The Final Reckoning (17 page)

If nothing else, this trip was proving to be a first class tour of contemporary London. Rebecca had driven them back to Upper Street but instead of heading east into the grime of Essex Road en route to Hackney, she had headed up the Holloway Road and into the well-heeled charm of Highgate village.

Neither of them spoke, but the silence was different now. The tension between them had been building steadily, like a darkening sky on a close summer's day. Thanks to the stand-up row, and the kiss that followed it, the weather had broken. He sat alongside her, no longer fighting the urge to stare or, occasionally, touch her.

‘Rebecca, we talked about the injury on your father's leg didn't we?’

‘There was no injury; I told you. Why?’

‘His body was found with a kind of metal shin-pad.’

‘So you say.’

‘Even though there was no injury.’ He reached
around to the back seat. ‘Can I get your father's notebook from your bag?’

She nodded, giving him another flash of the crooked smile whose power over him she surely understood. Tom thumbed through the handwritten pages. They looked like something altogether more valuable now, an authentic historical document of genuine significance. Gerald Merton had been one of the prime movers in a remarkable post-script to the Holocaust, a story that would shock anybody who had heard it. It would do to them what it had already done to Tom: force them to revise their view of an event about which they thought they already knew all there was to know.

When Goldman had used that phrase – sheep to the slaughter – Tom had felt a pang of shame. That was precisely the image he had long held of the Jewish victims of the Nazis, filing into the gas chambers without protest. He dimly recalled his history teacher at school using the phrase, and not un-sympathetically ‘Pity those poor Jews, as defenceless as lambs sent to the abattoir’. That had been the teacher's meaning, Tom was sure of it. But today he had seen how insulting, how wounding that notion must have been to men like Gerald Merton.

There. He had found it: a passage describing young Gershon's involvement with the partisans, hiding in the forests. It was one of those Tom had had to skim read, but something had lodged. And here it was.

Tom smiled to himself. So that explained the metal shin-pad. Gerald Merton was preparing
himself for the metal detectors he knew would be at the entrance to the United Nations building. The alarm would go off and, with an apologetic shrug, the old man would reach down, roll up his left trouser leg and show the security staff the metal plate he had to wear for medical reasons. He would probably crack a joke – ‘Airports are the worst’ – and they would smile and nod him through. And no-one would think to check for the state-of-the-art weapon he had disassembled and bandaged to himself, with the steel inserts and ammunition stashed along his spine or in some other formation.

The gun hadn't been on him that day: it was still in the hotel bathroom. The Monday morning trip to the UN had surely been a reconnaissance mission, of the kind young Gershon had doubtless done down the backstreets of Buenos Aires or Bonn or Rome or San Sebastián or any of the other cities where he had conducted operations for DIN. He might even have acquired the reconnaissance habit along the crunching footpaths of the Lithuanian forests or in the fetid backstreets of the Viriampole district of Kaunas that became the Kovno ghetto.

It would have been a smart plan: if Merton had returned to the UN the next day, and the metal detectors had gone off again, chances are, one of the security staff would have recognized him: that nice old boy with the plate in his leg. More smiles and they'd have waved him through, no need to
roll up his trousers a second time: ‘You just have a nice day, sir.’

And then he'd have gone in and … what? If only he could speak to the shade of Gershon Matzkin, ask him who that gun was meant for. Tom had still not heard back from Henning with that list. Who might have been in the headquarters of the United Nations this week who would have warranted DIN's last, aged warrior to don his assassin's cloak one more time? Tom pushed back into his seat, wishing that those missing pages from the old man's notebook would somehow reappear. Had Gershon torn them out and destroyed them? Or had he hidden them somewhere? Is that what the thieves were after when they turned Rebecca's apartment upside down?

Now they were driving alongside Hampstead Heath, the vast green woodland and park on their left, houses of extraordinary opulence and size on their right. When Rebecca slowed down, Tom shook his head: ‘Don't tell me he lives round here.’

Rebecca nodded.

