The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

‘Tom, get away. This has nothing to do with you.’ Rebecca's tone was different, harder than he had ever heard before. And yet there was something else in the voice too. Not just anger, but anxiety. The muscles around her mouth seemed to be trembling.

‘Rebecca, just talk to me. What are you doing?’

‘I mean it, Tom.’ She was restraining herself, striving hard not to shout. ‘Just turn around and go away.’

Tom looked over at Paavo Viren, who stood frozen in his suit. For the first time, Tom could see that his face, usually a model of statesmanlike composure, was drawn, ashen.

‘Rebecca, I've seen the photographs. Remember Kadish.’

‘So you know?’

Only then did he realize, in a fleeting moment of self-awareness, that he had assumed she did not know. He had wanted her not to know. He had told himself that, despite the pages stashed in the fountain pen, she had never fully understood her father's message, that she had not looked at the photographs of George Kadish. He had, Tom understood now, clung to the belief that Rebecca had demanded to see the Secretary-General for the sole purpose of hearing an official apology for the mistaken killing of her father. Now he could see the truth. He nodded to Rebecca. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘I'm sorry, Tom. I'm really sorry.’

‘Why are you apolog-’ And then he stopped himself. ‘Oh I see. Now I see very well, Rebecca.’

‘It's not like that, Tom.’

‘Is that what this whole thing was about? Is that what I was to you: a ticket into this place?’

‘Don't, Tom.’

His brain seemed to overflow with a whole new set of understandings, arriving in waves, one after another. She had wanted to be rid of him at first, but then suddenly she had softened, pleading with him for his help. He had thought that was simply because she was frightened by the break-in. Now he realized she had seen his potential: with Tom at her side, she had a chance of penetrating the heart of the United Nations, reaching the Secretary-General himself – with the chance to complete her father's unfinished business.

He remembered their kiss: it had come once he told her that he not only understood what her father and DIN had done, but that he agreed with it. Given everything that had happened to them, they were right: they weren't going to get justice any other way. Perhaps that was the moment she let down her guard, seeing Tom as a kindred spirit, a comrade in the struggle for vengeance. Or maybe it was more calculating than that. Maybe she had concluded that to rely absolutely on Tom to get her inside UN Plaza, she would first have to cloud his judgement…

When had her deception begun? Was it the moment he confronted her with evidence of Gerald Merton's meeting with the Russian and the discovery of an assassin's weapon? That was when she had thrust the notebook in his hand, telling him to read it in full. At the time, he'd assumed that had been aimed at making Tom and the UN back off from accusing Merton of being a hitman. But she had torn out the crucial pages: she was playing a game even then.

And the robbery? That was surely when she understood that this went way beyond her and her father and that she would need some serious help. Who better than a man who knew only those parts of the story she chose to reveal to him – a man backed by the heft of the UN and with the ability to bring her face to face with her ultimate target?

‘How many others know about this wild story of yours?’ Paavo Viren stepped back and raised himself to his full height, trying to take command of the room. His accent was somewhere between Scandinavian and international diplomat, that peculiar brand of English as global lingua franca, all traces of geography flattened out.

‘I've not told anybody,’ Rebecca said. ‘Tom worked it out for himself. Like I said, this is between you and me.’ And she turned to glare at Tom, her eyes imploring him to back off.

Viren spoke again. ‘Since Mr Byrne is here, perhaps you can explain to him what it is exactly that you want. Because I am still unclear.’

Rebecca leaned closer towards him. ‘I want you to tell me the truth. That's all you have to do. After all these years, it's too late for anything else. But the victims deserve that. They deserve at least that.’

‘You want me to start confessing to you, in this chapel?’ He gave a snort of mockery. ‘Are you some kind of priest?’

‘I've told you, we have the evidence. There is a photograph of you, herding Jews to their deaths in the Ninth Fort. No one noticed it before because no one knew your face, at least no one who cared. But now people care very much.’

‘I know this photograph.’ He paused then let his mouth widen into a joyless smile. ‘That surprises you, yes? Of course, I have seen it. Perhaps there is a vague resemblance, but nothing more than that. The idea that this would count as evidence is laughable. You're too young to remember the Demanjuk trial, Ms Merton. But perhaps you, Mr Byrne, remember it?’

Viren turned to Tom. It was a familiar manoeuvre, the attempt to co-opt the minor opponent, in order to isolate the major one. He wanted Tom to side with him against Rebecca.

‘I remember it.’

‘They called him Ivan the Terrible. Some car worker in Ohio.’ He pronounced the name as if it were an exotic, fairytale place, separating each syllable: O-hi-O. ‘All because of a photograph of him as a young man. Even the court in Israel could not convict him. A case of mistaken identity, that was the final judgement. And the Demanjuk photograph was of an adult. This picture you have is of a boy, a teenage boy. People's looks change so much between this age and adulthood. You don't have “evidence”. You have a baseless accusation.’

