Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
Evie’s bloodless response to the mysterious – and possibly
tortured – death of Wilhelm Frank annoyed McCall.
‘In my trade, we call this red meat.’
‘It’s gone off, McCall. It’ll poison you – and worry the
life out of Bea, too.’
He had arrived back from Germany that morning. Bea was doing
the Telegraph crossword in her chair by the drawing room fire. They exchanged
smiles and touched cheeks, nothing more. Evie was around so he had no chance of
asking questions Bea would not want to answer, even if she still had the full
power of speech. What he observed, though, was an almost mutually protective
closeness developing between the two women. Everyone fell in love with Bea,
eventually.
‘Don’t you see, Francis
did
know the significance of
what he was leaving me.’
‘How’s a bit of film of a man who died in a car crash
significant?’
‘So you don’t think there’s anything strange about Wilhelm
Frank’s death, either?’
‘You’ve no proof he was murdered.’
‘He just broke his own arms and legs did he? Lay down to die
like he’d been crucified and lo and behold, he’d once been secretly filmed by
Francis, too.’
‘That’s just how the skeleton was found.’
‘And I suppose it’s just another coincidence that
there was a copy of Bea’s photograph wedged in its mitt – ’
‘Pictures like that were ten a penny after the war.’
‘– and that
Minsky
happens to appear in the footage
of both these dead men?’
‘That’s your belief, McCall. Those blurry images aren’t
evidence he was there.’
He shook his head in disbelief. Evie tried softening her
tone.
‘Look, even if this conspiracy happened the way you say, it
was years and years ago and all those who might’ve been involved are either
dead or not the type to talk anyway. What’s the point?’
‘You might as well ask what’s the point of journalism.’
‘I’m not convinced it is just journalism, Mac. I think
you’re off on some very personal displacement activity.’
‘Spare me the analyst’s couch, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Look, Francis has just died. You’ve been ill, you’re upset
and confused – about Francis, Bea, your birth parents and whatever the future
holds. Your life’s turned upside down, Mac. You’re desperately trying to make
sense of it all but the last thing you need right now is a mission impossible
like this.’
McCall was out of patience. Evie was full of psycho-crap
because she could not get her civil servant’s head around what he was
uncovering. He left her in the kitchen and took refuge in the dacha on his own.
*
Gerry Gavronski’s background research on Arie Minsky
arrived. The Nazis murdered every member of his family. He had fought behind
enemy lines with British commandos in the Special Operations Executive and was
at the liberation of Belsen. Details of his rumoured covert role in the Jewish
underground were harder to find. But he was known as an objective,
independently minded reporter for various news organisations like the BBC.
Gavronski attached a cutting from the Baltimore Sun which
ran one of Minsky’s pieces when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956.
So this is “Socialism”, is it? I have seen for myself
what Moscow’s forces have done in the name of this great cause, not against
fascists or counter-revolutionaries but against the weak, the poor and the
defenceless who dared to question the puppet politicians in Budapest. And now
they lie, dusted with lime in the streets where they fell to the invaders.
The gallows and torture chambers of the Hungarian secret
police, once the stock in trade of the hated Nazis, are busy again under the
protection of “friendly” Socialist tanks. No doubt revenge will be taken for
those of their communist comrades whose bodies I saw hanging from street lamps.
Lynchings are ugly in any language but understand why some occur before rushing
to condemn.
Then Gavronski related an interesting rumour he had picked.
It’s hinted that Minsky was a bit part player in the Mossad
team which ambushed Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and brought him to Jerusalem
for the big Holocaust trial in 1961. What’s for sure is that he’s divorced, no
children, not involved in journalism anymore. Sits on the board of a publishing
house in Akko where he lives. Hope this helps.
It did, rather. Arie Minsky grew more fascinating by the
day. Two Nazi nobodies had come to violent and officially unexplained ends. If
Francis’s last reel could be linked to a third death – and if Minsky made
another guest appearance in it – McCall was in business.
But until then, it was proving to be a tantalising Russian
doll of a story, each clue having yet another hidden inside itself till he
might go mad at not knowing.
Why had such insignificant Nazis been selected and not their
more obviously culpable leaders? Why had a BBC stringer risked his life and
freedom to target them? And why had a British diplomat like Francis, and his
wife, become his accomplices?
*
McCall knew he should be grateful to Evie for spending time
with Bea, especially till the builders finished. But his mind was elsewhere,
not least on all the administrative papers Edgar Fewtrell needed signing for
the property and wealth Francis had willed him. Fewtrell asked if his trip to
Germany had been fruitful.
