The Final Reckoning (25 page)

Tom looked up at Rebecca and saw that the faraway distraction of a few moments ago had vanished. He followed her gaze to the blueprints, depicting in precise detail the layout of the water supply of five German cities, and then back to him.

‘Tell me the quote again.’

Tom reached for the piece of paper he had scribbled on. ‘“I will make them eat bitter food and drink poisoned water”.’

She nodded, still staring at the diagrams of the waterworks.

‘It can only mean one thing, Rebecca.’

‘I know.’

‘It would have been so many people.’

‘I know.’ She turned away from the drawings, preferring to stare at the floor.

Tom got up from the slashed remnant of a chair he had been sitting on and moved across to her. When he placed his hands on her shoulders, she leaned into him, welcoming his touch.

‘Look, we know it didn't happen. Everyone would know about it if it had. We know that Plan B happened because Plan A failed. The key question is, why did it fail? What happened?’

Aron went to meet this young scientist, Eliezer was his name, who took the note as if he were a pharmacist handling a prescription. He read it quickly, glanced up at Aron, then looked back at the note and read it again, and again. At last he said, ‘This will take some time. You will hear from me when it's ready.’

I don't know what Aron did in the days of waiting. I like to imagine that he wandered around the country that was then taking shape. I like to picture him on the beach in Tel Aviv, holding an ice-cream cone. Or buying a falafel from one of the corner kiosks in Jaffa. Or running his hand along the pale-gold stones of ancient Jerusalem. But such things would have been a distraction from the work in hand. He would not have been able to allow himself joy and delight while others had suffered such pain, at least not until that pain had been avenged. Above all, I suspect he would have been frightened: frightened that if he let in even an hour
of comfort, a few minutes of happiness, then his resolve would weaken. His will would soften and he would be unable to go ahead with the mass slaughter of Tochnit Aleph.

So I assume he spent his time in further meetings with the leaders of the Jewish state-in-waiting, still wearing the dark suit and white shirt of Europe. It's not just the character of the man that leads me to this assumption. It's also my knowledge of what happened next.

Perhaps a fortnight passed and Aron met again with Eliezer. The young chemist handed him the canisters filled with toxin, steel flasks cased in a protective netting. They could pass for camping equipment: Aron would be able to take them back to Europe in his rucksack.

He had arranged his passage with the men of the Jewish underground. He needed their help because he had entered Palestine illegally: he had none of the requisite papers to get past the British guards at the ports and board a ship. The underground told him of the British transport ships that sailed from Haifa. He could be smuggled onto one of those, with forged papers suggesting he was one of the Free Polish soldiers who were knocking around Palestine at the time.

I can see Aron on his voyage, alone with his notebook, planning and scribbling while the other men drank or sang. I picture him drafting his place in Jewish mythology: he would be the slayer of the Germans, the avenger of the Jews. He now
had the deathly potion in his bag. I was in Nuremberg, ready to pour the lethal liquid into the water supply for that city. Manik would do the same in Munich. Tochnit Aleph would soon transform itself from a plan into one of the landmark events in history.

The journey was nearly over, the ship about to dock in Toulon, France, when Aron heard the noise from above, the footsteps and the barked inquiries as British MPs, military policemen, boarded the ship. Did he have the instinct in the pit of his stomach that told him what they were there for? Did he know, as they rattled down the stairs to the lower decks, that they were after him? I bet he did. Did he reach for the rucksack? What did he do with the canisters?

They dragged him off the ship without explanation and later sent him back to Egypt, to a cell in Alexandria. Eventually they transferred him to jails in Palestine, including Jerusalem. Aron – our leader who had ducked and bobbed for five long years, escaping the clutches of the Nazis, who had dashed down ghetto side streets and hidden himself in hollowed-out tree stumps in the forests, who had never been caught by anyone – was now a prisoner.

The British interviewed him but their questions were vague, unfocussed. He came to the conclusion that they knew little about him or about Tochnit Aleph, that they had not picked him up on their own evidence but on a tip-off, suggesting
that Aron posed some kind of security threat. But who was the source?

I know the question gnawed away at him through those endless days and nights he spent alone, whether in a dank British prison cell in Jerusalem or held, like a captive knight, in an old Crusader fort in Acre. He would have assumed that he had been betrayed, that the informant was someone he had once trusted. He would have drawn up lists in his head of all those who knew of Tochnit Aleph – the elder who had given his blessing; the young chemist; the most senior underground leaders he had met in those last weeks. What might they have revealed? Had they blabbed to the British inadvertently or had it been deliberate? If on purpose, why? Why would any Jewish patriot have sabotaged this audacious attempt at justice?

