The Final Reckoning (15 page)

‘They'd have ended up jailing the entire male population,’ said Tom quietly, a memory of his own now surfacing. But Goldman was listening to only one voice: the one in his head, belonging to his father.

'At last it seemed as if they were going to get justice after all. And not simply by grabbing it for themselves. They had a hard debate but concluded that, if justice was truly on its way, they had no business carrying on as judge, jury and executioner. They decided to lay down their weapons, to disband and go their separate ways, start their own lives. My father and yours came here to London. Some went to America, many to Israel. They believed it was all over. But it was not to be.

He paused, as if remembering himself. ‘Are you fond of statistics, Mr Byrne?’ He did not wait for an answer. 'I am. I like nothing more than a neat table of numbers. My father was the same way. “One number can tell you more than a thousand words.” That's what he would say. There's a table in a book
by Raul Hilberg, one of the great historians of the Holocaust. A very revealing table. My father would look at it often. You just put your finger on the column of numbers, move it downward and there you are: it tells you all you need to know.

‘It starts off with the
Fragebogen
, the “registrants”, those thirteen million or more who were part of the Nazi apparatus. Then you move your finger down a line, to the total number of men charged. And this figure, you notice, is much smaller: just three million four hundred and forty-five thousand one hundred, if I recall. The figure on the next line relates to those who, having been charged, were released without so much as a trial. A blanket amnesty, if you like. It's large, this number: two million four hundred and eighty thousand seven hundred. They just walk away. If you have a head for mental arithmetic, as I do, you can work out that the gap between those last two numbers is just shy of a million. That is the number of Nazis still in the prosecutors’ sights.

'How are they punished? Just look at the table. Precisely five hundred and sixty-nine thousand six hundred of them are fined. The slate is wiped clean with a cash payment. Go down to the next line and you see that a further one hundred and twenty-four thousand four hundred men had to suffer the indignity of employment restrictions. Unfortunately, for certain jobs, being a Nazi mass murderer was an immediate disqualification. The same was true of eligibility for public office.
Twenty-three thousand one hundred Nazis were told their political careers were on hold.

‘If memory serves, another twenty-five thousand nine hundred had their property confiscated. I say “their” but this was property acquired through a rather unorthodox route. Those deemed guilty had seen their neighbours in Hamburg or Frankfurt dragged off to the camps, shed a tear – and then ransacked their homes once they were gone.’

Goldman's eyes were bright. 'The table then speaks of “special labour without imprisonment”: I suppose we would call that community service now. Thirty thousand five hundred get that. And nine thousand six hundred are sent to labour camps.

‘If you tot it all up, it leaves about ninety thousand convicted Nazi war criminals who were meant to go to jail for various sentences of up to ten years. But then we look at the very last figure in the table, the most important number of all: “Assignees still serving sentence”. And that figure is,’ he paused, as if expecting a drum roll, 'three hundred.

'Now remember these statistics were compiled in 1949. What this little table is telling us, is that within just a few years of the war fewer than three hundred of those Nazis were still behind bars. Do you see where this is going, Mr Byrne? Out of more than thirteen million men once deemed complicit in the horrors of the Third Reich, we have eleven death sentences at Nuremberg and three hundred men in jail. That's all.

‘And when the West Germans took over responsibility for war crimes prosecutions, they were no better. They convicted, to take just one example, Wilhelm Greiffenberger for involvement in
eight thousand one hundred
murders – and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment and three years' “loss of honour” even though the court found he had a role in the deaths of
eight thousand one hundred
people. I could name cases like that for a week and still not run out. Almost every man convicted melted back into German society. They walked free from those prisons, as if they were guilty of nothing more serious than a parking fine. They were so arrogant, so certain there would be no consequences, they didn't even hide what they had done. They were in the phone book.

‘And this, you see, is the dirty little secret of the Second World War. We're told, over and over again, that the attempted extermination of the Jews was the greatest crime in human history – and yet hardly anybody was punished for it. The guilty men got away with it. It was a crime that was unavenged, a genocide for which there was no reckoning.’