‘In one of these? No wonder young Julian's so screwed up.’ Rebecca gave him a look of mock disapproval. To Tom's great pleasure, the expression seemed somehow complicit, as if the two of them were now together, with Julian on the outside.

‘Here we go,’ she said, signalling a right-turn into a steep, sloping driveway. The house was vast and absurdly palatial; Tom could see sixteen
windows, half of them lit, before he lost count. Rebecca pulled the car up alongside a sleek Mercedes and turned off the engine. ‘Remember, all charm this time.’

Rebecca pressed the doorbell. A traditional ding-dong chime sounded, unexpectedly suburban for a house so grand and Tom was reminded of the days when his mother had dragged him around the wealthier parts of Sheffield, carol-singing.

No answer.

‘Try the knocker,’ he said. ‘Really hard. These houses are so big, they probably can't hear the doorbell.’

Rebecca reached for the brass knocker, fashioned as a bar of metal held between the jaws of a fierce lion. She pulled it back then banged it firmly down, twice.

The first knock gave nothing away, but the second rang oddly hollow and the door swung inward. It had not been locked at all.

Rebecca furrowed her brow at Tom, then stepped in. He followed her into a wide hallway, where their footsteps were muffled by a huge shimmering rug, an irregular checkerboard of different colours. Rebecca called out, ‘Hello?’ and walked further in, to a large reception area bordered on all sides by cream sofas, with two large, low coffee tables in the centre. The facing wall was covered with a vast picture that seemed part-photograph, part-painting. Recognizable were the faces of a forty-something Henry Goldman
and, with buck teeth and curly hair, a teenage Julian.

Rebecca tried again: ‘Mr Goldman?’

‘Perhaps we should leave,’ Tom suggested, glad of an excuse for an early exit – and perhaps a return to Rebecca's flat. ‘We can call him tomorrow.’

‘But Julian said he was definitely home.’

‘Does he live alone?’

Distractedly, her head peering into the darkness of a corridor, Rebecca said, ‘Yes. His wife died years ago.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Often when I was younger, but not recently. I'm just going to try the study and, if he's not there, we'll go.’

She stepped gingerly into the gloom, calling out ‘Mr Goldman? Henry?’ as she moved. She reached a door and as she opened it, the corridor was filled with light. Behind her by several paces, Tom felt vaguely disappointed: if the lights were on in the study, then the old boy was clearly home. He'd probably nodded off in his chair.

Rebecca's scream tore the air. She stood frozen in the doorway, then darted forward. Tom ran after her, only to find her hunched over a slumped body, her ear clamped to the chest of Henry Goldman, whose cold white face was staring upward. He looked aghast. Rebecca straddled his body and began pounding at his chest, bringing both hands, her fingers laced together, down in a
series of massive thumps. Crouching at her side, Tom could hear her exertion as she sent all her strength plunging down in successive blows. But he could also hear a different sound, a kind of desperate whimpering issuing from her. Tears streaked down her cheeks like rain on a window pane.

Finally, she climbed off the unmoving body and let her head fall onto Tom's shoulder. ‘He's dead,’ she sobbed, the tears soaking into his shirt. ‘He's dead. He's dead.’ Her fingers were scratching at his side and his arms. ‘He's dead, he's dead, he's dead.’ Finally, she pulled back so that Tom could see her face. ‘He's dead – and we killed him.’

He wondered at first if it was some kind of joke. When he saw it, he had immediately looked around the rest of the office, to see who might be behind it, but there was no telltale sniggering. Besides, he was hardly ever in this office. He had no co-workers to speak of, still less work buddies. As a first grade detective, that's not how you operated. Out of the bag meant you were neither glued into a uniform, nor chained to a desk. Jay Sherrill worked as he imagined a top surgeon or lawyer might, running his own day, travelling around, with the cellphone and BlackBerry in place of an office.