‘How do you know I’ve been to Germany?’
‘I’m not sure. Beatrice probably told me.’
‘But she wasn’t supposed to know.’
‘Well, maybe it was your delightful Evie.’
McCall let this pass. He drove back to Garth to re-examine
the third reel in the seclusion of the dacha. Francis must have been about nine
or ten floors up to get the aerial pan across a grid of streets in what looked
like a Mid West prairie city.
It showed a commercial district of early brick-built
skyscrapers with heavy traffic driving on the right hand side. He’d had
enlargements made of every frame which might possibly identify the location. An
entire wall of one building was an advert for the Garry Finance Corporation.
But it revealed neither telephone number nor address. US directory enquiries
had no listing and three hotel signs and street names were all too blurred to
read.
The only positive result came from a blow-up of the Odeon
Cinema’s frontage. It had been showing The Bridal Path which his film guide
said was a British-made comedy released in 1959. At least that gave McCall a
base-line date. He retrieved Bea and Francis’s old passports from the box file
Fewtrell had given him. They had criss-crossed Europe in the 1950s yet neither
was in the United States during that decade.
But on May 27 1960, Francis entered Canada. Eight weeks
later, so had Bea. McCall had been looking in the wrong country.
From his shoebox where memories were kept, McCall retrieved
all the birthday cards and letters they had ever sent him. In September that
year, Francis wrote him a short letter with a postcard of a Cree Indian, daubed
in war paint.
Dear Mac
Won’t be long now. We’ll be home for Christmas,
loaded with presents and shan’t we have a lovely time? Canada’s such a big
place, mostly wilderness. I’m still desk-bound, so haven’t seen any cowboys or
Indians worth speaking of. How are you getting on with your lessons at Mr
Whackmore’s Academy? Can’t wait for term to be over, I’m sure. Still, keep at
it, little friend. Bea sends all love.
As always,
Francis.
It was written on notepaper from Canada’s Air Command
Headquarters in Winnipeg, Manitoba. McCall rang the international operator and
called Winnipeg’s main library that evening. He asked if a company called the
Garry Finance Corporation ever operated there. It had – in the downtown Lindsay
Building at the junction of Ellice and Notre Dame avenues. Then he called the
Winnipeg
Free Press
cuttings library to check which reporter worked the crime desk
in 1960.
‘That’ll be our Mr Ted Cleeve. He was the crime desk.’
‘Does he still work on the paper?’
‘No, he retired a while back but he’s still knocking about
the city.’
Within an hour, he had spoken to Ted Cleeve at home. He
promised to dig out his old shorthand notebooks and ring back collect. Cleeve
was as good as his word. Not only that, he remembered something which had not
made sense all those years before. McCall knew then he would be going to Canada
– however much Evie objected.
*
McCall walked into the drawing room and for a painful
instant, thought he was seeing Helen again... that tossed-back laugh of hers,
the marmalade hair and Bea all smiles, eyes full of the grandchildren she craved.
Evie brought it all back, made it real, made it seem possible once more – to
Bea, at least. McCall felt a splinter of resentment that they appeared such
friends.
They looked up at him and went quiet, as if he had
interrupted something private from which he was excluded.
‘Hello, Bea. You’re seeming much better.’
Bea could not help her smile being twisted but McCall saw
the suspicion in her face. She began writing on her pad.
Where been?
‘I’ve been away on a story for a few days.’
Where?
‘London... Germany.’
Why there?
‘I have to see people, got to go where they live. It’s what
I do, remember?’
Bea’s frustration at being unable to write words as fast as
they came into her head was obvious. She retired early to bed. Over supper
later, McCall told Evie he had now established Francis’s third reel was filmed
in Canada. She was not impressed.
‘So was there a mysterious death there, too?’
‘You’ll find out if you come with me.’
‘You’re not seriously going, are you?’
‘Why not? I’ve found this old reporter who knows part of the
story.’
‘And what about all the stress and grief this could cause
Bea?’
‘If she’s not told, she won’t know.’
‘Come off it, Mac. She knows you’re digging away on Minsky.’
‘What’s she said about him?’
‘Nothing – but she’s not stupid. She knows you’re up to
something – ’
‘– because there’s a great TV show in all this stuff from
Francis.’
‘And that’s more important, is it – another Golden Turd of
Cracow for McCall’s mantelpiece and to hell with the consequences for anyone
else?’
