Authors: Colin Bateman
I beamed at her again, but she didn't seem quite so happy. She made an odd kind of face at me, jutting her head forward and screwing up her eyes, which I took to mean
get on with it.
But there would be no hurrying. It was important to explain the background.
'However, they found it difficult to settle in Prague, and with the Communists coming to power, they very quickly decided to move on. They had some obscure family connection here, so this is where they came, to our Belfast, which at the time must have seemed like a smart idea. They were determined to blend in and so changed their name to Smith. Mark set up the company we all know today, Smith Motors, while Anne turned to education, teaching dance both at a girls' secondary school and also in her spare time. Her success with this led to her forming her own dance school – and the rest, as they say, is history, all of it exhaustively chronicled in
I Came to Dance
.' The front cover appeared on the wall behind me, and was followed by a succession of photographs at regular intervals showing Anne with her students. These provided a changing background, calm and understated, while I delved further into dark matters. 'But you are no doubt wondering, how do we get from this lovely, copiously illustrated, value-for-money book to murder most foul? Well, ladies and gentlemen, it has all to do with Rosemary Trevor's accidental discovery that Anne had been in Auschwitz. Although it was not a secret, she had never publicised the fact, and in fact, somewhat bizarrely, made no reference to it at all in her memoir. Rosemary immediately realised that this was the
real
story, and attempted to get Anne to write it all down. From this moment on, her fate was sealed.' I nodded around the gathering. 'You see, certain persons knew that if Anne wrote in detail about what she knew, and particularly because her mental health was beginning to fail, she might forget herself and reveal the secret she had been keeping all of these years. What the killer or killers couldn't know was whether Anne had already revealed it, or exactly how much Rosemary knew. They decided that even if Rosemary or the people she spoke to didn't yet understand the significance of what they had heard, nevertheless they had to be eliminated. That's how important it was to them. At first this was just Rosemary herself, and then to play safe Manfredd as well – but once Daniel Trevor assigned a private investigator to the case, Malcolm Carlyle, and he began to uncover some of the background, he too became a target. After Malcolm was dealt with it all went quiet until Trevor, frustrated by lack of police progress, decided to employ, well,
me.
And that was really when things started to escalate.' I again nodded gravely. 'So what was this secret; what was so important sixty years after the fact, when most of those involved must surely already be dead, that so many murders had to be committed to keep it hidden?'
It was what we know in the trade as a rhetorical question. No hands were raised.
'Well,' I said, 'I visited Anne Mayerova and heard her story in her own words. I went over and over it in my head, but still couldn't decide what there was in it that was worth going on a killing spree for. And then one of our esteemed guests here tonight unwittingly gave me the clue that enabled me to solve
The Case of the Dancing Jews.
In fact, when he first walked into this store I thought he might actually be the killer – the clipped, efficient manner, the German accent – but then I relaxed totally when he reached up to lift a book down from one of my shelves and I saw the Auschwitz number tattooed right there on his arm.' I nodded down at Mark Mayerova. 'Perhaps you would care to . . . ?' I indicated my own arm. Mark Mayerova shook his head. 'Of course. This gentleman, in fact, introduced himself as Anne's husband Mark, and told me he'd come to thank me for taking the trouble to go and visit his wife in Purdysburn. It was only much later when I sat down to examine the facts of the case that the penny finally dropped. You see, I had jotted down the number tattooed on Anne's arm when I saw her, and I did the same for Mark. I'm like that with numbers. It's a little hobby of mine. I like looking for patterns. There are all kinds of patterns. You can find them anywhere. Not just numbers, but in tiles, and trees, and stars, and . . .'
My eyes fell on Jeff. He was shaking his head. I took a deep breath.
Concentrate.