At last, Goldman slumped back in his chair; he seemed exhausted, emptied out, like a medium once the spirit has departed.

Rebecca and Tom sat in silence. It was Rebecca who spoke first.

‘And that's why DIN reformed.’

‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘In 1952.’

‘And the killing started then. Except now it was
all over the world. Wherever the Nazis were hiding. Your dad and my dad.’

Goldman nodded. 'I found one of their lists. I was looking for something else, and I came across a file for his poker club. That was the cover they used: five Jewish men who met on Thursday nights to play poker. My father always said it was a secret society because if their wives knew how much they gambled there'd be hell to pay. So we could never know who was in it. Not even my mother was allowed to know.

‘When I saw the file I had to look. I wanted to know about this secret gambling world of my dad's, a man who did nothing more interesting than sell ladies' outerwear to department stores. Little did I know.’ He gave a rueful smile. 'Inside the file was a wad of foreign currency, several passports and a list of German names, crossed out one by one. I understood immediately. I was twenty years old, I think.

‘We had a fierce argument. We never stopped having it, from then until his dying day. I said I would alert the authorities. I was a newly qualified lawyer, an officer of the court. It was my duty.’ Tears began to appear in his right eye. ‘But I never did. I should have told the police what I knew, that my father was involved in a criminal gang.’

‘But they were hardly murderers,’ Tom said quietly. ‘They were ensuring that a grave crime did not go unpunished.’

Goldman looked at him anew. ‘I confess I am
amazed to hear a man like yourself speak in such a manner, Mr Byrne.’

Tom could feel the veins on his neck begin to throb. His anger was rising: he would have to repress it. I'm sorry. But ‘I'm just thinking of what you said a moment ago. That the men behind this monumental crime got off scot-free.’

‘Mr Byrne, as you should well know, I was merely doing the job of an advocate, putting the case for DIN as best I could, so that you might understand it.’ The steel shutters were down again now, the moment of communion with the spirit of his dead father vanished. ‘The right course of action was the law. That was the course these men should have pursued.’

‘Except the law often leads nowhere. We both know that, if we're honest, don't we, Mr Goldman?’ Tom could hear a tremor in his own voice. ‘And isn't that because, when all's said and done, there's no such thing as “the law”? We like to imagine some wonderfully impartial, blind goddess of justice – but that's no more real than fairies at the bottom of the garden, is it?’

‘Tom—’

‘No, Rebecca, I know about this at first hand.’ His temperature was rising, unwelcome memories surfacing. ‘We think there's law. But the truth is, there's only politics. And politics never finds it convenient to pursue the guilty.’

‘Tom, really—’

‘I'm sorry, but it's true. The bigger the crime,
the less convenient it is. When there's a clash of “reconciliation” and justice – and there's always a clash – reconciliation wins out every time. I've seen it again and again.’ There was that crack in his voice again, he could hear it. ‘So, inappropriate though it might be for a lawyer to say this, I have some sympathy for what this group, what DIN, were feeling. They had seen their whole families wiped out. Of course they wanted to hunt down those responsible. The law had let them walk free. I do wonder if, on this point, Mr Goldman, your father got it right and you got it wrong.’

Goldman was about to respond, when Rebecca stood up. Glaring at Tom she cried, ‘That's enough.’ Her eyes were burning. The unspoken reminder that she had just lost her father shamed them both into silence.

In the calm, she turned to Goldman and asked in a manner that conveyed both patience now exhausted and the desire for a brief, straight answer to a straight question, ‘Is there anything else at all, any other element in the DIN story, that you haven't told us? Some secret perhaps which someone, somewhere, might not want to come out?’

Tom, his pulse still throbbing, could see that Goldman was weighing his answer. As he leaned forward, about to speak, the air was filled with the brain-splitting sound of an alarm: not some distant siren, but one coming from inside the building.

