The King of Diamonds

CHAPTER 16

Trave crossed the Channel on the early morning ferry to Calais and then took the train to Antwerp. He had never been to the city before and was unprepared for the baroque grandeur of the central railway station, with its gilt and marble interior and huge metal and glass dome. It was like a cathedral — there was even a rose window above the entrance, surmounted, however, not by Christ in glory but by a golden clock. In Antwerp the trains ran on time.

Trave had obtained an address but no telephone number for Jacob Mendel from the lawyers who had acted for David Swain at his first trial two years earlier. The house was in the Jewish Quarter, which ran in a tangle of crooked streets south from the station. It didn’t seem too far on the street map that Trave had brought with him from England, and so he decided to walk. Almost immediately he found himself in a strange, utterly foreign world. It was the lunch hour, and crowds of Hasidic Jews thronged the pavements in their dark suits and white shirts, with curled sidelocks emerging from under their black felt hats. Everywhere was a hubbub of activity: cafes and synagogues and kosher delicatessens, and on Pelikaanstraat Trave passed by endless diamond shops with narrow storefronts and glittering wares watched over by morose merchants sitting perched on stools behind thick reinforced-glass windows.

Trave soon felt hopelessly lost amid a sea of trams and bicycles. The roads with their long Flemish names all seemed to twist and turn into one another, and he had just made up his mind to stop and ask directions when he looked up and saw that he was standing opposite the side street that he was looking for. Jacob’s house was halfway down — a nineteenth-century apartment building constructed around a small cobbled courtyard. There were names on the letter-boxes, but Mendel was not one of them, and Trave was about to start knocking on the apartment doors when a voice called to him from behind in a language he didn’t understand.

He turned around and found himself looking down at a small elderly woman with a bent back and a black scarf covering her hair. She was standing a few feet away in a low doorway under the entrance arch that Trave hadn’t noticed when he came in. She had a walking stick in her hand.

‘I’m English,’ he said hopefully. ‘I am looking for Jacob Mendel.’

Surprisingly the old woman seemed to understand.

‘No Mendel here. Why you want him?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘To talk to him about his brother. I’m a friend.’

‘Friend! Everyone says that,’ she said with a sneer.

‘Well, I am one,’ said Trave. ‘Jacob wants to find out who killed his brother, and I want to find out too. I want to help him.’

The old woman looked at him blankly and Trave realized with a sinking heart that she hadn’t understood a word he’d said. Her English was obviously very limited, and Trave didn’t know a word of Dutch.

‘Parlez-vous francais?’ he asked, switching to French, but the old woman ignored him. Instead she looked him up and down, staring intently, and then waved her walking stick toward his feet. For a moment he thought she was going to attack him with it, but then realized that she was giving him an instruction: ‘You wait,’ she said, and then turned around and went back through the doorway behind her.

She emerged again a minute later, holding out a big book, a piece of paper, and a pencil. Trave opened the book and found that it was written in incomprehensible lettering, which he assumed to be Hebrew.

‘I can’t read this,’ he said, pointing to the text and tapping the side of his head to try to make her understand his ignorance.

Impatiently she pulled the book back, closed it, and pushed the blank piece of paper down on top of the cover and made as if to write.

‘You write,’ she said. ‘Then you come back.’

‘When?’

‘Four,’ she said, holding up four fingers. ‘Maybe.’

Trave nodded and began to write:

Jacob — I am the police inspector who was in charge of David Swain’s case. Like you I do not believe Swain killed your brother. Perhaps we can help each other to find out who did?

William Trave

When he was finished, Trave caught the old woman’s eye as he handed the note back to her.

‘Please,’ he said, pointing to his chest. ‘I mean good.’

‘Yes, yes. Friend,’ she said, and Trave took comfort from the fact that at least she didn’t pronounce the word with the same derision with which she’d spoken it earlier. ‘Now you go,’ she ordered. And Trave went.

With more than two hours to kill, he wandered the streets in a state of distraction. Would Jacob come? Would he know anything? Trave had no answers to his questions. He began to feel hemmed in by the rows of tall medieval guild houses in the old town with their myriad of leaded windows, and so he headed west toward the river. Leaning on the parapet, Trave gazed out over the wide expanse of the Scheldt and watched as the afternoon turned from blue to grey in a moment as a bank of low clouds came funnelling up the river from the North Sea. He shivered suddenly, feeling the January cold in his bones, and turned to go back.