Or had the British received their information from somewhere else entirely? Tochnit Aleph was, after all, a plan to kill a million Germans. It was Germany that stood to benefit most directly from Aron's arrest. Was it even possible that the British would collude with the enemy …? No. Surely, it was unimaginable.

We – Rosa, Manik and me, even the DIN commanders – knew nothing of this, of course. We were simply waiting for Aron to return to Europe with the poison. Finally, a messenger arrived with a note that Aron had somehow smuggled out. It said simply, ‘Arrested. Proceed with Plan B.’

‘But if it didn't happen, what's the connection with everything that's been going on? Why would they be killing Henry Goldman or smashing up my flat? It doesn't make any sense.’

Tom wished he had an answer for her, but she was right. Each time they approached what promised to be a solution, the whole conundrum only seemed to get more complicated. It was clear their pursuers were after something and this – the secret Plan A – surely had to be it. In a way, they had been proved right: the evidence, probably the only remaining evidence in the world, had been hidden here, bound and taped inside the painting. There couldn't be anything else, some other secret concealed in this flat: every inch of the place had been probed and examined, if not by the thugs themselves then by Tom and Rebecca. Plan A was surely it. This must be the secret their enemy was striving so hard to suppress. Why else had they killed Goldman, if not to prevent him revealing it?

And yet, it lacked all logic. Plan A had not happened. There had been no mass poisoning of Germany's major cities. It was a pipe-dream from sixty years ago. How could it possibly matter now?

Unless they had been looking in the wrong place. Unless he, Tom, had been making everything too complicated. ‘Lets go back to basics,’ he said, pacing. ‘Your father was obviously after someone in New York. Whoever that person is reckons your father had evidence against him. That maybe your father had a list of names – like that list that came to your flat, except up to date, consisting solely of Nazis who are still alive. Maybe the person in New York knows he's on this current list. He needs to have that document. And that's why he was so frightened of Goldman talking. Because this person, this old Nazi, suspects Goldman had the list too.’

They had reversed positions, Rebecca now perching against the ex-sofa. ‘So this won't stop until we find that list.’

‘If there is such a list. There might not be. Let's face it, Rebecca. If we haven't found it yet, where's it going to be? It probably doesn't exist.’

‘Not any more.’

‘What's that?’

‘Not any more. Years ago, you could draw up lists of ex-Nazis who were still alive. You could fill a phone book with them. But there are hardly any left now. Everyone's too bloody old.’

‘Exactly. Which means whoever your father
was after was just one person, one name he had kept in his head. I think the only way we're ever going to settle this is by finding out that name.’

‘How the hell are we going to do that?’

Tom was all but forming his reply, that he had no idea, when it struck him. Of course: what an elementary mistake.
Too bloody old.

Tom quickly folded the blueprints and postcards back inside the picture frame – reckoning that since they had escaped detection there so far, there was probably no safer hiding place – and crudely taped the thing back together. ‘We're going.’

‘Where? I don't understand.’

‘Neither do I. Not yet. But I think we're about to.’

He would have preferred to have gone somewhere else, somewhere with more people, but without the car they couldn't be choosy. So they would take their chances and simply make the ten-minute journey back to the internet café on Kingsland High Street. The second Tom walked out of the front door, he scanned the street. He saw two women pushing buggies, one on a mobile phone. It could be an ingenious cover – or nothing at all. He looked in the other direction. A postman – or was that a disguise for a lookout? Thudding over the speed bumps was a white van with two young men inside. Had it been parked until Tom emerged? Did it contain not plungers and pumps, as promised by the ‘DrainClearers’ sign painted on the side, but state-of-the-art surveillance equipment? Tom shook his head, aware that all he could do was keep looking over his shoulder, cross the road at the first sight of anyone suspicious and stick to busy streets.