Jay Sherrill would have admitted it to no one, not even his mother – her least of all – but today he was feeling his inexperience. Ever since his meeting with the Commissioner he had had the novel sensation of a conundrum that might exceed even his expensively educated powers of understanding. If it were simply a matter of logic, he was confident that no problem could defeat him. But this required something more than deductive reasoning, more than what Chuck Riley would doubtless call, adopting his best Boss Hogg accent, ‘book-learnin'.’

At least Sherrill had reached the stage of knowing what he did not know. And this knowledge, he concluded, was not taught at Harvard or anywhere else. It was acquired over years, accreted like the lichen on an ancient stone. It was what the older men in the New York Police Department, those he could regard with condescension in every other context, already had and
what he, unavoidably, lacked. It was the advantage of dumb chronology, years on the clock. He would have it eventually but right now he was defeated by it.

He had followed the Commissioner's cue and made contact with the NYPD Intelligence Division. He had asked to see those involved in the surveillance operation of Gerald Merton. He had heard nothing back. He called again, adding this time that his need was urgent since it related to an ongoing criminal investigation designated as the highest possible priority by the Commissioner himself. No one returned his call.

He had weighed his options, including alerting Riley to this foot-dragging by a section of his own force, but ruled that out: what could look worse than a Harvard boy running to Daddy because the tough kids wouldn't play with him? It would get around, confirming every prejudice he already knew existed against him.

And then, this morning at 8.30am, the call had come. The head of the Intelligence Division, Stephen Lake, would see him at 10am. It made no sense. Sherrill had made a request at the operational level; he wanted to see an officer – or did Intel Division call them agents? – from the field, at most a unit commander, but someone involved in the hands-on work of monitoring the Russian and subsequently tailing Merton. That request had apparently been refused. Instead he was due to see the man at the very top.

This too he would not have admitted to anyone, but he was nervous. Lake had been top brass at the Central Intelligence Agency, a wholly political appointment made by the city after 9/11, when New York decided it could no longer rely on the federal authorities and had better make its own arrangements. Sherrill had done an archive search of the
New York Times
website that morning, reading up on the Intel Division and on Lake. Already it had up to a thousand officers at its disposal, a force within the forty-thousand-strong force of the NYPD itself. By comparison, the FBI, with just ten thousand agents to cover the entire United States, looked like minnows. The Feds resented them, of course; and the
Times
had reported a slew of complaints from civil liberties groups complaining that the Intel Division was not catching foreign terrorists but watching domestic political activists, bugging the phone calls and surveilling the homes of US citizens. It only added to the unfamiliar sensation now brewing inside Jay Sherrill, that he was badly out of his depth.

He knew how to interview cops, knew their foibles, their vanities, their sentimental weaknesses. But Lake had never been a cop. He was more like a politician, a veteran player of the Washington game. Why on earth had he taken this meeting? What message was he sending?

Sherrill had ten more minutes to wrestle with that question, sitting in the waiting area of the
office of the man formally titled Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence. He knew this manoeuvre all too well: keep a man waiting, remind him who comes where in the hierarchy. Jay Sherrill's response in this situation – a refusal to flick through any of the papers or magazines on the table in the reception area in favour of simply staring straight ahead – sent a message of his own: ‘You are wasting my time and I resent it.’

At last a grey-faced secretary gestured for Sherrill to come forward. He went through two successive doors, before being shown into an office which he instantly assessed as being slightly larger than the Commissioner's.

Lake was short by alpha male standards, five ten at most. His silver-grey hair was cut close and his eyes were chilly. He rose slightly out of his chair to acknowledge the detective's arrival, extended a hand, then began speaking even before Jay had sat down.

‘So what is it we can help you with, Detective?’

‘Well, sir, I really did not mean to trouble you with this. It's a matter way below—’

‘What, my pay grade, Detective?’ There was a mirthless smile. ‘Why don't you let me be the judge of that? What are the questions you have for this department?’