'You see, as soon as I had those numbers, they just fascinated me, I had to know everything there was to know about them. I became obsessed by them. I learned that during the Holocaust, concentration camp prisoners received tattoos at only one location – Auschwitz. At first these were sewn into their prison uniforms, and then only for those who were selected for work details, not those going directly to the gas chambers. But so many were dying that there was no way of identifying the bodies after their clothing was removed, so the SS began to tattoo the bodies of registered prisoners in order to identify who had died. In the spring of 1943, the SS authorities throughout the entire Auschwitz complex adopted the practice of tattooing almost all previously registered and newly arrived prisoners, including female prisoners. In order to avoid the assignment of excessively high numbers, they introduced new sequences of numbers in mid-May 1944. This series, prefaced by the letter A, began with 1 and ended at 20,000. Once the number 20,000 was reached, a new series beginning with B was introduced. Some fifteen thousand men received B-series tattoos. Are you with me?'
Most of my guests had come to hear about Irish dance, and here they were stuck in the middle of the Holocaust. Some looked horrified, some looked blank; others were bored and playing with their mobile phones. But those directly involved were clearly fascinated.
'The point, my friends, is that when I saw Mark Mayerova's tattoo, and jotted the number down, I didn't give it a second thought. But as I looked into the history of Auschwitz, trying to define what the secret might be, it came to me that given the dates when Mark Mayerova was a prisoner there, his B-series tattoo could and should have been anything up to 15,000, so how was it that his number was actually B17007? The B numbers
didn't go that high.
Was it some kind of clerical error, perhaps?'
I looked down at Mark. No flicker of a reaction.
'Mmm,' I pondered. 'Germans, Nazis, not otherwise known for slipshod work. So, intrigued, I began to look a little more closely at Mark Mayerova, and of course that's not an easy thing to do, because the Nazis were aware as the war ended that they would be in deep, deep shit when it came out what they'd been up to in the camps. They did their level best to destroy whatever records they had. But some were ferreted away and over the years they've turned up here and there, and actually there's been a lot of competition between different organisations to get hold of them, organisations whose main purpose is to make sure that we never forget the Holocaust. It's kind of a friendly rivalry. I turned first to the International Tracing Service, which has managed to accumulate some fifty million pages of records. After that I consulted America's National Archives. Then on to several foundations in Israel. I had it confirmed, and reconfirmed, that a man answering to the name of Mark Mayerova died in Auschwitz in 1944. And there it is.' I clicked on the PowerPoint, where Mark Mayerova's name, and Czech origin, were very clearly listed on a photostat of a typewritten document. 'So how is it that Mark is still with us, here tonight? How did he miraculously escape? Have you anything to say, Mark?'
All eyes were upon him.
When he spoke, he was calm and collected. 'This is
preposterous
.'
His son Max suddenly jumped up and pointed an angry finger at me. 'Is this some kind of a joke? What the hell are you—'
'Just sit down.'
It was DI Robinson, up on the balls of his feet, speaking quietly but firmly. He moved a hand up to scratch his head, and in so doing, and quite deliberately, his coat fell open to reveal the holstered gun at his side.
'Let the man finish,' he said. 'You'll get your turn.'
Max glared at him. Karl leaned across and whispered something in his father's ear. The old man never took his eyes off me. Max reluctantly retook his seat.
I nodded at DI Robinson. 'So anyway,' I continued, 'I thought to myself, how could this be?
Another
clerical error? How bizarre. Naturally, I wanted to find out a little bit more. If Mark Mayerova was really dead, then who was this man who was claiming to be him, who was married to Anne Mayerova? And do you know something, for someone who established a garage here in the late 1940s, who has gone on to become one of our country's leading businessmen, he has been rather remarkably publicity-shy. There are many,
many
photographs of his wife in circulation, but virtually none of him at all. Of course we're all entitled to our privacy – but still. I thought it strange. So I went hunting. Or should I say, I engaged what I like to think of as my family of beloved customers to hunt on my behalf. You see, they come from all walks of life; they are butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers – well actually, mostly they are white-collar, but you get my drift. Amongst them is one particular little genius who works for the
Ulster Tatler,
a magazine that has been recording our social elite at play for decades. He was sufficiently interested in this case to take it upon himself to go through the huge mountains of back issues in search of Mark Mayerova. Nothing was filed, nothing digitised or on-line; he couldn't just type the name in, he had to go through every issue. The only guidance I was able to give him was the suggestion that the immediate post-war years might be his best bet, the years when this man who claimed to be Mark Mayerova was perhaps struggling to establish himself in business in our strange little country – he would have needed to make connections, to get his face known amongst our movers and shakers. Perhaps some society photographer managed to capture him unawares, or he was unable to back out of a hastily arranged group shot without it making him appear odd. And do you know something? My guy found it.' I clicked on the PowerPoint, and the front cover of the magazine appeared, with a photograph from inside it immediately beneath.
