Never Coming Back (33 page)

There was a campsite a mile south of Totnes with a small room next to its shop that had a computer and internet access. I'd been past countless times on the way along the A381, seen the
“Surf at the beach—then come back and surf the web!”
sign out front, and I knew this time of year it would be empty. They were a week short of closing for the winter so the whole place was deserted. I paid for a couple of hours, then pushed the door shut.

In the silence of the room, I started to realize how tired I was. It had been twenty-four hours since I'd last slept and I was beginning to feel exhaustion dragging at me, deep down in my bones. But I pushed it away and tried to press on, slotting the memory stick in and double-clicking on its icon. Carrie had called the stick “Diss/CL.” I'd expected to find Word docs full of notes, interview transcripts, perhaps some scans of history books; instead, it contained a single folder called “Pics.” There were fifteen photographs inside.

I opened them up.

As I saw the first, I felt the tiredness slip away immediately. Eric Schiltz, Carter Graham and Ray Muire were all in the center, arms around each other's shoulders, all smiling at the camera. They were young, in their midtwenties, all dressed in the same early 1970s fashion. It wasn't the original—the picture was of a frame with the original photograph inside.
This is it. This is the one Carrie must have taken in Schiltz's study
.

In its background a building was taking shape, at the midway point of being constructed, and as I double-clicked on it and zoomed in, I felt something else fall into place.
It's part of a series I've already seen
. This was Carter Graham's LA office, rising up out of the Californian dust. The other stages of its assembly were documented in the twelve photographs I'd seen behind the door in the library at Farnmoor. I wondered why he'd never made this one a part of it, then recalled something he'd said:
Eric e-mailed a picture—I don't know, maybe a year ago, maybe eighteen months . . . I remember it because it was taken around the same time as these ones—except his one had all three of us in.
Even if he'd wanted to include the picture of the three friends standing next to the office, he wouldn't have been
able to. Because Katie Francis had been into Graham's e-mail and deleted it.

Just like she or Prouse had done with Ray Muire.

Just like Cornell himself had done with Eric Schiltz.

I remember Eric and I were down there a lot, watching it all take shape
, he'd said to me.
We clubbed together and flew Ray out a couple of times too. They were good days
.

I looked around the edges of the shot.

The backdrop was dusty, without landmarks, but I'd read that Graham had chosen Marina Del Rey, a man-made harbor south of Venice Beach, for his LA office, and I knew from my time in the city that it had only opened in 1965. Five, six, seven years later—when the picture was taken—it would still have been a development, full of pockets of space. On either side, people and machines milled around—construction workers, the right angles of heavies and cranes, big piles of concrete slabs and huge metal girders.

My eye was drawn to the far left.

There were two men.

One, in a hard hat, was pointing to something off camera; it looked like he was talking to someone else, perhaps relaying instructions. He could have been the foreman.

Then there was the second man. He was in his early fifties, almost entirely obscured behind the foreman, only his top half visible. It looked like he'd been in the process of stepping back as the picture was taken. His shape had a gentle curve to it, as if he was leaning away. He was slim and well built, smartly dressed in a pale blue flannel suit, with a waistcoat buttoned up underneath. He had a tan, silver hair swept back from his face, and a thin scar—colored a deep pink—running down the left side of his forehead, from his hairline to the ridge of his eyebrow.

I clicked through to the next photograph.

It was a second camera-phone picture taken in Schiltz's study of the photo frame. Same resolution, same light. Except this time Carrie had cropped in on the man to the left-hand side. Graham, Schiltz and Muire were all to the right, Muire barely in it at all.

This had been the one she'd had in her notebook
.

This was the epicenter.

This was Daniel Kalb.

I sat there for a long time, just staring at Kalb, wondering who he was and why he might have been there. Why LA in the early 1970s? Why at the building site? Why did this photograph even matter to Cornell, forty-one years on? And then another thought came to me:
because this could be the last remaining evidence Daniel Kalb ever existed
.

I moved on.

The third photograph wasn't of Kalb at all. It wasn't of anyone. It was a black-and-white shot of a forest, tall trees reaching up into the sky from a vast bed of pine needles. There was a gap among the trees, probably about the size of a small barn, where nothing grew, and on the right-hand side of the picture, a path—maybe twenty feet across—cut through the forest, arrow-straight, its eventual end obscured in a bright shaft of sunlight.

The next picture was shot across a bed of grass; a meadow of some kind. On the other side, I could make out the red roof of a bungalow, a chimney, a street light outside the front window. I clicked through. The fifth photograph was another shot of the same meadow, but this time it was higher up off the ground, and I could see more of the house: a little square of front garden, another building to its right with a pale blue roof, and—at the top of the shot—telephone wires, birds perched on them, one after the other. There was something else too: among the grass, half obscured but not covered completely, were railway tracks. There were two sets, one running parallel to the other. When I tabbed through to the next picture, I got an even clearer view: this one had been taken in winter, with snow on the ground, and the hard weather had compressed the grass, so that it seemed less overgrown and the tracks were more visible. It was shot from a different angle: down the lines, instead of across them. There was something else as well: to the left of the picture, a hundred feet from the bungalow, I could see a platform.