The old concierge was waiting for him under the entrance arch. ‘Badge,’ she said. ‘Show me badge.’

Trave complied, and she examined his credentials for a moment before beckoning him inside her doorway. Trave took off his hat and followed her into a surprisingly spacious room with two windows overlooking the main street through which the last of the winter sunshine was picking a golden, glowing path across the spotless wooden floor. There was no sign of Jacob Mendel, but on the other side of the room an old lady with bright blue eyes was sitting in a rocking chair beside a brightly burning fire. Trave could see that she must once have been very beautiful, but now her skin was wrinkled and pulled tight over the bones of her face so that it seemed as if she was made of antique porcelain, like the teacup she was holding in her hand. She was dressed entirely in black with her silver-grey hair tied up into a bun at the nape of her neck, and an enormous white cat lay stretched across her lap, apparently fast asleep.

‘Excuse me for not getting up, Mr Trave,’ she said in accented but otherwise perfect English, gesturing to an armchair facing her on the other side of the fire. ‘Mrs Morgenstein’s cat does not like to be disturbed. Would you like tea?’

Trave shook his head as he sat down, but the concierge handed him a cup regardless, before vanishing behind a curtain into the interior of the apartment.

‘It seems I have no choice in the matter,’ he said wryly. ‘Mrs Morgenstein was a lot more formidable earlier.’

‘Yes, she can be quite frightening when she chooses,’ said the old lady, smiling. ‘But it’s because she’s protective — she’s the kindest person when you get to know her. I miss her since we moved. And her cat.’

‘We?’ repeated Trave, looking perplexed.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector. I don’t mean to talk in riddles. I’m Aliza Mendel, Jacob’s grandmother. I expect you’re wondering where Jacob is?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s gone, I’m afraid. Where I don’t know. It’s nine months now since he left, and he is my last living relative, so you can understand why I am worried.’ Aliza screwed up her eyes, resisting a spasm of pain that momentarily contorted her features. ‘It is why I am here, Inspector: to ask you if you find Jacob to give him a message from me.’

‘What message?’ asked Trave. He wanted to help the old lady if he could. He remembered what had happened to Jacob’s parents, her son and daughter-in-law, in the war.

‘Tell him to come back to Antwerp and stop digging into the past. No good will come of it. I know that.’

‘I’ll give him the message if I find him, but I doubt he’ll listen to me. He’s a determined young man. I remember that from watching him at the trial when he gave his evidence.’

‘Yes — determined, headstrong, foolhardy. And obsessed too — obsessed with the letter Ethan wrote to him before he died. Jacob can’t stand it. That’s the problem. He can’t bear it that his brother wanted to tell him something but died before he had the chance. I suppose he thinks he could have saved Ethan’s life if Ethan had confided in him. There’s no basis for him thinking that, but he still feels it, and like you, he’s convinced that this man, Swain, had nothing to do with Ethan’s death. He says it was a set-up, a conspiracy. And I’m sure he thinks the same about poor Katya’s death as well, which I read about in the newspaper, although I haven’t seen him since that happened.’

‘Why? Why does he say it was a conspiracy?’ asked Trave, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

‘Because Ethan wrote the letter from West Germany and not from England, and so Jacob says that Ethan must have discovered something there that led to his death. Jacob may well be right. After the trial in London a stranger came here to this building and told me to warn Jacob to stay away from the past. Jacob wasn’t here, fortunately, or there might have been violence, and after the man’s visit we moved.’

‘What did the man look like?’

‘Not tall; thin; small, cold, watchful eyes. He kept on his hat and had the collar of his raincoat turned up around his ears so I couldn’t see much of his face. He came in the evening, and it was getting dark outside my apartment, so I doubt I’d recognize him again. But I know what kind of person he was. I’ve seen men like him before when the Germans were here, people who worked for the security police. He spoke in Dutch, almost like a native. But not quite,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Languages are my speciality — they’re how I made my living once upon a time, and they’re also the one thing Jacob seems to have inherited from me. I don’t think the man who came here was Belgian by birth — German maybe.’