Evie began to clear the table noisily.
‘Well, I’m going nowhere with you. In fact, Bea’s asked me
to go on a cruise around the Med and I’ve said I will.’
‘A cruise... you and Bea? What’s that all about?’
‘You just don’t get it, do you? You just don’t see you’re
setting about destroying something neither of us ever had.’
*
McCall did not need a shrink to tell him he was always
haunted by a fear of rejection or that all his relationships ultimately
foundered on questions of trust and betrayal. Evie was supposed to be his ally
in the search for his real parents and why he had been lied to about how they
were killed. Yet she, too, had switched allegiances and gone over to the other
side. It was not by chance his stepmother always got her own way. Bea could get
the devil pissed on holy water.
The evening was still light so McCall went back to the dacha
where the newly leafing trees were shifting in the spring wind. He pinned up
the photographs of Bea and Minsky, the concentration camp victims and the nine
Nazi soldiers with guns. He checked again with a magnifying glass and Rösler
definitely was not one of them... unless it was him who had taken the picture.
But Wilhelm Frank, the wood carver, stood second from the
right – solidly built, broad at the shoulder. It would not have been easy to
persuade such an individual to do anything against his will, let alone walk to
an agonising death in a maze of disused tunnels under a black mountain.
How the hell was it done? And why kill him and apparently
let his comrades live?
McCall decided to stay in the dacha. He would not sleep but
maybe Francis’s spirit might take pity and guide him through the night.
No one escapes their history. We are all pinned like
butterflies to a board by what has gone before.
*
The cruise liner
Aletha Delyse
slipped its berth and
cut into the Adriatic and Venice quickly sank in its wake. Ahead lay Mikonos,
Athens and Palma. Evie sat on the upper passenger deck with Bea – movie star
glamorous in one of the ship’s wheelchairs. She wore dark glasses, floral
headscarf and a pale yellow orchid cotton trouser suit with Persian slippers
stitched in golden thread. Evie, in jeans, smocked peasant top and wide-brimmed
straw hat to keep the sun off her freckled face, was happy to be in Bea’s
shadow.
A warm breeze blew from the Dalmatian coast. Bea seemed to
have blood in her veins once more, believing she might now cheat death and be
born again at the end of this ocean.
As with her and
Arie, so Evie carried burdens it was time to set down – if only to someone
without the full power of speech. So Evie admitted how torn apart she still
felt at her mother’s disappearance and for unwittingly hurting the hapless
Phillip by agreeing to marry him.
Bea responded with her eyes alone, wrote nothing on her pad
and only smiled when at last the long confession was over. Of Bea’s stepson and
Evie’s possible role in his life, no mention was made.
*
McCall’s plane made landfall over the polar
desolation of Labrador. He could see countless little lakes sequinned on a vast
shield of iron bedrock below. It looked a place of perpetual wind, inhabited by
creatures howling from the wastes of tundra and ice which they say was God’s
gift to Cain. For McCall, four miles high and jammed into a metal tube with two
hundred strangers, the future had never felt so uncharted. He still was not
well enough to return to work yet had assigned himself a story... a story of
which he and his were somehow a part. The usual safety barrier between the
professional and personal wasn’t there. Nor was Evie around to keep him
grounded in reality. Yet Francis had willed it all.
Toronto was still three hours away. He would change planes
there for the final sixteen hundred miles west over the Great Lakes of Huron
and Superior and the prairies of Manitoba then to its capital, Winnipeg.
Hang on, little friend. Keep pretending.
That is what Francis would say.
*
Arie Minsky’s morning exercise for his gammy leg was to walk
from his house to an Arab café near the green-domed Great Mosque of Akko. They
served cold lemonade with mint and he would sit across from its stone-flagged
courtyard and listen to the doves and sparrows in the waving palms. A muezzin
summoned the faithful to prayer from the tapering minaret which dominated this
city of a thousand years and more. It was April and the air was sultry and
scented by the blossoms of pomegranate and henna.
Arab women, head-to-toe in black, flowed like liquid between
the bazaar’s silken cascades of rainbow-coloured dresses, shivering on racks in
a breeze from the pewter sea. Akko’s ancient city walls had never been high
enough to repel the ships of the invader... Greeks and Romans, Crusaders, Turks
and the British all came, conquering and killing. In these times, Jews learned
that whoever does not want to be defeated has no option but to attack.