Yet someone had put this here and they had done it in the last few minutes. When he had arrived an hour ago, seeking a quiet space to think through his next move after that none-too-subtle warning from Stephen Lake of the Intelligence Division, there had been no Post-It note stuck to his computer screen. He had gone to the vending
machine for a cup of Styrofoam coffee, could only have been five minutes, and now there it was. The message was marked in block capitals: SUBWAY. ACROSS STREET. 4.15

He looked at his watch. It was 4.06pm. It could be a trap. He thought of some of the cases he had fought in the last two years, including one that touched on an outer ring of the mafia. Every cop in New York knew how those guys liked to exact their revenge. But his own role had been marginal; overwhelmingly, it had been an FBI operation. They surely wouldn't come after him. And in a crowded subway station, during the day?

He studied the note once again. It was cleverly worded. Someone passing by would have assumed it was not a message at all, but a reminder Sherrill might have jotted down to himself. The block capitals betrayed no clues. But how could someone have possibly got in here, one of the most heavily secured buildings in New York city, and got out again that quickly? He had no idea.

He also had no choice; he would have to go. You couldn't ignore a direct message like this; no cop would.

He walked out of the main entrance and was about to turn left for the subway station when he saw it, directly opposite him. Subway, the sandwich bar. He was almost relieved. It was the last place in the entire United States any mafioso would use for a hit: right opposite headquarters, it was an alternative police canteen, brimming with
cops fuelling up on foot-long Philly cheese-steak heroes with extra everything. It was the kind of place a first grade detective like Sherrill always avoided, knowing the derision and resentment that would come his way from the old timers the instant he stepped inside.

He pushed the door open and scanned the room, hoping he wasn't making it too obvious. A line of customers, either cops or secretaries on lunch hour; a couple of middle-aged men on cellphones. None of them seemed to recognize him.

‘Excuse me,’ Sherrill said, still scoping the faces, as a blue-overalled cleaner shuffled into him, lethargically wielding a broom and a flip-open, extended dustpan. One of those ridiculous, preppie habits Sherrill couldn't shake: apologizing when someone bumped into him.

‘No problem, Detective,’ the cleaner murmured back.

Sherrill wheeled round to see the man, black, dreadlocked and with white headphones in his ears, raising his eyebrows in recognition: ‘You wanna take a walk?’

Sherrill said nothing and watched, stunned, as the man propped his cleaning equipment by the front door and headed out. Once outside, the cleaner walked purposefully, not waiting for Sherrill to catch up. He remained a half-pace in front, looking ahead, so that he and the detective might just be two New Yorkers hurrying about their business, not communicating at all.

‘Thanks for coming, Detective Sherrill. Sorry about,’ he made a small movement with his hand, ‘all this.’

‘Who are you? How do you know my name?’

‘We're co-workers. I'm an agent with the NYPD Intelligence Division. Undercover.’ Still looking straight ahead, he smiled briefly. ‘In case you hadn't noticed.’

‘How did you—’

‘Get into your office? That was easy. I've got an NYPD pass. Besides, cleaner's overalls? That's a regular invisibility cloak in this town. Fuck Hogwarts. Just gotta be a black man dressed as a cleaner: no one sees you then, trust me. Hey, Sherrill, pull out your cellphone.’

‘My cellphone, why?’

‘Just pretend you're talking into it. And don't keep looking at me.’

For the second time in six hours, Jay Sherrill was coming face to face with his own inexperience. He had never done undercover work. He realized now, he didn't know even the basics. He did as he was told and tried to fake a phone call.

‘OK, what do you want?’

‘I don't want anything. I'm risking my fucking job here—’

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean—’

‘Want something? What is it with you people?’

‘I'm really sorry. That was—’

‘I have some information that might help you.’

The pitch of Sherrill's voice lifted. ‘Information?’

‘On the killing of Gerald Merton.’

‘What kind of information?’

‘The eye-witness kind.’

Sherrill couldn't help but shoot a glance at the man walking just ahead of him. Then, guiltily, he returned to the blank middle-distance stare adopted by all those talking on cellphones in the street.

‘You were there?’

‘I saw it all. From the beginning.’