‘Did he give a name?’

‘No, of course not. People like that don’t have names,’ said the old lady, giving a hollow laugh. ‘He didn’t stay long — just long enough to make his meaning clear. And I was frightened — I don’t mind admitting that, and so I told Jacob. I wish I hadn’t now. The man’s visit just made him more determined to find out who killed Ethan. And by then he’d become convinced that Titus Osman was behind it all, which made me angry…’

‘Why? Why Osman?’ interrupted Trave, leaning forward in his chair.

‘I don’t know. It’s difficult to understand when someone’s so wrong-headed. I suppose it’s because Ethan went to stay with Titus to find out more about his parents and ended up dying in Titus’s house, and because he went straight back there after posting the letter to Jacob, but I think most of all it’s because Titus arranged for Jacob’s parents to escape from Belgium and they ended up getting caught. That’s the root of the trouble, you see — Jacob blames Titus for his parents’ deaths, and so he blames him for everything else as well. It was awful at Ethan’s funeral. Titus came to pay his respects, as was right and proper, and Jacob practically accused him of being a murderer in front of all the guests. Titus was very good about it, very kind and understanding, but it didn’t change what Jacob had done. He had shamed me, shamed our family, and after that it was never the same between us. But now, now I wish he would just come back.’

The old lady’s voice caught, and she took a small white handkerchief from the sleeve of her black cardigan and dabbed her eyes.

‘Why are you so sure Jacob is wrong about Titus?’ asked Trave. He felt a little ashamed of persisting with his questions when the old lady was so visibly distressed, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop their conversation just when it had become so interesting to him.

‘Because I wouldn’t be here speaking to you if it wasn’t for Titus,’ Aliza said quietly, recovering her composure. ‘He saved my life and the lives of my grandchildren, and for that he deserves our gratitude, not slander. He arranged everything: the false papers to get us into France and the guides who cut the wire and took us through the woods into Switzerland in the early morning with diamonds hidden in the heels of our shoes. Without the diamonds the Swiss would never have let us stay. At the border you had no chance — they handed you over to the Germans without a second’s thought, but in Zurich it was different. We paid money, and they put us in a labour camp. It was hard, but at least we were safe, and my son and his wife could have been there with us if Avi hadn’t been so stubborn, so pig-headed about staying in Belgium. It was Avi’s fault what happened, not Titus’s. He waited nearly a year, until the winter of 1943, and by then it was much harder to get out. Switzerland had become impossible, and so Titus tried to send them through Vichy and across the Pyrenees to Spain, but the borders were tighter and they were stopped, sent back

…’

‘Why did your son wait?’ asked Trave. ‘He must have known how dangerous it was here.’

‘He thought he would be safe because he and Golda were Belgian citizens, and for the first year after the deportations began in 1942 the Germans had a strict policy of only taking foreign Jews. It was easier for them that way. Almost all the Jews in this country were refugees, and exempting Belgian citizens kept the local population guilt-free. And the Germans were clever that way. They did everything gradually so as not to make us panic. They came in in May 1940, but it was two years before they made us wear the yellow stars. Registration was the key. Once we’d registered they knew where to find us when they were ready. They made a camp at Mechelen. Do you know where I mean?’

Trave shook his head.

‘It’s a pretty town — twenty kilometres from here on the road to Brussels. There are good rail connections into Germany and from Germany to Poland. And Mechelen’s where they told the Jews to report for deportation to labour camps in the east, except it wasn’t a labour camp they went to. You know where they went, don’t you, Inspector?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Trave, bowing his head, experiencing that same sense of empty despair that he always felt when he thought of the Holocaust.

‘Many Jews suspected too, I think,’ said Aliza. ‘They went into hiding, and when only a few thousand answered the work orders, the Germans began the round-ups, the razzias — beating down people’s doors, dragging them from their beds in the middle of the night.’

‘And yet your son stayed?’

‘Yes, for more than a year. Like a fool he believed he was safe even while the Shoah was occurring all around him. And he didn’t want to leave his home, his business — everything that he’d worked so hard to achieve.’

‘But surely he wasn’t able to carry on his business?’