‘So why don't you walk out?’ It was Tom, standing in the shadows.

‘What?’

‘If this is all baseless nonsense, why are you still here? You've been talking to Rebecca Merton for-’ Tom made a show of checking his watch, ‘quite a while. If this was all slanderous rubbish, you'd have walked out by now. You'd have summoned your aides. Henning Munchau would be here, drafting a writ of slander. You'd have called Security. But I'm looking around and I don't see anybody here. Now why would that be?’

Viren lifted his chin, as if making a more thorough assessment of Tom Byrne. ‘I'm trying to be humane to Ms Merton. She's clearly a lady in some dist-’

‘Really? Or is it because you don't want anybody else, not even a security guard, to hear what she has to say?’

The SG began to pace, half-turning his back on Rebecca. The movement made her flinch. For the first time, Tom wondered whether the man was armed in some way – an absurd thought, he realized, as soon as he had formulated it. Even so, Rebecca had been brave confronting him alone like this. He was not young, that was true, but he was not frail; he could have overwhelmed her, he could have-

‘Do you know how old I am?’

The question hung in the air. The longer it lingered, the more it made Tom feel unsteady. The physical resemblance in the photograph had been so striking, he had not even considered basic matters like age and chronology. Now, though, his memory spooled back to the way he had come across the picture: the discovery of the name ‘Kadish’, the search in the photographer's online archive for an image that might connect to Gershon's story, then finding one that seemed to make sense of everything, right down to the word ‘March’ in the caption. A snapshot that showed at last why Gerald Merton had embarked on a final mission to New York, to the steps of the United Nations headquarters.

But perhaps Tom had made an elementary error: perhaps he had seen what he had wanted to see. Police officers did it all the time, following a pattern of apparent evidence to a conclusion that fitted their first assumptions. It was a universal, human failing; we are suggestible creatures. How else did optical illusions work, except by relying on the eye's habit of seeing what it expected rather than what was actually there?

Rebecca broke the silence. ‘Your official biography says you're sixty-eight.’

‘Good, Ms Merton. You have done your homework. My biography says I am sixty-eight because I am sixty-eight. And how's your mental arithmetic? Because mine is quite good and it says that I was five years old when the war ended. Five! We can agree that the man in your photograph was more than five years old, yes?’ The smile again, this time with more enthusiasm.

‘You lied about your age.’

‘What, for all these years? Do I look seventy-eight to you?’

Rebecca shot back. ‘My father didn't look his age either. He was fit and strong. He could have passed for sixty-eight too.’

Tom could feel his knees weakening. What if Rebecca was wrong? What if Gershon Matzkin had got it wrong? There had been no DIN organization any more, just an elderly, lonely Gerald Merton at home, probably scouring the internet, struck by the physical similarity of a newly public figure to a hated face in an ancient photograph. They were making a terrible mistake.

But Rebecca had not budged. Instead she was standing even closer to Viren, examining him as if he were one of her patients.

‘Oh, there's no hiding that, though, is there, Mr Secretary-General? That line around the ear always gives it away. You've had some work done here, I can tell.’

‘So what? A little cosmetic surgery is nothing to be ashamed of in this day and age. Just ask the prime minister of Italy. Human vanity is no crime, Dr Merton.’ Then, as if he could sense Tom wavering: ‘Besides, and this you must know already, I am not Lithuanian. I am Finnish, for heaven's sake. I served as the foreign minister of that country. I am the wrong age and the wrong nationality – which means you have the wrong man.’

Tom looked down at his feet. He would need all his lawyerly skills to resolve this situation. He would have to offer an apology, explaining that both he and Rebecca Merton had been under extreme stress, and that they withdrew their accusation, undertaking never to repeat it. None of this would be put in writing, lest such a document itself, even in refuting the charge, be taken as grounds for suspicion. And Dr Merton would waive any claims for compensation for the death of her father. Tom would sketch out the broad terms to the SG now, then work out the detail with Henning later.

He stepped towards Rebecca, aiming to place a gentle hand on her arm and guide her out of the chapel. He hoped she would not make a scene. But the instant he moved, she wheeled around and gave him a look that froze him.

‘Don't disappoint me, Tom.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don't think so little of me. Or my father.’

‘I don't under-’

‘Do you really think he would have come here, ready the way he was ready, if he wasn't certain? Dead certain, that this man is exactly who he thought he was? Do you think I would be here now if I wasn't certain?’

‘But it's just one photograph.’

‘Oh no, Tom. There are many more photographs of this man. He was one of the stars of the ghetto, weren't you, Mr Secretary-General?’

Tom looked at the SG – who had the same pitying expression fixed on his face – then back at Rebecca. ‘There are more photos?’

‘Yes, there are more. They weren't all taken by Kadish either. Lots were taken by the Nazis themselves. Half a dozen at least, some quite formal, some casual, the boys joshing around. Like a team photo. And young Paavo Viren, or whatever his name was then, always in the middle: the team mascot.’