‘Sir, the UN security force opened fire on Gerald Merton at 8.51am yesterday. Two minutes earlier, the Watch Commander of that force had received a warning from his liaison within NYPD, offering
a description of a terror suspect said to be about to enter the United Nations compound. It was on the basis of that description – for which Gerald Merton offered a complete match – that the UN officer opened fire.’ He knew this account would have more punch if he added the words, ‘thereby killing an innocent old man,’ but he could not bring himself to do it. In spite of the indifference shown by the Commissioner, to Sherrill's mind the gun and fingerprints found in Merton's room remained the most compelling evidence in the case.

Lake rubbed his chin, apparently deep in thought. ‘I see,’ he said at last. ‘And your question to me is what exactly?’

Sherrill could see that Lake was going to extend not the slightest help.

‘I want to know how the NYPD was in a position to pass on what could only be live intelligence to the UNSF, sir.’

‘Live intelligence?
Are you sure you're not getting a little ahead of yourself here, Detective? Is intelligence an expertise of yours?’

Sherrill could feel a burning sensation in his cheeks; one he desperately hoped did not manifest itself. He tried to calm himself, to remember that this tactic of intimidation – the invocation of specialist knowledge – was just that, a tactic. ‘I don't think it requires any great expertise, sir. Just as it would have required no great expertise to see that Gerald Merton was a man in his mid-seventies – hardly the profile for a terrorist.’

At that, Lake's eyes turned to steel. ‘There are two answers to that, Mr Sherrill: the official one and the unofficial one. The official one is that this department never comments on operational matters, lest we compromise those working in the field to protect the great city of New York and, with it, the entire United States.’

‘Of course, sir.’ Sherrill wondered if he was about to make some headway. ‘And what's the unofficial one?’

‘We may have had our eye on the UN for a while, with evidence of a ticking time-bomb over there. Or we may not. But this was one hundred per cent a fuck-up by the Keystone Kops at UN Plaza. You try to roll the blame ball over to this department for that and you better make sure you're not in the path of travel. Because if you are, I will personally make sure that it crushes you into the ground so hard you'll think yourself lucky if you end up writing out parking tickets in Trenton, do I make myself clear, Detective?’

Sherrill swallowed hard. ‘Doesn't this count as coercion of a law enforcement officer, sir?’

‘Save it for the Kennedy School, Detective. The only words I have uttered to you in this meeting are as follows: that this department never comments on operational matters, lest we compromise those working in the field to protect the great city of New York and, with it, the entire United States. Any other words imagined by you will be denied by me. I will swear an affidavit to that effect and submit
it to any court – along, of course, with a copy of your medical records showing your past history of mental illness.’

Jay Sherrill could feel the wind exiting his stomach as surely as if he had been punched. He barely managed to whisper the words, ‘What are you talking about?’

Stephen Lake looked down at a single sheet of paper he now held between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Seems, Mr Sherrill, that you once sought counselling for depression. Is that compatible with the role of a first grade detective in the New York Police Department? Hmm, I can't recall. Perhaps we should just check with the Chief of Detectives.’ He reached for his telephone and began punching the keypad.

‘No!’

‘What is it, Detective?’

‘It was years ago; I was a student! My brother had just died!’

‘My condolences. I'm sure the human resources department of the NYPD would have been real sympathetic when you applied to be a fast track, high-flying, big swinging dick detective. Except, for some reason, you forgot to share that piece of information with them, didn't you? I've got your form right here in front of me.’ He reached for another document. ‘“Have you ever sought professional help for a mental health problem, including but not confined to …” blah, blah, blah, oh there it is, “depression”? And here's the little check box
you've marked with an X and guess which one it is. It couldn't be clearer. N-O spells no. That counts as a lie in my book. Might even count as perjury. Remind me to check that with a lawyer.’ He threw the paper down onto the desk and fixed Jay Sherrill with a fierce stare. ‘In case I haven't made myself clear, Detective, this is what I'm saying to you. You go take your blame ball and roll it onto someone else's yard – because this one's full of land mines and one of them will blow you right out of the sky. I guarantee it.’