'Ulster Tatler,
October 1950, Belfast Round Table Christmas Dinner, there he is, Mark Smith, as he became, second from the left, beside his rather beautiful wife Anne – if you don't mind me saying?'
I nodded down at the still remarkably impassive old man. He looked even thinner in the photograph than he was now. His shape was not helped by an ill-fitting suit.
'I was thus armed with a photograph of the man claiming to be Mark Mayerova, all thanks to my wonderful customer, who unfortunately can't be with us tonight, but rest assured, a book token has his name on it already. So what next, then? Well, perhaps you're ahead of me already, but I got to thinking: if he's not the real Mark Mayerova, who can he be? Another prisoner? Why would another prisoner need to adopt a false identity? Perhaps he had something to hide? What if he had been a kapo, a prisoner appointed by the SS to make sure their orders were carried out? Kapos had no choice but to obey such orders, or they themselves would have been killed . . . but some certainly went about their business with more enthusiasm than others. And come liberation they couldn't suddenly revert to being ordinary prisoners again, for those prisoners they had beaten and bullied would surely want revenge. So
there's
a reason to adopt a false identity. My next step was of course to establish whether the man impersonating Mark Mayerova really was one of these dreaded kapos and if whatever he had done perhaps even qualified him as some kind of
war criminal.
And the simplest and most straightforward way of finding this out was to send this photograph to some real
experts
in the field. I e-mailed it to the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. Within two days, they responded.' I looked down at Mark Mayerova. Icily calm. His sons were sweating, though, darting little looks around, particularly at DI Robinson. 'They had absolutely no idea who it was in the photograph.'
I kept him waiting.
'However, I don't give up easily. As I said, there's a lot of competition in the Holocaust business, so I sent the photo out to everyone I could find. And you know where it ended up? Almost full circle, back with the Wiesenthals. Only this time with his lesser-known brother, Erich, who ran his own centre out of Basle, Switzerland. He's dead now, but his sons continue to fight the good fight. Once they got a look at the photo, they said, we've been searching for this guy for sixty years. But no kapo he.'
You could hear a pin drop.
'Of course they weren't just going to name and shame him on the basis of a photograph. They said, we have his fingerprints on file from immediately after the war when he was briefly arrested.' I clocked the PowerPoint and a copy of the original arrest sheet, with photograph and fingerprints, appeared on the wall. 'If you think it's him, they said, if he's really still alive, we're going to have to get a new set to compare. As it happens, I said, I believe I have his fingerprints already.'
I clicked the PowerPoint, and the next image came up.
'This is the Auschwitz Bible Mark Mayerova himself handed to me in this very shop just a few days ago. The fingerprints were a perfect match.'
I clicked again.
This time the photo showed Mark Mayerova as he had looked during the war.
'Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you SS Sergeant Major Wilhelm Koch. Otherwise known as the Mechanic of Auschwitz!'
So much happened in the next twenty seconds that it is much easier to list the events as bullet points. Which is quite fitting, really. In fact, it would be much easier to illustrate what happened by way of a graphic novel, because later Alison captured it perfectly, but there are copyright issues that prevent me reproducing her drawings here. Sufficient to say, it was chaotic for a while. These are
my
impressions of what happened:
• Karl Mayerova makes a run at me.
• DI Robinson takes him out with a rugby tackle.