Agreement between he scratched without leaving a mark. He gave it a shake but still no ink would flow. He unscrewed the barrel and saw the explanation: there was no ink cartridge.

Perhaps it had become detached and fallen back into the barrel. Tom held it up to the light and saw that there was indeed something inside – but he knew instantly it was no cartridge.

At first he wondered if it was some kind of cigarette, perhaps even drugs. From what he'd heard in the presidential suite, it would be no surprise. Tom tapped the pen barrel on the surface of the desk and it popped out. Not a cigarette, but a neatly rolled sheet – perhaps two sheets – of paper.

It took Tom no more than a second to understand what he was looking at. As he rolled them flat, the size of the pages, the faint lines, were instantly familiar. And the handwriting was unmistakable.

Tom scanned the words.

I received the list of names and worked my way through them methodically. I could not get to them all at once. Some of these men lived very far away; they had hidden themselves well. Each mission required papers, a fresh passport, money and a cover story. In San Sebastián, Spain, I pretended to be a tourist. I followed Joschka Dorfman, a senior SS officer at Treblinka, for days before I had a chance to ‘meet’ him away from his wife. She came back from a shopping trip and found that he had not taken an afternoon nap as he had promised. Instead he was hanging from the ceiling of their hotel room…

Tom's head began to pound. So these were the missing pages torn from Gershon Matzkin's notebook. They had not been missing at all. Rebecca had had them all the time. She had known all along the truth of her father's life. She had known about DIN.

Of course she had. What had Julian Goldman said when Rebecca had introduced them? ‘You have never seen a father and a daughter who were closer. Even when it was just the two of them, they were a family. A two-person family.’ They were a pair, the Mertons; they worked together. But Tom had been so blinded by sympathy, by warmth towards her, by his desire for her, that he had not seen the obvious. Whatever it was Gerald Merton had been up to, Rebecca Merton had been his confidante and accomplice.

But she had also sat there in Henry Goldman's office, stunned by the story the lawyer had revealed as much as Tom had. Hadn't she? A memory, brief and fleeting, came to him. He had wondered about it at the time, but the moment had passed. It was when they had argued, back in her flat, straight after the Goldman meeting. She complained that the old lawyer had been droning on, ‘telling us what we already knew’. What we already knew.

Had the whole thing been a charade, one long act? She must have decided it from the very start, tearing the key pages from her father's notebook long before Tom had shoved it in his bag. She had probably done it the instant she heard her father had died.

But he had discovered the truth anyway, he had learned about DIN and their work of vengeance, seeing the evidence for himself, stashed away in the box at Julian Goldman's office. They had gone straight there after the envelope arrived.

Of course. No wonder he had never been able to work out who had sent over that faded, crumbling list of names. It was the piece of the puzzle that could never fit. The person who had sent that letter – delivering it by hand, in an envelope that was not stamped – had surely been none other than Rebecca Merton herself.

He pictured her, sealing the envelope, then presenting it as if it had come from out of the blue. How clever she had been, standing out of sight, alternately hiding or disclosing the crucial clues that would unlock the mystery of her father. She clearly had wanted to put Tom on the path towards DIN – without ever revealing how much she knew.

But why? Why lead them both on such a pointless charade, pretending not to know what she knew perfectly well?

He thought back to the meeting with Sid Steiner, the almost absurd lengths they had gone to, first to find him and then to dredge up his memories. Rebecca had seemed no less baffled than Tom had been, desperate to know what Sid knew. She had been the same during the last visit to her father's flat, the secret papers hidden in the Aleph painting apparently as much of a revelation to her as they had been to him. Could all of that have been a sham? Or was this more complicated than that: had Rebecca known part of the strange, murderous life-story of Gershon Matzkin – but not all of it?

Tom rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked back at the hand-written pages in front of him. Sure enough, at least on the basis of this skim-read, Gershon seemed to be recounting only his work as an unofficial executioner of individuals – hunting down specific, named men who had once, just a few years earlier, been part of the Nazi killing machine. There was no reference to the bakery at Nuremberg and none to the water plot. Tom looked hard for the name of the man whom they had met just a few hours earlier, the Israeli president. What if Rebecca had, after all, harboured the crucial evidence Tom had promised when bargaining for their safety, evidence whose existence he had conjured from nowhere for the sake of a bluff? What if such evidence existed right here, rolled up in the barrel of her own fountain pen? But there was no sign of the Israeli's name. The man who was now the president of Israel, along with Plan A and Plan B, was unmentioned in the journal of Gershon Matzkin.

The ink on the last sheet was thicker and fresher and the handwriting spidered across the page. It was obvious that these lines had been added long after the rest of the journal had been completed. Gershon now wrote in the unsteady hand of an old man.

DIN's work finished many, many years ago. For nearly forty years, none of us has taken on any more of this duty. We tried to remove Mengele, but as you know, we failed. We came close, but not close enough.

Rebecca, I promised myself – for your sake and for the sake of our family – that I would stop. And I kept my promise to you. For all these years, I have only been a normal, loving father to you. I have certainly tried.

But a long time ago, I made another promise, a promise to a young woman just as full of life and of beauty as you are today. I never thought I would have the chance to honour my word to her. I thought it was too late.

Now I have the chance and I cannot let it pass. This is why I am going to New York. If you want to understand, you must do as I say – and remember Kadish.