Minsky was untroubled by this philosophy early on. It was
his own, and that of the Irgun – and therefore, his fellow saboteurs, hanged by
the British from a girder in an Ottoman citadel just along Al-Jazzar Street.
But if their blood had irrigated the nascent state of Israel, all the ensuing
wars of survival gradually undid the psyches of those living under the constant
threat of death
Yet to admit such a psychological cost would be to appear
weak, uncertain that the cause was right. So any emotional damage to Arie
Minsky and those like him was held within their heads till in time, what
remained became so brittle it could collapse at the slightest touch.
He finished his drink. An important phone call was expected
and he needed to get home through the hewn-out passageways and lanes of the old
city. Here was shade but heat, too, places where the scent of flowers gave way
to wood smoke and sewage and the snarling of emaciated cats, fighting in the
dirt for their lives.
*
McCall met Ted Cleeve in The Second Cup coffee shop in
central Winnipeg. Cleeve came over as an irreverently cynical soul. They talked
first about stories they had covered and bastards who crossed them. It was a
ballet of the bullshitters, each weighing up how much to trust the other.
Cleeve only got to the point as they walked to the city’s main library under a
granite-grey sky threatening snow from the Rockies.
‘OK, McCall. Here’s what I know. The cops tell us a guy’s
strung himself up in his garage out in this little town, Carmen – miles from
any damn place. A bunch of us reporters head out there to interview the wife
who found him. Ella Virbalis she was called. Pretended not to speak English
though we knew she was a clerk in a furniture store downtown in Winnipeg.’
‘Maybe she was in shock, Ted. Must’ve been pretty grim to
find him like that.’
‘Yeah, sure. Anyway, her daughter’s there and we’re getting
nowhere and it’s all a bit tense. The kid wants us to go so I ask to use the
bathroom. When I come out, I’m on my own with the wife and I snatch a last
question – why did she think her husband would kill himself?’
‘And what did she say?’
‘It takes her off guard. She stops dabbing her eyes and
stares at me and says in English, “He didn’t. My Yanis didn’t tie the knot
himself. He’d have left me a note”.’
‘Maybe she needed to believe he wouldn’t do such a thing.
Made it easier to bear.’
‘No, McCall. I was there. She
meant
it, believe me.
She
knew
... like she knew immediately she should’ve kept her mouth shut
to me.’
‘But you asked her what she meant, yes?’
‘Sure I did but she looks real scared and pushes me out the
door.’
‘What about the police investigation? Was this a lead they
followed up?’
‘You’re joking – those guys couldn’t find a cat up a tree
back then.’
‘But there must have been an inquest.’
‘Of course but the cops haven’t found any evidence of any
foul play so everyone agrees old Yanis Virbalis finished himself off for
reasons no one could figure out.’
The library’s file copies of the
Winnipeg Free Press
from the autumn of 1960 told of espionage and paranoia – US spy planes over the
Soviet Union, Polaris nuclear subs operating out of Britain and a political
crisis developing in Cuba.
They were dangerous days but history already. McCall found
Cleeve’s story, buried below the fold on an inside news page.
The widow of a Lithuanian-born man found hanged in his
garage told the Free Press that she did not think her husband would have killed
himself.
‘Yanis wouldn’t have tied the knot’ said Mrs Ella
Virbalis at her home on 9th Street, Carman.
The couple, who have a 14 year old daughter, Rosa,
came to Canada as penniless immigrants after the war to build a new life. Mr
Virbalis, aged 55, worked at the railroad depot in Carman where his colleagues
said he was well liked and had no reason to take his life that they knew of.
Mrs Virbalis, employed three days a week as a clerk at
Wilson’s furniture store in Main Street, Winnipeg insisted if her husband had
intended to kill himself, he would have left a note. She telephoned him less
than two hours before she found his body when he seemed in good spirits,
according to Mrs Virbalis. Police are carrying out an investigation and would
not comment further.
The story carried a single column photograph of Virbalis. It
was the eyes which caught the attention – deep-set and dark, too close together
under such a wide forehead. He had cropped hair, receding, jug ears and full
rather full, womanish lips. Beyond that, he was an unmemorable face in the
crowd.
But McCall recognised him immediately. He was in Bea’s
photograph – the one showing the nine Nazi soldiers. Virbalis had stood next to
Wilhelm Frank, the wood carver... in whose skeletal hand the exact same picture
had been found.
More than that, Yanis Virbalis was the man Francis had
filmed in his final reel.