Suddenly, a memory flared.

Did I recognize this place?

All three photographs looked like they had been taken relatively recently—probably the last five to ten years. In the third, to confirm it, I could see a silver Skoda Octavia. In the bottom corner of each was a
stamp:
© Museum of Modern History
. I didn't know the location of the museum, but it was clear Carrie had taken these from its website.

I clicked through to the seventh picture, hoping to find another shot of the platform, but instead it was of something different: a group of five men sitting at a table. They were all laughing at something. The photograph was black and white, and looked older than the last ones. Much older. The men's hairstyles were short and severe, hair melded to their scalps and glistening with oil, and their fashion spoke of the 1940s or early 1950s. Behind them on the wall was a map, too fuzzy and indistinct to see in detail, that looked like Europe, from the western curve of the Norwegian coast down to the Franco-Italian border and east into Russia, as far as the Ural Mountains. In the center, hands flat to the table, was Kalb.

He looked in his early twenties.

Over two decades before he had accidentally strayed into the shot behind Carter Graham, Ray Muire and Eric Schiltz, he looked different: younger obviously, with no hint of the gray that would mark him out later on, but he seemed more intense too. He wasn't laughing like the others. Instead, his mouth was turned up in a half-smile. Nothing more. He was the only one looking directly into the camera, his eyes so dark they were like ink spots on the film. There was no scar either. The one that had run from his hairline to his eyebrow wasn't a part of him then. It must have come later on.

I moved on to the next.

It was a posed shot of Kalb, probably taken in a studio, but there was no way to tell for sure. He was about the same age as in the previous picture—twenty, twenty-one—but the definition had become fuzzy over time, and the background was just a wall of black. He was looking at the camera, the view of his face the clearest it had been in any shot I'd seen of him so far: hair parted in the middle and slicked down either side, not even a hint of a smile. Still no scar. He was clean-cut and handsome, despite his sobriety.

Then I noticed something.

On the right were a couple of small white blobs, running diagonally against the indistinguishable darkness of his clothes. I selected the area and zoomed in. Two squares.

Silver collar pips.

He's wearing a uniform.

The memory flared again, but this time more clearly: something Robert Reardon had said to me before we'd got cut off.
Her dissertation didn't become about the years after Yalta, it became about the years before it. Carrie had done a hell of a lot of reading: Soviet history, Polish history, the major beats of the Second World War
 . . . I zoomed back out and looked at Kalb again. And as I did, a dreadful realization broke like a wave.

I clicked through to the next picture.

“No,” I said quietly. “No, not this.”

Another old black-and-white photo, but this time not of Kalb. It was the place I'd first thought to be a meadow, except there was no grass on it now. Just the railway lines.

Because it wasn't a meadow.

It had never been a meadow.

A train was at the platform, and in the background I could see the silhouette of a guard tower rising up out of the earth, looking across the tracks. Out of the train spilled hundreds of men, women and children. Uniformed officers were waiting for them as they came off, a few gesturing away from the platform, to some unspecified point off camera. I thought of the picture I'd seen moments before of the pine forest; of the empty space where nothing grew.
That's where they were being sent
. It had never been a barn there.

It had been a gas chamber.

In the middle of the shot, watching everything, was Kalb.

She already knew about So
 . . . Reardon hadn't had a chance to finish what he was saying before we got cut off. But he didn't need to now.
She already knew about Sobibór
.

The Nazi extermination camp.

I put my phone back together, sliding the battery in and powering it on. I didn't care anymore. I just dialed the number and waited. Reardon answered after a couple of rings.

“Hello?”

“It's David Raker.”

“Mr. Raker. We got cut off earlier.”

“Daniel Kalb worked at Sobibór.”

A pause. “Yes.”

“Her dissertation was going to be about Polish history post-Yalta,” I said to him, letting it unfold, needing to hear it myself to get it straight in my head. “But then she saw that picture of Kalb, in the States in the early seventies, and she changed her mind. Like you said to me, she'd already done a ton of reading on Polish history, so she knew about the camps—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, all of them—and she knew about the men who had run them. She knew that Kalb had gone into hiding at the end of the Second World War. That changed everything. She turned her MA on its head and she went after him.”

“Yes,” Reardon said. “Yes, that's right.”

Reardon had probably seen the headlines early on—one of his students finding a man who'd helped send two hundred and fifty thousand Jews to the gas chamber. The hunt for the last Nazi.

Then something Healy had said to me surfaced in my mind: the old man on the beach, the man I now knew to be Kalb, had had scarring under his left arm.
It's a small surface area. Like, really small. Only about a centimeter squared. But whether he did it himself, or someone else did it to him, the knife went in deep. Like he was cutting something out
. I didn't need the full forensic report. I knew why the scarring was there.

“Was Kalb in the Waffen-SS?”

“Yes,” Reardon said. “How did you know that?”

“Because he had the SS blood-group tattoo.”