It made him feel grateful that Gerald Merton had stayed in Hackney, even to the end. Well-to-do areas were almost always deserted, especially at this time of day. Kids ferried to and from school in the sealed capsule of a four-by-four; fathers returning from work in a sleek, insulated BMW; any chat with neighbours done indoors and by telephone or, for all he knew these days, computer. But in a poorer part of town, a place like Hackney, life was lived on the street. There were always people around, waiting for a bus or picking up a bottle of milk and a packet of fags from the shop. In the residential areas kids still played football in the middle of the road. They weren't told by their mothers to stay indoors, for fear of what other, rougher lads might do to them. They were the kids other kids were frightened of.

Tom appreciated it all, as they made the three or four turns towards the high street en route to the grandly titled Newington International Call Centre.

‘I've been thinking,’ Rebecca said, looking left and right as they crossed Cazenove Road. ‘Shouldn't we have heard from the police by now? About the autopsy.’

‘No news is good news. If they'd found anything, we'd know about it. If there were drugs or poison in Goldman's bloodstream, you, Dr Merton, would definitely know about it.’

‘So the police will say he died of natural causes?’

‘And therefore it's not a murder inquiry.’

‘But it should be.’

Tom thought about repeating his earlier reassurances – that Goldman's death might have been no more than a coincidence – but he couldn't do it.

They'd reached the internet café where he was gratified to see the same melancholy clientele gathered for the afternoon shift. The fake-wood phone booths were again filled to capacity; most of the computer terminals were in use. As Tom handed over a couple of pound coins, reserving the machine at the end of the row, an older, bearded man, in traditional ultra-orthodox Jewish garb, got up from the next seat along. Now there were two spaces, one for each of them.

He went straight to Google and typed in the two words which had struck him with such force in Gershon's flat. It had been such a basic error of logic he was almost embarrassed by it. What had been his request to New York? To come up with a list of everyone over seventy who was present for the week-long General Assembly. He had drawn a blank, presented with a roll-call that included a Chinese interpreter and an Israeli head of state, among others. The opposite of a list of Nazi war criminals.

But when Rebecca had complained that ‘Everyone's too bloody old,’ he had instantly seen it. Just as she had been raised in the shadow of the events of the Nazi era, so had many others of her generation. And not all of them were
children of the victims. Some were the children of the perpetrators. They too might have been drawn into this strange, left-over riddle, still unfinished after all these years. They might have been enlisted into this posthumous battle just as Rebecca had been, fighting the wars of their fathers. Except these men, the ones Tom was imagining, would be fighting on the other side.

Which is why Tom so badly wanted his hunch to be wrong as he typed into the Google search field the two words that made his heart heavy.

Henning Munchau.

Most of the pieces that appeared were in German, starting with a news story from the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
when Munchau's appointment at the UN was announced and several others from the specialist legal press. In English there was an interview with
New World
, the magazine of the United Nations Association in Britain, and a diary item from the
New York Observer
, noting Munchau's legal summons to the Manhattan magistrate for failure to pay a parking fine. Not what Tom was looking for.

He put his head in his hands. He knew there was something else he wasn't remembering. Think.
Think.

Tom closed his eyes trying to visualize the office of the legal counsel, plush with an outer area containing two secretaries and a window view over the East River. There was a sign on Henning's door. He had gone past it a thousand times without ever looking at it properly. Slowly
it formed, in his mind's eye, the lettering taking shape. There it was:
W. Henning Munchau.

W.

Now it came back to him, both of them in the queue to leave Dili, East Timor waiting for their papers to be checked and approved. They had swapped documents, so that Henning could examine Tom's passport photo and mock him on his visible decline.

‘Once so handsome. What went wrong, eh, Tommy?’

Tom had seen nothing that provided counter-ammunition in Munchau's photograph: the man had barely seemed to age. But he had seen his colleague's full name for the first time.

‘Ah, we have a Kaiser in our midst, no less. Pray silence, Mein Herren, for Kaiser Wilhelm Henning Munchau.’

Henning had shut him up. Tom hadn't questioned that at the time. He was getting leery, there were people around. But now, replaying that memory in his head, Tom wondered if Henning had suddenly lost his smile for a different reason.

He retyped the name into the computer.

Once again, the first two entries were in German. They seemed to be from formal legal gazettes with Henning's name in among a long list of others: probably the announcement of various awards and promotions.

Tom decided to narrow it down. Not allowing himself to stop, lest he change his mind, he
reentered the name into the search field –
Wilhelm Henning Munchau –
this time adding one more word:
Nazi.

It took the machine less than a second to scour the world and find the sentence Tom had dreaded. But there it was, the first few words of an entry intelligible even in the opening list of results. It came from a website attached to the Department of History at the University of Maryland.