‘He used gentiles to run it as a front. And that worked for a while. Until the Germans changed their minds and went after the Belgian Jews too. And then Avi and Golda went into hiding, sewed diamonds into their clothes, and got caught at the border. They were on one of the last convoys that went from Mechelen to Auschwitz, and they didn’t come back. Almost no one came back.’

Auschwitz: the dread name that Aliza had hitherto avoided using fell like a stone into their conversation, reducing them both to silence. Outside the sun had set, and the fire’s blaze had died down so that Trave could hardly make out the expression on the face of the old lady. She seemed far away, lost in places where he could not follow.

‘How do you bear it?’ he asked her. ‘This terrible suffering — how do you go on?’

‘Because I must,’ she said simply. ‘It is my fate, the fate of my people. I have a choice — to live or to die. I cannot choose to live and die.’

Trave shook his head, thinking of his own life — the death of his son, the loss of his wife, all the murdered men and women whose deaths he’d been called on to investigate, but it was all as nothing compared with what had happened in the war. Auschwitz was beyond measure — it stripped the world of meaning.

‘It’s not easy,’ said Aliza, looking at Trave as if she understood what he was thinking. ‘My life has been hard, but there’s been good as well as bad amid all the wandering. My name, Aliza, means “merry and joyful” in Hebrew. I think my parents called me that because they were so pleased to have me. My mother had had difficulties before — several miscarriages. Many times during my life I have thought of changing my name, but I never have because it is who I am, who my poor parents intended me to be, who I must try to be despite all the suffering.’

‘You said you wandered,’ said Trave. ‘So you are not from here?’

‘Antwerp? No. I came here from Poland after the first war, fleeing from pogroms, dreaming of America, but I ended up staying like so many others. I got work at the bourse, the diamond exchange, as an interpreter. I met my late husband there and we had Avi. And Antwerp became my home. I could have gone to Israel after the war, but I had to come back. They say that Antwerp is now the last shtetl in Europe

…’

‘Shtetl?’ repeated Trave, not understanding.

‘It means “little town” in Yiddish. Like one of your villages in England where everyone knows each other and everything is familiar and yet life is always fresh and new and colourful.’

Trave nodded, remembering the vivid bustle of the Jewish Quarter earlier in the afternoon.

‘But perhaps I was wrong,’ said Aliza meditatively. ‘Perhaps I was selfish. Maybe in Israel the boys would have looked forward rather than back. Every day in Switzerland they waited for their parents to come, and then in Antwerp they thought constantly of what might have been.’

‘Were they close, Ethan and Jacob?’

‘Yes, they were inseparable, even though they were so different. Ethan was two years older, and he was more like me I suppose — steady, patient, persevering — whereas Jacob is headstrong, ruled by his emotions, in love with extreme positions. After Ethan’s death he left our synagogue and became a Hasid, and then two months later he gave that up and said he was a Zionist. I don’t know what he is now. Or where he is…’

‘Has he written to you, telephoned you, made any kind of contact since he left?’ asked Trave.

‘No, nothing. As I said, our relationship deteriorated after Ethan’s funeral.’

‘Do you have a photograph of him? I saw Jacob once when he gave evidence in London, but a picture would help with finding him.’

‘Yes, I thought of that,’ said Aliza. She leaned forward to pick up an old weather-beaten black bag that was lying on the ground by her feet, and the white cat on her lap stretched and jumped softly down, looked quizzically at Trave for a moment, and then stalked away out of sight.

Aliza took a small framed picture out of the bag and handed it to Trave, who got up from his chair to take it from her.

‘It was taken two years ago,’ said the old lady. ‘And Jacob wears glasses now. He was always short-sighted like his father, but it got a lot worse at the beginning of last year. I’ve written my address and phone number on the back.’

A young, good-looking man with thin cheeks and wide eyes stared back at Trave out of the photograph. He was neither smiling nor scowling, but the line of his mouth was resolute and his chin was firm and set. He looked like a man on a mission, Trave thought — a soldier about to go to war.

‘I will look for him,’ said Trave slowly, feeling like he was taking a vow. ‘I can’t promise anything, but I will try, and if I succeed, I’ll tell him your message.’

‘Thank you. That’s all I ask,’ said the old lady, holding out her hand in farewell. ‘I feel you are a good man, William Trave. I think you have suffered too like me and so you understand what I have told you. May God go with you and be your guide.’