The Final Reckoning

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

Tom wasn't sure he felt Paavo Viren's muscles go rigid at the mention of that word. It could have been another trick of the mind, Tom imagining what was not there. But now Rebecca had the old man's sleeve rolled up to his elbow and she was staring hard.

Wolf. It had taken Tom a beat, no more, to remember that name. It had been one of the most chilling details in the Kovno journal of Gershon Matzkin. Indeed, it had been one of the few occasions when the Nazi enemy had a face.

As Tom felt the strain in his arms from keeping Viren immobilized, he tried to see again those handwritten lines. The Wolf had not been German; Gershon had been describing the son of one of the Lithuanian guards in the ghetto. The Jewish inmates had feared him especially – or perhaps that was, as Rebecca had suggested just now, merely the memory of those who had been children at the time. It was easy to see why the young would fear him so intensely, a killer and tormentor with the face of a boy.

When Tom had sat in the cafe around the corner from Rebecca's flat, reading the faded pages of Merton's journal, he had tried to picture the cruelty of this Wolf, the smiling, teenage sadist who had asked for the pleasure of punishing Gershon's sister, Hannah, for the crime of smuggling a crust of bread. He had stripped off the clothes of a girl his own age, beaten her with a truncheon, then forced himself inside her. Hannah was wounded. Not just her face, which was no longer hers. But her soul.

So this was why Gershon had broken his own rule, ending his retirement from the work of DIN. The Wolf was a special case, a personal score to settle. What had the torn pages, concealed in Rebecca's pen, said? 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.

No more than a boy, Gershon must have promised his older sister that he would avenge her, that he would, one day, make the Wolf pay for what he had done. Somehow he had kept alive the memory of that single act of brutality, even amidst all the killing and carnage he was to witness in the weeks and months and years that followed. He had seen such horrors, yet this one act had burned inside him.

Rebecca was peering intensely at Viren's forearm. Tom was trying to work out the expression on her face. Finally she spoke, uttering words that seemed to suck the air out of the room.

‘There is no scar.’