Captain Wilhelm Henning Munchau, 1898-1975; served in the SS's Totenkopfverbände or Death's Head units; received suspended sentence from West German court in 1966 for service at Theriesenstadt (Terezin).

Tom followed the link on the word ‘Totenkopfverbände’
.
It took him to the website of something called the Museum of Tolerance. There was a definition:
SS Units who guarded concentration camps. On the right collar of their uniform they wore the death's head symbol, from which they took their name. They became an elite unit within the elite SS.

Tom scanned to the end of the entry.

… they were put in charge of killing Jews and partisans.

Now he pushed back his chair and reached, instinctively, for the pouch of tobacco in his inside pocket. If there was anywhere left in London you could get away with smoking, surely it was in a hole like this. With one hand, his eye still on the screen, he rolled himself a cigarette and put it between his lips. Even this sensation, before
he had lit a match, felt like a hit of soothing nicotine.

Jesus Christ. What part of his brain had not thought of this earlier? Had he suppressed the very thought of it? It had been under his nose. The minute he had opened Gershon Matzkin's journal, he should have at least considered it. Everyone else would have. He'd been despatched to shut down the case of an aged Nazi-hunter by – guess who – a German! You didn't have to be filled with prejudice to see the connection, just common sense. Why had he been so stupid? He had allowed his personal affection for Henning to cloud his judgment. It had obscured the most obvious line of enquiry. His friendship had barred his synapses from even twitching at the possible interest a German diplomat might have in suppressing the Nazi past. Or perhaps it was that Tom no longer even saw Henning as German, but rather as some internationalized quasi-Australian.

His mind sprinted ahead, trying to keep up with the implications. Surely it meant that Henning had tricked him by sending him on this mission. He had claimed to know nothing of Gerald Merton but he had known everything that mattered, starting with the old man's motive.

But that was the least of it. The chief legal counsel of the UN had somehow masterminded an intelligence operation in a foreign capital, able to track down – and trash – the homes of both Gerald Merton and his daughter, to say nothing of eaves-dropping
on, then murdering, Henry Goldman. How would Munchau possibly have such power? Unless he was part of something much bigger.

At first Tom had felt a slight sense of disappointment. Specifically, disappointment in Gershon Matzkin. He had expected more of him. It seemed beneath him to have travelled to New York simply to track down the son or, more likely, grandson of a Nazi war criminal. Tom had, despite himself, sympathized with DIN's determination to hunt down the guilty men, but this – visiting the sins of the fathers on their children and grandchildren – was impossible to defend. The only way it could make sense was if this was not simply about Henning Munchau and his Nazi grandfather, but something in which the UN lawyer – Tom's old boss and great friend – was just a minor player.

He turned to Rebecca, expecting her to be looking over his shoulder, reading the potted history of Munchau Snr that still glowed on the screen. But Rebecca wasn't looking at his terminal. She was looking at her own. And her face was white.

‘What is it?’

She simply pointed at the display, open to her Facebook page. She indicated the Friends column down the left hand side.

‘I don't understand,’ Tom said, once again aware not only that Rebecca was ten years younger than him but that the latest wave of the internet revolution had mostly passed him by. Everyone else
might have been forming social networks but these days his own personal community consisted of the models he dated, the Mafia men he worked for and the British-born tailor he had discovered on Spring Street: and none of those relationships happened online.

Rebecca made a few key strokes, going back several pages. Tom was distracted: he had spotted a new customer.

‘See this guy here?’ She was pointing at a square filled not with a photograph but with a question mark. ‘He asked to friend me earlier.’

‘To
friend
you?’

‘It's a Facebook thing. Anyway, I said yes.’ She saw Tom's look of disbelief. ‘Lots of people were getting in touch, mainly to send condolences about Dad. It just seemed easier to say yes to everyone.’

Tom was looking again at the new arrival. Something about him was familiar.

‘Look at these status updates.’

Tom looked down at the list.
Jay …is dining in York – again. Zoe … can't wait till she gets off work so she can have a stiff drink.
His eye went off the screen and back to the man, now sitting at the end of the row. White, iPod headphones nestled by his collar.

Rebecca's finger took Tom back to the list of status lines on the Facebook page, directing him to one five lines down. ‘That's him.’

Richard needs to meet Rebecca urgently – so he can explain everything that's going on.