‘But he's just sixty-eight.’

‘He lied about his age. Plenty of the young ones did. They got new papers, adding ten years to their date of birth. Once they were in their late twenties, it all sounded plausible enough. It was easy. Remember, they had a whole lot of people to help them.’

‘He's from Finland.’

‘He went to Finland, Tom. Not the same thing. Some went to Canada, some to Ohio,’ she glanced back at the SG, ‘some even went to Germany, for Christ's sake. They started over: new lives, new names. Finland was a good choice: hardly any Jews there, and certainly no survivors of Kovno. No one who would remember.’

Tom looked at her, imagining how she appeared in Viren's eyes: a crazed, deluded young woman. ‘Where is all this evidence, Rebecca?’ Tom hated how his voice sounded, sceptical, prosecutorial – as if he were doing the SG's work for him.

‘It was all there, in London, in a file. But it was taken. One of the first things they took.’

‘From your father's flat or from yours?’

Her delay in answering suggested she understood the significance of the question. ‘From mine.’

‘So you've known this all along.’

‘My father told me what he was doing before he went to New York.’

Tom nodded, a gesture that was not meant to convey acceptance so much as a pause, a timeout in which he could digest what she was telling him. ‘And what else did you know, Rebecca?’

‘I knew about DIN. But not the rest, I swear. The break-in made no sense to me. The bakery, Tochnit Aleph – I never knew anything about that. You have to believe me.’

‘It makes no sense, Rebecca. Why would your father tell you about DIN and keep the rest secret?’

‘I've tried to work that out, Tom, really I have. All I can think of is that my father was ashamed. Plan A was random. It was indiscriminate. The DIN I knew of only went after the guilty. But if I knew about Plan B I'd find out about Plan A. And if I knew that, then I think my father believed I'd stop loving him.’

Viren cleared his throat, as if he were politely requesting his moment at the podium. ‘You say this so-called “evidence” has vanished? It has been stolen?’

Rebecca did not answer. Tom said nothing.

‘So we are back where we started, correct? Back with a wild claim?’

Tom was struck again by the simple fact that Viren was still here. Rebecca did not have him at gunpoint; she had no physical leverage over him at all. Yet here he still was. Why?

Rebecca now walked back a couple of paces, coming closer to Tom. Once there, she faced the SG and raised her voice a notch. ‘I'll leave you alone. I'll drop these claims. I'll never make them again.’

‘Dr Merton, I'm glad to hear-’

‘On one condition.’

‘What? What condition?’

‘That you let me examine your left arm.’

The features of Viren's face remade themselves, from initial confusion to horrified indignation. He looked aghast. ‘How dare you suggest such a thing. Do you have any idea who you are addressing? I am the elected representative of the entire world community!’

But still he didn't leave. What was he frightened of? Did he fear that if he stormed out, Rebecca would rush into the lobby of the UN and start shouting that the SG was a Nazi war criminal? She would be bundled out by Security and that would be the end of it. Why did he care what she said?

Was he waiting for something that would change her mind? And then a new thought struck. The SG was waiting for him, for Tom. If he, her escort on this trip to New York, agreed that Rebecca was just a traumatized, grieving daughter, then her claims would be discarded. But if he, a former senior lawyer at the UN, lent her any credence then the charges would gain at least some currency. And mud like this needed to be hurled only once to stick. Tom wondered if the new Secretary General was one of the few people in this building who did not know Tom Byrne's history: otherwise, he surely would have known what the Israeli president had known – that any claim Tom Byrne made about anything could be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Mafia hack.

Now Tom understood. He had been forced into the role of referee; the SG wanted Tom to agree with him that Rebecca Merton was a maniac. Only then would he risk stepping back into the outside world, letting this woman rant and rave with her accusations.

‘I think you should let her see your arm,’ Tom said softly. ‘Then this thing can be over.’ And he stepped forward and took hold of Viren's left wrist. The Secretary-General desperately tried to remove his arm from Tom's grasp. But he did not shout or scream.

‘OK, Rebecca,’ Tom said, suddenly aware that he was assaulting an innocent, eminent old man – an old man with a shocking degree of strength. ‘Take a look at his arm.’

She stepped closer, her own nervousness clear. She couldn't look Viren in the eye, focusing instead on his wrist. Slowly, with great care, she pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, then began to unbutton the cuff of his shirt. She was cautious, like someone handling a suspicious package.

‘What are you looking for?’ Tom said, the words squeezed out between short breaths as he struggled to keep the older man restrained.

‘I'm looking for a scar,’ Rebecca said, her voice low and steady, a doctor in surgery. And then she looked up, so that she might fix the writhing Viren in her gaze. ‘I'm looking for the scar my father's sister left on the arm of a young man who raped her, a young man who terrorized the children of the Kovno ghetto – a young man they called the Wolf.’