Some members of the Waffen-SS—especially early in the war—had their blood group tattooed on to a space near their left armpit. It allowed doctors to quickly identify their blood type in case a transfusion was needed and their dogtags were missing. But Kalb realized, after the war, that it was like having a target painted on him.

So he cut it out.

“How the hell did he end up at Sobibór?” I asked.

“We only have third-person accounts of a lot of this, but it looks like he started out as a guard at Dachau, then he was ferried out to the Eastern Front as part of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union. That's where he got his facial injury. After that, he was sent back to Germany to recover, then—for whatever reason—landed at the Hartheim Euthanasia Center in Austria, working for a man called Franz Stangl.”

Stangl. In 1942, he became commandant of Sobibór. A year later, he was running Treblinka. While Kalb was in the States in the early 1970s, swanning about a free man, Stangl was being put on trial for the murder of nine hundred thousand people. He'd been on the run until his arrest in 1967. I'd done stories on Simon Wiesenthal, the Austrian Nazi hunter; even interviewed him. He'd been the one who'd found Stangl holed up in Brazil.

“So Stangl chose Kalb as his deputy at Sobibór?”

“Yes.”

“How old was Kalb at the time?”

“On May 16, 1942, when Sobibór became fully operational, he would have been twenty-four. He was young, but very highly rated from what we can tell. Stangl chose him personally.”

That made Kalb ninety-four at the time of his death. He'd had a long life he hadn't deserved, but he'd gone out in a box, being sailed out to sea somewhere by Prouse. Yet, still, one thing remained unanswered: what connected him to Cornell?

“And after Stangl left for Treblinka?” I asked.

“Kalb ran Sobibór—until the uprising.”

The uprising
.

I'd read about it, but I let him fill in the blanks.

“On October 14, 1943, about three hundred prisoners managed to escape the camp. Most of them died—they were either shot, or killed by mines—but about fifty to seventy made it to the end of the war alive. Himmler wasn't impressed, as you might imagine, so he ordered all remaining prisoners to be killed, and then tore it down. The whole camp.”

“So what happened to Kalb?”

“Afterward, a lot of the officers there, and at Treblinka, were put on anti-partisan duty in Trieste in Italy. It was basically a death sentence.
Highly dangerous work. There had been an uprising at Treblinka too, a couple of months before Sobibór, so it was a kind of punishment for the soldiers; the price they paid for letting prisoners escape the camp. It was also an insurance policy for the Nazi hierarchy: if men like Kalb and Stangl didn't make it, they couldn't report back on what had gone on in any of the death camps.”

“And after the war?”

“No one knows. After he was posted to Trieste, he fell off the map. But it's probably likely he used ratlines to get himself out of Europe and across to South America. That's what a lot of the Nazi fugitives did: Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl himself. He got out and he stayed hidden.” Reardon paused, a quiet, contemplative silence on the line. Then, softly: “He might never have been seen again if it hadn't have been for Carrie.”

I looked at the picture on the monitor, the Jewish families being led off the train and away from the platform, the children desperately clinging to their mothers, and anger flooded my system. Then my eyes shifted to Kalb, who was standing there watching them. He disappeared in 1943 until a single photograph, taken in 1971, put him in Los Angeles. Then suddenly—forty-one years later—his body washes up on a beach in south Devon.

How the hell does all this fit together?

“When Carrie said she thought she might have found evidence that Daniel Kalb had been alive and well in America in the early seventies, well, you can imagine my . . .”

I tuned out and tabbed on to the next picture.

It was a top-down artist's impression of Sobibór. Then on to the next, a photograph I barely had the stomach to look at: bodies piled up in a heap, discarded like their lives meant nothing. Men. Women. Kids. Then the next: Kalb in another official photograph, this time in the uniform of the Obersturmführer when he'd been running the camp in 1943. He had three silver pips and a silver stripe on his collar. The background was blank, just a wall of gray, but the scar was visible on his face now.

What connects you to Cornell?

I sat there, staring at him.

And then a thought came to me.

It wasn't just the scar Healy had mentioned to me in the conversation
we'd had about the body on the beach. He'd also said that Kalb had had sand in his lungs.

Tiny traces of it. It's not local.

So where's it from?

Same story as the skin. Results not yet in
.

I thought of Carter Graham's Los Angeles office, rising up out of the Californian earth. I knew Kalb was in the States at that moment, possibly living there. I could put him in Marina Del Rey, in an actual location. But what if he wasn't actually based in LA?

What if he'd just been up for the weekend?

I thought of something Healy had spotted that very first day: the body had been frozen. You'd freeze a body to preserve it. You'd freeze a body if you were taking it a distance.

I took him out in that box
, Prouse had said to me, and suddenly it all started to fall into place. Kalb had been packed into a freezer box as a way to hide him. Cornell, for whatever reason, had decided to take Kalb's body on a five-thousand-mile trip.

That's why Kalb had traces of sand in his lungs.

Because he and Cornell had both lived in Las Vegas.

And Las Vegas was in the desert.